this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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People often think about death as some kind of positive non-existence when in reality death can't by definition be experienced. If it feels like something then it's the process of dying people are talking about. Not being dead. I believe the closest thing to death we can "experience" is general anesthesia and the people who have gone thru that know there's nothing to experience. Just a teleportation from one moment to another.
This actually makes me believe in some form of "rebirth". Not in the sense most people think about it but since consciousness can only experience being but not "not being" then it seems very likely that death just means that your experience moves from one place to another. If there's a break in between you can't experience it. You just can't help but keep having experiences.
Really interesting stuff. Sam Harris made a fascinating podcast about this subject. As a subscriber I can give free links to the full episode if you're interested. Just send me a PM.
Quantum suicide is really interesting, I've always thought something like this could be possible and this is the first time I'm learning that there's a word for it. There's something intuitive about it, I bet lots of people also feel the same way. I've been in a few potentially near-death situations and one specific thought always pops into my head afterwards, "I wonder how many versions of me just died from that."
That's a terrifying thought. But then what happens when you get very old? We don't live forever. And even if some life extension technology is discovered before we die, what about everyone in the past who died? Did they all end up in a reality where some incredible technology figured out how to keep everyone conscious indefinitely? What about people who lived before we even knew what viruses were? As intuitive as it feels, it doesn't seem to pass the smell test. I would guess that some of the "intuition" I'm feeling is actually just a fear of dying
There's this hypothesis called Quantum Archaeology, I'm not a scientist and I don't know how believable this is (If you think you understand Quantum Physics, it means you definitely don't and all that), but there's an idea that the universe may "remember" details about.. well.. everything, and this "memory" could be tapped into by a sufficiently advanced computer capable of datamining reality itself.. Allowing you to bring anyone back from the dead, provided you have enough ink in your 3D Printer and all the 1's and 0's that make up what ancient people mistook for a soul.
I gave you how I understand it, it's likely more complicated than that if it's indeed real. (Never got a solid answer one way or another, a friend of mine talked about it once... He was very anti-mysticism and pro-rationalism, so I took it more seriously than I would have if some Spirit Science Hippie told me about it.. He up and vanished one day, never found out what happened.)
If Quantum Archaeology AND Quantum Immortality/Quantum Suicide hold true, it's possible that once you get old enough the only timelines left to "jump to" are societies in the far future where Quantum Archeaology is a puzzle that's been cracked.
Heck, maybe Heaven & Hell and are merely some Dyson Swarm powered Alien Satellite somewhere that's just been left to "Crunch the numbers" as it were. I don't know, anything's possible in an infinite and unknowable universe.
Sam Harris believes in life after death?
No and even if so then not in the way any religion describes it.
You literally just said he did!
Edit: I may have been too quick to say that
You mind showing me the quote where I said that?
I may have misread or misunderstood, but it sounded like you said Sam Harris believed that somehow you experienced a form of "rebirth", where you appear somewhere else after death, and talked about this on a podcast.
If that's not what you meant, I apologize, that is how I understood what you wrote.
The podcast was about death in general and what I was talking about is just one thing he talked about. It's not something he believes in per se but just an idea he entertained. I can link you the full episode if you're interested.
EDIT: I explained this theory a little further in another thread:
Ah I see, sorry these days it's very easy to equate talking about something to giving support for it, terrible habit.
I blame youtube
Yeah no worries. I added a little more detailed explanation of the theory to my previous post.