The "proof" of life after death in Phaedo- whose flaw of logic is this?

Question

I am a bit confused- or perhaps I am not- by the logic of the passage in the Phaedo addressing the generation of life from death, and vice-versa.

Socrates addresses Cebes' statement of concern that the soul, after death, simply dissipates, "issuing forth like smoke," and concludes that an underworld or afterlife
must exist- and the souls of the dead remain conscious there- that life can be born from death.

This seems to be terribly flawed conclusion- akin to saying that the underworld is a sort of Tupperware container in which the dead are stored for further regeneration of life. In my understanding, he is not speaking figurately or conceptually- but means that the souls of the dead literally maintain a conscious existence.

My confusion lies in a possible congruency between Cebes original statement- namely the dissipation (or perhaps dissemination) of the soul, as Cebes describes it, is not antithetical to the dead regenerating life.

Socrates seems to indicate the truth of death regenerating life in plant life (as fertilizer), without the existence of a soul; and it is conceivable that a soul (if it can be conceived of as breaking apart), is capable of regenerating life without remaining identifiable as a single entity.

Is this to say- in Socrates's conception- that human regeneration is of a part material and spiritual, indivisible- though he goes on to name differentiation as a consequence of regeneration and regeneration as a consequence of the division of substances.

Or is this a flawed logic in what is, essentially, a consolation in answer to, what seems to me, a more provocative question?

Okay, yes- we are all enlightened here. I'm not taking Socrates to the mat on what we post-Adornians think we know, but what Socrates thought he did.

If you haven't read Plato, please don't answer(?). I understand- really I do. There is no God. Got it. Check. Entiendo.

Answer 1

To even argue a soul's existence is to presuppose it continues on after physical death. What the hell good is it if it fades out the minute you start assuming room temp.

Trying to visualize the afterlife is really mental masturbation. Nobody can know for sure...nobody. To claim, as atheists do, that this is it and there is nothing else is, to me, intellectually vapid. There is absolutely no thought or imagination involved with that conclusion. It is, by definition, impossible to contemplate your own non-existence....therefore the only thing to contemplate is that we do go on.

Answer 2

I would agree with the first answerer that if a soul dissipated at death, then there's not much use having one in the first place. Occam's razor would certainly point towards the non-existence of souls as the more rational and elegant answer.

I would also agree with him that any talk of what an afterlife might be like is pure speculation. ("Mental masturbation?" Lol.) However, we atheists are not "intellectually vapid" in our claim that there is no soul or afterlife. We know for a fact from science a good deal about how our brains work, and indeed that a working brain is a necessary prerequisite for any kind of conscious thought. We also know that everything that makes us who we are--our memories, experiences, tastes, goals, preferences, dogmas, etc.--are stored as patterns of interconnections between neurons in our brains. And that minutes after death, our neurons shrivel up, destroying all that information like data being wiped from a hard drive. So nothing surviving after death can have any thoughts, any memories, any identity. Thus we are back to the original question, of what good is postulating the existence of a soul anyway?

Socrates' "proof" is nothing of the sort; just speculation, non sequiturs and wishful thinking.