The afterlife thread

[SentinelSlain]

Thoughts? Near Death Experiences? Trips that told you that there is a purpose in life and a life after death?

I think I spoke with a dead relative's ghost once and they accurately told me about stuff that was going to come up. That only happened once, so I doubt it was schizophrenia. It wasn't specific enough to prove it wasn't a manifestation of my subconscious though.

I also saw a UFO with a friend. It was pretty crazy actually, really weird, sadly I didn't have my glasses for long distance, but he could see it and I saw a lot of it.

I've been trying to pin down whether near death experiences can be totally explained by science and I've got to the stage where I think neuroscience gives explanation for a lot of the things people describe, but I don't see the evolutionary advantage in your body making your conscious mind think it's going to heaven (or hell, experiences like that have been recorded too). The fact that both have occurred for a lot of people seems to cancel out the plausible evolutionary advantages for one or the other.

 

[mutantllama]

So is this just a thread for weird experiences?

Sometimes when I'm high as fuck I seem to notice sleep paralysis more and when it happens I get a weird feeling like I'm a machine in the middle of a room about to be worked on by a bunch of odd figures I can't seem to identify.

 

[Dak]

It must be the afterlife because ML posted twice in a day.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I had a dream once at the peak of my fundamentalist beliefs that I was at an empty construction site, wandering around and wondering where God was watching me from (since he's always watching, y'know). Then I turned around and saw a black head way off in the distance peering over a fence, and immediately realized it was God. I immediately looked away, but it was too late, He knew I knew and suddenly this sonic blast hit me and sent me flying into a concrete cylinder. He then peered over the opening of it and started yelling something in the most terrifying voice, and I was just like "I won't say anything I swear!", and then I slowly began to wake up, fading to white then darkness. I was completely terrified and it wasn't until I could hear my siblings' voices clearly that I got out of the covers because I thought I was now in hell.

 

[Master_Yoda77]

I sleepwalk. It's pretty cool waking up randomly on the floor of the living room.

 

[The Butt]

I sleepwalk. It's pretty cool waking up randomly on the floor of the living room.

That's awesome.

 

[Master_Yoda77]

Oh sorry, I didn't mean sleepwalking. I meant I get drunk as fuck and wake up naked on the kitchen floor with an empty box of PBR laying over my crotch.

 

[The Butt]

I swear man, a lot of you gotta come up here and drink with me sometime.

 

[tagradh]

Whenever I've drank with Americans they've been terrible lightweights.

I don't mean that in a dumb, condescending "omg u cant drink 12 pints u faggit" way, more the "I don't know and/or care if I can drink like you guys but I'm gonna try keep up and then stumble around like a twat before passing out and pissing and/or puking everywhere".

Who the fuck wants to be around that?

 

[Dak]

Our livers are too busy processing FREEEEDUM to process alcohol efficiently.

 

[SentinelSlain]

I've seldom interacted with Americans irl. They tend to be amused by Britishness, from what I've seen.

 

[SentinelSlain]

I still can't work out if there is an afterlife though. Life is kind of absurd if there isn't, but, there were other species of the Homo genus still in existence when the very first religious structures and organisations were being created, which is a bit of problem, for most modern religions. People may dispute this, but it hasn't really been announced, as far as I'm aware, it's just something you can put together yourself from recent discoveries, like the ancient ruins in turkey and the hobbit skeletons and cave skeletons found in china. Also I suppose the controversy of the age of the great sphinx at Giza fits into it as well.

Now another question is, what brought about the movement towards religion, as a social construct. Well, you could say it's a combination of humans manipulating each other and the side effects of both the uneducated mind trying to reason out the world and trips from psychotropic substances such as magic mushrooms.

 

[Einherjar86]

If you're willing to think like a deconstructionist, then the concept of an afterlife is fundamentally at odds with the logic of life/survival. There's actually a book written about this, called Radical Atheism, by Martin Hägglund.

This is a quote from the very beginning of the introduction:

The desire to live on after death is not a desire for immorality, since to live on is to remain subjected to temporal finitude. The desire for survival cannot aim at transcending time, since the given time is the only chance for survival. There is thus an internal contradiction in the so-called desire for immortality. If one were not attached to mortal life, there would be no fear of death and no desire to live on. But for the same reason, the idea of immortality cannot even hypothetically appease the fear of death or satisfy the desire to live on. On the contrary, the state of immortality would annihilate every form of survival, since it would annihilate the time of mortal life.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

 

[tagradh]

You die, that's it.

 

[SentinelSlain]

it probably wont always be the case for everyone though.

 

[tagradh]

I imagine we will be able to copy people's counsciousness one day but it'll still just be a copy. And unless the copy is made right at the point of death it's hardly the same consciousness anyway. So the you that you think of as you is still you, and it still dies.

 

[SentinelSlain]

Well they can already interface with the brain directly and have partially successfully experimented with giving "lock in" paralyzed people control of a mouse cursor and blind people limited vision through a camera.

It seems to me to be likely that at some point, they will be able to have an interface that can kind of take over, I mean, somehow stimulate the transfer of memories to the new non biological part of the brain, along, ultimately, with the consciousness. If that all happened whilst the patient was alive then arguably the copied over consciousness is them.

 

[arg]

scientists need to discover how to transfer the entire consciousness and memories (exactly them, not a copy) of a dying person into a computer.

then when in the computer, have a program simulate a real, exciting, pleasurable life, like going to the beach, skiing, fucking whores, etc.

imagine a future full of these massive hard drives filled with the minds of people who no longer have their human bodies, living forever in a false but beautiful utopia. itll be awesome

 

[SentinelSlain]

Yeah until someone unplugs the rig or we have a power cut. I don't think it would be a traditional computer though, I think it would probably be an artificial brain, that physically models the chemistry and conductive patterns (or something, I'm no neuroscientist) of the human brain.

Death is only a insurmountable problem if all of your emotional investment is in your stream of consciousness. I worry about not having contributed much to the world, but I also think I have done no real harm either.