Nothing

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 article is just going to be analyzing some of the possibilities and trying to figure out whether they're good or 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 eternity. But this doesn't really make sense. This is reifying nothingness. The comedian Norm MacDonald once said. And then I came to a realization that you and death will never intersect as long as you're here. Death is not as long as death is. There. You are not. But since, you know, it's coming. 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 badness. Directly burning my hand is immediately and intrinsically bad. But let's consider a different scenario. Let's say I spend my evening scrolling TikTok 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 TikTok 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 instead. 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. 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 times 30 years of reproduction times 12 eggs, times 2.5 billion men times 50 years of reproduction times 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 and B tier.

Heaven

Ranking heaven in a article 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 hundred 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 minesweeper 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 million year 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 imagine 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, 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 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. C tier.

Hell

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 lakes. 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 article, 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 downsides. 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 D tier.

Ghosts

Ghosts. Apparitions. Phantoms. Specters. Spirits. Ghouls. 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 and Kinect for your only line of communication to your relatives is through 13-year-olds trying to induce a paranormal experience at 3 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 D tier.

Reincarnation

What in tarnation? 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. 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 all right 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 anatman, 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 Theseus. Imagine a ship. After a while, some of the boards start getting a bit weak, so they're 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 metempsychosis. Coming from metta to change and m'saken 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 tier.

Infinite Loop (Eternal Recurrence)

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. 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 Nietzsche 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 gonna 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 recurrence, but eventually they get over it and end up embracing it. Now, it's interesting to note that Nietzsche 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 pass Nietzsche'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, to 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 tier.

Simulation

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 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, we'll assume substrate independence for consciousness. Bostrom also spends some time in his paper laying out some concrete 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 ten to the 14 operations per second to replicate a human brain. Other estimates sit a bit higher at ten to the 16 or 10 to the 17. We'd have to generate some kind of environment for that brain to. 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 ten 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 diseases 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 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 kinda 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. god. The AI wanted to figure out how it was created, so it started running simulations of human civilization and the lead up 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.

One with Everything

There's an old joke that goes something like this. The Dalai Lama 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 hippy 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 Erwin Schrödinger, 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 cringey 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 were 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 ten years old. My memory of who I used to be is the continuity between all the moments of my life. 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 Theseus. 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 memory is and everything else is constantly changing. But here's the kicker that immediate conscious experience is the same thing that other people have to point to. What you call AI is the same thing that I call AI. 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 A.D. 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 key 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 Rawls. Imagine you have no idea who you will be in society. You don't know your ethnicity, your gender, or your social status. Rawls 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 possible situation. S-tier.

Conclusion

So here's the final list. This article 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 article, consider throwing me a couple bones on comment section to support my article page. Thanks for reading. Have a nice time. Goodbye.

.    .    .