Life Death

Do you believe in life after death?

Too often I find that the subject of death is addressed with goofy speculation, close-minded stubbornness, or outright fear and avoidance. So let's bypass the "Death for Dummies" approach and take a deeper intellectual look at death to better understand the important role it plays in our lives... and especially what it can teach us about how to live.

As far as our human bodies are concerned, death eventually captures all of us. As far as I can tell, no human being has yet managed to live forever. Even if we evolve new silicon bodies for ourselves and find a way to transfer our minds into them, there's no reason to believe those bodies will be immortal either (even with frequent upgrades). We may be able to delay death, perhaps even for a very long time, but eventually our physical existence will end at some point. Forever is too long for us to last as physical beings. No backup system is foolproof, especially when its opponent is the infinity of time.

On average more than 150,000 people die every day on this planet. That's 2 people per second. Over a million corpses a week. And this is "normal" for planet earth. Does this fact help you get some perspective on the scope of various tragedies? If 3000 people get wiped out in a single stroke, that's still only 2% of one day's total... hardly significant from a cosmic point of view.

And here's the worst part. You don't even know when you'll die (unless you're reading this right before committing suicide, in which case I'd better keep writing). But my guess is that you don't have an item labeled "die" on your to do list or in your tickler file.

So how comfortable do you feel with the idea that today might be your last day alive?

For 150,000 people today, that's about to become the reality, so if you happen to be among them, you'll have plenty of company. I wonder how many of those people feel prepared for what awaits them.

What do we really know about what happens after death?

Instead of launching into stories about near-death experiences and what various religions say, let's try sneaking up on this problem from a different angle. Let's ask this question instead:

What can we reasonably say does NOT happen after death?

Obviously what's "reasonable" will differ a bit from person to person based on his/her context and beliefs, but I think most of us can agree on some fairly basic observations.

First, you can't take it with you. All your physical stuff stays here. Whenever someone dies, we notice that their stuff remains in the physical world. It doesn't suddenly vanish.

Another thing we notice is that our physical bodies stay here. That includes our heart, lungs, brain, hemp tattoos, etc.

Also, it's fair to say that because the physical stuff stays here, then any knowledge and skills you've developed which are rooted in the physical world will become obsolete when you die. Your knowledge of HTML probably won't be of much use in the afterlife, unless of course there are dead computers in the afterlife too, such as my old Atari 800. I hope you still know BASIC.

If we manage to retain anything of ourselves after death, it seems reasonable to say that it won't include any of our physical stuff or our physical bodies. And much of our knowledge will be obsolete as well.

If we can take anything with us after death then, it would have to be something non-physical in nature. And the non-physical part of ourselves is our consciousness. You can call it other names if you wish -- soul, spirit, etc. The exact term you use doesn't really matter. I'll use the term consciousness.

So we have a couple alternatives that seem reasonable to me:

1. After we die we retain some part of our consciousness, but all the physical parts of our existence are lost.
2. After we die we cease to exist. Our consciousness gets wiped out along with the physical. Dead and gone forever.