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Old 06-18-2007, 01:38 PM   #21 (permalink)
ExploringTheMatrix
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Join Date: Jun 2007
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I was about to type up a post about how if you subscribe to subjective reality, you can't know what happens when you die. But I changed my mind. The reason I would say this is that our true nature is awareness, it's the only constant, but how awareness came to exist and how it works is a mystery. Therefore awareness could just be a computer simulation that responds to your thoughts. And that computer simulation could end any time. So you could just die and at that moment the operators of the program would end the simulation.

However, upon further consideration I don't think this is possible. From a subjective reality point of view, awareness/consciousness has a very limited set of capabilities. This is a little hard to describe so bear with me. Awareness can create experiences and the mind, but it doesn't actually create objects. The mind separates out parts of the experience and labels things as objects.

Within subjective reality, when I run a computer program, there's no actual computer program running. You punch keys and move your mouse, and consciousness responds by giving you the experience of the program is running. Likewise, there are no people, only the experience of people. So from a SR standpoint, you could never create a computer simulation and place awareness inside it, because there are no computer simulations and no other awarenesses.

Now I'm going to make a big leap here and perhaps my logic is a bit faulty. All realities are subjective. If there was some scientist out there who's put my brain in a vat, he'd be in a subjective reality as well (because he's never experiencing the real objective reality, he's seeing it via a brain signal brought in from his eyes so he can't know if it's real or not).

And we just established that awareness can't create more awareness (at least within reality, perhaps awareness can fork itself off). So barring some sort of weird non-aware reality that creates aware realities, our awareness almost certainly exist independently and on its own.

Getting back to what happens when you die, I think it literally depends on what you believe. So literally, a Hindu could be reincarnated as a cow while a Christian would go up to the pearly gates. I doubt an atheist could cease to exist however, I doubt awareness can destroy itself. At worst, the atheist would end up in the void and have to create a new reality to play in.

For me at least, I'm believing that under my human avatar identity, there is a spiritual body that continues. That way I can hopefully jump right in to another human avatar and not forget everything I figured out in this life.
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