This is not a discussion of beliefs - merely a flight of fancy. Once your carcass has given up the ghost, the you that is you - call it soul, spirit, essence, whatever - continues to exist. Your senses continue to function as they do now, so you can see, hear, smell, etc, but you cannot interact with the living.
Where do you go? What do you do? Will you watch your descendants? Seek your ancestors (being dead, too, you can interact with them.) Do you explore the universe or go to your favorite place and just hang out?
I need to think on my answer, so that will come later. Have at it!
So I can’t touch anything or feel hot or cold? Then I’m hooking up with an old friend and heading off to places like Yellowstone or the Great Barrier Reef to observe nature and wild life. So much more interesting than watching people do things.
Just go visit all those places I’ve wanted to visit, but didn’t get a chance to visit. Including all the secret places, like Cheyenne Mountain. See the Stargate
It will take long enough that, when I finally run out of new places, the first places I visited will likely be different, so I can start over.
Considering that Life After Death is said to be Eternal, I’ll be checking in on loved ones, maybe favorite celebrities (and discover they’re really and truly just plain ol’ boring people after all), but a good chunk of my time will be mastering every hobby that I can think of (that don’t prove to be too uninteresting). Oh, and I’ll also try to learn everything written down about everything.
But what’ll I do after that first few million years?
It’s pretty much the same answer as if I had a time machine. I’d contact my ancestors who moved from Ireland to Wisconsin in the 1830s and find out who they were and why they moved. They then moved to the Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and I’d find out the reasons for that too.
And the world tour thing too. And why not the universe too? Travel to other planets, hell, other galaxies and see if there’s life there. Even if I couldn’t interact with other living beings, I’d know if we were alone in the universe or not.
For one man’s answer to this one, see Act Three of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. (Short answer, people watch their descendants with indifference, but it’s unbearably painful to go back to see your own past and witness your loved ones not fully appreciating the brief and precious time they have with each other.)
The rest of you who want to spend eternity just visiting places on Earth aren’t looking very far afield. After all, we already know that there’s a canyon on Mars that makes the Grand Canyon look like a pothole. And that’s just the next grain of sand over from us on a beach that’s a million miles long. Who knows what fabulous things there are to see and experience on trillions of planets in the universe?
And to paraphrase, Eternity is long. Really long. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly long it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long wait for the pizza delivery guy to show up, but that’s just peanuts to eternity.
Well, that requires us to determine the Physics of Ghosts. Can a ghost travel in space without assistance? Can they travel anywhere without assistance? Can they fly, or can they only walk? Are they limited to light speed? Or maybe nowhere near lightspeed? Sure, visiting other solar systems would be cool, but not if it’s thousands of years between stops.
If the ghost has to hitch a ride to go longer distances, that limits what they can visit. I thought about hitching a ride to the Moon on the new Artemis missions, but then I thought, “Wait, what if the program gets cancelled before I hitch a ride back? How long would I be stuck on the Moon?” You think Earth would get boring after a few thousand years? Imagine how boring the Moon would get. You can only visit the Apollo landing sites so many times before you get tired of it all.
If it’s a “plan your own fantasy” afterlife, I’d watch the entire Criterion Collection on the big screen, see all the Doctor Who episodes that were wiped from the BBC archives, and catch up on all the reading I never got to in life.
If I could experience corporeal pleasures, I’d seek out the world’s most delicious food and ghost-eat it (presumably leaving it intact for the living people it was intended for).
I’d plunge to the deepest depths of the ocean and hopefully be able to experience it in all its biological/geological glory (a little hard to imagine exactly how, since it would be completely dark, but hey, we’re suspending disbelief here).
Then I’d zoom off to other places in the solar system, to start with. Long hikes across Mars! Swimming in the oceans of Jupiter’s moons!
Relationships with other ghosts would be tricky - there are people I’m glad to be free of that I would hope to avoid, but also loved ones I’d enjoy spending time with. To keep things fresh, I think we’d have to set some rules though: “Let’s spend the next hundred years exploring together, then take a break and meet again in another 100” - or something like that.
Eternity is a long time. I’d point my spiritual form to the next star system, freeze my cognitive system, set myself flying at the speed of thought until I got there, then reawaken and see if there’s intelligent life on any of the planets. If not, try the next one.
There will be around 109 billion ghost rummaging around just from Earth. I’d hope they’ve spread out by time I’ve kicked the bucket, that sounds kind of crowded. Eternity is a long time, but given the vast distances involved, can our ghostly consciousnesses handle nearly 5 years of nothingness just to visit the nearest star system? I’m assuming even ghosts are light-speed limited. if we can put ourselves into “stany-by” mode like Knowed_Out suggested though, then that’s all goof i suppose!
