do we continue to exist after the death of the body and if we do what would that look like I'm not suggesting that I know the answer to this question and I also don't want to disparage any religious beliefs that help people come to terms with death that's not really my bag this video is just going to be analyzing some of the possibilities and trying to figure out whether they're good or [Music] bad you die and that's it nothing you cease to exist death is the permanent end of experience Eternal nothingness this is the most
straightforward scenario death is the end of life so the idea that there is life after death is obviously false our fear of death is biologically programmed into us and to an extent it's unavoidable but maybe philosophy can help us reason our way out of this situation is death bad well you might say that someone dying is bad because they're not around anymore that person was there and now they're not but I don't think this is actually the key to the Badness here let me hit you with this thought experiment let's say your best friend in
the whole world is this guy George George spent years studying astrophysics and he's about to go on an expedition to the Andromeda galaxy to do research there for the rest of his life you can't follow him there and once he leaves there will be no way to communicate with him ever again that's a bit of a bummer but now let's say that instead of leaving the rocket George is taking explodes immediately after launching killing him instantly the outcome is the same from your perspective George is gone and you'll never see him again but the situation
where the rocket explodes definitely seems worse so the issue isn't just that George isn't around anymore there's something important about the fact that George died okay so instead of thinking about George let's think about me death is bad because I won't exist anymore and personally I really like existing existing is pretty epic is it bad for me though when I'm dead I won't exist so who would it be bad for it's easy to think that when we die we enter into a kind of Blackness or void and we place ourselves into it it's as if
we sink into this pit of nothingness and we're trapped there forever we end up in this strange realm with no thoughts no Sensations no experience and this is something that we somehow witness for each eternity but this doesn't really make sense this is reifying nothingness the comedian Norm McDonald once said and then I came to a realization that you and death will never intersect as long as you're uh here death is not as long as death is there you are not yeah but but since you know it's coming oh but you well yeah you don't
want that he got this idea from the Greek philosopher epicurus who had a similar quote so death the most terrifying of ills is nothing to us since so long as we exist death is not with us but when death comes then we do not exist it does not concern either the living or the dead since for the former it is not and for the latter are no more okay but does it actually have to be bad for me for it to still be bad things can be bad in different ways putting my hand on a
hot stove is bad because I'm experiencing the pain and the bad directly burning my hand is immediately and intrinsically bad but let's consider a different scenario let's say I spend my evening scrolling Tik Tok the whole time I'm mildly entertained it's a neutral experience but what if my friends had also invited me out that night I was scrolling Tik Tok alone in my room instead of cracking a few cold ones with the boys which would have been way more fun that time I spent scrolling wasn't intrinsically bad but it was bad compared to what I
could have been doing inad dead this example illustrates the deprivation account of why death might be bad not existing isn't bad in an inherent way but it's bad compared to all the fun meaningful experiences I could have if I continued to exist okay but let's take this non-existing thing a little further what if I never existed in the first place would this be bad well it seems bad for me because I do exist now but this runs into some major problems think about all the possible people that could exist let's look at our current generation
right now let's say there are about 5 billion people who could reproduce Half Men and half women each man could technically create a new person with each woman and beyond that every single egg sperm combination of each of those pairs would also create a different person if a different sperm won the race I wouldn't be the same person I am now I would be my sibling as a rough calculation that's 2.5 billion women time 30 years of reproduction time 12 eggs time 2.5 billion men time 50 years of reproduction time a conservative 365 ejaculations per
year times about 40 million sperm per ejaculation that works out to this number 15 with 32 zeros and this is still only a tiny fraction all of those potential people could also have children with each other this could go on for potential generation after potential generation if the deprivation account is true you have to feel sorry for this infinite amount of people who never got the chance to exist that seems like a bit too much emotional labor for me okay but we can just fix this by adjusting the deprivation account a little bit instead of
a deprivation of life it's a deprivation of a life that actually existed at some point this seems to have filled the hole I just poked in the argument but there's still a problem the section of time after your death isn't the only section of time you don't exist you also don't exist before you're born but who really cares about that if you told me that I'm only going to live to age 50 I would be bummed out and I would wish that I could live longer but I don't wish that I was born 50 years
earlier we seem to care more about existing in the future than existing in the past so to sum things up non-existence after death is a complicated issue personally I'm sympathetic to the deprivation account I like existing a lot but this is also the perspective of a guy who exists which is definitely biased I'll put nothingness in B [Music] tier ranking heaven in a video like this is a little tricky religions that describe a Heavenly realm are usually pretty vague about what it's actually like there it's described as this perfect beautiful place with no pain and
suffering where we can live in Bliss and worship God for eternity but is this kind of immortality something we actually want the deprivation account might say yes not existing is bad because you'll miss all the fun so if we live forever that would be ideal well not exactly at a certain point there might not actually be anything interesting for existence to give you you wouldn't be deprived of anything imagine a classic idea of heaven we all turn into angels and spend eternity singing Psalms together or something singing Psalms is probably pretty fun to do for
a while but doing that for all of eternity seems a little excessive what kind of life would be worth living forever this isn't just a 100 years a thousand years a million years or a billion years this existence has no end there are some things I love doing eating lamb vindaloo solving mind sweeper puzzles listening to beach house whatever but after the first 100,000 years of doing that it would probably get a bit stale okay well let's say you take a different approach and you try to make the most of your time you spend A
Thousand Years writing novels A Thousand Years painting you learn how to play every single instrument at an expert level you will always run out of things to do at some point you will have done it all you might be able to fix this problem with some kind of Amnesia system let's say you get bored after about a thousand years of doing stuff at this point you start to lose your memories and forget what you did a few hundred years ago by the time you're at 2 billion years you could barely remember what you spent your
time doing as a young 100 milliony old angel at this point you've changed completely you have different tastes a different personality and you spend your time doing things that you wouldn't imagin doing before but is this really worth it there is continuity between the Young Angel me and the old angel me but is it still really me I don't even remember the previous me existing at all my personality is totally different too and I'm probably hanging out with different Angel friends I don't think I'd want something like this all right right but maybe instead of
having to try to do interesting things or entertain yourself you just experience complete Bliss for eternity maximum pleasure this seems appealing at first but it also reminds me of something there was a study where they attached electrodes to a rat's brain that released an intense burst of pleasure they hooked this up to a button that the rat could press whenever it wanted as you might expect the rat just sat there pressing the button over and over until it died but I'm not a rat I'm a human and and it might sound arrogant but I somehow
feel like I'm above that kind of thing I'd probably really enjoy the intense Bliss for the first few thousand years but then I'd start to think to myself is this all there is okay so here's a heaven I think would actually be desirable you can hang out there as long as you want but the door is open once you're satisfied with all the things you've done you can peace out this scenario seems pretty good the problem is we don't really know which of these situations Heaven would actually be and some of these cases are just
totally made up to fix the boredom problem I think the standard understanding of Heaven is just that you live forever in a perfect place if that's the type of Heaven we're working with I'm not a huge fan see [Music] tier Inferno the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy is probably the most famous depiction of hell it has Nine Circles filled with horrible punishments like boiling in pools of blood or being submerged in Frozen legs even Buddhism has different types of Hells with intricate punishments like the realm of the hungry ghosts there are a lot of
different depictions of what hell would actually be like so I won't spend too much time on the details here at least in the biblical tradition it's important to understand that hell is a very complicated issue from what I gather a lot of the colloquial understanding of Hell comes from medieval art and literature and isn't actually directly based on anything the Bible says you ever sat down and read this thing technically we're not allowed to go to the bathroom some people believe that when the Bible says Eternal fire it might not necessarily mean eternal torment it
could be that you had a soul but it gets destroyed if you're a sinner that would make this situation similar to nothingness you don't experience suffering for eternity you're just denied entry into the Afterlife but for this video I'll consider the most common interpretation of hell some kind of Eternal suffering if that's hell I don't think my placement here will be particularly surprising it's safe to say that suffering is bad it's like burning my hand on a hot stove like I mentioned earlier we have an immediate absolute aversion to the conscious experience of suffering it's
a fundamentally negative state of being and not only does suffering suck but our damnation would in fact be Eternal when I talked about heaven I came to the conclusion that immortality itself comes with downside Ides even if you're free to do whatever you want or experience intense Bliss here all the bad things about eternity are combined with a constant state of suffering bottom [Music] tier ghosts apparitions Phantoms specters Spirits uh ghouls son of a surprisingly something like 18 % of Americans believe they've had an encounter with a ghost if you were a ghost you would
be condemned to exist in the realm of the living no clipping through surfaces and witnessing your loved ones going through their lives maybe this is some kind of limbo State before you go to some afterlife but for now we'll just consider the ghost life the only way you can communicate with people is with a Ouija board which by the way is created by Hasbro the same company that makes Monopoly in Connect 4 your only line of communication to your relatives is through 13-year-olds trying to induce a paranormal experience at 3:00 a.m. I feel like that
would get pretty frustrating maybe you'd be condemned to haunt a particular location for some reason maybe you were murdered in a particular house and now you have to spend eternity shifting around items on the counter to freak out whoever happens to live in that house in the future maybe some guy is being too much of a greedy capitalist on Christmas and you need to visit him one night and show him Visions teaching him about the errors of his ways and inspiring him to care more for others during the holiday season in any of these cases
I think this would be a pretty bad existence the stuff you're able to do would get really boring really quick it's not quite as bad as hell with the whole Eternal suffering thing but I'll still put it in bottom [Music] tier what in Tarn ation it's time to talk about reincarnation Incarnation more like the United States of America with their lack of walkable cities and Reliance on the automobile [Music] Incarnation reincarnation is when you die and then start a new life in a different body repeating the cycle of life and death for eternity this idea
is very very old and there are a lot of different takes on how exactly it might work according to the Hindu tradition we all have souls that get passed along through lifetimes which explains how there's continuity from One Life to the next in very early Hindu culture there was an almost Christian understanding of an Afterlife with a heaven and a hell depending on how good of a person you are in life you end up in one of those places but some people thought that this was too black and white people aren't either good or bad
as a whole it's a gradation being good and being evil has levels to it if you're like a slightly allright person you'll end up in heaven with Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi but if you're a bit of a bad dude you'll end up in hell with Hitler this doesn't really seem fair but reincarnation kind of fixes this you end up reincarnating into a new existence directly proportional to how good you are if you're a decent enough guy you'll get a decent reincarnation but if you're really Min maxing your karma you'll get a pretty sweet reincarnation
but for the Buddhists there isn't actually anything concrete like a soul that's carrying over Buddhism has the famous teaching of no self or a not man which is the idea that nothing in the world has any kind of permanent Essence to it including our personhood for the Buddhists what we think is our self is composed of the five Aggregates form the body perception Consciousness feeling and Fabrication these structures are impermanent but in the cycle of existence that's what's being carried over into the next life you can think of it kind of like the band King
Crimson over the years a lot of the members have left the band and new ones have joined after a few years none of the founding members were there anymore it's all new people but it's still King Crimson this is what the mind is like in Buddhism there's no tangible core or identity to it because it's constantly changing over time another example is the ship of Theus imagine a ship after a while some of the boards start getting a bit weak so they replaced with new ones new screws new sails everything eventually every single component of
the ship has been swapped out but there's still continuity there ultimately through extensive meditation and contemplation you can achieve enlightenment which frees you from this cycle of life and death and you achieve Nirvana some ancient Greek philosophers also believed in a kind of reincarnation but they called it matm psychosis coming from meta to change and micun putting a soul into Pythagoras is probably the most famous guy from this tradition that seemed to believe in it there was an anecdote about a puppy being beaten and Pythagoras jumped in to stop it he argued that when he
heard the dog yelping he recognized the soul of one of his friends so would reincarnation be desirable well for me it kind of solves both the problems of nothingness and immortality when you die your conscious experience doesn't cease to exist so there's no deprivation of experience into the future and it also wouldn't exactly get boring every new life presents you with a new mode of experience new friends new things to do maybe in my next life I'll be an orangutan running around or maybe I'll be a famous musician who knows and if getting reincarnated isn't
really your bag you can just get enlightened and break from the cycle this all seems pretty good A [Music] tier you die and then immediately begin the same life again everything is exactly the same you make all the same decisions you make all the same mistakes you work the same job you have the same friends and you die in the exact same way just to do it all over again for eternity a here we go again this is the famous philosophical idea of eternal return or Eternal recurrence it started with the stoics who you might
be familiar with from all the self-help stuff on the internet but it really took off when n brought it up his first reference to it is a thought experiment in the gay science it goes like this one day a demon visits you and says hey man this life you're living right now you're going to live this same life an infinite amount of times and there won't be anything new would you hate this or would you accept it he expanded on this some more And Thus Spoke zarathustra the main character starts off pretty terrified at the
prospect of Eternal Rec currence but eventually they get over it and end up embracing it now it's interesting to note that n doesn't actually come out and say that he believes this is the case he's not making any concrete metaphysical claim he's just throwing it out there as a possibility what this thought experiment is doing is more concerned with your reaction to that possibility if it terrifies you you probably aren't living the kind of life you actually want to live but if you embrace it you're probably on the right track but what if this is
actually the case when you die everything resets back to when you were first born and you go through all the same experiences again for me personally this seems pretty good at least so far my life has been pretty enjoyable I had a happy childhood and my early adult life has been interesting and rewarding so far assuming everything goes according to plan and my life continues to be fairly good on average I think I would be content living this life over and over again for eternity I guess I passed n's test it might sound a little
depressing to know that this life is all there is but every time I live my life it feels like it's the first time even if I've already had all these experiences in the exact same way an infinite amount of times already it still feels like the first time all my experiences feel fresh and new but with that being said I have a pretty fortunate life to the point that I'm basically as lucky as you can get I had good life RNG I'm a white straight man from Canada with enough money to live comfortably I don't
face any kind of Oppression I don't have any chronic pain I have great friends and a loving family but unfortunately a lot of people aren't so lucky if Eternal recurrence is true everyone who has ever suffered would have to live through that for eternity everyone who died in a famine everyone who died in a war would have to experience that over and over forever if we're extending this to non-human animals too every single Factory farmed cow would have to live through that horrible existence for eternity every instance of suffering gets magnified an infinite amount of
times the same is true of positive experiences you will have your first kiss an infinite amount of times but the suffering makes it seem like that might not be 100% worthwhile if I was ranking this based solely on my own experience I would put this pretty high but because of all the conscious suffering I'll compromise and stick it in B the simulation argument is really big among Silicon Valley guys pretending to be philosophers but the actual simulation argument was laid out by a genuine philosopher Nick Bostrom the argument goes like this he lays out three
possible scenarios in scenario one humans and other civilizations like ours probably won't advance technology far enough to create simulated realities or creating simulated realities is impossible in the first place in the second scenario creating simulated realities is is possible but if a civilization creates one it won't make a lot of them because it requires too much processing power or there's some other kind of limitation and finally creating simulated realities is possible and there's no limit on how many get produced these simulations would be entirely indistinguishable from ordinary reality if we're in this scenario we're almost
certainly living in a simulated reality right now the sheer number of simulated realities would outnumber actual Reality by so much that the probability that we're in actual reality would be very close to zero now bostrom's argument makes a lot of pretty hefty assumptions the first one is that mental states don't depend on their physical instantiation our current conscious experience happens to emerge from biological neural networks in our brain but according to this view this doesn't have to be the case if we could create a silicon processor in a computer with the exact same neural network
the same conscious experience would arise Consciousness is a matter of information processing there's nothing more going on this is known as substrate Independence to be clear this is a pretty controversial take a lot of philosophers of mind believe that Consciousness isn't reducible to computation some believe that Consciousness does require a specific kind of substance for it to emerge like a brain but for the purposes of this argument will assumes substrate Independence for Consciousness Bostrom also spends some time in his paper laying out some rete numbers showing how the simulation might be done if it does
end up being possible it will be really hard but if we assume that technology continues to progress and accelerate it doesn't really matter how long it takes based on how much computing power it takes to replicate a single piece of neural tissue we would need a computer that could perform about 10 to the 14 operations per second to replicate a human brain other estimates sit a bit higher at 10 16 or 10 17 we'd have to generate some kind of environment for that brain too and this really depends on how thorough we are with environmental
simulation at a minimum we'd have to replicate the ordinary interactions humans might have with each other or their environment we couldn't program every single subatomic particle in the universe so a lot of stuff would have to be left unrendered until a human came by to observe it based on all of this along with a hypothetical computer design that could perform 10 to the 42 operations per second Bostrom figures that civilizations in the distant future could indeed create simulations there's nothing in principle preventing this from being possible now for the record I'm not personally sold on
the simulation argument I'm not sure substrate Independence is true and I also don't know that it's a guarantee that Civilization will continue developing forever with climate change resource depletion and nuclear war it's totally possible that we'll end up destroying ourselves this might be thousands of years down the line but we need a lot of time to make a simulation this would also explain why we haven't encountered any alien civilizations it could be that civilizations tend to self-destruct and even if we make it that far and substrate Independence is true our future descendants might not even
want to make simulations in the first place should we run a simulation of all the suffering in the world if the beings in there have conscious experience just like us if we created ancestor simulations of our whole civilization we would be simulating famines Wars and dis dises as well but for our purposes here my take doesn't really matter if we are in a simulation right now what happens when we die maybe it's like the episode of Rick and Morty where they play Roy in this episode Morty straps into a virtual reality game called Roy where
he lives through the entire life of a man named Roy he lives through childhood attends school becomes a football star gets married has a child spends years working at a carpet store is diagnosed with cancer Beats the cancer and then dies in an accident he's then presented with a game over screen and wakes up again as Morty he's obviously confused because he just spent 55 years living this virtual life only to realize that it was all a game in a Reddit Thread about simulation and death one smug redditor put it this way we take our
VR headset off and go wow that was so real take a piss and then put the VR headset back on ready to play a new character this VR game possibility is kind kind of similar to reincarnation at first glance you get to live through a whole life and then swap it out for a new one when you're done but it's not exactly the same because it's a solipsistic existence none of the people you encounter in the simulation are real they're just parts of the simulation like NPCs in a video game all the friends and connections
you make are Illusions this kind of sucks maybe it's like the Matrix where we wake up and realize we're just being harvested for our energy or something at least everyone in the simulation is still an instantiation of a real person so all the connections you make are sort of real but I think this case is strictly bad at the level of Ultimate Reality you're just being distracted with this fake world so that you can be enslaved okay well maybe we're all just a tiny portion of some kind of super AI God the AI wanted to
figure out how it was created so it started running simulations of human civilization and the leadup to technological singularity when we die we just merge back into the AI God Consciousness and finally maybe it's just the same as nothingness once our lifetime in the ancestor simulation is over your Consciousness ceases to exist none of these possibilities seem desirable to me and every single one of them seems to diminish the value of our world pretty considerably we would all just be imitations of people who supposedly existed before the singularity happened I'll put simulation in C tier
there's an old joke that goes something like this the Dalai llama walks up to a hot dog stand and he says to the man running the stand hey make me one with everything the idea that we're all one Consciousness has the connotation of being a bit hippie dippy it's often associated with meditation practice or other techniques that supposedly reveal this truth but this idea is actually pretty old it's part of the system of reincarnation in some schools of Hinduism where deep down were all God or Krishna it also emerged a few times in the western
intellectual tradition schopenhauer talked about this kind of thing a lot for example and some pretty famous physicists have described similar things including Irwin Schrodinger Freeman Dyson and even Einstein sometimes this idea is called open individualism which is a term coined by Daniel kolak there isn't really much academic philosophy on the subject but there are a number of books about it and it actually has a pretty sizable community on the internet in this view there are basically three ways you can look at personal identity first is closed individualism you start existing when you're born and you
stop existing when you die everyone is a separate Observer that exists moment to moment this is how most people intuitively think about it next there's empty individualism everyone has had the experience of trying to fall asleep and suddenly a cringy memory from your teenage years pops up you're ashamed you're embarrassed what could you have possibly been thinking it almost seems as if someone else had done it but perhaps it was someone else the you of the past in every single moment we're a different person this is empty individualism in this view you're just a little
dot on the timeline of your life each moment you exist is a different unique entity that's constantly changing over time we are just a moment of experience and finally there's open individualism you are every moment of experience on everyone's timeline the fact that some other entity is instantiating consciousness makes them identical to you this might seem a little wacky at first but stick with me here let's go back to closed individualism for a second you're the same person from birth to death but what's holding it all together maybe it's memory I remember some of the
stuff I did when I was 10 years old my memory of who I used to be is the continuity between all the moments of my life but but this doesn't really work we don't remember everything that's not how memory works I don't remember what I had for breakfast on New Year's Day of 2013 and there are also false memories people can be convinced of experiences that they never actually had okay so memories out well what about my body I've had the same body since the time I was born but once again this doesn't really work
the cells that make us up are constantly changing over time like a ship of thesis same goes for the brain so all of this kind of hurts closed individualism we can't seem to point to anything that ties it all together so should we opt for empty individualism well maybe not even though there doesn't seem to be anything tying it all together it definitely seems like there's continuity in our experience but how can we get over the weirdness of open individualism well think about your conscious experience for a second from our perspective there's basically no gaps
in our experience we're unconscious all the time when we sleep but there doesn't seem to be any transitionary nothingness in between it's almost an instantaneous change from falling asleep to waking up when I got my wisdom teeth removed I remember laughing from the nitrous oxide as the surgeon prepared the equipment and then in the next moment I was sitting in the recovery room it was as if no time had passed it was a seamless transition this continuity lasts from our first experiences as children until the instant we die and importantly from our Center of awareness
this block of experience doesn't have a beginning or end we just kind of find ourselves in the world as if we've always been here objectively we weren't always here but it feels like this awareness is a constant because it's all we are the only stable thing about me is my immediate conscious experience it's the only thing I can really point to and say that's me because my body my memories and everything else is constantly changing but here's the kicker that immediate conscious experience is the same thing that other people have the point to what you
call I is the same thing that I call I now with all that being said I'm not totally sold on open individualism but once again let's just roll with it let's say we are all the same person we're an identical subject of experience but we're just different parts of it so what does this say about death well one suggestion might be that when we die the illusion ends as MC ride once said my experience is a momentary lapse of reason our identification with ourselves as one particular human stops and we return to the ocean of
being but what would this be like would we experience all conscious experiences that all beings are having simultaneously almost like you're sitting in front of a bunch of screens watching every single experience play out this is a pretty tricky thing to wrap your head around and it's unclear whether this state of being would be positive negative or neutral but you might also consider the fact that right now you're only one instantiation of consciousness maybe instead of returning to some default where you're everything at once you cycle through every instance of Consciousness this picture might look
something like the short story the egg by Andrew Weir in this story the main character you die in a car crash you meet God who explains that you've already reincarnated loads of times before in your next Incarnation you'll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 ad in fact you've actually been reincarnated as every single human being who has ever lived you were Abraham Lincoln Adolf Hitler and Jesus you were also every Holocaust victim and every follower of Jesus this whole process is meant as a kind of test once you've lived every single human life you
become a God just like him the universe was created so that you understand that every time you hurt someone you're really just hurting yourself every time you do something good for someone you do it for yourself this picture is a lot like reincarnation but with a few differences first it seems to be human only you won't come back as a mosquito or a lion and secondly it doesn't seem to be tied to any kind of karma you'll be cycling through every single human life so the actions you take in your current life don't really have
any meaningful bearing on your next lives aside from the fact that you'll experience the other side of every interaction this story also has a really important ethical implication that's kind of similar to the veil of ignorance thought experiment by John rolls imagine you have no idea who you will be in society you don't know your ethnicity your gender or your social status RS argues that we should attempt to structure Society from this perspective our principles should not be based on our current life and all the circumstances we happen to find ourselves in but they should
be based impartially as if we could end up as anyone in society the egg scenario is a lot like this because you're actually everyone so the doctrine of do to others whatever you would like them to do to you takes on a very literal meaning because the others are also you now this is a tricky one to rank I'm not really sure what to think about returning to the ocean of being it's hard to say what exactly that would be like but as for the human- to human exhaustive reincarnation idea I think that's really great
you would quite literally get the full spectrum of human experience every instance of suffering pain Joy ecstasy and love I think that's easily the most interesting Poss possible situation s tier so here's the final list this video is not an exhaustive account of every possible situation that could happen when we die I also don't really care to make the case for any of them being more plausible than any other at the end of the day we're all currently alive so we really don't know for sure if you got something out of this video consider throwing
me a couple Bones on patreon to support the channel thanks for watching
