Product Description
Addressing the question of the individual's fate at death, this work provides a critique of the reductionist case against post-mortem personhood. Claims of near-death and out-of-body experiences are considered, as are proposals that offer artificial intelligence as a model of human consciousness. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Most difficult book I've ever tried to read.
I found this book completely unintelligible. I'm a college graduate with a master's degree, but I had great difficulty understanding what he was writing. If there were a rating below a one star, that's what I would give it.

Well worth the read
This author, Robert Geis,is a very meticulous and cautious thinker. Loathing any thought process that is not based in evidence or fact, he takes us through the very difficult yet supremely important question of one's final end: is death extinction or does the human person retain his personhood even though his body is reduced to dust.Geis first goes to show that arguments suggesting annihilation is man's absolute end have in-built fallacies that reflection and study expose.Materialism has many such faults and Geis contributes greatly to our understanding of how materialism is fraught with those weaknesses.He then shows us how many arguments advanced to show immortality isan impossibility are guilty of question begging, of arguing circulalry.Such forms of argument are inherently worthless, though at first blush appear persuasive.Moving on to show that now the field is open to re-examine the question of immortality "from a fresh start", the author brilliantly presents five powerful chapters that open up an incredible amount of understanding to us: how concept formation shows acapacity in man that cannot be materially bound; how memory cannot be a spatio-temporal construct; how consciousness is impossible if the materialist paradigm of Dennet and Churchland (among others) is correct.Their reasoning is trenchantly exposed as question begging, presumptuous of what needs to be proved in the first place.And then the emprical/experiential application of the Near Death Experience to this question of endless existence is set forth in very illuminating detail and explanation.

Robert Geis has carried out a very difficult taks with aplomb, style, but most importantly with an ability and strength of reasoning that one rarely encounters in such a difficult area.This makes his book all the more valuable because what Geis is treating, the destiny of my being, of your being, in the end is probably all that matters to you or me anyway.Geis' exposition is the most important I have read on this in all the years I have been trying to understand just what it is that happens to me when I die.

Geis shows us hope
Robert Geis'work has brought me much peace in that the author in this very persuasive work has argued and debated on the same grounds as his contemporary scientists and physicians.There is not one appeal at all to religion in this entire work, and that makes Geis' arguments even far more complelling.Geis then operates from the neurological paradigms of consciousness and shows that our chaotic, disagregated, completely haphazard electrochemical events in the brain (cortex, the spine-- wherever one wishes to argue the point) cannot provide the continuity, unity, and coherence of all our percepts.And there is no constant electrical or neuroelectrical capacity in the brain, or the human body, that provides for the seamless experience each percept is.For example, we experience a table as one and whole and a unity.But the events in our brain, receiving the sensory data from the eyes and the hands, are simply random, brutally chaotic, and without any predictability of occurrence.This is true for whatever sense experience you take.Geis' suggestion: if there is no electrical, no material function, that provides for our perceptions as the uniform, whole, and entire events in consciousness that all of our percepts are, then perhaps there is a function in each of us that is not material, that is immaterial.And if immaterial, then immortal (read the argument on how immateriality is indestructibility).

Geis argues on 5 different fronts in this fine book, and one is the NDE.He does a magnificent job in unpacking this phenomenon as a possible evidentiary setting for the claim "I am personally immortal".

The article this month (August 2003) in the Readers Digest (where I have posted a summary on this book tonight) follows closely some of Geis' reasoning.

I think his book can flesh out for readers interested in this all important question about eternal existence as a person.I have never had an NDE or an OBE.I am a very practical and skeptical man.But Geis was even more so, (no dreamy eyed visionary is he, but a cold eyed realist) and his work has brought to me a calm that offers me hope that maybe, just maybe, death is not annihilation, is not my total reduction to nothingness, but just maybe it is a transformation to a new existence wherein I maintain my personal identity as I was here on earth.The only difference now, in the transformed existence that death wrought, is that in death I "am in another morn' than ours".But I am still "I".I do not perish.

I hope this helps others here who read my comments.

Thank you.

Sobering yet uplifting, a genuine must read
For those interested in a step by step and seriously thought out argument on immortality, this book has the right balance.The author has done a very masterful job of making it much easier to understand how arguments against immortality have little proof value, while the argument for immortality has concrete data one can examine: long-term memory seems to be non-localizable, hence giving man a possible non-spatial dimension.Consciousness requires a unifying principle to hold together simultaneously all the billions of data bits entering awareness.No bodily electrical or neurological component seems to make that possible-- so man has another non-material element to him.The Out of Body experience, which Geis handles very slowly and with good caution and skepticism makes the reader think if there might not be a third argument for immortality.

I recommend the book, given its directness of style, clearness of expression, tightness of reasoning, and fairness to the opposition-- to those who deny immortality, but seem unable to really show why immortality is not an actual dimension of human existence after all.

More important than any other subject
The writer has addressed a subject that almost all avoid, and has done so with clarity, forcefulness, openness, and objectivity. Avoiding labels and employing the most impartial of approaches, the writer has done a remarkable job of bringing understanding and persuasion to the reader of his main point. That is, that no argument against immortality has any force, since, as the writer shows, the arguments commit fallacies of thought, improper evidence claims, or violate simple common sense. Dr. Geis' presentation of how knowledge and certainty occur is invaluable in his exposition.

What happens when I die? The thought should scare the daylights out of every living human. I do not know what will happen to me when I die-- but Dr. Geis has certainly provided me with a way to look at the subject and perhaps conclude that I am, in fact, immortal after all.

For that alone, for showing that it is not unreasonable at all for me to think I may in fact have endless life, the writer of this work deserves high praise and long thanks. He has opened my eyes.

Sometimes indeed you are glad that you read a book.

David M. Brawner
Arizona ... Read more