Besides religious reasons, do you believe in an afterlife? Why or why not, and what kind?

Home - Quora Link

I am, and I devote a considerable amount of time to trying to understand exactly what an afterlife means. I’m not going to touch the actual mechanics of transference of consciousness from the physical to the non-physical, that’s immaterial to what I want to explore.

What I want to know is what do people actually do in the afterlife. Your life in the Earthly realm is pretty well-ordered by the cycle of growth. You want something, you try to get it, you fail, you learn, try again, eventually succeeding. This cycle fuels the growth of your consciousness. What makes the cycle possible is the fact that the physical world we live in is full of constraints and challenges.

If you remove the constraints and challenges, existence becomes boring. People in this position in real life will do one of two things, they’ll either drift towards utter stasis or they’ll start seeking out new challenges to keep them occupied. I’ve gleaned that stasis only tends to be comfortable for a short time. So everyone ultimately will start seeking out challenge and growth again once constraints are removed.

A physical world offers the best environment for growth. A non-physical world removes aspects like death from the equation, limiting challenge potential. My current take on the afterlife situation is that everyone reincarnates back into a physical world eventually, it’s just a matter of when.

What makes physicality so good for growth is the rules. Rules are the building blocks of reality. Things are more or less real by virtue of how many rules can be perceived about it. Math seems real even though it’s super abstract. You can’t reach out and touch math, but that doesn’t stop you from studying it in school anyway.

The rules don’t care about you. You have to apprehend the rules and learn how to get what you want out of the world regardless. There are more rules than just the physical to understand. Society has built up an elaborate edifice of rules, both stated and unstated, to understand. Biology has created rules for you to ignore at your own peril.

The afterlife strips away a good quantity of the rules we currently live by. Reincarnation seems to strip away a vast amount of self that you build up in this life. I like myself, I would rather not see it go away. What I’m concerned with is if I happen to die and my body is not rejuvenated, (I plan on being cryo-preserved) will I be able to sustain myself in the afterlife? For how long? Will I be able to maintain challenge in the afterlife indefinitely? Will I even want to? Or will I end up like everyone else, dissolving shortly after dying in search for another physical existence?

Because once you die, everything that binds you here goes with it. You’re cut adrift, a wanderer without a home. Perhaps you can go to heaven, but I can’t imagine that even heaven can’t get boring.

My faith in the afterlife builds off of a faith in the ultimate benevolence of existence. But ultimate benevolence does not mean that I’ll be certain to get what I want. Just that what I do end up getting will be ultimately good for me.

I don’t just want what’s good for me. I want life to last forever and always get better. Otherwise I’d rather just reincarnate and roll another character. Or to satisfy the silly materialists, to end it all and not exist again. Reincarnating without the memories and understandings of this life doesn’t seem all that different from oblivion anyway. An afterlife is just a softer transition.