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Do you believe there is some form of self-conscious life after death?

Do you believe there is some form of self-conscious life after death?

  • Total voters
    177
Thor 2 said:
No really but being a person with an open mind I see a very very slight glimmer of a chance via thought transfer. Sort of reincarnation without woo.:)
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That's not open-mindedness, that indecisiveness... or something.
 
Ah, reincarnation... or as I like to call it, the soap opera theology. You get shot in the head on NCIS, you get to star on Rizolli And Isles next year. And if you've been really good, it might even be a better role ;)

Unfortunately, that also makes me wonder why people even care about that kinda thing. Even if it actually were real (and I don't think so), so what? That's not a continuation of YOU, it's just reusing an app slot for someone completely different. It's like claiming that Witcher 3 is the reincarnation of Anno 1404, because I deleted the latter to make room for the former, to run on that CPU.

All your decisions, your personality, etc, is based on a voting process in your brain that you can even watch in real time on an MRI, based on the associations formed by your previous experiences. Whether there is a soul or not, that soul then would be just processing those experiences to reach any decision. Whether it's about reaching your hand around the corner to light a room before stepping foot in it, or distrusting authority, it's all based on previous good vs bad experiences for that course of action. E.g., stepping on LEGO pieces or dealing with a bad teacher. Everything that is YOU, as opposed to a generic body and a generic brain chemistry baseline shared by a hundred million other people, is literally in your previous experiences.

If you start that soul from zero again, with no memories of a previous life, and learn from a whole new set of experiences, guess what? That's not the old you any more. It's someone different, just processed by the same CPU, if that CPU is a soul.

If the old you learned to be honest, while the new you gets punished harshly by bad parents for admitting mistakes, the end result will be fundamentally different people, and the lessons learned in the previous life won't care one bit. If they're not in the memories that go into that voting up there in your head, they don't get to matter in the result. The notion of the same you, just with none of the previous data, is nonsense.

It's introducing the unneeded extra entity of a soul (or an *ahem* "non-soul" if you're a Buddhist, heh)... for no reason at all. The end result is still that the old you has been utterly erased from existence, and the new you is starting from scratch.

So why is that stupidity even in any theology?
 
One hundred per cent yes . I suspect that those who have yet to embrace this are young souls who have " all ahead of them " in terms of spiritual enlightenment . But as Time is just a local matter , it becomes a variable that effectively disappears within the overall process .That is , "we " all get the same overall opportunity , though , within local conditions ( Time ) it appears that some souls take much longer and later to develop and progress than others . Michael Newton's findings express this paradigm in simple terms and they nicely outline the equivalent of structure and system within continuous creation .
 
Kid Eager said:
That's not open-mindedness, that indecisiveness... or something.
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Is there a difference?

Just to be clear. I think the chances of there being life beyond death is extremely low. However I think there may be a slight chance, be it ever so small, that some mechanism, beyond the world of woo, may give that chance.
 
Maybe, but if it's reincarnation, why does it even matter?

I mean, let's say the universe actually works like a World Of Warcraft server. Or a Skyrim game, or Fallout 4, or Minecraft, or whatever anyone is familiar with. So this server/universe has a number of processes that deal with the NPCs AI. Whether it's actually separate threads or just chunks of memory to keep their details or whatever.

Let's call this process a "soul". And we have a big but finite pool of them around to keep all the NPCs in the game running around doing their thing.

Or you can think of it as the computer equivalent of a huge bookcase with cardboard folders with all the details that make a person tick, if you're not an IT person.

Now some bandit dies, and some other NPC is spawned, let's say some settler. WTH is the fundamental difference between:

A) we throw the whole folder into the garbage bin, and start a new one for the new person, or

B) we just completely empty its contents into the garbage bin, and start putting the new person's data in the old folder?

B is fundamentally equivalent to A, in which case we already have a perfectly good explanation for what runs the new person's data: the new being's biological brain.

But, I mean, the faith/hope in reincarnation beliefs is... what? That the universe is buggy, and has a massive data corruption problem because the new person's data isn't properly initialized, and bits of old data make it through?

Well, that's not something to hope for. It's something to scare the seven shades of sh... err... crap out of you. I'd rather not live in a corrupt game, if you get my drift. Those tend to crash or terminally go off the rails sooner or later. Usually sooner.

And what if it's not limited to humans? What if you end up with bits of Hitler's personality in some industrial robot handling nuclear waste? What if when a nuke is decommissioned, and a cop's flashbang grenade is built, some data from the former ends up in the latter? That scares the crap out of me, instead of giving me hope.

Plus, even assuming we lived in some buggy simulation, some 3000 years ago when reincarnation ideas were all the rage... am I the only one thinking that such a major data corruption problem would have been patched by now? ;)
 
Thor 2 said:
Is there a difference?

Just to be clear. I think the chances of there being life beyond death is extremely low. However I think there may be a slight chance, be it ever so small, that some mechanism, beyond the world of woo, may give that chance.
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I think it's highly unlikely unless the human species evolves a USB port.
 
I went for the unlikely option simply because I can't completely rule it out. But I certainly can't see any good reason to rule it in.
 
Pixel42 said:
I went for the unlikely option simply because I can't completely rule it out. But I certainly can't see any good reason to rule it in.
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You will , given time , imo . If not in this life ,then the next . With eternity, the blink of an eye , the wait is irrelevant .
 
Pixel42 said:
I went for the unlikely option simply because I can't completely rule it out. But I certainly can't see any good reason to rule it in.
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I've said "no" because there is still despite people searching for millennia there is absolutely zero evidence that such a thing could exist. Never mind the "areas" such a thing could exist in have now been so finely described and evidenced that if it does exist it can have no link to what I consider to be "me".
 
I went for no too, because it's a functioning assumption; a "belief".

The neural meat work in your head, different as it is falling down the days, is not going to cohere through its impact with the side-walk of death.
 
Solid no.

1. There is zero evidence for the existence of any non-biological aspect to our minds.
2. I don't feel the need to tack on an apologetic "But I could be wrong" statement onto things as an intellectual out.
 
Well, what you believe and what you hope are different issues. I see no problem with asking about one of them.
 
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