ideal version of what happens after death

The idea that you'd be granted some sort of magical continued existence with an ideal brain-dependent awareness is imo such a blatant sanity-preservation wishful thinking technique that this thought exercise feels identical to those reddit posts you might see like "what would you do if you woke up as yourself at 14 years old but with everything you know now?" And the answers are just like "I'd invest in Apple LOL" or "I'd have the confidence to kiss Cheryl at the big dance!!" Fortunately no longer existing is so absolute that I won't be able to have any opinions/regrets about it. You could consider that a perk in a way.

going all the way back to Neanderthal animist beliefs,

he does know a lot about stats and epidemiology, so I trust him.

lol

idk I would definitely want the 'nothing/you're just gone' option for to be what happens after I die myself, but I think I would prefer one of the other options to be true for other people because I can't bear the thought of people I loved just not existing anymore - but maybe it's unfair to impose eternal life on them if I couldn't take it myself

idk I would definitely want the 'nothing/you're just gone' option for to be what happens after I die myself, but I think I would prefer one of the other options to be true for other people because I can't bear the thought of people I loved just not existing anymore - but maybe it's unfair to impose eternal life on them if I couldn't take it myself

I want the mercy of nonexistence for everyone I love, but I want all those other people to wind up in some Beckettian hell where they're just a head in a bucket, forced to talk to the head in the next bucket over about nothing for eternity.

buckettian hell

reincarnation but you just get to skip back to the age of 10 and retain everything you've learned in your life, as many times as you want

ghost would be pretty sweet though

The idea of experiencing eternity frightens me so much (and I'm amazed that other people can countenance it without feeling the abject terror that I feel) that if forced I'd have to go for non-existence after death but the possibility that some nirvana like oneness of consciousness where time is revealed to be a meaningless human construct could be achieved is maybe a bit easier to deal with

And at the front gate, what a reward awaits
One bite of loaf from a holy ghost
An eternity of suffering
In the company of all those Christian men

As long as the void is comfy, I'll go with the nothing/you're just gone option.

Also voting for “just gone” as the ideal, though contemplation of it gives a strange simultaneous pleasure/pain sensation.

if I had to gamble my astral life savings I'd say the universe collapses and re-expands and at some point whatever molecules made up your brain reform and you become yourself again perhaps in slightly different form and maybe just maybe this is a process that's occurred thousands of times already

The void, please.

i turn into a skeleton

GTA-style exhaustive stats screen followed by mission select menu allowing you to replay any bits you want with optional cheat codes

^^^^^now we are fuckin talking

All faced with a limitless world of possibilities and second chances, finally banishing lifelong regrets forever, only you just end up spending the whole time suplexing people in year 8

as it's deems' birthday, multi-angle My Greatest Goals comp

was always amused by nietzsche's eternal return of the same (my understanding could be flawed, it's been a long time) that essentially we just live the same life over and over again in exactly the same way without knowing it

Enslaved by ant creatures in a Lovecraftian hellscape (thank you Mr King)

But seriously, GHOST would be an obvious choice for me (which I’d regret after about 10 minutes)

Ideal for me? A non-eternal heaven which serves as a vestibule to nothingness, where you have an interval during which you do not need to serve your physical needs, so as to eliminate pain and worries, and you can you learn how you, as an individual being, fit into the universe, before losing all sense of self and merging back into the whole.

I would like to be gone except for a tiny grain of consciousness that carries the knowledge of the existence of the world/the universe/existence itself, because what freaks me out the most about death is the idea that my POV is the only one I have access to and thus when it is gone it will be as if nothing exists or has ever existed, and I can't wrap my head around that much nothing.

Other, gone but you take fifteen hundred carbon credits with you to offset

any afterlife that involves me maintaining consciousness via my terrible malfunctioning mind is a big thanks but no thanks. would ideally prefer the opposite, reincarnation as some low-level lifeform with negligible consciousness like a tube worm or slime mold or something

Ideal for me? A non-eternal heaven which serves as a vestibule to nothingness, where you have an interval during which you do not need to serve your physical needs, so as to eliminate pain and worries, and you can you learn how you, as an individual being, fit into the universe, before losing all sense of self and merging back into the whole.

Having trouble parsing this… Do you merge back into the universe or into nothingness? You learn where you “fit into the universe” after you’ve lived your life (when it’s too late to change your life)?

I voted "other" just because it suggests something interesting. What I expect is a rapid disintegration of consciousness and that's it. But I'm open to 2001-style cosmic awareness, that would be cool.

i can’t decide between these options without more detail. what kind of reincarnation, random or based on my karma or do i get to pick? if ghost, am i a self-aware ghost who can just float around doing whatever or am i bound to reenact my earthly traumas? which heaven, which hell, which moral system determines where i go? if i can just pick heaven that would be nice. i would like 1 ultra-hedonistic heaven, please, with music and flying and people i love and exquisite beauty all around me forever, etc.

the "what dreams may come" heaven is pretty neat, but the fact that people who commit suicide go to hell in that cosmology (because they don't realize they're dead, which makes no sense) is a bit fucked, to put it lightly

I see a lot of people watched the finale of The Good Place.

my thought as well

Do you merge back into the universe or into nothingness?

Since energy and matter are conserved, I project that whatever it is that my heavenly existence was grounded in would be conserved, too, just on the basis of analogical thinking, but if I no longer have have any consciousness of an individuality that seems like a kind of nothingness on a personal level. Since nothing of this sort is observable, it makes sense that one's language about it is imprecise.

You learn where you “fit into the universe” after you’ve lived your life (when it’s too late to change your life)?

I don't envision this as a report card or a chance for a do-over, more like a culmination. As a species we seem to have a strong desire to answer these questions about our place and purpose. We have imagined a large set of possible answers, but certainty escapes us. It would be nice to be able to ask questions of this sort in an afterlife and be provided with definitive answers.

Hope this helps you in your struggle to parse.

“nothing/you’re just gone” is the logical choice but it is also the root of my lifelong fear of dying

i’ve got it managed to the point where i dont have anxiety attacks that wake me up from my sleep anymore but there’s still a part of me that cant deal with the heaviness of non-existence

so i might have to be a cornball & vote heaven/hell purely for comfort reasons rather than practicality

Me too Veg. I can't face 'nothing, you're gone' but everything else is awful too I guess except an actual heaven that's actually awesome and then you can choose to switch off when you want.

heaven obviously, wtf at having to choose hell as well

The only reason I don't want to die is because I don't want to miss what happens next. So, I picked ghost.

I think reincarnation might be the best pick, actually. In some versions of Buddhism, you can be "re-born" as a ghost, or a god or demon in various heavens and hells. It covers most of the bases.

I want the ability to go anywhere at any time period and just follow anything that interests me. Go forward and see what happens to the people I leave behind. Bounce around the next American century and see if we fuck it up or not. Rubberneck on the outskirts of some major catastrophes. Go forward a million years and see if we evolve into giant pulsing brain creatures. Dive through Jupiter's atmosphere. Find out if Milton Berle's dick is as big as they say it was.

Then, when I run out of ideas, off to the eternal nothing.

Also, it might be nice to find out if I mattered at all.

in buddhism i like the bardo part more than the reincarnation part.

Yes, it must be a bit of a bring down after seeing the clear shining light of a thousand suns, only to be told "Join the queue for uterine re-entry, on your left mate".

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

All of the animals can talk and are dressed up for the occasion of my arrival in the afterlife.

you become Dominic Toretto

Makes sense. That franchise has already lasted an eternity.

i went with reincarnation. that's my ideal version.

heaven/hell - no. those are both game over in different ways 5)
reincarnation. play again. 1)
ghost. i guess you're just observing. i don't know what else i would do. hang out at ghostville. 2)
nothing/you're just gone 4) game over
other 2) newgame+ play the life you just had, with everything you learned along the way, starting at the beginning

play again, except as a different character

could be like playing as Luigi

or as the Start Menu, and you wait for eternity for a player to start the game

play again, but you jump twice as high and your legs spin wildly

lol if you wake up from death to a card that says "Congratulations! You unlocked Luigi!"

or as the Start Menu, and you wait for eternity for a player to start the game

oof that's brutal
the eternal spinny wheel

*raise

Tonight I need your sweet caress
Hold me in the darkness
Tonight you cause my breastlessness
Do you believe my sandwich?

perhaps that fly is in insect heaven, drinking kool-aid all day long

If we dont remember past lives if we do reincarnate, then how is that practically any different to ceasing to exist?

I want to go on as a bodiless ball of energy/thoughts, interacting with all the other minds. Like the internt but without the pesky shit body cage weighing me down. I dont want to stop existing.

https://i.imgflip.com/2z9jkz.jpg

If we dont remember past lives if we do reincarnate, then how is that practically any different to ceasing to exist?

If you - Trayce - are at this moment a reincarnation of a previous life, are 'you' practically 'ceasing to exist'? This Trayce incarnation, with all its problems, crises, hopes and joys etc, feels different from just 'checking out'.

If this amorphous essence carries no recollection of the current me then i cant fathom the way in which it can be said to be me

The christian notion of a soul but divorced from my consciousness feels far less me than the actual me sitting here tbh

I guess it depends on the design of the 'ideal version' of what you wish happens after death. Do you want to build in some 'recollection' aspect of continuing consciousness etc.

what freaks my nut out is the thought that death can be thought of as like a giant comedy hammer smashing your brain to pieces - in the final microseconds, your cranial neurons are still firing, but they have been rent asunder, separated - what then is the moment of death, what is the consciousness, what state is it in, how can it be preserved intact, what is the point of system restore, etc

which makes me think 'ghost' is still the best answer, because a ghost is an echo of a self at a certain stage of life before death, an echo of the living consciousness and not the one whose neurons are being smashed apart by a hammer

quite fancy lunch now

Reincarnation - ideal version design options

(i) no continuing essence or 'soul' during incarnations

(ii) continuing essence or soul
Option A: constant awareness of continuing essence or soul
Option B: intermittent awareness of continuing essence e.g. at death/between incarnations

Design question: Is the continuing essence on some kind of journey with an aim in mind (e.g. undertaking incarnations with the aim of learning something,?) or are incarnations random or selected with any purposes.

It gets complicated very quickly.

(x post)

Who is it that quite fancies lunch: is it your soul, your present incarnation, or an karmic development resulting from decisions and actions made in your previous incarnation?

The divine fancies lunch, with me as vessel, obvs

The thought of final micro-seconds of death also freaks my nut, in that I irrationally and phobicly can't help envisaging it as feeling subjectively like an eternity of time (similar to the experience of time slowing down in a severe accident).

The afterlife as an eternal perception of one's dying moment eh

Zeno's paradox as applied to consciousness, your final second slowed down and stretching into infinity

More an adaptation of the black hole approach

Before you fuse with the singularity, an endless instant of pure agony

Or pure bliss!

was listening to an expert speak on the topic (on radio 4) the other week and it turns out the time-slowing-down thing is a trick of the memory rather than something experienced in the moment, they had an experiment with having people watch rapidly flickering displays and suddenly starting a bungee jump.

when I was a child, I imagined that when you die you get handed a set of trading cards that collect all the key moments of your life

and then you try to collect other people's better key moments

trade you one 'having a child' for that 'built a pagoda'

Hanging around the pearly gates waiting to scam new arrivals out of their rares.

HOT STAMPERS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd4rgyZzseY

04.45 minutes onwards

...I remember that afternoon, not as so many minutes spent in my drawing room interrupted by these strange excursions in time, but as years and years of heavenly bliss interrupted by short periods in my drawing room

i'm getting to thinking that genuine belief in heaven/hell is psychotic and drives a lot of evil behaviors

Well yeah tbh

absolutely it does

if you think that heaven is real, that hell is real, that they're both eternal, and that there is a god that decides, then you will do whatever it takes to get there.

above family

i really, REALLY wish that the protestant movement had developed some sort of Purgatory-like belief, just to provide some sort of option between absolute bliss and absolute torture. it really is just the biggest extremes they could possibly go with. you can so clearly envision the Great Awakening preachers just scaring the absolute crap out of ignorant people, realizing that the control they could gain by doing so

I remember the first newspaper article I saw that explained Parallel Universe Theory had it “in a parallel universe, you could be Cliff Richard”.I decided that was dumb, because either way it would not be me *or* Cliff over there.

i think foucault's analysis of knowledge-as-power has deeply affected my worldview on everything, including this. heaven/hell and similar kinds of beliefs, quite obviously, to me anyway, constitute institutional power structures. religion was at the forefront of figuring out how to tap into all the worst aspects of human behavior and psychology vis a vis these hard definitions of total fantasy, while feeding on the human spirit, in order to accumulate power. i think purgatory may have been the result of some kind of compromise that religion had to make with the state?

I hope its just this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsS_VMzY10I

Not exactly ideal. But at my dentist's earlier today, I imagined Hell as an exponentially prolonged dental procedure, in which the painkillers didn't quite take and the dentist's tools keep scraping your gums and tongue.