Pages

Friday, June 17, 2016

More about afterlives

As I have posted before, an afterlife depends on the details.  The Christian'/Muslim afterlife sounds terrible.  Either you are in Hell to start with or you are in Heaven, but still have free will but have cashed in the Jesus-Sacrifice card, so the slightest misstep or bad thought and pop its to Hell with you.
Then there is rebirth, which as the Buddha taught us is a horrible trap of nature forcing us to live life after life after life in a world of suffering and death.  Even pleasures in this world are self-limiting and temporary.
We are wired by natural selection to have a desire to live, and like all desires it causes us to grasp after life, and this just adds to the suffering.
Still, I don't want to die, and I think I have reasons that go beyond instinct.  My pet theory at the moment is that we all live in a huge simulation and when we die we just get up and pull the plug -- a sort of entertainment or maybe education.  This is not solipsistic -- as I see it we all participate in the same simulation at different places and times.
Of course why?  Well it seems to me an advanced society would put in place such things much as we put in place carnival rides, and the probability that we are in such a thing, when you sit down and do the arithmetic, becomes overwhelming.  No doubt humans in the future will do as much, creating another level of simulation.

No comments: