If there is an afterlife...

[Darwinian]

How could it be explained?

First of all I have to object to the term 'afterlife'. Because if, after the death of your body you find yourself aware, with your consciousness, memory and personality still intact you are clearly still alive, at least in some form or another.

Ok then, grumble over.

What has always fascinated me is not the question "Is there life after death?" as this is obviously a simple yes or no thing but instead, if there actually is then how can it be explained? What mechanisms could be in play to allow such a thing to happen and what does that say about the way we perceive what we think of as reality?

Big IF I know but it's fun to think about, well it is for me anyway :S

I think the most common idea that I hear is that life is like a dream and that when we die, we simply wake up somewhere else. This is probably what I thought as a child until I stumbled onto the next mad idea.

But now technology has grown so quickly and with research being carried out in the realm of quantum computing it is not too difficult to imagine a future where entire 'virtual' worlds can be created that, to the person immersed in them, are indistinguishable to the 'real' thing. What if this universe in which we live, including its 13.7 billion years of cause and effect is just that, but on a scale and level of complexity that we cannot imagine? And further imagine that all of us, i.e. people who currently live in this universe are just in some way 'plugged in' just as our future selves may plug ourselves into some virtual world running on a quantum computer.

Now, I'm not in anyway saying that this is something I actually believe to be true but I have always found the speculation fascinating.

The question is then, if it were somehow proved that you did indeed survive the death of your body what theories could you come up with to explain it?

It's a thought experiment thing....

[thesummerqueen]

There is no spoon.

[Violet]

There is an afterlife.

And it is called 'death'.

First of all I have to object to the term 'afterlife'. Because if, after the death of your body you find yourself aware, with your consciousness, memory and personality still intact you are clearly still alive, at least in some form or another.

Yes. In essence: you never died.

But now technology has grown so quickly and with research being carried out in the realm of quantum computing it is not too difficult to imagine a future where entire 'virtual' worlds can be created that, to the person immersed in them, are indistinguishable to the 'real' thing.

At what point does a simulation become a reality? I should think that a simulation is simply another facet in the chaotic funhouse of reality.

What if this universe in which we live, including its 13.7 billion years of cause and effect is just that, but on a scale and level of complexity that we cannot imagine? And further imagine that all of us, i.e. people who currently live in this universe are just in some way 'plugged in' just as our future selves may plug ourselves into some virtual world running on a quantum computer.

Along the same line of thinking, perhaps we are simply 'simulations' to a bunch of game designers that need to freshen up on their understanding of 'reality', and are as dead as the rocks of the game when our time comes.

Now, I'm not in anyway saying that this is something I actually believe to be true but I have always found the speculation fascinating.

The question is then, if it were somehow proved that you did indeed survive the death of your body what theories could you come up with to explain it?

I wouldn't be guessing theories if it were the proven to me that I could/would survive platform destruction... but I would give a cursory look at any of the different ideas I come across incase any of them fit the data as i understand it.

It's a thought experiment thing....

Surviving platform destruction in that way would change many things for me... I would have to take another look at everything I know from the ground up, possibly ripping apart my previous understandings of reality.

[Shell B]

I can't begin to explain how an afterlife would be possible.

I've always wondered where people who believe in afterlife think all of these "entities" or whatever go. I mean, if there are billions of people on the planet, just today and countless billions in the past, where are you going to fit all of these floating dead people? Heaven must be fucking huge.

[ldarwin]

I don't get it either. Do most people believe they were somewhere before they were born? Why, all of sudden, do we go somewhere when we die?

[theVOID]

That's a fucking excellent question, I bet it would stump a fair few of them.

Maybe because we've already moved beyond the scope of the past they have no reason to fear it? I have always thought that the main reason was not a fear of death, but a fear of admitting you fear it - Some ego driven thing.

Then there are the masses who genuinely believe they are going to get another life, It must really suck to think you're going to get this extremely valuable thing and then realise it's not happening - It would be like winning the lottery only to find your numbers were from last weeks draw. Then again if you get hit by a truck and die on the way to check the ticket you never realise your excitement was a sham.

[Rayaan]

What has always fascinated me is not the question "Is there life after death?" as this is obviously a simple yes or no thing but instead, if there actually is then how can it be explained? What mechanisms could be in play to allow such a thing to happen and what does that say about the way we perceive what we think of as reality?

What are the mechanisms at play? I can't say for sure, but one of the crazy ideas that I have is that the soul (which includes our actions, thoughts, and memories) probably escapes into a higher dimension when it goes to Heaven. You could also say that it gets "uploaded" into Heaven after we die. Well, this is possible because the universe itself is like a giant quantum computer which is processing information.

In a book titled "Programming the Universe," by Seth Lloyd, the author explains how the the universe acts like a powerful cosmological computer, or a quantum computer:

"The universe is made of bits. Every molecule, atom, and elementary particle registers bits of information. Every interaction between those pieces of the universe processes that information by altering those bits. That is, the universe computes, and because the universe is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, it computes in an intrinsically quantum-mechanical fashion; its bits are quantum bits. The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer" (Lloyd, 3).

In this sense, the universe is processing our own behavior as well since our actions are producing new information, and those information gets registered by the computational nature of the universe. And according to information theory, information can never be destroyed, and that's why our deeds will not disappear either but will be stored and recorded for us in the afterlife.

Also, remember that the computational power of Heaven is probably much greater than that of the universe.

This is just a philosophical musing on the afterlife in respect to my knowledge of digital physics. I don't know if this is how it really works or not. But, interesting stuff nonetheless.

[Anomalocaris]

Define:

1. Higher dimension
2. Heaven
3. Digital physics

If you are so sure the theoretical preservation of all your information is sufficient to give you continued life, then you wouldn't be too adverse to my whacking you over the head a few dozen times so all your indestructable information can immediately be unloaded into the higher dimension of heaven where the digital physics of quantum computers pervail.

[Welsh cake]

The after-life concept is merely a natural emotional response to thanatophobia.

Some people simply cannot accept the notion that when you're dead, you're dead. People with the same obsessive–compulsive disorder refuse to let the Star Wars franchise die from a lack of limelight caused by either from the ravages of time or the indifferent neglect of man's apathy.

[Anomalocaris]

I might argue that when the ability to conceptualize self first evolved in the brain of some ancestry of ours, it was a primitive planning aid for instinctive use when deciding how to conduct ourselves when alive. It didn't need any facaulty for conceptualizing any state where the self ceases to exist. Only later when more rational thinking ability developed did we acquire the ability in a different part of our brain to reason out what might happen to self when we die.

So if we fall all the way back, through our rational thinking facilities, to the pimitive part of the brain where concept of self first developed, we find it unexpectedly hard to intuitively conceptualize the nonexistence of self. We rationalize this difficulty with afterlife.