Afterlife (or not dying)

We don't want to die (become extinct when our body terminates), although this does seem likely and we can't, with medicine as it is now, do anything about it.  I think at some point this will no longer be the case, but that seems a ways off.

There are of course alternatives on offer, although some of them don't seem much better than dying and a few are fearsome.  I see no point in joining some cosmic ocean, or being reborn with few, if any memories of a previous existence.  These may as well be personal extinction.

And then of course there is a Heaven or some variation.  My personal heaven would be an outdoor life on horseback and fishing, living in a tent and making fish and eggs and coffee on a fire.  However, the work parts of this, such as chopping wood or grooming the horse, as well as the unpleasant parts, such as bad weather and insects, would not be part of it.  I and others would also sit around at night before bed and sing and talk philosophy and psychiatry and religion and tell jokes and have sex.

In an earlier blog I talked about why I think the mind is a process, not thing, so the question is how does this gust of wind or flickering flame survive the brain's death?  That would seem to depend on what it is, what "mind" is, and we don't know.  We don't even know what sentience is or where it comes from.

Maybe it is something "mystical," or at least as yet undiscovered by science.  Frankly, I suspect its discovery will have to await the passing of modern scientific physical materialism and the insistence on experimental evidence to a time when scientists work with inference and reason without physical confirmation.

As process it may be like other processes we observe, and have both "wave" (process) and "particle" (matter, etc.) properties (this is misleading derived from our ways of thinking and requires a lot of mental work to really conceive, but I put it as best I can to be understood).  In that case sentience or mind, probably just forms of the same thing, could be conserved much as mass/energy and charge and momentum are conserved.

Of course that wouldn't prove much.  Energy is conserved, but degrades in a way (entropy increases) and readily changes form.  It does to my mind, though, hold a conceptual way in which rebirth might work.  A lot depends on the nature of sentience, and, if, as we infer, sentience has a tendency to persist as it is, then you would have it.

Another possibility, and one I would not be at all surprised at, would be that our life is some sort of dream or entertainment or punishment or education or even reward and when we die we also wake up to the reality above us, assuming it too is a simulation.