(April 11, 2015 at 11:09 pm)Esquilax Wrote: What you actually did was arbitrarily decide that an afterlife that doesn't "transcend," whatever that means, is implausible, and then you similarly arbitrarily decided that a plausible afterlife must necessarily "transcend"...
No afterlife which you would not want to enjoy for eternity is plausible. The Christian heaven (given that we know virtually nothing of it), if nothing else, at least has the infinite God for the souls to explore; or perhaps an endlessly expanding civilization to build.
Valhalla is fully finite; and who'd want to stay there forever? The end result is indeed "persistent vegetative state."
If you don't like "transcend," use "upgrade." The meaning of transcending is a transformation that preserves some A, B, C and greatly upgrades other P, Q, R. On the one hand, then, Valhalla is implausible, because nothing in it gets upgraded. It merely continues the same "slaying of enemies" that was featured in this life.
On the other hand, my argument does not assume that everything will get upgraded, either. That would be an opposite mistake. It thus delineates one thing, namely, the human insatiable urge for improvement of oneself and the world, that will not be upgraded. It is part of human nature here, and it will be part of human nature in the hereafter. As a result, the hereafter must needs present an endless supply of novel experiences and will never be boring.
