Afterlives

[Magical Realist]

As much as I want to believe in an afterlife, and sort of have to since receiving a miraculous sign from my departing mother, I have to say very few scenarios attract me. I don't like the idea of heaven and perfection. I think an afterlife is better with danger and challenge and adversity. I liked the version from Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series, where everyone is resurrected on the shores of a million mile river and must journey along it to find their answers. And when you die you just reemerge at another point on the river. That'd be cooler than a heaven. Or maybe something like Star Trek, aboard some magnificent starship discovering new life and new civilzations. Or the world of Pandora in "Avatar".

Maybe the afterlife isn't really much different from what we have here. Just more time trying to make a life in some world with a whole bunch of others and avoiding the threat of pain and death. And no God even in sight. That'd be ok too I guess. The joke being on us for believing it would be this great golden compensation for how we lived our lives here. What's your idea of the afterlife, if you believe in one that is?

[elte]

I would want the maximum happiness and contentment always.  Since it would be miraculous, how that would be done is something that I can't speculate on.  Anyways, I don't believe there is an afterlife.

[C C]

What's your idea of the afterlife, if you believe in one that is?

The "ideas" can't help but emerge and subsequently be examined / studied, regardless of personal belief being the case or not.

"Afterlife" would be an agency or process that is holding and continuing / adding to a human memory that just happens to be identical to "mine", apparently with retention of supposed past events right up to moment of death ("supposed" because imaginary ones might result, too, though they must be minor and few for "identical" to be justified).

As a process, such might be nothing more than a scattered, intermittently-interrupted by centuries to millions of years series of Boltzman Brains briefly fizzing in and out of existence as conscious moments constituting that afterlife. [Still yielding coherence due the internal "storyline" linking the isolated events of the irregularly disrupted chain of BBs]

Or a less random and ephemeral agency generated by anything from a cosmos with different principles or habits that conjure all possibilities of minds/bodies that can evolve in other realms like this universe... To a deliberate resurrection agenda in ours carried out via computational virtual reality (etc) in the distant future (Tipler's Omega Point, Jack Sarfatti stuff, etc)... To a super-tech "mining" of a hacked spacetime to reclaim general information and creator-ancestor memories by a posthuman civilization or godlike archailect / T-singularity.

Regarding the latter scenario, it would be a "be careful what belief-system you espouse" consequence, since there would be transhumanism versions of some current religious and life-philosophy ideologies that would survive into that era and equally strive to technologically realize their brands of "heaven/hell" and alternative post-death circumstances as an eventual fact in some enabling context.

Given the known or conventional restriction of cognition being confined to just the "specious now" which each of its sequential temporal parts sport (as well as confined locally to a particular body that is maintaining a system of consciousness across those individual durations of time)... It seems that even my current situation is one of hopping illusion-like from one micro-identity change to another, while "simultaneously" all the cognitively discriminated divisions of my worldline as a macro-identity whole are "lit-up" with awareness of their own unique "nows", too. So a "leap" after death to some remote continuation of this mutable identity at an elsewhere / elsewhen would be just another memory-relation as well. Doubtless, however, I'd be distributed over a variety of multiple kinds of afterlives rather than one. But due again to the aforementioned limitations of local system / retention of the past I would seem to be only conscious of a specific afterlife maintained among those possibilities, rather than all of them collectively.

In contrast to the above, "reincarnation" wouldn't qualify as a legitimate afterlife since there is no preservation of the former memory / identity. Instead there is just the generic subjectivity of "mind" being instantiated hither and thither simultaneously by other bodies; when one brain winks out of operation the general identity characteristics of human consciousness still persist and supervene over the rest. There is not even an experience of "snapping" from a dead body to another still living one, since the generic subjectivity was already abiding with that surviving brain, or correlated to it, before the death occurred. Partially similar to the scenario of spacetime eternalism, static-time or "four-dimensionalism", there would be the illusion of only "being here immediately right now" from the conscious POV of this one body, when actually there was a more primal, underlying generic identity to phenomenal experience with planet-wide but spatially interrupted ubiquity.

[C C]

Death being complete extinction of one's experiences (oblivion) is probably indeed a good or merciful outcome. That utter disappearance of everything could be construed as a form of unconventional "nirvana" which is not popularly appreciated enough as such.

However, the pessimist in me then consequently begins to view any notion of postmortem "paradise" (including this blank one) as yet another fantastic or speculative hope which a mindless and indifferent entity would vacuously deny us. The effects of "mindless and indifferent" shouldn't be equivalent to the deliberate sadism / cruelty which militant atheists ascribe to the Abrahamic deity. But the end result of this universe's global disinterest in complex life -- of making it as difficult as possible to even arise, much less survive minus suffering on an individual basis -- is easily interpreted as amounting to the same situation feeling-wise. For one's inner pessimist, there are occasions when any kind of "peace after death" expectation seems almost as much imaginary BS in secular thought as in certain religious thought.

And the eternalism view of time seems to be what falls out of physics, especially General Relativity. A literal process transpiring of one state of the universe coming into being and then being eradicated as it is replaced by another cosmic-wide change is but psychological or commonsense folklore: Mere appearances. The universe isn't "happening" but instead "just is" from its earliest 13+ billion years ago to the distant future. Along with that is our own life histories not being annihilated, but remaining permanently embedded in the structure of whatever spacetime is (monolithic block-universe, branching polylithic field of a multiverse, etc).

Thus the death point is not a true expunging of one's consciousness, for the body's moments prior to that still exist and accordingly are still cognitively viable. We are at the very minimum trapped in this kind of perpetual Hell. Albeit the possibility of eventually experiencing "something else" is hardly out of the picture, anymore than this superficial miracle (due to memory & temporal part relationships) of my finding myself only cognitively "here" in this particular Now or state of the universe as opposed to all the others before and after.

Robert Geroch: "There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as 'moving through' space-time, or as 'following along' their world-lines. Rather, particles are just 'in' space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle." --General Relativity from A to B

Paul Davies: "Peter Lynds's reasonable and widely accepted assertion that the flow of time is an illusion (25 October, p 33) does not imply that time itself is an illusion. It is perfectly meaningful to state that two events may be separated by a certain duration, while denying that time mysteriously flows from one event to the other. Crick compares our perception of time to that of space. Quite right. Space does not flow either, but it's still 'there'." --New Scientist, 6 December 2003, Sec. Letters

Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science

[elte]

Death being complete extinction of one's experiences (oblivion) is probably indeed a good or merciful outcome...

Reminds me of the efilism and antinatalism philosophies, which as alternatives to there miraculously being a benevolent deity, are the next in line positions that I settle upon.  They observe the world as one of unimaginable pain, as countless animals, including humans, inflict suffering upon thinking animals, again including humans: predator and prey.  Unfortunately, those philosophies could use better spokesmen since profanity tends to be too common.

[Magical Realist]

I have no problem not existing in death should that be the case. It's just that state extended forever and ever that bugs me. How does one undergo a timeless blanking out that lasts forever? I have my suspicions about this not existing. I think it is something we construct for ourselves after we become conscious. We simply experience non-consciousness as a lapse between two conscious moments. As missing time, with nothing in between. So this idea of a nonexistence not sandwiched between becoming unconscious and becoming conscious, for ever and ever, seems ludicrous. Nonconsciousness is nontemporal, so that there can be no infinite extention of it in time. It cannot exist outside of time and for all time, at the same time! It cannot exist accept in contrast to becoming aware. Yin and Yang and so forth..

[elte]

The nonconsciousnes periods of thinking, living and wakable, animals are in time.  That they experience it as nonexistence is subjective.  Before the existence of the particular brains in question, nonconsciousness continued indefinitely before the minds physically existed, and it continues indefinitely after they stop existing.  We can't say it extends forever past and future just that the time spans are indefinite. That's the way things look from a physiological point of view.

[Magical Realist]

The nonconsciousnes periods of thinking, living and wakable, animals are in time.  That they experience it as nonexistence is subjective.  Before the existence of the particular brains in question, nonconsciousness continued indefinitely before the minds physically existed, and it continues indefinitely after they stop existing.  We can't say it extends forever past and future just that the time spans are indefinite.  That's the way things look from a physiological point of view.

But we don't really experience the nonconsciousness before we were born. Hell, we don't even experience it when we're just babies. Our past--our one past--just fades into forgottenness, and we reconstruct it as such and such. But how can there be nonconsciousness to someone who doesn't exist yet? There can't. Nonconsciousness can only happen to an already existing being, as being a state of once having been nonconscious. There's no state of that either before birth or after death, if we assume both those to be nonexistence. Because there has to exist someone for whom it is true that they are nonconscious, or were nonconscious. In short, we have to exist to be nonconscious, or to have been nonconscious, since nonconsciousness is a subjective state of existing.

[elte]

Probably it helps to see two types of nonconsciousness.  One is of a living thing and the other is of a nonliving.  Both of those are not conscious.  I'm still speaking from a physiological perspective.

[C C]

I have no problem not existing in death should that be the case. It's just that state extended forever and ever that bugs me. How does one undergo a timeless blanking out that lasts forever?

Sustained [ultimate] peace of any kind -- whether heaven or nonconscious oblivion -- is just too good to be true. If there's no radical relational transition to a different medium that is continuing our memory-based identity after death, then we're still going to be stuck in experiencing the moments of the same former life story. If the latter, hopefully some kind of variation is provided by an indeterminate version of the block-universe. [Not that our revised brain structures would thereby allow us to ever compare or notice the difference one way or the other, though: "Oh, I was an accountant in the other alternate worldline; here I'm into real estate sales."]