Quote:
Originally Posted by A1eutian
You don't have to be religious or believe in anything to understand that anything is possible after your heart beats for the last time.
You know that at one time you didn't exist. Sometime after your were born you developed self awareness, and slowly you gained an understanding of your mortality and how this is all going to come to an end. Big bummer, right?
But, did you ever consider if all this happened once, that it may happen again? It's not reincarnation, but ANOTHER incarnation of a person, not connected in any way to you, that will experience a life as a "me" after you die.
Maybe everything doesn't go dark forever and ever. It's possible that someday you (but not YOU) will live again. It might be in Calcutta or Baghdad though, so maybe another life isn't the best thing that could happen.
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I see that as a kind of continuation of life too. I wouldn't see any reason to believe that we'd retain our memories, but the language of our ancestors, our instincts, would still be there.
And when humanity finally fades, life will go dormant, and perhaps pop up again elsewhere, and the seed of awareness will again bloom, and the me's and you's that are not you and I will be reborn, and life will continue, in a kind of/sort of way, as a form of pseudo-reincarnation.
That's another way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it I kind of like is that for all of eternity, we will have lived, and that is a form of immortality.
In a sense, I see you as a continuation of me. We're both sentient. Our lives each have value because we feel and experience the world around us. We each consider ourselves to be an I. We have casings of our physical bodies, and our memories, but what's really important is that we are each I's. Because other humans will live on, I consider them a form of immortality for myself. Because other feeling life will live on, I might even consider the apes and dolphins a form of immortality for myself. Because life will, I assume, spring up somewhere else in our universe or in others once Earth is gone, I would extend the prior ideas to see that as a form of immortality for myself.
And that works well too.