NDE and afterlife

[robvalue]

I don’t see the point in spending the finite amount of time in the life trying to prove or disprove whether we somehow have "another life" afterwards, whatever that even means. We do or we don’t, and our beliefs or even knowledge about it won’t change the facts. If it turns out we don’t, it would seem to me to be an awful waste to allow fear of mortality to consume this finite existence.

Of course, if it’s mere curiosity, the by all means continue. Like I said, I don’t know what an "afterlife" is even meant to be. My consciousness is, by all accounts, an emergent property of my physical brain, and the concept of what makes me "me" is also linked to the rest of my physical body. Somehow grafting a part of me into some new vessel, or even having my consciousness somehow float about independent of anything to create it, is not really a continuation of this life. It’s some gross mad scientist-like experiment. I’d rather pass, I can’t think of anything more horrible.

If this is all supposed to be part of nature, then it contradicts just about everything about it we know so far and requires a huge list of extra assumptions just to get off the ground. If there’s some mental being doing all this to us, fucking around and splicing emergent processes onto other planes of existence for whatever reason, then we're all screwed. But luckily there’s no reason to think that’s the case.

Not every experience a brain produces relates very well to reality, that should be quite obvious. As the brain gets put under more and more stress, it becomes less and less reliable. Once you get to the point where it’s about to die, or even somehow ceases function but then starts again, it’s going to be hallucination central. Most importantly, the memory of how and when all the "experiences" occurred are going to be incredibly unreliable. Just think about how dreams work for a start. The experiences could be real, but it appears far more likely to assume they are the way we already know brains behave under such circumstances.

Anyhow, as always, I could be wrong. There could be some sort of new vessel waiting for us, for whatever reason. But since it appears there’s no way to study this reliably, nor can we do anything about it, it’s not much of a pressing issue.