Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

If my soul survived my death, and experienced something like an NDE on the way out, would it (he?) be able to remember what it saw?

My grandmother experienced anterograde amnesia, finding it hard to remember anything that happened after her stroke. If such brain damage can destroy the ability of the soul to remember things it experiences, would not death, the ultimate in brain damage, cause the deceased person to lose all memory of his NDE, even if he had one?

There seems to be a lot of confusion here, especially over the nature of the soul. You seem to imagine your soul as being somehow essentially your human self. There are many reasons this can't be the case. Of course your soul would remember what it last experienced during an NDE of its human self, but the point is that the soul is vastly greater than your human self and subsumes it as a small part of itself, which includes memories of a far greater experience. It doesn't go the other way - you, your human self, doesn't normally have access to soul consciousness and soul memories. 

So your grandmother's  soul, being a superior being that includes as a small part of itself her human identity, personality and memories, wasn't damaged or impaired by the stroke, but her human self as experienced in body definitely was impaired, since human spirit embodiment mostly in the brain involves the human spirit becoming intricately and closely intertwined with the neurological structure of the brain, in order to achieve the mind-body interaction required for embodiment and manifesting in the physical world. That close intertwining and interaction between spirit and brain matter in physical life means the human mind self as experienced in the body will, as we well know, experience much apparent damage due to damage of the brain and body.

I disagree with your definition. My brain has mental content, and my brain is physical.

Sorry, missed this bit. The question how can the brain which is made up of stuff (particles, waves, fields, whatever) that is defined by physicalists/materialists as having no mental content end up producing something that has mental content.

To quote Neuroscience PhD and New Atheist "Horseman" Sam Harris:

To say “Everything came out of nothing” is to assert a brute fact that defies our most basic intuitions of cause and effect—a miracle, in other words.

Likewise, the idea that consciousness is identical to (or emerged from) unconscious physical events is, I would argue, impossible to properly conceive—which is to say that we can think we are thinking it, but we are mistaken. We can say the right words, of course—“consciousness emerges from unconscious information processing.” We can also say “Some squares are as round as circles” and “2 plus 2 equals 7.” But are we really thinking these things all the way through? I don’t think so.

Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness.

However, this is not to say that some other thesis about consciousness must be true. Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don’t know what that sentence means—and I don’t think anyone else does either.

@Merle - you are beating a dead horse. The debate about this argument has persisted, at the very least, since the dawn of the Enlightenment Age.

And now we have a crowd here.

I see a lot of responses, but nobody really addresses antegrade amnesia. 

Are memories stored in the soul? If so, why does the soul start forgetting things it experiences after brain trauma. If not, how can the survival of a soul after death have meaning without memories? 

I won't keep on beating a dead horse--and definitely not a living one--but I will simply note that I see no answer here to this question.

Regarding recollection when faced with brain illness, I think Terminal Lucidity challenges your view. There's actually a SciAm article on this by a self-styled "radical rationalist":

One Last Goodbye: The Strange Case of Terminal Lucidity

I see that in no way addresses why a soul loses memories when a brain is damaged. Why does this happen?

A sudden rush of lucidity after death--if it is a verified thing--could be similar to a rush of strength when the adrenaline flows.

More generally, as per the neuroscientist-philosopher Raymond Tallis memories cannot be held in a brain that is defined as being made of non-conscious matter.

I see no reason to believe that memories cannot be stored in molecules. Even simple creatures do that.

I do think we should separate the irreducibility of consciousness from the afterlife. It definitely makes an afterlife more plausible but in itself isn't sufficient.

Everybody seems to jump to their canned talk rather than address that souls can lose the ability to remember after a brain injury.

...her human self as experienced in body definitely was impaired, since human spirit embodiment mostly in the brain involves the human spirit becoming intricately and closely intertwined with the neurological structure of the brain, in order to achieve the mind-body interaction required for embodiment and manifesting in the physical world. That close intertwining and interaction between spirit and brain matter in physical life means the human mind self as experienced in the body will, as we well know, experience much apparent damage due to damage of the brain and body.

The damage to the mind after damage to the brain is real. I see no question about that.

If a spirit intertwined with a brain loses the ability to remember when the brain loses the ability to remember, how would the soul remember anything about my life after my brain is gone? It seems it relies on what the brain knows.

Sorry, missed this bit. The question how can the brain which is made up of stuff (particles, waves, fields, whatever) that is defined by physicalists/materialists as having no mental content end up producing something that has mental content.

To quote Neuroscience PhD and New Atheist "Horseman" Sam Harris:

I don't think Harris questions that brains can produce mental content. What he finds admittedly baffling is where consciousness comes from. 

Harris does point out that, under anesthesia, consciousness completely stops. So without a brain function, no consciousness. So I think he thinks the brain is necessary for consciousness, but questions whether it is sufficient.

I don't think Harris questions that brains can produce mental content. What he finds admittedly baffling is where consciousness comes from. 

Harris does point out that, under anesthesia, consciousness completely stops. So without a brain function, no consciousness. So I think he thinks the brain is necessary for consciousness, but questions whether it is sufficient.

Well it's not clear what happens under anesthesia.

I don't think Harris thinks there's an afterlife anymore than Tallis does.

But it seems odd to me to that when there's such a huge explanatory gap one could assume consciousness ceases when the brain-body dies.

Other's mileage will vary of course.

Everybody seems to jump to their canned talk rather than address that souls can lose the ability to remember after a brain injury.

It isn't clear that it is the soul that loses the ability to remember. But it's fine if you want/need to believe that death is the end.

"Death destroys a man but the idea of it saves him" - EM Forester

I see that in no way addresses why a soul loses memories when a brain is damaged. Why does this happen?

A sudden rush of lucidity after death--if it is a verified thing--could be similar to a rush of strength when the adrenaline flows.


I see no reason to believe that memories cannot be stored in molecules. Even simple creatures do that.

You seem to be saying two things at once - that the brain damage causes memory loss because the the mind is totally dependent on the brain, but somehow this is overcome by a "rush of strength"? Does a surge of electricity fix damaged memory storage on a computer?

The Tallis article I linked gives plenty of reasons for why memories cannot be stored in molecules, specifically separating human memory from simple creatures...