As an Atheist, I voted for oblivion. After death, my brain is no longer functional. If I have a soul, what functions are available to it without my memories & brain functions?
I like to imagine that the life energy/the soul/etc. or whatever you call it, is something that living beings "borrow" from the Universe, and that when we die, we simply return what was borrowed. Of course, this is all fluffy feel-good woowoo without a shred of evidence so is a completely personal opinion.
I suspect that the information which makes up all that exists will always exist an eventualy it will be posible to recreate anythang.!!! I voted "other".!!!
The problems we experience imagining what our own death is our tendency to imagine death as a state of consciousness that we can experience from the inside so to speak, while we are dead. (We ask, 'what will it be like to be dead?') That's almost certainly a mistake. Death is the cessation of experience in my opinion.
I'm not sure what "oblivion" means here. If it's a common definition like "total forgetfulness", then that still suggests something functionally "brainy" going on that has memories to forget or is unable to access them. So I'm going to assume that what people usually mean or should be meant by "oblivion" is complete absence (not even a cognition of and phenomenal presentation of "nothingness / silence"). There are supposedly god-independent beliefs about afterlife, reincarnation, panpsychism, etc in other cultures. So a status of being an atheist wouldn't entail me having to vote for oblivion. Additional stimulus from other views would be needed. Materialism isn't even necessarily a done deal for that purpose since there are oddball brands of it that stray into panpsychism or pan-phenomenalism (like Galen Strawson's "realistic materialism" or the positivists of the late 19th century who sometimes referred to their alternative qualitative conceptions of matter as "materialism"). But I often depend on waving at some "mainstream version" of materialism to justify outputting that matter usually lacks empirical and intellectual evidence of itself. Erwin Schrödinger: "The world does not manifest by its mere existence."
Oblivion, with a stipulation: If everything is composed of wave energy, then thought and physical actions produce outflowing waves that emanate spherically from their point of origin. In that sense, you exist forever as one with the universe Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!.
Until those "waves" attenuate so much that they're entirely indistinguishable from background noise...
No argument on that, but the attenuated wave energy would still exist, and could be expected to continue on forever, IMHO.
Whut? What does "omniscience" have to do with death? Because "death" is how we designate what we observe. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Communicating with living people while requiring a channeler would be pretty cool. Perhaps I'll spend all of eternity haunting all of the people who have wronged me in this life, and they will make movies about me, and everyone will watch them on Halloween. --_-- I'm spiritual, but not religious, so I'd say some type of heaven?, perhaps, but I don't really think about it much.
