ideal version of what happens after death

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.