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.

[Spenner]

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.

Hmm, see, I'm open to the idea of an EXPERIENCE after death, but I don't think reincarnation really. Unless there is some kind of substance we cannot perceive within everything, them being strings or some kind of energy or something, which we'd never be able to see. And they somehow reconstruct themselves somehow. Which seems pretty unlikely.

I tend to have a pretty open mind about it, thinking of the possibility of different things out there we're unable to perceive. I'm not going to discount the idea just because I can't prove it to myself. But I'm not going to pretend like there IS proof and be religious about it. I'm more or less just an observer. Since it's inevitable, I'm kind of just excited to know the very truth about it. Not in any rush I mean, but when it does come, I'll be accepting, and ready for it.

[Crashfan3]

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.

I don't believe in reincarnation, but computers are not sentient beings. They have no thoughts and no free will. My computer is not going to run any program unless a human (or a program written by a human) instructs it to. Without a human to use it, my computer is just a really shiny hunk of plastic, metal, and silicon.

On the other hand, humans are sentient beings. We have free will. I can decide completely on my own what I do and when I do it. Those in favor of reincarnation believe that this makes us and other beings in the animal kingdom unique. But what benefit is there to recycle the thoughts and memories of sentient beings?

In addition, let's say I were to die tomorrow. I'm reincarnated into the life of some human baby somewhere. Unless this newborn child can benefit somehow from the experiences of the life of Crashfan3, what's the point?

If reincarnation is completely random, it would be very unlikely that I spoke English in every one of my past lives. Somewhere, someone must have spoken German or Arabic or some dead language that nobody uses anymore. So why can I only speak English? Why can I not draw upon the collective knowledge of my past lives and suddenly become fluent in Mandarin?

Just a series of random ramblings from inside my head. I apologize if they're somewhat disorganized.

[fido123]

Our brain functions fairly similar to that of a computer. Also I'll just leave this here: http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/cms/lang/en/pid/56882

[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.

[UserNameGoesHere]

Originally Posted by 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?

That's pretty much exactly what I said. I already said the physical machine itself did not matter so much, though it could be conceived of as reincarnating via some sort of recycling (whether into another computer or not). But that what was important was precisely what it was doing as it was running. Furthermore, there is no reason this "what it was doing", this internal action could not be duplicated elsewhere.

In the case of a human then, the body becomes less important than the spirit or essence or "you", this internal goings-on of electrical signals and whatever else that constitutes what you think about as the conscious "you". So the body could die and thus be recycled, yet what in the cosmos would stop this exact assortment of signals and processes which defines "you" from ever arising again? I can think of nothing that would.

The events which led up to "you" existing in the first place were unlikely events which happened anyway. I see nothing which could stop similar events from happening again, unlikely as it may be, considering the vastness of the cosmos, and an infinity of time and space for such series of events to happen. In a way, it becomes more and more likely because there is an infinity of time and space in which this can happen.

I'm just saying I don't see it as impossible is all.

[Reincarnate]

So you believe there is a spirit, correct? When, along our evolutionary timeline, did the spirit become part of our being? "Start" point being atoms and molecules, "end" point being what we are today. I may have misread you, feel free to correct; just trying to establish explicitly what your beliefs are.


"The events which led up to "you" existing in the first place were unlikely events which happened anyway. I see nothing which could stop similar events from happening again, unlikely as it may be, considering the vastness of the cosmos, and an infinity of time and space for such series of events to happen. In a way, it becomes more and more likely because there is an infinity of time and space in which this can happen."

This one's tricky to explain, but bear with me with the following analogy, in hopes that you will look at consciousness a little differently with respect to locality:

I'm not going to get the Google links (you can find them for yourself if you really want to) but it is possible to live with half a brain, either left or right. Consciousness is achievable in either half, standalone. So, consider the following scenario. You, right now, have your conscious "window" which we might typically think of as a "spirit." Say I cut your brain in half and put each half in a new, empty shell of a body and hook everything up. What happens to your "window" and what might this imply for the nature of consciousness? "Who" is now in each body? When "you" wake up from your operation, where do you wake up?

[UserNameGoesHere]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

So you believe there is a spirit, correct? When, along our evolutionary timeline, did the spirit become part of our being? "Start" point being atoms and molecules, "end" point being what we are today. I may have misread you, feel free to correct; just trying to establish explicitly what your beliefs are.


"The events which led up to "you" existing in the first place were unlikely events which happened anyway. I see nothing which could stop similar events from happening again, unlikely as it may be, considering the vastness of the cosmos, and an infinity of time and space for such series of events to happen. In a way, it becomes more and more likely because there is an infinity of time and space in which this can happen."

This one's tricky to explain, but bear with me with the following analogy, in hopes that you will look at consciousness a little differently with respect to locality:

I'm not going to get the Google links (you can find them for yourself if you really want to) but it is possible to live with half a brain, either left or right. Consciousness is achievable in either half, standalone. So, consider the following scenario. You, right now, have your conscious "window" which we might typically think of as a "spirit." Say I cut your brain in half and put each half in a new, empty shell of a body and hook everything up. What happens to your "window" and what might this imply for the nature of consciousness? "Who" is now in each body? When "you" wake up from your operation, where do you wake up?

I already defined what I meant by spirit/soul/consciousness/etc... in both previous posts. The computer analogy is it isn't the computer itself but what it is doing internally, electrical signals, state of RAM, what the CPU is doing, and all of that, taken as a whole. This "doing" could be duplicated on different hardware. In a sense it is what your brain does.

I can think of no reason why this exact activity could not be duplicated at some other time/place either intentionally (future scientific advancements) or through generalized chance of events, being as how there is the entirety of all of time and space in which such an event could happen. It doesn't mean it will happen but it means it's at least plausible that it could, unless there is some cosmic reason why it couldn't (which I can't think of).

If you were split entirely and each half managed to live then, yes, each half would be at that point another variant of "you", which would then split off and diverge from that point onwards. In fact I see no reason why there couldn't be multiple "yous" existing right now. Almost entirely unlikely, but I don't see it as impossible. For all I know, "you" could exist both as yourself and a similar being on some other world far out there somewhere. I could not disprove this though I would not be inclined to believe it.

So what I am saying, in a nutshell, is I don't know if reincarnation will happen, but I can see no reason why it absolutely can't. In my view it is plausible but not necessarily actual. Your view is that it absolutely cannot. I think you'll have a hard time proving absolutes such as that.

[Reincarnate]

My view isn't that it "absolutely cannot" -- anything's possible, but I remain agnostic about things that aren't provable or knowable one way or another. However, belief skews the probability one way or another based on evidence. For instance, I am an agnostic atheist (as are most atheists) for this reason.

With regard to something like reincarnation, I am agnostic because I do not think the answer to such a question is knowable. So I don't claim absolute truth one way or the other. But I don't believe it is true (much like I don't believe in fairies) because of the evidence based on how humans function and how atoms work and what the nature of consciousness is.

Your argument is basically one of eternal-return, which says that if you're given an infinite amount of time and a universe under constant change-parameter, then you'll "come back" again (along with all other possible permutations) at another place, another time, etc.

The reason why I don't think eternal return works in the way you're thinking of is because if it were true, we'd already know about it. You "came together" randomly out of nowhere, so you think there's no reason for it to happen again later. Technically speaking, you didn't come out of nowhere. The event of your birth happened at a specific point in history, resultant of billions of years of deterministic processes. A body was forged, a mind was forged, etc. That event is what defines you. It only feels "random" if you're asking yourself "why was I born as me and not someone else?"

The answer is easier if you think of it from the perspective of the universe. Asking why you were born as you and not someone else is like asking why atom A is atom A and not atom B. Something has to be distinct from another. In this fundamental sense, it is a sort of "randomness," just different from how it's typically defined.

So when we die, I don't see any reason why we'd ever "re-experience" sentience. We already do this when we're alive, but we're just unaware of it because we're localized to our own consciousness (all sentient beings are disconnected from each other even though, from the perspective of the universe, the universe is "experiencing everyone" at the same time). If I die, I'm done for. Even if you put my functions back together again, it wouldn't be a continuous conscious experience. It's a lot like the teleporter argument. Say there's a teleporter that destroys you and recreates you elsewhere. Would it still be you even though it has all the same memories, mannerisms, etc, as you? Technically no; you'd experience death and someone else would experience birth but FEEL as if he had just been alive and kicking. I think "reincarnation" would have to be a lot like that; but we already experience this anyway when our atoms are in flux.

tl;dr version: Technically when you die, you're dead. Bits and pieces of your consciousness would be reconfigured into other apsects of the environment and serve as THEIR functions, but this is already happening. You don't suddenly experience other conscious lives because you're localized to your own functions. That alone is a HUGE blow against the reincarnation argument.

Consciousness is really hard to talk about without delving into philosophy, but that's mainly because consciousness is typically a "private" local concept that is currently unknowable, so we're ultimately agnostic about it. Which direction we sway in belief depends on how we interpret the evidence.

[UserNameGoesHere]

I guess the only difference, then, would be I would say that, yes, in the teleporter argument, the reconstructed person would indeed be you. In fact if you had a perfect cloning device, all clones would be you as well. It is just perhaps very difficult to conceive of how it would feel to be in multiple bodies at the same time without actually experiencing that firsthand.

In fact, who you are is in constant flux. You of right now is not the same as you of 10 minutes ago, which is again very different from you of 10 years ago, and so on.

For an interesting perspective I would recommend the adventure genre game Out of Order. Play the game the entire way through, and then reconsider some of these perspective issues. You likely won't understand what's going on until you've completed the game or come close anyway but I find it encourages you to think about things in different ways. It is freeware -- if you have to, use a walkthrough, but try to get through without one. At the very ending of the game you should see how it ties into this discussion very well. It blurs the lines of what it means to "be", what is reality, mind/body separation, and so forth.

[Cavernio]

"It is just perhaps very difficult to conceive of how it would feel to be in multiple bodies at the same time without actually experiencing that firsthand."

Are you saying that you think it's possible to have 1 consciousness in multiple, physically separate bodies usernamegoeshere?

"Say there's a teleporter that destroys you and recreates you elsewhere. Would it still be you even though it has all the same memories, mannerisms, etc, as you? Technically no; you'd experience death and someone else would experience birth but FEEL as if he had just been alive and kicking. I think "reincarnation" would have to be a lot like that; but we already experience this anyway when our atoms are in flux."

I would say that technically yes, it would be me, especially considering that our bodies are constantly changing and therefore 'experience' all this at the same time. Otherwise there's no real way to define an individual. I am me not because of my physical entity, but because of what I experience. But this an aside semantical argument I think.

Fido: Sure, the person's dead and it does not matter to them, but you seem to be missing the point. Value itself is not a real, tangible thing. I can also say that it doesn't matter if I kill you and eat you because it wouldn't technically hurt me at all, and of course I am the only person that matters. (well, if you were a person whom I didn't have interaction with at least.)

Also, next time your pet dies, eat it and enjoy it.

[UserNameGoesHere]

I don't see why not. I don't know if it ever would happen but I can't think of any reason why it strictly couldn't.

[SocoNhydro420]

Originally Posted by MrRubix

See the metaphysics thread.

Odds are, once our brain ceases to function, so does out perspective and sentience. Therefore you basically wind up in the same state of existence that you were in before you were born. That is to say, nothing.

This is what i think. Can you imagine the nothingness of not existing before you were born? I cant, but i imagine thats what it would be like.

Interesting thread, i like reading everyones opinions. Thruth is, nobody knows the answer so everyones belief is just as likely to be true as the others.

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by SocoNhydro420

Thruth is, nobody knows the answer so everyones belief is just as likely to be true as the others.

Not so much

[devonin]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

Not so much

This. A number of even fairly popular theories are testable even though we can't reliably kill someone and then bring them back to life to find out what they experienced.

Primarily anybody whose system includes reincarnation while retaining the memories of past lives, or physical reincarnation after some future 'end times' scenario.

[Ouroboros Prime]

when we die we probably go to some kind of afterlife

[ScylaX]

Originally Posted by Ouroboros Prime

when we die we probably go to some kind of afterlife

We're in critical thinking here so please explain your opinion, give critical arguments to put some bedrock to your postulate. Or he will crumble.

[Ouroboros Prime]

well there has to be more to life than this
and we couldn't be here without god
so it's not that much of a stretch really. probably something after death

[fido123]

Originally Posted by SocoNhydro420

Thruth is, nobody knows the answer so everyones belief is just as likely to be true as the others.

I completely disagree. Some answers are based off nothing but magic and fables. We have a really good idea how we got here after earth was formed, what happens after we die, and what existence is. Any answer that goes against what we have a decent understanding of is probably false. This comic illustrates how I view a lot of people's beliefs on how we got here:

Originally Posted by Ouroboros Prime

well there has to be more to life than this

Why? I don't think so.

Originally Posted by Ouroboros Prime

and we couldn't be here without god

Yes we can. Watch Carl Sagan's a guide to the cosmos. It's at least 30 years old (I think) but that should just further illustrate my point.

Originally Posted by Ouroboros Prime

so it's not that much of a stretch really. probably something after death

Existence is merely a product an arrangement of atoms and molecules aided by survival of the fittest. When this arrangement ceases to exist, why would our existence continue to exist?

[HammyMcSquirrel]

Originally Posted by Ouroboros Prime

well there has to be more to life than this
and we couldn't be here without god
so it's not that much of a stretch really. probably something after death

Rubix, please stop using an alt to troll people.