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

If I die today,where will I be tomorrow?

Who am I? Can I find me?

I have many questions.

The question is - does anybody have any answers?

Yes

Definately.

Many people have studied these questions. They have not agreed on an answer.

If you die today, where will you be tomorrow?

1. nowhere
2. you will live on in the minds of your friends
3. you will go on to somewhere outside of this universe
4. you will be reborn as something else

Take your pick.

Finding yourself.

If you are not an American, it is easy. Take one mirror. Look in it. This is really all you have to do. You are who you think you are. Enjoy it.

If you are an American, you might try watching reruns of Thirty-something, where the protagonists attempt to answer the same question.

I reckon:

5. All of the above

1. nowhere
I appeared from nowhere and i will disappear into nowhere. Seems implausible to me. Not much evidence of things spontaneously appearing in my neck of the woods.

2. you will live on in the minds of your friends. If so which one will be the real me - or are there lots of me?

3. you will go on to somewhere outside of this universe - more feasible....me thinks - can I choose or is it pot luck.

4. you will be reborn as something else - even more feasible, but again can i choose?

Take your pick you say. If only it were that easy.

If you had the choice would you choose to be an American - watching re-runs of Thirty-something....! Or our Lord and Master - young tony Blaaaiir!

Look in the mirror - this confuses me. I cant tie it down. Keeps changing every year.

1. Nowhere:

Lots of things come from nowhere and go to nowhere. I baked a loaf of bread last week; it is gone now. This thing was made with an intention. Other things appear with no intention. A volcano erupts and a new mountain is formed. Purpose in this? None that I can see. Only a few million years later, well what do you know? It's gone again!

2, 3 and 4: can't see much in these

The image in the mirror keeps changing. Is that a problem?

Actually the bread didn't disappear - it just changed form and went somewhere else. Which is what religious types generally believe happens to you when you die...

The atoms in the bread undoubtedly remained as atoms. I don't have a nuclear reactor in my stomach. But even the molecules were broken down as it was digested. So nothing remains of the bread, unless you believe there is some mystical essence of bread which floats around the bread and now is wandering unattached, waiting to find a new loaf of bread to inhabit. My bread essence will be reborn as a new loaf. If it lived a good life, it will come back as ciabatta.

No more ridiculous than some of the things I've been asked to believe about my own spirit, which is flavoured with juniper berries as far as I can tell.

Do you really want me to get graphic here? Fine...

You ate the bread. Then you plopped. The plop used to be bread.
That is except for the nutrients and such that used to be in the bread but are now floating around in your body. They stayed behind - a bit like how the body stays behind after death. But the plop, which used to be bread, went elsewhere.

So, if you equate your body to the physical universe in which we live, the nutrients to a human body, the plop to a human soul and the underground drainage system to the afterlife.....sorry, I've lost myself. The metaphor was just so incredible that I've forgotten what I was using it for.

You can in a similar way track all the atoms in your body when you die and see where each of them goes. But they are just atoms. A carbon atom that was once a part of me is no different from any other carbon atom. The something special that is me is gone, destroyed. I am made up of the atoms, just as the bread was made up of atoms. When the bread is digested, it is no longer bread but has changed to something else. When I die, the atoms that are me stop being me and start being something else, namely a rotting corpse. Although I am greater than the sum of my parts, there is no other me that still exists after you have subtracted all the parts. So I will have ceased to exist as an individual.

By the way, you seemed to think the bread is an analogy for something or other. I'm not talking analogies here. The bread is baked, the bread is eaten. I am born. I die.

...but the plop will still remain...