I just got back from my friend’s Dad’s wake. He was doing yard work and started having chest paints. He died at the hospital.
Do you believe in an afterlife? I do not. I think humans make up an afterlife so we can feel good about death. What do you think?
Honestly i cannot say. Most people would like to believe there’s an afterlife…
I take comfort in the fact that i will only find out once i die, and that if there is no afterlife i need not worry, because i wont exist…
I’ll start by saying I try not to believe in anything, I go by probability. To me the most probable thing that happens when a human dies is simply that, we just die. Our brain is what we use to think and observe things, and without that, how can we still do these things?
Ok, what is the proof that there is an afterlife?
Religious text, but I don’t see how that is conclusive proof.
Science? Not that I can tell. So where is the evidence
that there is an afterlife? No evidence of any kind.
So it is a story that we tell each other to make us feel better
about dying.
Kropotkin
An afterlife is a theoretical aspiration for the pursuit of more than our realm of thought.
Because human thought is subjective, we are forced to a placement of absent consciousness where that emptiness becomes a desireable discovery.
Without an asnwerable question, we pursue the unthinkable, and force ourselves into the assumption of ignorance; believing that there is something more justified at the end of our road.
This assumption is evoked from that very theory of absence, because, by human logic, and secular conversion, everything leads to somewhere, and is inevitably “humanly good” at some point in time.
How can we define an afterlife in relation to the life we live now?
From a lively standpoint, however, i cannot presume death.
I guess i will find out when i die.
I am terribly sorry for your loss and especially for your friend’s loss. Especially since it seems to have been sudden. At least when it is expected, one can mentally steel themselves for the coming transition. Losing a parent is never easy, and your friend has my deepest condolences. Support him as best you can, it will no doubt be very hard for him.
As for the question posed, I suppose it really depends on how one conceives personhood and the relationship between personhood and life. At the very least, cherish the fact that they continue to exist in you and others that they influenced in life. Do we have an afterlife in a strict ‘religious’ sense? No, I do not think so. But the effect that we have had on others allows us to live on. And that is very important. So cherish the memories you have of him, and encourage your friend to continue to live as his father would have wanted, encourage him to excel. That is the best afterlife we can ask for.
When we die we go back to the earth and become nourishment for other forms of life, in that sence we could come to the conclusion that we as life will never end until what we know as existence itself ends.
Makes me think about a british sci-fi comedy “red dwarf” - where in one episode the humans mock the robot for believing in ‘silicone heaven’
I think an interesting question to ask is, do cats, dogs… frogs, whatever have an ‘afterlife’ because essentially for me… all animals on this planet (void of dominent species) are equal… so if they do not, why should we as human beings? - i don’t believe so, i believe the idea of an afterlife is simply an idea to help give meaning to our lives - an end goal. I’m not egotistical enough to think we are important enough to have something after we die, otherwise why do we die? and if an afterlife is better… why do we live first?
If I had a nickel for everytime I heard;
“Do you believe (and it would have to be a ‘belief’ or idle speculation) in ‘life’ after ‘death’?”,
already assuming and accepting as a given, without question, that there is ‘life’ before ‘death’!!
Sloppy thinking, I think, as the ‘life before death’ question would seem to preceed the ‘after’ question.
If there is no ‘life’ before ‘death’ then the question of ‘life’ after ‘death’ becomes moot.
Is mind energy? Is thought energy? Is consciousness enrgy? Because that is what we ultimately are.
“We” not the body. The body gets recycled.
But what happens to thought energy?
I’d say no. Lack of evidence/definition.
But yet it is there.
But yet what is where?
The Uncertainty Principle.
Matter is in no particular spot.
Consciousness is in no particular spot.
Consciousness is not from raw materials out of which man is constructed. Concciousness is not be from the firing of synapses.
You asked;
To which i replied;
To which you replied;
And, not knowing what you meant, I queried;
… referring to your ‘it’ is ‘there’? Requesting clarification.
I think that i understand, now, your reference to ‘it is there’ meaning that although Mind and Consciousness are not energy, they ‘are’ (no ‘there’).
‘Thought’, on the other hand, on reconsideration, might well be as ‘energetic’ (as existent) as the brain with which it is found.
Like the taste of sugar it somethingthat can be experienced and felt but can not be explained.
Let me preface by saying I’m not a physcist not by along shot.
Wave of Probability.
The wall, the pen, the brain are all wave - wave that extend infinitely by the way. That wave stay a wave untill it is observed. Then did the wave provide a consciousness to see itself.
Or maybe consciousness is the wave ; thus It is creating the brain and the synapses , not the synapse creating consciousness.
“I will not die, the earth will die” someone said that and it means something.
I do not think that this carbon based brain could ever comprehend all.
But Personaly;
Two times for a splt second in ridding thought meditation ; It seemed as if i did.
Newtonian materialists can not accept the immaterial. And immatterial is all there is.
There is obviously consciousness.
Whatever matter eminates from so does consciousness, thought, memory, eminate from it ; matter is not producing it.
Erwin Schrödinger wrote that ‘what we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space itself’.
Do I believe in the after life? Yes. Do I know it? No.
Did you want an argument?