My suspicion is there’s nothing but oblivion after death–that it is the end of everything, the essence (spirit/soul/insert your own term) as well as the body. It would be comforting to believe otherwise–especially as I’ve crossed the borderland between late youth and early middle age, and therefore think more about the subject than I used to–but I don’t. One way or the other, I’ll find out eventually.
(And manhattan should immediately be abducted and hooked to every piece of life-support equipment known to humanity, just in case.)
I sometimes think that this sense of self that makes me feel separate from everything else is probably illusory. My self probably contains very few of the atoms that it was orginally formed of. I take parts of the separate world into me, and release parts of “me” to the world. I have the illusion that there is a boundary of me approximately where my skin is, and that I am somehow separate from all these other things around me.
When I am thinking this way, I think that–if there is anything after death–it is the loss of this illusion. Then again, without this notion of self, whatever remains isn’t noticeably me anyway…
Who are we to expect anything better than what we have now after we die? Thats pretty selfish, I think. The whole being alive to die and go to heaven dosen’t fit well with me. We’re told heaven is bliss by the bible and the church, but those are pretty old, 4,000 years or so. What was some desert nomads idea of bliss? He didn’t have TV. If he did, maybe he wouldn’t be so quick to go. For all we know, heaven could be a place with clean water and comfortable shoes. But shouldn’t that be enough? =)
Milo, this has helped me tremendously. Thinking of infants, children, the old and frail going through it – if they can do it, so can I.
But it’s still scary. Whenever I try to imagine what it’s going to be like, I get the same sensation as in my falling dreams, only the fall never ends. So I try not to think about it.
I think the afterlife is a big question mark, and disagree either with super religious people or with atheists who are able to make an assertion without reservation.
Smartass: Questioning the afterlife AND consciousness all in one paragraph, that is bleak dude. On that I agree with Descartes, that consciousness is self evident, and no other part of human experience can exist without it (Meditations on the First Philosophy). In essence you can’t question your existance unless you exist and have the freewill to do so.
The problem for me is reconciling the afterlife with science in such a way that the afterlife “makes sense” and of course this probably means it will be impossible (at least in the short term) to make any difinitive conclusions about the afterlife. But consider…until a few hundred years ago the concept of eletricity was poorly understood…oh sure you can say it was visible in lightning storms, but then again one could say human consciousness is visibile all around too…in oneself and in the rich complexity of other humans. Now our technology has advanced so that we can measure and understand electricity and energy in general in a more comprehensive fashion. But, say, a thousand or ten thousand years ago, electricity, or the idea thereof would have seemed quite metaphysical, yes? Well as we now know, one of the neat things that the brain does is trap energy and use electricity to function. Perhaps there is this third state…not matter or energy, but what Carl Sagan calls “soulstuff”…which exists in the natural world, but which we are unable to measure at this time, though we can see its effects around us. When living things are created their nervous systems use matter and energy to “trap” some of this soulstuff, using it to function better (after all the only thing humans have going for them is their consciousness). Human brains being the most complex trap the most of this soulstuff, and when you die, the brain loses functioning and the soulstuff is re-released. I still haven’t worked out whether you would be able to maintain one identity, or simply return to some sort of cosmic mire. Also consider, that “souls” may “choose” to exist within physical bodies (sorta like “What Things May Come”) as this may present a challenge, and a means for learning some experiences which are not available without physical bodies…perhaps going through the hardships of “life” make souls wiser, stronger, etc. It would be necessary for these souls to “forget” that they were “immortal” as one of the big challenges of life is avoiding death.
These are obviously just some speculative ideas and need work.
When I think of all the arguments (usually as I’m about to fall asleep) for and against an afterlife of any sort, I usually feel overwhelmed and sort of dizzy. I start to think then about the various other things I can’t understand or figure out. I think about how small I am within Everything Else, and how it is arrogant to imagine that I could begin to understand how Everything Else works. All I know of the entire universe has been what I’ve experienced through my tiny senses, and my understanding of it is based on a (almost certainly wildly inaccuarte) model I have created. So, yeah, I’m going to die. No, I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I have to figure that, just because I can’t reconcile the idea of continued existence with my model of the universe, I don’t have even the beginnings of the tools necessary to rule anything out, or claim that I know what will happen. That’s also why I think it’s strange that people will claim to understand these sorts of things.
There are a lot of people who didn’t die. Like Elija in the OT. Sure, he went to heaven, but he didn’t “die.” He simply rode to heaven in the luxury of a fiery chariot. That’s the way I want to go.