What happens after we die.

[UserNameGoesHere]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

To those that believe in afterlife/reincarnation:

Consider this analogy (seriously, guys, I want your answers to this):

Say you own a computer. You smash it to bits and send it into an incinerator. Does the computer experience afterlife? Does that computer experience another reincarnation in any way?

As you answer this question, draw the analogies back to life and try to pinpoint why exactly you believe in reincarnation/afterlife/etc.

The materials which were remnants of the smashed computer could theoretically be recycled in some fashion and later become parts of new computers or electronics. In this way you could say that computer reincarnated.

But I think what is more important is what is the "life" or "soul" of the computer. It's not the hardware, but rather what is going on while the computer is running which is most important. In this sense, every time you shut down (entirely, which may mean unplugging) your computer, it "dies" and every time you boot it up again it experiences another "life". It is the electrical signals and impulses, what is happening in the CPU, the ever-changing contents of RAM, and so forth.

To bring this back to a human analogy, your body, upon death, will experience a sort of reincarnation in the sense that the physical chemicals will be reused by other things and become parts of other things, given enough time for decay/etc, but this is not important.

The more important detail is that of the soul. I will define the soul to be the sense of being (some may say consciousness) which is generated by the activity of the brain. Such activity did not exist prior to your life (that you know of), it does exist during your life, then ceases upon death.

However, such activity essentially "randomly" started for at least the duration of your life. What in the cosmos is there which would prevent this same activity from "randomly" starting again somewhere else? I'm not saying it's likely, but you have an infinity of time and space for this to happen, so it doesn't have to be likely. Your chances for it to happen once were essentially the same as your chances it could happen again. After all it happened by "random" events.

*Random* -- I realize each instance here is not truly random but rather wholly unpredictable series of complicated events which, for all practical purposes, can be treated as random. Point being that what is there to prevent similar circumstances leading up to the series of events from happening a second time, third time, etc??? Unlikely, perhaps, but I don't think there's anything preventing it.