Saturday, July 08, 2006

Life after death

Life after death is inherently implausible, much like life before birth.
Our conscious existence, our self-reflexive insight, our private I - that is our inner self - is a reflective loop that stems from and is based in the physical brain. Our personality, our temperance, our characteristics, our loves, hates, desires, emotions and sense of self are all mechanisms of our physical brain. We are not “consciously” aware of ourselves at birth and only acquire our conscious awareness after our brain has attained a certain level of development and our neuro-pathways have made the necessary connections and web. When we die our physical brain dissolves and so does our consciousness, our inner-self (sometimes, mistakenly, referred to as our “soul”), so as far as an afterlife involving ones personality, conscious awareness, inner-self, etc., such a thing does not exist. It only exists in the minds of those who, not only hold a phobia of an impersonal and random nature that is not concerned with human endeavor, retain a neurotic fear of death (which is understandable to some degree).
This is one instance in which I am an orthodox Freudian. In Freud’s The Future of an Illusion he explained religion and the mythology of the afterlife inherent therein as the highest form of wish fulfillment, being the cheapest form of our emotions. I believe this to be the case with belief in the continuation of self after death with regards to any religious precept and notion, there simply is absolutely no evidence that ones self will continue after the dissolution of their physical being.