How can someone experience life without the physical body?

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This is a good question, I’d like to speculate a little.

First, let’s define the experiencer. You are many things, one of those things is that of something that experiences. Things happen to you, you react, and you do things that the world reacts to. The thing that does this experiencing is called consciousness. Your consciousness lives in your brain. Your brain carries the imprints of all the things it’s experienced before. Things that are experienced include both sensory processing, and our own internal processing.

There is no reason to believe that any of this happens without the actual body. But strangely, we don’t need to actually be able to describe it in order to have experiences. We don’t need to understand the brain in order to experience things with it. But the brain actually contains all of the little variations that color experience.

Asking to experience without the brain is like trying to experience dipping your foot into a river by loading a simulation of the river into a computer program and watching someone dip their foot into it.

The way out of this is to posit that there is more than one brain. You have both a physical brain, and a non-physical brain, and the experiencing you have right now affects both brains. When your physical brain dies, your non-physical one simply continues to operate, only in the non-physical realm.

Now, of course, this is only half of the equation. We are accustomed to dealing with physical reality. Physical reality operates according to rules, which would obviously be different outside of a physical world. Our brains have a tough time making sense of everything.

The real thing that would make experience difficult is meaning. In order for an agency to persist, it needs to do things. In order to do things, it needs reasons to do those things. If you don’t have any reason to take action, then you’ll just lie on the couch all day. Physical bodies require maintenance, physical brains have drives like the one to reproduce.

A non-physical body and mind will slowly run out of things to do. The entropy of your mind will run out and you’ll settle into stasis.

You can posit a world with rules, and subject the non-physical being to those rules, thereby creating a source for meaning to his existence, but then you’re just re-creating a new physical world around him. He’s as good as re-incarnated. This is why Christian Heaven looks like reincarnation to me, even if it exists, entities existing in it will eventually become static, progressively losing aspects of agency as the being runs out of things to do.

We need a cycle of death and rebirth because otherwise existence becomes meaningless. But even a cycle of death and rebirth becomes meaningless eventually without growth.

Beings need progressing levels of self-awareness in order to avoid devolving into stasis. If you just do the same things over and over again. Let’s say you kept playing chess for eternity. Eventually you’ll have exhausted all the games of chess you could have ever played, against all the people you could ever play chess against. In order to avoid your existence becoming merely a loop, you need to introduce new rules, new aspects to the game. You need to evolve.

Evolution across lifetimes is the big trick here.