Nothing.
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Death
This is for atheists and non-atheists, what do you think happens after death?
"If conquest constituted a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them." The Nationalisation of the Land Karl Marx
"To belittle the socialist ideology in anyway, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology." What Is To Be Done? V.I. Lenin
Nothing.
Yeah, nothing. I really have trouble believing that the mind/soul/whatever is powerful enough to continue existing even after physically ceasing to function.
It's a scary thought but whatever.
As far as any one individual is concerned, there is no 'after death'. Death is the end of the human experience; there is no guessing what happens after it.
Sure, there's the grief of the people socially connected to the deceased, but that has nothing to do with their(the deceased's) experience.
It's a depressing sight for anyone who does not believe in an afterlife: the consciousness is snuffed out, the body is degraded by animals and plants or burned. I've often seen death romanticised by supposed materialists with sayings to the rough effect of "It gives life so much more worth", but this is just vaguely poetic-looking nonsense. Death is an enemy for our species to eventually surmount.
Dann steigt aus den Trümmern der alten Gesellschaft, Die Sozialistische Weltrepublik!
The Soul of Man under Socialism
Life keeps going without one's presence. One's molecules are recycled to create more life.
I chose option 2. Essentially it is the school of thought revolving around many religions and belief systems such as Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and some schools of Taoism and Buddhism, as well as Hinduism - it states the soul i.e. consciousness is entrapped is a matter body with the purpose of tending the material world on behalf of the Absolute - (humanity is the way "Chaos" has chosen to bring "Order" to the material universe) after a life dharmatically "well lived" you essentially ascend to either a re-unification with the "Abstract" aka "God" in a "Nirvana" state, or at least ascend into a metaphysical being such as a deva or asura, or an "angel" or "demon" ... "descendancy" would be transmigration down the ladder into an animal form, so essentially option 2 is also the "reincarnation" option.
Last edited by Astarte; 17th May 2011 at 04:24.
"If conquest constituted a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them." The Nationalisation of the Land Karl Marx
"To belittle the socialist ideology in anyway, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology." What Is To Be Done? V.I. Lenin
Yes, we will be able to extend the number of times our cells can divide. And yet, while it is within grasp, it receives no research funding.
I voted for nothing, but I really don't know. It isn't really possible for me to know.
well...whatever happens...one day we will all find out.
In fact, if humanity ever did conquer physical death using science it would be the apotheosis of the human race itself, and one further step in the union of the physical and metaphysical worlds.
"If conquest constituted a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them." The Nationalisation of the Land Karl Marx
"To belittle the socialist ideology in anyway, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology." What Is To Be Done? V.I. Lenin
I agree with this to an extent. The conquering of physical death would so drastically reduce the domain of metaphysical thought that it might seem absorbed by the physical. (What is after life if there is no death? If it was possible and normal for one's consciousness to 'live' indefinitely in the physical world, the only ones who would seek death would not hope for anything that resembled life in it, would they?)
Anyway, I voted "Nothing" in the poll, as that is what becomes of the consciousness of the dead individual.
Dann steigt aus den Trümmern der alten Gesellschaft, Die Sozialistische Weltrepublik!
The Soul of Man under Socialism
The energy in your brain dissipates as heat and returns to the great entropy of the environment. It's over, you're a mass of rotting organic matter.
We should totally do this shit! Fuckin' awesome idea!
We can preserve people like Lenin and Marx and consult them like they're some divine oracle supercomputer.
"Machinery in itself is a victory of man over the forces of nature, but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces" - Uncle Karl
Although I don't believe humans possess a soul, I do believe in the Buddhist notion of karma and rebirth.
To put it simply, actions have consequences. Either these consequences come to fruition right away, or they do so at a later time. If I die before experiencing the consequences of some actions, those actions will be a factor in where I am reborn. Heaven, hell, or maybe even another human existence. Nevertheless, this new existence is finite as well, since whatever is born must eventually die. The result is an endless cycle of birth and death.
But rebirth is not the transfer of the soul from a dying body to a living one. It is the birth of a new being that inherits the consequences of the actions of the old being, without sharing essence with the old being.
"The coming Revolution can render no greater service to humanity than to make the wage system, in all its forms, an impossibility, and to render Communism, which is the negation of wage-slavery, the only possible solution."
From The Conquest Of Bread, by Peter Kropotkin
There is a mathematical problem with the concept of rebirth or reincarnation (I am dealing with only human to human reincarnation at this point).
If a human dies and is born again as another human, all well and good, but that would mean the population would have to remain static. Obviously, our population isn't static, it is always growing (at 1.092% per year). Where are the new humans coming from? I believe this fact disproves human to human reincarnation, rebirth, and past lives absolutely.
Now some religions hold that you may not be reincarnated as a human, but as a lower life form. However, the total biomass on this planet is decreasing due to human actions. I'm not talking about the extinction of species, just that there is less life on the Earth now that there was 100 years ago. This is especially true in the oceans, where plankton and bacteria populations are declining steeply. So if human to non-human reincarnation is considered, there aren't enough new lifeforms for the old lifeforms to inhabit. Now we have trillions of extra dead lifeforms with no where to go. Thus again, mathematics disproves the doctrine.
That'd hold only if everything is reborn on earth in a physical cellular form. But earth is just one planet in a huge universe, which potentially is just one universe out of many. And cellular life is just one kind of existence. Within Buddhist cosmology there's such a thing as formless existence for example.
All the mathematical argument proves is that if there is such a thing as rebirth, then cellular life on earth can't be the only destination. It can't prove or disprove rebirth, just as mathematical arguments can't prove or disprove the existence of god, soul or afterlife, or any other kind of metaphysical construct.
"The coming Revolution can render no greater service to humanity than to make the wage system, in all its forms, an impossibility, and to render Communism, which is the negation of wage-slavery, the only possible solution."
From The Conquest Of Bread, by Peter Kropotkin
Reincarnation and karma is a horribly reactionary fairy tale as it justifies suffering and class. Those who were better people in a previous life get a better life next time so the people who were bad end up having a shit life great almost everyone I know must have been a right bastard last time around thanks. Not to mention babies who were born with aids or addicted to drugs but hey that's karma right they probably deserved it?
Why is I don't know (which is the truth for almost everyone) not a choice?
I'm afraid your wrong. You see, involving the universe as a whole just extends the argument, and mathematics is infinitely scalable. In the case of sentient to sentient reincarnation, again, the population of the universe as a whole would have to remain constant, and growth disproves this. You still have to account for new spirits/souls being created, and no reincarnation doctrine does this. Something can not be created out of nothing, so there are no new spirits/souls.
In the second case, even taking formless existence in to account, there would be an ever increasing number of formless spirits, until it reached infinity. An infinite number of things that don't exist and a finite number of things that do exist. Since any level of existence entails either mass or energy (which are after all the same thing), you would have to have an infinite amount of mass or energy, which you can't have.
Sorry man, math is scalable. You can't make a problem too big for math to solve. Math 2. Reincarnation 0.
P.S. You'd be amazed what I did with math yesterday, but I can't tell you because it's against the DIY rules. It involved volumes, unit conversions, ratios, densities, and algebra, all with hard constraints. Boy was it fun!
Last edited by Inquisitive Lurker; 17th May 2011 at 14:57.
