Believing in an afterlife

Magical Realist

Magical Realist

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Would you live your life in any different way if you believed in an afterlife? If you didn't believe in an afterlife? Would your outlook on life change? Would you be less afraid of dying? More afraid? Or the same..
 
There's a lot of parameters that need detailing for such a conjecture to be answerable.
Is anything carried over from one life to the next?
Are you able to carry anything of yourself forward?
Do you have a memory of the past life?
Does your current life have any bearing on any aspect of your next phase?
Can you affect your destination?
Is it possible to know anyting about the destination while still in this life?
All of these would strongly affect the answers to your questions.

Although, I suppose, since the question is phrased as a belief, you would be making your own answers, and just taking it on faith that you're right. I was initially thinking of it in the form of an objective given that there is an afterlife, and therefore we would have some consensus of how it worked.
 
I thank "life changes" are illusionary… ie… no actual changes possible… so my outlook on life is stable in that i dont have a to-do list for makin impossible decisions about unknowns:cool:
 
Magical Realist said:
Would you live your life in any different way if you believed in an afterlife?
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I think the main influencer on that would be whether or not you also believed that your actions in this life would have any effect on your afterlife.

For example, suppose Jesus tells you that you're going to heaven no matter what you do, because God loves you. In that case, you have no reason to change whatever it was that you were going to do anyway, just because you've learned that heaven is real.

On the other hand, if Jesus tells you that if you do bad things you'll go to Hell, but if you do good things you'll go to heaven then if you were a rational sort of person you might be incentivised to do more good things and fewer bad things. But then again, people are notoriously bad at making good choices in the short term for a uncertain or non-specific potential long-term gain; they will often be tempted to go for one cookie now rather than 10 cookies at some future date. There is, in fact, some data on this. Christians who believe in the afterlife of heaven and hell, for example, are no less likely than atheists to commit crimes as a result. In fact, they even might be, on average, more likely than atheists to commit crimes.

Finally, if Jesus tells you that if you strap explosives to your body and kill yourself (and maybe a whole bunch of other people at the same time) in His name then you'll go directly to heaven and live in paradise with Him forever, then you might be motivated to end your life as quickly as possible, because the promise of heaven sounds really neat and much preferable to this mere worldly existence.

In practice, of course, none of us know if there's an afterlife - or what Jesus (for example) actually said or wants. Given this fact, it doesn't make a lot of sense to change how you live your life, based only on a belief system for which you have no good evidence.

I suppose that some people might benefit personally, in terms of a greater sense of contentment or similar, from their faith-based belief in an afterlife, but whether or not that occurs - or whether it is beneficial or detrimental to the individual - will usually depend on the nitty-gritty of what is actually believed. Some people, for example, go through life carrying a very real (to them) fear of going to Hell, which inevitably impacts on their ability to fully enjoy life.
Would you be less afraid of dying? More afraid? Or the same..
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Again, it depends on the details of the belief.

Suppose that the belief is that everybody goes to a Hell, regardless of what they do in life, because "we're all sinners" or something. Anybody who honestly believes that will be more afraid of dying than somebody who doesn't believe it - or who believes we all get Paradise after we die.
 
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Magical Realist said:
Would you live your life in any different way if you believed in an afterlife? If you didn't believe in an afterlife? Would your outlook on life change? Would you be less afraid of dying? More afraid? Or the same..
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Afterlife seems to entail that there is another level prior in rank to our apparent universe (that would thereby make the latter some kind of simulated reality). But that does not mean that the higher(?) stratum in the Matryoshka doll is more benevolent than this one.

IOW, an afterlife would still be some degree of hell, just like this world. The only perfect heaven is "absence of everything", including not just the presentation of an external environment but especially the manifestation of personal thoughts and feelings (total extinction of suffering and the bribery of pleasure). Ironically, "absence of everything" is what materialism offers after death, which in turn might arouse a skeptical attitude in the pessimist that such "good fortune" could be as much BS as the idealized or flawed religious reward.

So I'd feel a sense of fatalism and no escape. Using a biological lab experiment as a crude analogy, there's no fussing about morality with respect to the microscopic denizens it is tinkering with.

Reincarnation, IMO, is excluded as being an "afterlife" if the memories and identity of the relevant, particular body are not passed on (i.e., information). That's taking account that the "generic subject or subjectivity" of Eastern beliefs -- that is supposedly underlying everything -- would be blank in terms of personal characteristics and motivations, if minus the specific mind/brain or "tangle of information processing" riding hither and thither upon that "universal ocean of phenomenal presentation". IOW, no individual, distinct "consciousness" (including information) would really be migrating to another body. The universal or more fundamental version of it would already be present in other existing organisms.

I also don't feel that eternalism qualifies as an afterlife, in the sense of a replay of the same life, when one "seems" to cognitively reach the state of death. There's no "consciousness" (as if it was a substance) literally flowing through the chain of different configurations of one's body/brain in the dimensionally extended block-universe. Each co-existing brain state from fetal development to death is an island that is always aware of itself alone (a kind of solipsistic POV that only it is real among all the others), with the illusion of a "flow" or passage of time falling out of the intertwining of memory between one brain state and the next.

Both Hermann Weyl (along with author H.G. Wells decades before in 1895), referred to "consciousness" flowing in the four-dimensional structure, because it's a quick and convenient misconception to satisfy the public with. Since the public already accepts the incoherence of "time flowing" in the rival view of presentism, despite there being no existing past and future moment to transit from or to, even if time was such a moving substance. (Otherwise, minus that white lie, it would take hours or days of discourse for people to finally grok what was truly going on, if even then.)

Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science
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I don't think believing in an afterlife necessarily entails having religious beliefs. It is entirely possible that the afterlife may be the mere extention of our conscious state into some other form or life as natural and as secular as our present one--and something that occurs to everyone who dies. The idea of it being some reward or punishment for how we lived this life is imo a confabulation of religion that merely uses that as motivation to be good. What if we are here merely to learn and to diversify our experience, to sift thru the incidental debris of our random sojourn for those pearl-like moments we carry with us into the next phase of consciousness?
 
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Magical Realist said:
[...] What if we are here merely to learn and to diversify our experience, to sift thru the incidental debris of our random sojourn for those pearl-like moments we carry with us into the next phase of consciousness?
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The problem with continuity is that there are no memories of a previous existence (and accordingly the latter would be useless, even if the case).

However, such lack of knowledge would be expected if this were merely the initial step in a developmental process. We tend not to consider the latter because of all the celebrities turned authors reporting how they were once Cleopatra or Napoleon, or a minor god in the otherworldly realm of Goroboros.

The problem might also be one of the reasons for inventing karma, as an alternative justification for continuity, via the events of a previous life or stage at least setting the parameters for the next one. No information need be passed on, apart from having selectively caused an experiential connection to the kind of identity and circumstances which one was currently born into.

However, again, without precise knowledge of what happened before, there seems to be no edification as to why one emerged from a particular womb into a particular community or realm, steered toward or chasing a particular destination.

The minimal individual who asserts that their life is an isolated and finite sequence of events (also roughly equivalent to a random origin) can make a case as much as the maximal individual who claims a sequence that is infinitely long and segmented with many previous masks that were arbitrated (non-random).

It boils down to which view is the most therapeutic orientation for the person to believe (with respect to their own privacy, not the epistemic standards that a job might require conformity to). That's perhaps the blessing of metaphysics resisting precise validation, or remaining a blank placeholder for many possibilities (i.e., open to its own form of multiple realizability).
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I was far more afraid and paranoid when I was a Christian. Not about death so much, more about evil forces out to claim my soul.

An after life to me now makes zero sense. What age would I be? What memories? Feelings? If I was just a "soul" or mind would that not be the worst kind of hell?

A consciousness just floating around?

I meet gran, is she still 62 or 25 in the prime of life? She's not gran to me then, she will not know me.

Far easier now, no devil just bad luck, bad decisions and bad people.
I die eventually and that's it.
 
DaveC426913 said:
She's 18, naked, and boinking anything at the drop of a hat. Any. Hat.

This is her heaven. Your hell.
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Thanks for that image! Kind of illustrates my point.
Reminds me of the stranded on an island with three of your heroes.
Pretty sure Dirac would not want to be answering my physics questions 24/7.
 
Magical Realist:
Magical Realist said:
Would you live your life in any different way if you believed in an afterlife? If you didn't believe in an afterlife? Would your outlook on life change? Would you be less afraid of dying? More afraid? Or the same..
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I'm interested in what your answers are to these questions.

You believe in an afterlife, don't you? After all, ghosts and all that are a thing, for you.

Have you, in fact, lived your life differently since you started believing in an afterlife?
Would anything significant change about how you lived your life if you were to stop believing in an afterlife?
Are you less afraid of dying because you believe in an afterlife? Or more afraid? Or does it make no difference?
 
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Magical Realist said:
I don't think believing in an afterlife necessarily entails having religious beliefs.
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It entails believing in the supernatural. One must believe that there is something akin to a soul that lives on after the body dies.
It is entirely possible that the afterlife may be the mere extention of our conscious state into some other form or life as natural and as secular as our present one--and something that occurs to everyone who dies.
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How did you establish that it is "entirely possible"?

Did you get any further than working out that it isn't completely inconceivable?

How confident are you that it actually happens? On a scale of 0 to 10 (with 10 meaning totally 100% confident that it's true and 0 meaning totally convinced it's 100% false), how confident are you that there's an afterlife of some kind?

And what makes you that convinced?
What if we are here merely to learn and to diversify our experience, to sift thru the incidental debris of our random sojourn for those pearl-like moments we carry with us into the next phase of consciousness?
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What if there's no reason that we're here, other than that our parents had kids?
Magical Realist said:
I like to think that something remains of this life in the soul after death.
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Does your liking to think things make it more likely that the things you like thinking are true?

Do you have any evidence for a soul, of any kind, that can exist independently of your body and/or which can persist after death?
Favorite scars, traumas that made us, anatomical flaws, and even the vast collective past of our DNA.
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Those remain in the "soul" after the body is long gone? How? Why?
 
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“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

"If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]." ---Kurt Godel

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”---Einstein
 
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Magical Realist said:
“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

"If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]." ---Kurt Godel

“Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That signifies nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”---Einstein
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Q: Name one thing these people had in common when they made these statements...
A: None of them had died.
 
I take it you have no interest in actually engaging with the topic you started, Magical Realist.

Why is that? I mean, it would make sense at the very least to share your own responses to your own questions (see post #13), even if you haven't thought things through sufficiently to attempt answers to questions of the kind I asked in post #14.

Why did you start this thread?
 
James R said:
I take it you have no interest in actually engaging with the topic you started, Magical Realist.

Why is that? I mean, it would make sense at the very least to share your own responses to your own questions (see post #13), even if you haven't thought things through sufficiently to attempt answers to questions of the kind I asked in post #14.

Why did you start this thread?
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I know what I believe and its affect on my life. I wanted to know what other people believe. Is that a crime?
 
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