What happens after death? I don’t believe in an ethereal or wraith-like spirit that rises from the body and heads for the great blue yonder, but I do believe that our conscious experiences don’t cease. We don’t continue to experience this world, but our consciousness goes through a transition of perceptions and experiences - most likely taking on ones that we can’t even imagine - until they settle on a pattern or “tapestry” (for lack of a better word) that defines the world of the afterlife.
I’m also not so sure we get to keep our individuality - that is, the most likely scenario, I think, is that we cease to be ourselves and become one with the universe. The “tapestry” of experiences we end up having would be none other than those belonging to the ultimate consciousness - the universal mind.
When I die, I will need something that will outlast me that carries something that could be labeled as perhaps ‘my essence’.
Firstly, offspring, which I hope will be heterosexual and capable of reproducing (and hopefully their offspring, and theirs, ect.), to of course pass on my genes.
And secondly as to what to do with my remains…
I was thinking I could at some point in my life decide upon a tree, a strong tree, a beautiful tree, a tall tree.
The thing is I want the seed of such a tree to be originally fertalized with my cremated remains, or perhaps even my buried body.
This way, in a sense, that tree will be me.
Then the tree will live and grow for hundreds of years. Well, as long as a strip mall isn’t built on it, or the earth hasn’t entered the second Ice Age, or any other myriad of conflicting factors occur.
Imagine my great-great-great-great grandchild explaining to their children the origin of such a tree…to me, attempting to capture my essence in this tree, is the most profound action I can take in my death.
Both and all, sometimes cremation is preferred while other times burial is preferred. As for the other part some people need th grieve while others need to laugh to get past their pain. My mom made sure they did both.
I would personally prefer cremation, and I think my funeral should be fun so that everyone can get over it more easily.
Being that I am Sicilian, and between that group and hispanic/latino groups there isn’t a great deal of difference, linguistic, cultural or otherwise, we have relatively the same semantics to go through in celebratory instances.
I’ll bet your cultures matrimony celebration is relatively similar: X number of days of partying, feasting, prayers, gift giving … two families come together to basically form a small village … and at “some” point, the final ceremony to make it seem worthwhile. (let’s see if I’m wrong)
As far as death, it is unbefitting in any manner, (either my Sicilian heritage, or my chosen martial life), to leave life as anything less than a warrior. Death should be celebrated, and mourning is often viewed as a selfish act, disregarding the life of the departed.
It should be a ceremony of dance, song, food, wine, love and admiration, that one close to you, has left this world for a better place in the next.
My “culture” just has a funeral, perhaps a wake, then goes back to the business of living. Funeral are for the living not the dead. They help people accept death and provide some social validation of the deceased for the benefit of the friends and family.
There’s virtually no evidence or information about what, if anything, happens to our consciousness when we die. Religions have their dogma & revealed writings, but to me it seems based wholly on ignorance and superstition- they’re just guessing. In the absence of any sound logical basis for thinking there’s an enduring “soul” or some type of afterlife, I will have to consider those concepts to be baseless speculation. Since I’ve never seen any compelling reason to think that we have a soul, I obviously don’t think it “goes” anywhere after our physical bodies die.
Still, that’s just based on the information I have now. Some scientists have postulated the “mindon”, or elementary partical of “animation” or life. No one has found one nor does any accepted theory of things predict one, so it may be wish fullfillment masquerading as pysuedoscience. The Second Law of Thermodynamics points to increasing entropy, but the Conservation of Matter & Energy says nothing is created nor destroyed, it merely moves around and or changes form.
Is there a “ghost in the machine”, some type of soul that sets up shop sometime around conception or birth? Or are all the traits we attribute to a soul just byproducts of the same biological processes that make us tick? If it’s the former, then perhaps this “energy” remains cohesive after we die. If the latter is the actual state of things then those traits that make us humans instead of meat evaporate when we die.
It would be neat to think we will endure in some form after we die. Although instead of looking at life as something we lose, we could be thankful that we gained it at all, albeit briefly- it’s pretty remarkable, given that the bulk of the Universe is made up of nonsentient matter & energy (so far as we know). We get the rare chance to become self aware, to gain a perspective on the cosmos. True, it’s just one brief flicker of a candle in a near eternity of darkness, but it’s still something remarkable.
So you must believe in consciousness. Some people equate “soul” with “consciousness” (like me) - this doesn’t make it eternal, but if we were to accept this equation, we would have to say that the soul indeed exists.
How do you figure? That doesn’t logically follow. You’re talking about an axiom- “only thru a soul can we be self aware.” But I see no evidence that self awareness requires a soul, if by that you mean some spiritual essence aside from the brain. In my estimation, an extremely sophisticated & powerful computer could become self aware. Would it then have a soul?
Of course, if you answer ‘yes’ then perhaps we don’t so much disagree as use a different lexicon.
This is exactly what I’m asking. Lexicon is everything, but it is too often ignored. As a result, we get some people denying the existence of the soul whereas others strive to affirm it. In the end, they probably have two very different notions of what the word “soul” means. This is not trivial - I think much of our misunderstandings of each other when it comes to these kinds of debates (consciousness, soul, mind, etc.) can be traced to what we understand these definitions to be.
I, for one, believe in a soul and by “soul” I mean “consciousness”. Now if we can agree on what “consciousness” means, then we should also agree that the soul, by my definition, exists.
I’m still not sure we agree, GIB. Please define “conciousness” for me, then. As I said, I feel a sufficiently advanced computer could be conscious, but that wouldn’t mean it had a soul unless you define “soul” as: the consiousness of a thing. Which you could, but you wouldn’t really be saying anything meaingful.
Let me put it this way- say a computer was getting close to what you or I might call sentience. Let’s imagine that at 12:01 p.m. today it made that breakthru. Would we then change the name of the A.I., declaring it “soul” by linguistic fiat? Or do you assert that at that moment, some spirit or soul would enter the circuits, making it conscious?
Most would say a computer program running on a computer is purely an effect of electrons moving thru the hardware, that the program has zero independant existence from the machine running it. Is that how it is for us humans, too? Set aside the issue of indestructibility or immortality, is this “soul” something concrete that resides in us, or is it merely a shadow cast on a wall by our brains?
My conception of consciousness is very different from most people’s. I don’t think it’s just the state of an organic computer computing its own existence - although this may be what the brain is. I’m not a Cartisean and I’m not religious - at least, not any of the institutionalized ones.
Short answer - I’m an idealist/subjectivist, but not the Berkeley kind. My ideology reverses the rolls of mind and brain and says that matter is a sensory representation of a greater external mind. It’s really too complicated to explain in a thread like this, so I don’t think I’ll be able to defend it very well. I’m writing a website though in which I explain it in as much detail as it deserves.
Oh, and I do believe in an afterlife in which our “soul” carries on, but I hesitate to call it a “soul” at that point. My view is more inline with eastern philosophy in that we become one with the universe, effectively losing our individuality or ceasing to be a “Self”.
In Tibet, after death, the relatives break the back of the corpse, and making a bundle out of it, carry it to a place of designation, and leave it for the carrions and others to consume.
That is quite fearless as well, and honestly it’s better than putting someone in a box to be eaten by worms… I prefer cremation but I can see how the Tibetans don’t want to let anything go to waste.
In Holland, such a method would not be tenable.
Tibet has 3 million people in 965,000 square miles, Holland has17 million people in 16,040 square miles. Besides the air in Tibet is dry and thin, here it is wet and thick. The rot in the air would be lethal.
even worse, in Mexico where they worship the day of the dead, besides of the sun, in the times of the Mayans the Hero of the country was escorted up unto a the pyramid, where the king, the priest broke the hero’s back, sacrificing him to the Sun God. This was followed by the opening of the chest and removing the still beating heart. This was the reward of winning wars, and securing the country’s security.
