Materialist Heaven

Some people (Sean Carrol, for example) assume that materialism implies that we’re not going to heaven. Fortunately, Dennet does not make this mistake. However, I found his treatment of materialist heaven a little bit disappointing. In a book of what, 400 pages? he devotes about a half a page to it, and I found his treatment very vague. Maybe he actually wanted certain people not to notice what he was up to.

To me it’s very simple: if materialism is true, then when we die, our minds get uploaded to heaven.

Now I suppose that’s not materialism in the strictest sense. It posits a heaven that is explicitly not made of matter, or at least the kind of matter we know and love. What I mean by materialism is mind-materialism. Not that *everything* is matter, but that the mind is matter. To posit mind-dualism, we need to actually update physics to include a new category of consciousness, which actually has causal interactions with good old matter. But positing a spiritual heaven does not have this problem, since there’s no reason for heaven to interact with the material world. The heaven arrow goes one way.

Now, the secularists of course would say that we have no evidence for the existence of heaven. I think that is not really an objection to what I’m saying here. We have a tradition that heaven is real, and that’s good enough for the purposes of this discussion.