What do you believe happens when a person dies? Are we eternal or do we completely cease to exist?

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What a lot of people don’t realize is that we are more than just our conscious experience, even if you held the materialist perspective that we don’t have souls. We are everything that we identify with. Our lives, our memories, our relationships, our possessions. All of these things go away when we die, if they don’t, then it would be indistinguishable from not dying.

Let’s say you get ejected from your body and become an amorphous blob of agency. Let’s then go and annihilate the universe so there’s no hope of going back to your body. Eventually everything that you took with you, memories, skills, personality, would go away, leaving only a core essence of awareness. Things exist only to interact with other things. If you don’t hold on to something, you’ll progressively lose it.

Lets say you lose everything. Are you still the same person as the one who used to live on 55 Johnson Blvd, Lexington KY, that had three kids and is an acclaimed tennis player? No. Nobody would recognize you, not even yourself. History connects you with that person, but you can’t control your history, you can’t interact with it anymore, having no memories left of it. You might as well be a speck of dust.

We’re not playing in the realm of conscious experience anymore, we’re in the realm of our very identity as separate beings.

It is for this reason I do not believe in an afterlife, but rather reincarnation. We have souls, but the souls are not really recognizable as such. If you looked at a soul, you wouldn’t know what you are seeing. The soul holds your core essence, the part of you that, when you inject it into a small baby, gives that baby a completely formed personality and abilities and desires, right from the get go.

If we had an afterlife, we’d eventually become so disconnected from our prior lives that we’d literally either fall apart or become something else that’s not us.

Eventually you will end, one way or another.