Ask Lemmy

Anyone who says they know what happens when you die is trying to grift you. No one knows and we all find out one day, no point in dwelling on it.

Well it is part of my religion, but how it's interpreted varies :3

I personally don't worry over death too much either way

No

Regarding consciousness/the human experience, I think the best way I've seen it explained is: a soul (whether you add the religious meaning or not) watching a brain watching a body.

Personally, since I believe I'll be judged by the Creator, I do believe in life (consciousness) after death. Not reincarnation, but it's a continuation. Monotheists around the world believe in it also, for whatever that's worth. 😅

Sort of, not in a religious way.

Like I don't think there will be anything special that you get to keep with you, the "soul" is just a vessel to experience things, nothing special about it. As in: There aren't any hero stories, no "dragon reborn"s, no Karma. Just randomness. This moment, you are a human, when you die, your next moments could be a bug crawling next to you when you died, or newborn kitten to a pregnant cat in your backyard, or a cockroach about to get stepped on. Then some time again, you will be another human. Or perhaps proximity doesn't matter and you could be born on some alien planet far away. There is no concious god, its just pure randomness.

As if you are an immortal camera and your body is the microSD card adaptor, your memories are the microSD card, your experiences are just what the camera sees.

Sorry if my beliefs are silly, but I think there is some part of living beings that current level of technology cant quite measure yet. I think it has something to do with mass energy equivalence, maybe when we die, we become some energy that just bounces around until we become something else.

Its like people used to think the Earth orbited the sun. People used to not be able to see germs, or atoms, then we went from seeing atoms, to protons, electrons, then we say those even smaller parts.

Perhaps there is something that can't be measured yet. Perhaps it may never be able to be measured.

The way I see it:

It's either:

[1] Nonexistence --> I exist --> Nonexistence (and never exist again)

Or

[2] Nonexistence --> I exist --> Nonexistence --> I exist again (repeat for a long time, possibly forever)

Option one breaks my brain, so I just choose to go with option 2 to keep my sanity.

Maybe is just my monkey brain being silly, idk, but our minds have to invent these little stories to keep ourself sane. We as non-omniscient beings cannot objectively observe the universe, is all just biased subjective interpretations that are unique to us.

But regardless, this is the only chance I get to experience "this" life, "next" time I might be the bug the gets crushed by a neighbor that "this" life used to live with. So um... yea, thanks for coming to my ted talk

Take it sleezy 🤷‍♂️

🌌 (Your next life will be on a planet in a solar system with 3 suns, good luck with the chaotic eras lol)

(I must sound so stupid right? Given that this is Lemmy and eveyone here is an Atheist. Its fine, just leave my monkey brain believe its weird theories 😅)

If it was a choice why would I ever wanna come back to this hell hole ?

I see it (or at least some form of it) as a realistic possibility. Let's say that consciousness is a completely physical thing, a certain set of chemicals, cells and molecules in my brain that define what is "me". That would mean that given infinite time, something that possesses "my" consciousness would eventually appear again.

I want to believe

I say that consciousness is independent of memory because we forget, clearly dependent on our physical body

Some parts remain even after you forget. That is the outcome of your own free decisions, that has formed part of your personality. For example, you like cornflowers because you have decided to like it. So when you forget how cornflowers look, you will still like them when you see them, even without really remembering them. A good part of your personality is formed in that way: you have decided to be that way.

I believe that (most of ?) our personality remains when the current body goes to compost and we enter the next world, either up or down :)

I don’t believe in reincarnation, but one thing that isn’t mentioned enough is that there aren’t enough “souls” for everyone to have a reincarnation. If you rewind the clock back, once the original (for the sake of this exercise) 100 people died, the next generation would have 200-300 people already alive due to multiple children, which means they would halve mostly new souls. Fast forward to today, I’d imagine a lot of people would have baby souls.

We live in an infinite universe. As such, it seems hubristic to me to believe that we have, more or less, nature figured out.

I don't feel compelled to believe in the soul as some strange sort of object that is continuously reincarnated towards a great purpose. But if we consider consciousness as an energy of its own kind, then it should hold true that it cannot be created or destroyed, only change form. This could mean that the consciousness that resides in the body could move between different life forms like a fluid, freely mixing and melding with others, filling a new vessel as necessary.

You say forgetting memories is proof or indicative that memory depends on the physical body. But isn't that true for conscious as well?

Our conscious is inherently bound to our physical being. We see, we feel, we taste, we identify with our body. Our brain allows us to think, and experience, to conceptualize our body, our being, us as an entity.

We cut off fingernails and discard them as no longer part of ourselves. We drive a car and internalize movement as if it were us moving, while not seeing the vehicle as part of ourselves.

Without experiencing and without a body to conceptualize, what would our consciousness be? Without a body and mind where consciousness can arise from experience and thoughts, how could consciousness arise?

Want there to be evidence reincarnation exists . Want there to be research teams dedicated to finding it