I honestly don't know.
Atheists often seem to comfort themselves/others regarding death by noting that you won't be there to experience the sense of loss or any suffering. Personally, I find that cold comfort.
I tend to hold-out the outrageous hope that given an advanced enough level of science and technology, and a deterministic universe, everything in the past (and future) should in theory be calculable from present conditions. As such, your friend could be perfectly cloned down to their very brain chemistry and 'resurrected' in some utopian future age, where you get to live forever. I think that's about as good a version of the scientific afterlife as you can get. An outside hope, I guess (though perhaps a good reason to help humanity survive and progress even from an entirely selfish POV).
I can't really offer anything else. Death sucks.
Atheists often seem to comfort themselves/others regarding death by noting that you won't be there to experience the sense of loss or any suffering. Personally, I find that cold comfort.
I tend to hold-out the outrageous hope that given an advanced enough level of science and technology, and a deterministic universe, everything in the past (and future) should in theory be calculable from present conditions. As such, your friend could be perfectly cloned down to their very brain chemistry and 'resurrected' in some utopian future age, where you get to live forever. I think that's about as good a version of the scientific afterlife as you can get. An outside hope, I guess (though perhaps a good reason to help humanity survive and progress even from an entirely selfish POV).
I can't really offer anything else. Death sucks.
