h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Sometime or another, people sit back and ask themselves "What happens to you when you die?"

It’s a question which cannot be answered, but, instead answered with an opinion.

So, you’re sat back in your armchair. Outside your window you can see dusk approaching. The street lamps are still red as they slowly flick on randomly down your road. Your TV is turned off and your radio is on just enough to hear. All is quiet.

Your mind starts to wonder and one question pops up in your head, quite naturally you start to ponder about this question. "What will happen to me when I die, pass away or "snuff it" as it were?

After a very long time, this morning at around 3am the same question unlighted itself inside my head.

On thinking on this question i've decided on my theory of what could happen when you finally die.

Everybody has their very own spirit; these spirits can be aggressive, funny, possible naive. These spirits decide on your personality, your looks, right down to your DNA structure. When you die, your spirit leaves your body. Floating around the area your empty body lay. This spirit floats around for a very long time. This would be known as a ghost to those who are sensitive enough to feel and see these spirits.

When a woman falls pregnant, the early stages of the baby is just an empty template, a blank van gough canvas. A spirit floating around knows when there is a blank template close by.

When this spirit finds the blank template it is drawn to the strong fact that it is pure. Getting close enough the spirit is fused with this blank template. After this has happened you are able 2 hear the baby's first heartbeat. The spirit then starts to affect the way this baby will grow. It will decide hair colour, skin colour and everything else relating to DNA. The spirit will always know from the mothers DNA what it will inherit. Thus bringing in similar features to your parents.

After the spirit has done its job the baby starts to become aware of its surroundings, starts to hear things. But cannot move very much. When the time is right that baby is born. Unfortunately the baby doesn’t remember any thing from the past life the spirit had, maybe some occasions that person may experience a past life memory.

The baby grows up to be an adult and once again the process starts over again in one big cycle.



If you have your own theory on Life & Death I’d like to hear about it, as this question interests me greatly.


Thank you for reading this and I hope to hear from you.


Andrew Orchard

The nicest response I can manage is, thank you for giving me a good laugh.

If you want to I can explain toyou where your theory is obviously wrong but I wont unless you ask.

Hmm, nice thought, but it's probably true that there have pretty much always been more children being born than people dying.

Your wandering spirits sound a bit like souls...?
Where do new 'souls' come from?
What happens if new 'souls' can't be manufactured quickly enough?

Or
Are there just so many souls in existence (2^30, 10^10?) and from time to time there's a Soul Convention in hell, deliberately timed to coincide with the one in heaven, whereupon a decade or two later we have wars & other strife because most spare souls were otherwise occupied at the crucial time?

Or
Have the 'Sign of the ' and the 'Sign of the ' finally run out of fresh souls?

I agree with Rod, there would be an inevitable shortage of souls, unless you're french..

I was always interested in the concept of self, and what it would have been like to be your in awareness in someone else's body. I've been quite obsessive about this at time. But I do firmly believe that when the body dies, everything else dies with it, soul, awareness, self, Joshua - whatever you want to call it.

I think people who truly believe in reincarnation have a far easier, more relaxed life than me. I'm a skeptic, and always thought I should make the most of the one life I have. Maybe this is why I like cats...

"I was always interested in the concept of self, and what it would have been like to be *you* in awareness in someone else's body."
Is what I meant.

scary thoughts tho

wooooooo

have you read the "nights dawn trilogy" by peter f hamilton

its SF but has a nice concept about the afterlife

intelligence produces a "soul"

after death some souls hang around the edge of reality looking in and bemoaning the fact that they are dead and have no sensory input

other braver ones make the journey across the darkness to a higher plane of reality

an alien opens a rift between reality and the dead and the souls return to posses the living

some brill space battles as well

looks like i'll have to look out for that book, also sounds like it would make a good movie too :D

would make wonderfull cinema

unfortunately the books are quite detailed and each volume of the trilogy is about the same thickness as the compleate edition of lord of the rings

would make a better series akin to firefly

yh sounds good

ive read ur space, wer both on night shift lol

i finish at 8 this morning, what about you????

my relief is due 07:15

i get out around 07:30

in bed before 08:00

just dropped you a line on e-mail

Anybody read any of the Seth material? Jane Roberts channeled several books as Seth. He states that souls can split to reincarnate in several places at once. So, theoretically, you could meet yourself.

strange, wooooo

I hadn't seen the ghost smiley in so long that I'd forgotten about it! Perfect.

lol

Just occasionally have you ever stopped to ponder that your moment-to-moment self-awareness is just the operation of your brain? Try to retreat into that conscious awareness. (I liken It to that thing you might have down as a kid when you realise your breathing and you can control it and then nearly suffocating yourself trying to remember to make it automatic. It makes doing things like walking down stairs, engaging in polite conversation or going to the toilet fantastically dangerous - so confine yourself to armchair speculation)

Who am I?

I think (here we go again) who or what I am, is the pattern of neurological awareness and connections that in any particular moment are present.

I have access to my memories, and my thoughts about the present and future.
I can be confused and tricked by optical illusions. I receive sense data from my organs and my body (in the case of my eyes, minus the red spectrum.) I interact with people and objects around me. In particualr to me I have a neurological disorder that makes processing some of this stuff fun and interesting. Collectively, stretching back over the course of my life, they are me in the subjective.

And when as I die, those patterns dwindle and fade until when I am dead those patterns are lost.

and that's it.

I don't believe in souls or spirits or reincarnation or anything like that. I think this life is all we are going to get. if I am feeling poetic about it, I might add our *ahem* patterns live on in the memories of those left behind, the 'how we were' recorded in someone elses neurology or some artefact of our existence, a record, a drawing, a book, a footprint whatever, that was produced by me at some point but too fades in tiem and distance, as any programme on archeology tells us.

But ultimately, all that I am ever destined to be, whether you wish to describe that as patterns as I've chosen to do for this or something else is finite. I choose to speak of patterns rather than souls because I think it accords with broadly where we are in understanding the material and modular operation of the brain. Perhaps there is a more apt description but I chose to just run with this one for now. But I come back to this point, in whatever it is that I consist, it is finite.

And I, for one, don't have a problem with that.

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ... and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

J. B. S. Haldane (1892 - 1964) a British-born Indian geneticist and evolutionary biologist

If we are trading quotes my favourite J.B.S Haldane-ism is:

Confronted by a group of theologians, Haldane was asked:

"And what does one suppose one can discern about the nature of The Creator from a study of his creations, My Haldane?"

A moments pause for thoughtful reflection and Haldane answered:

"That He has an inordinate fondness for beetles."