Philosophical Vegan Forum

The right-wing YouTube channel PragerU has uploaded a video entitled "Is There Life After This Life?", and the answer in their eyes is "If there is a god, then there is an afterlife". This, Dennis Prager argues is because a good God would use an afterlife as a method of giving justice to those who do evil by sending them to hell and to the victims of evil by sending them to heaven. He says that he would end up going crazy if he thought that there was no afterlife as it means that people who torture and get away with it in this life can evade justice entirely by not being sent to hell.

If you are a good person and believe in an afterlife where justice is delivered to those who do evil, then you believe that Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Hideki Tojo, Augusto Pinochet, Albert Fish and all other evil doers are currently facing punishment in hell. Not only that, but whenever anything bad happens to anybody anywhere on earth, you will be comforted by the fact that those responsible will be punished and those affected given compensation in the afterlife. And that is the problem!

Religion is like alcohol in that it can numb the pains you are feeling. It does this by providing you with hope that everything will be okay in the end, hence the afterlife. The poorest will be the richest in heaven and all your misery will end. This ends the emotional drive to accomplish anything worthwhile here on earth. If you are oppressed, it removes your incentive to rise up against your oppressors, as you believe you will go to heaven and they will go to hell. Religion can thus be harnessed as a tool by your oppressors, who can use it as a mechanism to get you to accept your place.

Religion, in my opinion, is a scam. Like an email from somebody who claims to be a wealthy Nigerian Prince who wants to send you money, it lures you in with promises such as life after death, which sounds nice as death is something which many people are afraid of. However, like the wealthy Nigerian Prince scam, you get screwed in the end. All it is a tool utilized by corrupt individuals (capitalists) in order to keep you subservient and to remove your incentive to go against injustice.

Death is nothing to be feared. It is just when the brain switches off and you experience nothing more. In a way, it is like a television turning off. Indeed, it is natural to grieve when you lose loved ones. However, what I have had to come to terms with always when this happens is that they are not coming back. Death isn't a new beginning, it's the end. It is because of this that we must make the most of the time that we have here on Earth and seek to do the best for all humanity whenever we can.

I believe that there is an afterlife but I also do believe that there is only heaven and hell on earth. Those people who you mentioned are probably living now on the earth again and just don't know why they have hard lives and why everything bad is happening to them...
I also believe that there is a spiritual road to something bigger than being just a human being.

I do agree with you when it comes to religion but I am not sure about death... I don't think it's the end, I think it is a new beginning but we just don't know where and how that beginning will be.

masterofdesign wrote: ↑Sat Jan 13, 2018 7:48 am Those people who you mentioned are probably living now on the earth again and just don't know why they have hard lives and why everything bad is happening to them...

This is a worrying viewpoint to take. It would mean that people such as Anne Frank deserved what happened to them, as they only received it due to doing something terrible in a previous life.

I read a while ago "The God Delusion" and in it, Richard Dawkins talks about a woman who met a Buddhist in another country who was taking care of a child who was in a dreadful condition. The Buddhist said to her to not pity the child, as the child must have done something dreadful in a previous life, and so deserved it.

and just don't know why they have hard lives and why everything bad is happening to them...

If they don't know why, then how are they meant to improve? Imagine Hitler is reincarnated into having a terrible life, and because he doesn't understand why he is having such a terrible life, ends up blaming the Jews, even wanting to kill the Jews, ending up in the exact same place he started.

Furthermore, the reincarnation viewpoint leads to societal decay in the exact same way that the heaven/hell viewpoint does. Not only is there no evidence for either of them, but they remove our incentive to prevent injustice. If we think that the abused will be reincarnated in a good life/go to heaven and the abusers will be reincarnated in a terrible life/go to hell, then the emotional drive that makes us so passionate to prevent injustice will be removed. Whereas, if we think that death is the end, we will be fueled by that belief to prevent injustice wherever we see it, because we only have one shot at existence and must use it to the best of our ability to improve the lives of as many people and animals as is possible.

I don't believe in a merit-based reincarnation, because that sounds religious. If reincarnation is possible, there's no reason why what actions someone did in their life would have any influence on into what they would reincarnate, because of the default assumption that the universe just is and has no morals. But that's assuming reincarnation is even possible in the first place. I believe the axiom that not being born yet is fudamentaly different from being dead is arbitrary, so in theory if the conditions that made us sentient in the first place are met again after our death then we could reincarnate into another sentient being. But here's the question: what are the conditions to make that a subjectivity awakens, or to take Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz's analogy, to make that a TV can turn on in the first place? And even if the TV that's turned off can in theory turned on again, this could take a long time, possibly billions of years or much more, for the conditions that made us sentient in the first place are met again after our death, so we would have to wait long time to reincarnate. But it may seem like it's not as bad as it may seem, because of something I recently learned about time perception.

I used to intuitively think that time felt subjectively was absolute, in the sense that for the same level of distortion of spacetime, two sentient beings would subjectively feel the same amount of time. This changed when I recently watched a video about how subjectively felt time is actually relative too. The point of the video was that the more energy the brain consumes for its cognitive abilities, the slowest time is subjectively felt. We could extrapolate by saying that once the brain shuts off, because there's no more energy to slow down the rate at which time passes by subjectively, time passes by at the fastest possible speed (I was tempted to say at an infinite speed but I prefer to have a finite equivalent to the speed of light and physicists hate infinity anyway) so the time during which we would "wait" without being able to feel anything until reincarnation would go by much faster than how we currently feel it. It doesn't really matter because you can't be bored while unconscious, but the possibility that afterlife could come sooner than later might feel more comfortable while being alive.

I said that I found arbitrary to say that not being born yet is fundamentaly different from being dead, which I believe is the axiom at the fundation of the belief that once you die it's the eternal oblivion. It might also be said that subjectivity appears ex nihilo, that before our birth it wasn't just an consciousness being turned off, but absolutely nothing... but if afterlife is impossible, then it's either a different kind of absolutely nothing which would be a paradox (because I'm philosophically pretty sure an "absolutely nothing" can't be different from another "absolutely nothing"), or it would store information to prevent that same consciousness from waking up again, which would mean it's not nothing, and that information should have to be stored somewhere. But even if it's not a difference of nature it may be a practical impossibility. For example, ultra heavy elements like oganesson have unique chemical properties like other elements, but they can't actually manifest in our physical world because these elements are so unstable they decay before they can do pretty much anything (which also means their chemical properties can't be properly tested by observers). Of course calling afterlife a practical impossibility implies that we know why subjectivity can awaken in the first place, why my subjectivity awakened in my body rather than in someone else's, and if I could have been born as another sentient being rather than me if my mother aborted early during pregnancy (I'm pretty sure we don't have the answers to those questions) and how to explain these with a theory of awakening of sentience that's compatible with the physical laws of the universe. Why it may be a "practical" impossibility may not sound very intuitive, but here's a way to imagine how such a concept could make sense: https://dmishin.github.io/js-revca/index.html
It's a reversible cellular automaton, which means you can go back in time with absolute certainity, and that shapes can only have one single immediate precursor, unlike something such as Conway's game of life. You can draw on the surface to open or close cells, and display the shape you want. Then you can animate it so it automaticaly evolves, and you can go backwards to see what previous configurations could have been a precursor to the one you initialized. The paradox is that in either case the evolution will almost certainly be more chaotic than your initialization, yet if you reverse your evolution it will go back to the more organized shape you initialized. It's possible that if you let it evolve enough time one way or another it will give another organized shape, but it's possible that it may never be the case. The analogy in this example is obviousy between "organized shape" and "sentience".

Even if reincarnation is inevitable given enough time, time itself could be limited, because the universe is expected to die at some point, with sentient life becoming a practical impossibility because of too much entropy. If the conditions for what's your subjectivity to awaken again after your death as who you currently are are never met before the heat death of the universe, then it's indeed the eternal oblivion. According to Wikipedia though, there's a non-zero chance that the universe could resurrect after an absurdly long time:

Wikipedia wrote:Around this vast timeframe, quantum tunnelling in any isolated patch of the vacuum could generate, via inflation, new Big Bangs giving birth to new universes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
It mentions this reference: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0410270
Is that's true, and that there's no fundamental difference between being not born yet and being dead, plus nothing in the rules of the universe that would make afterlife a practical impossibility, then reincarnation is inevitable. But the point is, we don't know why our subjectivity was awakened as who we are, which I think is the fundamental question to ask if we want to know what makes sentience even physically possible in the first place rather than just studying how it manifests, and until we have the answer we can't conclude anything about afterlife. Unfortunately the only way I could imagine many of these questions having an element of response is if we ever reverse brain death and ask the patient what they have felt. To illustrate how important this question is, I'll mention the abortion problem again: if I was never born, could I have been born as another sentient being? What if another spermatozoon hit the ovum? What if I was conceived a few days before of after, or not at all? What if, again, my mother aborted before my central nervous system developed? If your opinion is that the subjectivity that animates me would have been condemned to never awaken and rest in the eternal oblivion forever in any other case than what actually happened, then I don't agree with it, because it implies fate, which I think is a religious concept. Talking about fate is fine in a deterministic system, but it's something emergent and not actually tangible, like the event horizon of a black hole or the supposed "intelligence" of an ant collony, and I don't believe in a consciousness that's waiting for very specific circumstances to appear and is otherwise condemned to never wake up.