Read an article yesterday that says nervous systems and brains are an evolutionary adaptation given to animal life forms so that they can react to stimuli. Plants don't need to move, so they don't develop conciousness.

On the one hand, you could look at that and say conciousness is an evolutionary accident, and that humans are basically the trucks from Maximum Overdrive. Built to do one thing, but then they start running wild and doing other stuff.

On the other hand, you could look at it as saying that early lifeforms spontaneously developed conciousness because they decided they needed it. Which is interesting.

... until your body becomes so damaged with age that it will be incompatible with life. Then there will be exactly zero parallel universes in which you continue to live. — litewave

Not necessarily. Since there are an infinite number of parallel universes (in theory), and all possible alternatives happen in one of them, there could be universes where time passes more slowly than it does here, or where aliens land and start handing out immortality pills. Doesn't matter if something is preposterous, because as long as it's not statistically impossible it will happen somewhere.

How do you know there is no afterlife?

You're not ruffling any feathers here, as I assure you I have no idea what the answer is. — Hippyhead

I don't. Although I can't prove the existence of one, I'm open to the possibility. This conversation is about me "wanting to believe" in one. I would like there to be an afterlife.

I realize no one is going to give me a ticket stub from the great beyond as definitive proof, but I'm still interested in theorizing.

Doesn't he? We're still talking about him. Children who have yet to be born will continue to know and learn about him for the foreseeable future. — Outlander

Yes, but none of that will have any relevance to his existence anymore if his existence has in fact ended. The man contributed to humanity's understanding of the universe, and so he will be remembered. But remembrance isn't life, and so it can't be called a reward in the traditional sense. Hawking isn't receiving a benefit from it, is what I'm saying.

I'm aware that living your life for the sole purpose of receiving a "reward" would be considered selfish, but it's a valid consideration nonetheless. Personally, I don't live my life on the premise that I'll be rewarded or punished when it's over; I live according to my own moral code and I always will. If Hawking felt exhilarated by his work when he was alive, then that's all any of us can really ask for. If he had been slogging through it, hating every second, living for the idea of scientific immortality (doesn't really sound like he was) then his own happiness might've been better served by hiring more hookers :sweat:

People should do whatever makes them happy, and it's not for me to say what that should or shouldn't look like. I'm just asking a question.

Why do you think you know all this? — Hippyhead

I don't know any of it. That's just the natural extension of there being no afterlife. Which is what Hawking believed. If there's an afterlife, then great. Maybe Hawking is somewhere up there right now with working arms and legs, popping a bottle of champagne for a life well-lived. Or maybe he's been reborn as a horse or something.

I'm not trying to ruffle any feathers, this is just a question whose answer I find important.

Stephen Hawking doesn't "live on". That's kinda what brought me to this point.

Yes, Hawking was an award winning physicist, but if he'd been a bus driver it would've amounted to exactly the same thing in the end. He doesn't care if his books are still selling. He doesn't care if his theories all get outlawed and every trace of his research burned. He doesn't care if children dress up as him for Halloween. He's dead.

If there's no afterlife, then it changes the context of human existence. It doesn't make life worthless, but it does alter what's important. If you work for 70 years, determined to make people build statues in your honor after you die, then you've kinda wasted your life. Because you're not going to be looking down from a cloud and saying "Hehe, I'm still cool" when all is said and done. You won't care.

To provide a little context, I dreamed of being a famous writer. I have a few well-reviewed books, even if I haven't sold many copies. But any notions I might've had about literary immortality kinda ring hollow these days, because again, I won't care after I'm gone. So if I spend thousands of hours working hard on a book, or thousands of hours watching One Piece, it will still result in the same end. The only question being "Am I having fun right now?"

Hence my afterlife question. How I view my existence matters quite a lot in terms of how I live.

Very poetic. And it actually touches on something else I've wondered about. If I accept that there is no such thing as a soul, and my sense of self is completely comprised of the ones and zeros inside my brain, then that would in theory mean that I am just a program (or a pattern if you like).

If, in the vast stretches of time and space, that pattern randomly emerges again in another life form, even partially, then is that being also me?