Q: Do you believe in life after death?

A: Maybe, but it might be nothing you can imagine.

For example, one possibilitiy is that each person's mind functions autonomously while embedded in a physical body, but that when the body dies, the mind would fade out like a light going out when the tungsten burns out, but there's a Super Being that's found a way to incorporate the mental essense of a human mind into Its own mind as a new additional "cell", thus expanding It's knowlege and consciesness a tiny bit like if you were able to add new neurons to your brain.

That big It would now be able to recall the specific events of your life, but It would also be able to recall the events and experiences of the lives of all the others It has incorporated into its meta-mind, in a way where It's all one hyper-consciesness that wouldn't really be overly concerned about the experiences of the individual component minds, analogous to how the consciousness and state of awareness of a single neuron cell is very small, but when you wire 100 billion of them together in an orderly manner, it creates you, a meta-consciousness that is capable of percieving colour and feeling emotion on a level that no single cell ever could.

In otherwords, level one consciousness is whatever dim little bit of awareness a single neuron has, level two consciousness is what you are familiar with, and level three would be something as far above you as yours is above that of a neuron, meaning it's as incomprehensible to you now as would be your state of consciousness from the perspective of a neuron... but you haven't become nothing... something has still carried on.

Of course you can probably see some immediate refinements and variations on that theory, i.e., that only the "good" one's get incorporated into the meta-entity's mind, or that there might be several different meta-mind's up there and you'll get incorporated into the one that your character matches the best, or where there's a meta-mind up there, and where the nature of the laws of reality are such that a soul can still exist after death of the body, but if the soul don't get incorporated into a metamind it drifts around as a ghost feeling like it's in hell, etc. etc.

The point is, the sum total of the experiences and attitudes and abilities that you've aquired and developed while in a physical body might carry on, but it might be in a framework that's nothing at all even remotely close to the framework your familiar with.

In any case, like String Theory, no hypothesis about an afterlife has come along yet that's scientifically testable, and so, like String Theory, it has to stay in the realms of being something that a person chooses to believe or not.

Q: Have you had any experiences that convince you of that belief?

A: Well, there was one time when an older gent I knew - a professor I hadn't seen in years who was a key mentor, where the last time we'd talked it had ended in a real nasty argument over some fundamental principal of philosophy and I'd stomped out - showed up when I was in some sorta half-awake half-asleep dream-like state of mind to tell me that everything was cool and that I'd been a favorite student and that I should learn to relax and enjoy the movie, and then the next day I found out he'd died the night before, but I dunno... I 'd heard he was ill, but I'd never got around to calling him, so maybe it was just my subconscious trying to round things out combined with it being a cooncidence that he'd died that same night.
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I am doubtful that life exists after death. I think it is our ego that makes us think WE have to survive in some form, because we are so important. But I could be wrong. People I trust in most matters have told me of seeing ghosts.
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