I don’t know that I’m not dead. However things are the same as when I was alive, or if I was never alive things are the same as they’ve always been for me, so it doesn’t matter.
You are detecting something that I did.
If I’m not alive, then there’s no meaningful distinction between alive and not-alive, so it doesn’t matter.
If I’m dead, that means I was alive at some point.
If I was alive and died, that means there is life after death.
If there’s life after death, that means what we know about the physical universe is either untrue, or the process of life is a miracle.
If what we know is untrue, then we don’t really know if we’re alive or dead.
If it’s a miracle, it implies the existence of God.
If there is a God, a large number of people on this board would have their heads explode.
Since that hasn’t happened, either we’re all alive, or nobody knows anything.
Do you remember doing anything incredibly dangerous that you could have died from?
What if I told you that you already died, perhaps more than once, and when you die, your consciousness transfers into a different Universe/dimmension where you continue to live your life as if your death had never happened. You continue to live, breath, think and interact in the universe with other people, but in your previous universe, there are people mourning over you.
Ghosts are fictional. In the real world, only living beings are self-aware. I am self-aware, therefore I am alive.
I would say I don’t believe this theory of existence without some evidence to support it.
I got laid last night. I don’t expect that I’d getting that when I have died.
Your haikus still need work, though.
Well, what’s YOUR theory of existence? What evidence do you use to justify it?
Many Worlds theory of quantum mechanics. Dig it. I accept this principle completely.
It’s the “Ultimate Anthropic Principle.” I only exist in those universes where I didn’t die.
We, in hindsight, see the world’s survival of the Cuban Missile Crisis as a miracle. Nope: in 98% of all possible worlds, Kennedy and Khruschev fuck it up, and we’re toast. We simply happen to exist in one of those 2% of all worlds. It isn’t luck; it’s survival-selection.
To answer your original question: I don’t. I could easily be a ghost. Or a figure in a holodeck sim. Or a lunatic in an asylum, dreaming all of this. Or deceived by a malignant spirit. (Maybe even a benign one; this world is pretty cool, most of the time!)
Solipsism always wins; it can never be falsified.
I realized a long time ago that, while there are a lot of things that are unknowable, none of them actually matter. Because if they did matter, then you could use the way that they matter to know them.
I haven’t yet faced the particular judgement.
How do you know that I do? Why do you think that I am?
- Cogito ergo sum.
- I choose to believe that what I experience is caused by a reality outside of myself and not just a figment of my imagination. Therefore, I reject solipsism.
- I then form conclusions about the nature of reality based on the evidence I receive from that reality.
That last one covers a lot of ground. But relevant to this topic, I have never perceived any evidence that would cause me to believe in the existence of life after death or existence that can be transmitted through alternative universes.
A shower wouldn’t wash off the stink of a rotting corpse.
Is this a variant of “what you don’t know can’t hurt you?” It’s true, pretty much – but that sudden “finding out” at the end can be really brutal.
…“but that’s just one man’s opinion.”
Well, if THIS is the afterlife, I’d have to say “OK, I guess it could be far, far worse.” And admit I obviously had a pretty humdrum regular life, seeing as I’m not drinking it up in the hall of heroes nor lounging with 72 hot teen virgins but neither am I swimming in a lake of fire.