4RM3D said:
Time for a more serious subject. Do you believe in the afterlife? And how does it affect your actions in this life? I guess believing in the afterlife is mostly tied to a religion and believing in God (one or more). But correct me if I am wrong.
Personally I am far to rational and pragmatic to flat-out believe in things without some logical argument or scientific proof.
But first off, let's say you do believe in the afterlife. The believe is all you need, because for this life is doesn't matter whether there is something beyond or not. It only matters how you act on that (dis)believe. That believe must be comforting, as no matter how shitty this life is, there is always going to be a next. [assumption incoming] And those that believe generally believe the afterlife will be better and longer (for them, at least).
But maybe it doesn't work that way for you?
I'm trying to find some argument that can theoretically prove the possibility of a beyond. But I am not succeeding. The human mind is limited and this theory might go beyond our limit. Anyhow, I would see the afterlife as a destination for our soul with our body as the vessel and our life as the journey. In the same way you use a vehicle to travel from A to B. The problem with this theory (and many others) is that I can't explain the soul. Where does it come from? We are born with a soul? How does that work?
In the end I tend not to believe in the afterlife, but I will always be holding a small glimmer of hope that is the vastness of the universe and in the complexity of life there is something more, until science proves otherwise.
Then there is also the matter of reincarnation. Maybe you don't view it as the afterlife, but as being reborn? Though, if I have to put my money or either the afterlife or reincarnation, I would have to go for afterlife in terms of logic.
Phew... that's enough for now. What are your thoughts or believes?
PS. I haven't mentioned the term 'heaven' (or 'hell') on purpose. Instead, I have used the more general term 'afterlife'. But, if you have an issue with that, please correct me.
EDIT: And I just realized, I've posted this in the wrong forum.
Well, I neither believe, nor disbelieve.
The problem lies when you try to envision, how or why an afterlife would exist, you immediately also face the question as to what life is.
Or rather, it's not a question about life, but it's a question about consciousness.
Why do I experience anything at all? What relation does my experience of the world have to anything going on in the world?
To ask what happens when you die is to ask where the subjective experience of existing comes from.
And that's a very tricky question, and ironically, also one which science is very badly equipped to handle.
Ask yourself exactly how you are supposed to find an objective answer to a question whose very nature depends on personal subjective experience.
I can infer that you are a conscious being. But how do I know this is true? My only viable point of reference is my own conscious experiences, and that you have measurable qualities and behaviours which are quite similar to qualities and behaviours of my own. (which I associate with my conciousness.)
I can't even prove conclusively that there is an actual correlation between any physical processes going on in my body (or that my body actually exists), in relation to my experience of the world.
Put it like this:
The scientific worldview leads roughly to the following ideas:
1. The world around me exists
2. I can measure this world, and reach consistent conclusions about how it works.
3. My experiences correlate with certain measurable phenomena in the world around me.
4. Therefore, my experiences must be causally related to those phenomena.
But... The only fact which anyone can actually be certain of is this:
1. I am aware of existing.
To me, the afterlife isn't something I'm concerned about with as such. Heaven and hell are amusing concepts, but they aren't significant to me.
The question that occupies my mind is consciousness itself. Where does my internal sense of 'existing' come from, and how is this related to all the sensory inputs that tell me for instance that there is a world around me, that I have a body, and that there are other people (who presumably are also aware of their own existence. - though I can't prove this in any way.)
I suppose I can't wrap my head around the idea that you can go from a state of existence to a state of non-existence, because my consciousness doesn't work that way.
I'm never unconscious.
Now, I know that sounds really odd, but think about it carefully.
In your own experience, have you ever been aware of not being aware of something? Of course not!
Consciousness, in from your own point of reference is unbroken, and continuous.
However, once you start to compare it against your sensory inputs, and this world that supposedly exists, that's when you start to question this idea.
After all, every time I fall asleep and wake up again, there seems to be a discontinuity in the world around me.
Now, as it happens, this discontinuity seems explainable as the world having continued in a consistent unbroken manner, but me having lost awareness of it for several hours.
But... From my own purely subjective viewpoint, what actually seemed to happen was not that I lost awareness for a few hours, but rather that there was a discontinuity in the world I was perceiving.
That, to me is the question that this all revolves around.
Ceasing to exist is a very odd idea to me. But... So is the idea that I would go on forever.
But then again, this becomes a question of time. According to objective external measures, the time I was asleep passed without my awareness.
According to my own internal sense of time, this period just didn't happen at all.
Which is the correct viewpoint?
And with regards to death, what would that mean, say, if I die 20 years from now, but then due to some unexplainable quirk of the universe, I exist again 3 million years from now?
On the basis of logic that seems unlikely. But... Sheer probability means it's not completely out of the question.
The thing is, what does that mean for my personal experience? If I cease to exist in the meantime, then to someone who exists continuously within this universe for that entire period, I would appear to have been dead for 3 million years, then suddenly have come back to life.
Yet from my own perspective, the most likely way for that to seem from my point of view, is simply that the intervening 3 million years just didn't happen.
However, this question as a whole becomes much more interesting if you reverse it.
Instead of asking 'what happens after you die', try the thought experiment of asking 'what happened before I was born?'
Because under the conventional understanding of how time works, you've already experienced that;
And since by that same conventional sense of logic, you didn't exist before you were born in much the same way you won't exist after you die, it is a very useful tool to help answer this question.
And it leads to some very interesting answers.
For instance, I have pictures of myself when I was little. Based on the accounts of others, I know it's me. And I even have stories of what I supposedly did when I was around that age.
Yet, I don't remember it at all. So, to my own understanding, it didn't actually happen.
For that matter, there are aspects of what happened yesterday which I can't remember.
Did they even happen at all?
And my experience of the here and now is quite different from any of the memories I
can remember...
Are my memories real? Who or what experienced those memories, since it doesn't as such seem to be 'me', in the sense of how I experience the current moment in time.
When you start asking questions like that reality can seem to start to unravel in front of your eyes.
So... To answer anything about 'after death', you must first answer what it means to be concious. Because that in itself is a very strange thing.
