Ask Lemmy

I don’t believe in it in the traditional sense, but I do have a feeling that there’s something deeply mysterious about our minds and consciousness. I wouldn’t claim with absolute certainty that death is the end of experience.

Take general anesthesia, for example - it’s one of the closest things to dying that we can experience and still return from. What does it feel like? Nothing. By definition, it cannot be experienced. You might have been under for ten hours, but from your perspective, you simply go from feeling drowsy to waking up in another room, with no sense of time having passed in between. You can only experience being, not not-being.

Who’s to say something similar doesn’t happen when you die? Your experience could simply continue elsewhere. Whether it happens instantly or after a ten-thousand-year gap is irrelevant - because from the standpoint of your subjective experience, it would feel instantaneous. We could take this even further and consider the possibility that consciousness is something universal - something we merely tap into rather than generate individually. In that case, who’s to say you weren’t “born” this morning into this already existing body, complete with prior memories of a past life, simply continuing from where “someone else” left off?