What happens after we die.

[Reincarnate]

UserNameGoesHere: Yes, the materials of the smashed computer get recycled, but they don't necessarily get recycled into another computer -- they're dispersed back into the environment. Also, your atoms are already being recycled right now as we speak. The atoms that compose you right now are not the same atoms that composed you ten years ago. Atoms are in constant flux; therefore, it's not the atoms that localize your feeling of existence, but the function of the parts in action. Response?

Crashfan3: Okay, so those are the questions to address: What is free will? What is sentience? I'll answer both: Technically you DON'T have free will, but it "feels" free. You're still causally embedded in the environment, just like everything else is in the universe (save a few key points of quantum mechanics where we technically remain agnostic about currently). When you make a decision, it's the result of the sum of effects on your life up until this point. For instance, say you choose to eat Cheerios this morning. Think about why you made that decision. It will be broken down, ultimately, into a variety of factors that aren't actually within your control. In other words, you can still make decisions, but they're technically influenced by a huge number of variables that you simply aren't aware of and can't track. That's what a decision is, at its basic level: A physical response to the environment. Only in the case of humans, the response is wrought forth out of a much more complex procedure.

Onto sentience; sentience is just the property of a particular structure to be self-aware. In other words, consider a computer with a webcam, microphone, hard drive for memory, etc, and a program that made sense of all of this. How is that result fundamentally different from that of a human mind? We're technically just input/output machines, with a neural-network that processes and makes sense of the stimuli. A computer isn't going to run unless a human starts one, sure, but that only applies to actual computers that we KNOW we've created. This also doesn't mean programs can't be left running; human interference is not required. More generally, it doesn't mean a human must start everything, either. To finish the analogy, think of your birth as the "start" of the program. Okay, so what started your parents, who birthed you, and their parents, and so on? We keep going back up the chain of evolution until we arrive at something like abiogenesis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6QYDdgP9eg

In other words, humans are not needed to give humans sentience or to "run" their "programs." It's just physics and chemistry. In yet other words, we are like computers that have been refined over billions of years, with humble origins in natural laws.