As the last of the energy from a dying battery is expelled, is that energy stored up and earmarked to be interred into a new battery, or is that energy just floating out there to be used as the universe sees fit?
It’s not me being reincarnated then. It’s me being discarded, and something else being incarnated.
You can’t ‘experience nothing’, but you can ‘not experience anything’ - in fact, it can happen under anaesthesia, or just very deep sleep - your inner narrative doesn’t sit there ‘experiencing nothing’ (because being conscious to notice that it was experiencing nothing would be a form of experience). It ‘does not experience [anything]’.
Nitpickers may object to the above on the basis that there is still brain activity ongoing even during unconsciousness, but that is largely irrelevant to the higher-level matter of ‘not experiencing’.
Well, I mean I find it odd to imagine that you would just be floating around in death for all of eternity, without respawning at all. I mean, that means that since you’re unaware, how. would that work at all? Like the universe would instantly be destroyed and possibly instantly recreated or possibly the dimension holding the universe together might also be destroyed instantly and then recreated again and again and you won’t respawn at all? Sounds a bit strange to me.
Not only that, but it is extremely unlikely that I just happened to magically be born as the exact personv that I am, when there is a absurdly higher chance of me being born as a single piece of virus or bacteria and then dying after a few seconds or minutes after being born and apparently never existing ever again.
I mean, there should also be done sorry of life on other planets as well, probably both intelligent and nonintelligent. So that’s probably quintillions and quintillions of sentient beings I could have been, compared to the much higher possibility of being an almost infinute amount of bacteria or viruses our single cells or plant things and yet SOMEHOW, by our chance I’m a human on this planet in this age? Haha no, that is ridiculously unlikely that it’s actually impossible. Unless they’re is a god, the note realistic idea IMHO, is that I’ve been every single person, bacteria, etc possible either forever it’s up until now and will continue to be.
IF there is an after/pre life (and i’m not convinced there is), i always imagined it to be in a different dimension - one that doesnt have the time constraint of our 4 dimensions. and so the souls just exist with no beginning and no end and no passage of time. that these souls join our universe for their one (or more) lives and then return to their other realm. so to us, here in this universe, there was a time before they came here, and a time after they were here, but to the souls its all the same; no before, during or after, that to me is what is meant by death is just loke before you were born.
mc
That and a wicker basket entitles you to ask for a collection from your bench of followers one day a week. At least that’s how I see it.
On the bright side, The First Amendment protects you from persecution from ignorant hordes of people who disagree and might try to shun or harass you for your beliefs.
Some people call that concept, “Freedom of Religion”.
No, I’m not seeing “not being born” as something that inevitably leads to “being born”. Billions of sperm cells and egg cells exist without turning into foetuses. So we have clear evidence that birth is not some inevitable event. The odds were against you being born once; being reincarnated would be like winning the lottery a second time.
You’re not going to be floating around. You won’t exist.
Ok, think about the time before you existed. What changed and caused you to exist? It didn’t just happen spontaneously. What happened is your parents had sex, which brought together a sperm and an egg, each of which had a particular set of half your parents’ DNA. If it had been a different sperm or a different egg, you would be a different person now, not you. Even then, you didn’t suddenly spring into being fully formed. You developed over days, weeks, months, years. If your mother had slept on her left instead of her right when she was pregnant, if you’d moved to one town instead of another, if you’d dated someone different, if you’d married someone different, if you’d had cereal instead of toast for breakfast this morning–any of those would make you different that you are now, a slightly (or vastly) different person.
But you’re right that there’s nothing preventing it from happening again. If your parents met again, and the same same sperm fertilized the same egg, and then the same life experiences accumulated in the same ways, then the person who resulted would be identical. Would they be “you”? That depends on what you mean by “you”.
If not, what would make a different person or animal or thing “you”? Your answer to that question will either be “Nothing, unless it also shared my memories and experiences” or it will be something the rest of us (for the most part) don’t believe in, something for which the evidence is weak or nonexistent.
many believe that there are 3 (or more) parts to us. the 2 sets of dna from your parents plus the soul from wherever (heaven). its not such a stretch from there to believe that the dna doesnt have to be from the same people - or even people at all - for reincarnation to happen.
mc
If you believe in a soul, then sure, you can believe whatever you want about it. But I already addressed that, saying that it’s something for which there is no evidence. And the OP already said he *doesn’t * believe in a soul.
Right. And “many people believe” that the stork brings babies, and “its not such a stretch from there to believe” that it’s not a stork, but a green alien.
How could I have missed that oh-so-logical possibility? :smack:
ahhh, i see. then my question to dude robert is; if there is no soul then what are you before you were born and after you die?
mc
To dude robert: say I gather up a pile of twigs, and I bang some rocks together until I get a spark, and campfire ensues. And maybe I roast a marshmallow over that fire, or something. And eventually that fire burns out – and, as per my boy scout training, I carefully pour water over the remains of what used to be a fire.
Where was that fire before I made it? Where is it now? What will it come back as?
Or . . . do those questions simply make no sense?
You would not be floating around in death; you would simply not exist.
you’re better than this.
as i’m sure you could figure out, i was responding to alan smithee pointing out to dude robert that we are made of two sets of distinct and unique material, thus precluding any reincarnation without those 2 criteria. my point was if you add a third ingredient. the soul, then reincarnation is not impossible. i believe we are talking philosophically, and so concepts of “soul” and “reincarnation” are allowed. as was pointed out upthread these are, currently, untestable concepts and are therefore unprovable and so should not be promoted as scientific or true. but i see no harm in waxing whimsically about such topics, IMHO. especially since there is a long and well documented history of such thoughts being discussed and taken seriously by men and women much smarter than i. (and maybe you)
mc
Yep, there is no “you”. Before you are born there is no you and after you die there will be no you.
Well, as I said before, it seems very unlikely to have just been made a human by chance when there are much higher chances to have been made something else and then died as that something else and never became anything else ever again, according to the “no reincarnation” idea.
So I would prefer to say that before I was born, I was probably many many trillions and trillions of bits of non-sentient lifeforms all having lifespans of probably a few minutes or seconds or even less, so that as soon as the lifeform dies it instantly is converted to another one, I guess?
Well if you were careless with the water and splashed it on the fire in such a way that it forced the hot air and embers to escape the fire pit and instead populate a bunch of dry bush and buckets or opened canisters of generator fuel that was lying to the side of the fire then it might suddenly explode into a massive bushfire.
Even if it doesn’t do that, you can still feel the warmed air, smoke and melted wood flying through the air and crashing into the ground.
Err, on a more serious note:
Well, I think that if reincarnation was not a thing, then that fire will probably come back as the exact same fire made by the exact same person in the exact same environment after you give it some time.
I mean, even without the instant reincarnation, I find it very hard to believe that there would be no sort of afterlife at all. I mean, surely there would be a very good chance of all of the particles of you all coming back together at least once, right? It doesn’t even have to be for very long, it could just be for less than a few milliseconds.
I mean, isn’t it very unlikely that that will never happen? Since if you were completely unconscious for all of eternity, that means that the universe has already ended and begun and ended over and over again, right? After then after it has done that lots of times, surely something that is “more powerful” than the universe would also change in some sort of way many times as well, unless for some reason that area is “above” changing. So after the universe dimension changing and warping over and over, why wouldn’t all the bits of materials that make up you and the trees and bushes and the reasons you had for lighting that fire at least make themselves exist again at probably multiple points? I see no reason for this not to happen if reincarnation is either not a thing, or not a permanent thing so that it stops after a while for some reason.
You either aren’t grasping the meaning of “non-existence”, or you have no intention of discussing it at all because it conflicts with this “reincarnation” idea you have.
But in your first post, you were on about me getting reincarnated as bacteria and insects. Now you’re talking about me getting reincarnated as – well, as me, as “the exact same person in the exact same environment”, again lighting a campfire for the same reasons while again surrounded by trees and bushes that “exist again”.
I think I get that; I just don’t see how it has anything to do with whether an insect can be reincarnated from a bacterium and then be reincarnated as a human.
The idea that an indistinguishable entity would briefly flare into existence if the same components ever got reassembled in the same circumstances – how does that have anything to do with vastly different organisms somehow being reincarnations of the same entity? What does that even mean?