What comes after death

Okay, but I just find the afterlife to be too much work for not enough reward. It is unlikely to exist, it is based almost entirely upon human conjecture and fear and in the end I can think of worse fates than simply dying with nowt afterwards.

I wouldn't exactly complain about (say) reincarnation, but in general? I'm more than happy to just not be, I can understand why you wouldn't want to not be, but in general it seems as if no-one knows what an afterlife is or isn't going to be and are making it up as they go along in order not to feel so worried about death. I can understand being worried about it, but I can't understand being activly afraid of it as many people here seem to be.

edited 10th Dec '10 12:52:02 AM by JosefBugman

Too explicable means what exactly here?

Oblivion terrifies me more than anything. I do not want to just disappear. I'm not even religious. Life is just too interesting to let go. I want to feel.

edited 10th Dec '10 11:04:23 AM by Nimitz

I think that if we want an afterlife, we're going to have to build one ourselves. We already have the storage space needed to store the contents of a human brain. We just have to come up with a way of reading the data out of one and an emulator to run the software on our silicon-based computers.

^ And then you've still got the original human, doomed to die while the duplicate lives forever. Hardly fair.

That said, it is amusing that a lot of utopian sci-fi seems to be about how to build an Earthly equivalent of the Christian heaven (albeit one with a distinct lack of harps.)

edited 11th Dec '10 1:50:43 AM by feotakahari

But harps are Bad Ass.

Truth:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMESIQAQsbU&NR=1

This is also proof that heaven needs fiddles and stepdancing.

No it's not. -__-

ANYWAY, my opinions on the subject notwithstanding (not the "don't know don't care", other opinions. As I simply refuse to state them here, if I want to be laughed out of a thread I'll post a Touhou Hijack video, thanks.) why do people seem to automatically assume that either

A: People who believe in an afterlife only do because they can't handle the NIHILISTIC, HARDCORE DESPAIIIIIIR that comes with just ceasing to exist

or

B: People who don't believe in an afterlife only say they don't so they can do whatever they want and get away with it. Alternately, they're emo assholes.

?

How about this for a hypothesis: people who believe in an afterlife do so because the concept of ceasing to exist once dead is simply too abstract for them to get their minds around.

To use an analogy, most people can't get their heads around really high-level maths because it's so heavily abstracted, but they can handle concepts which can readily be applied to the physical world, such as basic geometry, just fine.

edited 11th Dec '10 12:49:11 PM by Roxor

edit: On second thought, don't. I've had enough of being called an idiot for a lifetime, and I'm sure that that's exactly what I would've been called just now.

edited 11th Dec '10 12:57:53 PM by SpainSun

@Malph:

I also do believe in nothingness and cease of existence. I also was a little sad about that before i had some thoughts. First of all, i don't imagine it being sleep, i imagine it being NOTHING. Second, i can't cemprehend the total absense of everything, no one can, but that doesn't matter. Because i belive that my consciousness will cease to exist, so will my thoughts. I wont be able to perceive anything anymore, i wont have emocions, most importantly, that includes fear! Not being able to fear is nothing to be afraid of. Since i learned that, i dont worry about being dead anymore, only about (the way of) dying.

edited 13th Dec '10 3:46:33 AM by ZheToralf

Not being able to fear doesn't make the thought of being nothIng any better. I'm not worried about being fearless (that's redundant); what worries me is the end of my story as a whole. I will no longer learn, grow, or share.

If u put it that way, there are theories that someday the universe will implode and make another big bang, so every universe is preceded by another universe. This would mean that in the end, NOTHING stays of you, not even a memory. No matter what you do.

So if you believe that theory, persistence cannot be your goal in life.

I want there to be something after death. I'd like to see my grandads and granny again, amongst others. It'd be nice if our lives on this earth meant more than just our physical existence; if our consciousness and contemplation of things like philosophy, morals and spirituality could be attributed to more than just evolution.

On the other hand, science suggests nothing happens. So I'm not sure.

^^ What I've often observed is the construction of elaborate fantasies about how SCIENCE! will allow us to survive heat death. I do believe they're fantasies, but as I said above, I don't actually see any difference between the world many sci-fi writers want to build and the heaven Christianity promises.

Then again, I want to believe in that world too, if only because it's easier to believe in than another world separated from our own by more than space. Everyone has some impossible dream, right?

There had better be a life after this one, or else I'm asking for a refund. Seriously, this place is lame.

To be fair, the only thing we need is FTL travel, which hasn't been completely eliminated as a possibility. (With that, you can survive for several thousands of trillions of years via timey-wimey.)

I want my immortality already.

If u put it that way, there are theories that someday the universe will implode and make another big bang, so every universe is preceded by another universe. This would mean that in the end, NOTHING stays of you, not even a memory. No matter what you do.

But if the universe keeps going on forever, even through Big Bangs, wouldn't the presence of infinite time imply, that every infintely improbable chance will eventually happen?

Because that would mean that sooner or later, a bunch of atoms will group together in a way that a room filled with a huge stash of unmade Suzumiya Haruhi sequels, and a computer with a copy of T Vtropes (but with more new tropes) will materialize, and in the middle of the room, there will be a guy with a brain that's neurons are the same as mine, right until the memories of my death?

Well statistics would say that with an infinite amount of tries the possibility of this never to happen, would go against zero, but this does not mean it HAS to happen.

Besides, it just sounds silly!

edited 15th Dec '10 12:18:51 PM by ZheToralf

^^In infinite time? Sure. Life is weird.