Do you believe in life after death?

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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby DamianaRaven » Wed Oct 02, 2013 12:41 pm

aviel wrote:Okay, so it just has illustrative utility rather than predictive utility?


Brilliantly clarified, lovely boy!
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby w00 » Wed Oct 02, 2013 5:35 pm

DashaBlade wrote:So, here's the thing though. I think that the afterlife and other such stuff is largely irrelevant to my current life, because there's no point obsessing over whether or not I'll be reincarnated or move on to Heaven or be worm food right now.

...

And I have children, so even when I'm gone, the stuff that makes up my genetics will survive through them. The lessons I have taught them will survive through them. The story about me getting so drunk I puked inside their dad's truck will survive through them. That's why it matters not one whit to me whether there's a heaven or a nirvana or a rebirth or a long vacation in a dark buggy hole at the end of my ride.

Can't disagree with any of that.

And the mitochondrial DNA being passed along is a good point. Not sure how "alive" DNA is, but it is a marker that will be traceable for an indefinite period of time.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby Malfeasinator » Thu Oct 10, 2013 2:33 am

I've been knocked out a few times.

Once was for surgery, once was from an accident, the other times were fights.

I had a rough childhood.

I just assume death is like being knocked out, except you don't get up. I used to be afraid of that idea but then I realized how pointless that was since there won't be any me to ever really get freaked out by it. I will be on, and then I will be off.

Thinking of death is a waste of the time I get to have while I'm alive. There's no point to it. I can try to live longer to prevent it, but sooner or later it's going to happen, and I can almost guarantee I won't see it coming. It might happen while I'm typing this out. It might happen as I get blindsided from another driver. It might happen all kinds of ways. It will definitely happen, though, and nothing I do will prevent it.

I think the bigger issue is why does it bother me to die at all. I think there's so much thought that evolution has had a hand in shaping. I have an innate need to survive because my ancestors had it, and that gave them an edge to keep going and reproduce. Much of the ways I feel about things are more about having inherited those feelings because not having them would have meant I wouldn't be here at all.

I don't think we have to look outside ourselves to something bigger to find our purpose here in life. I think we get to define what it is we mean by "purpose." I think that's beautiful, even if it is harder to start figuring these things out from scratch.

It is a cold universe, and we are all its accidental orphans. Artifice need not be a mean, sterile thing. Even knowing that we are animals and understanding that all our thoughts are chemical reaction, needs not diminish our feelings.

We can come up with something that we can mutually agree is worth doing while we are here. We can make this journey more interesting than a march toward its conclusion.

We need not worry about death, but more, I think, we should worry about what it is we do with this precious gift of consciousness. Death is predictable. To me, that makes it boring.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby DamianaRaven » Thu Oct 10, 2013 3:11 pm

I'm glad you lived long enough to hit "Submit," Mal.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby Malfeasinator » Sun Oct 13, 2013 12:09 am

Thank you.

That means a lot.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby blehblah » Fri Oct 18, 2013 2:28 pm

I know that this is just my near-brain-dead mind at work, but every time I see this topic title, I go to a very dark place.



*Shudder*
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby DoglovingJim » Mon Apr 20, 2015 4:40 pm

"Do you believe in life after death?"

Yeah I do.


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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby octoberpumpkin » Tue Apr 21, 2015 5:20 pm

I suppose I should, being Catholic, but I honestly have no idea. A part of me hopes there isn't. The idea of life after death kind of scares me
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby gorillathehun » Tue Apr 21, 2015 6:11 pm

There's a region of your brain at the back of your head called the primary visual cortex. If you suffer a traumatic brain injury to this region (through stroke or otherwise) you will be blind. Similarly there regions of your brain devoted to processing auditory and tactile (touch) information and any damage to these regions will lead to the loss of its corresponding sensory modality.

There are regions of your brain necessary to produce and perceive language (Broca's area and Wernicke's area respectively) and the loss of these regions will result in the inability to produce or perceive language.

The hippocampus is necessary to produce new long-term memories and the amygdala is necessary to understand the emotional valence of objects and situations.


By definition, when our brains stop functioning we are dead. If our consciousness survives our bodily death then it necessarily does so without sight, hearing, or touch. It cannot produce or perceive language, it has no memories and no emotions.

If my consciousness survives my bodily death then the nature of that consciousness is so vastly different from everything I've ever consciously experienced that I'd rather not speculate about it.
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Last edited by gorillathehun on Tue Apr 21, 2015 11:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby KleinerKiller » Tue Apr 21, 2015 11:26 pm

Count me as one of the hundreds who don't believe in life after death.

I suppose I hold out hope that when we die, it's like a camera pausing -- an instant cut in your consciousness to a point in the far future where everyone gets resurrected or some shit. Or maybe all of the evidence that this is all we have is the devising of a massive computer simulation where everyone who ever existed is actually a natural electronic intelligence. But those, for all we know, are pure nonsense.

A beautiful bit of prose that is quite relevant: http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/An_Egg
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby D-LOGAN » Wed Apr 22, 2015 12:41 am

Maybe ... this life ...IS THE AFTER-LIFE to a previous life we lived before we were born, with even the most mundane things in this emanation, like gravity or algebra being the stuff of mind-blowing fever dreams to the world before... and when we die ... we go to another double-after-life and so-on .... each new life even more bizarre and ineffable than the last, until ....
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby PSTN » Thu Apr 23, 2015 5:14 am

DamianaRaven wrote:It's just as possible that I'll be able to feel and experience all the fractured parts of my soul in all the people/places that I've put it.


You made horcruxes?!
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Thu Apr 23, 2015 5:17 am

PSTN wrote:
DamianaRaven wrote:It's just as possible that I'll be able to feel and experience all the fractured parts of my soul in all the people/places that I've put it.


You made horcruxes?!

Who HASN'T made horcruxes?
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby EstebanColberto » Sat May 02, 2015 8:14 pm

Since I'm the one usually trying to be all things to all people on issues like this, I'm just going to order them from most to least likely.

1. Nothing happens. Life ends. I understand some people find this to be a very cynical point of view. Why even live life at all? I just don't think I need a reward to be a good person. Being a good person is it's own reward. Despite not believing in his divinity, I might quote Jesus on occasion. I don't need to believe he is God or even existed in the first place to believe in his message of tolerance.

2. Reincarnation. We don't really understand what consciousness is, other than it probably has something to do with the brain. For me, accepting the possibility of a soul existing in the first place means that soul must be subject to the same laws of nature provided by everything else in nature. I was randomly born into a first world country as a white male heterosexual. If I dedicate my life to be a saint, I might just end up on the low end and be an Asian transgender in Russia. If Reincarnation is real, God's probably real too, but his "tests" would be us trying to understand each other and his "paradise" is us understanding these differences and working with each other so paradise is some future earth that we're reborn into where there is no hatred or conflict.

3. Heaven/Hell/Purgatory. Sorry Christian friends. Some people I grew up with were really judgmental. I saw too many people use this Heaven/Hell dynamic to justify shitty behavior. I used to get told I'd go to hell cause I read fantasy novels which usually depict made up gods. I got told I'd go to hell for a lot of things. I was told I'd go to hell for being Catholic. I have a cousin that switched faiths and my entire family blocks his facebook feed cause he keeps railing on about Catholics. We still have him for Christmas dinner cause you can love someone while simultaneously not liking him. If you believe in Heaven/Hell and you do good things because of it, awesome! Keep doing that. (Chances are you're just a good person though and would probably do it anyway.)
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Re: Do you believe in life after death?

Postby 52xMax » Sat May 02, 2015 9:47 pm

I wouldn't be comfortable ranking any of this so-called possibilities, if anything because until someone actually dies and comes back from the dead with reliable evidence, we simply have no way to find out what's the fate awaiting for us. We've come up with some scenarios that fill the void, like reincarnation and afterlife, but really, none of those are any more plausible than the matrix, Brahma's dream, or pretty much anything you could think about right now, implausible as you might think it sounds. Maybe our last breath lasts forever in our minds and we never even notice we are gone. I once read this crazy hypothesis that said that the whole universe has only existed for a few minutes, even a few seconds, and that all our memories up to that point were fabricated to give us the illusion that we've been around far longer. Some people think our world is actually the afterlife and we're all in some sort of purgatory. Some other people believe it's the other way around and this life is nothing but a larval state until we move on to the next stage of being, in some sort of extra-dimensional universe. Hey, anything goes. If these theories sound farfetched it's only because we grew up listening to some other stories, but the proof we have for those (i.e. nonexistent) is just as valid as anything we were raised to believe.

Applying Ockham's razor, the most logical conclusion is that we simply cease to exist altogether, given that our brain activity stops and there is no transfer of energy leaving indicating the existence of a soul or any remaining of ourselves to go anywhere. I don't know if I actually believe that. Perhaps I want to believe there is something else, but simply wanting it doesn't make it any more true. If I have to be honest, I simply don't know. I'm a true agnostic in that respect.
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