Thank you, Al Esperida, for such a profound question.
We would all love to know what happens when our hearts stop beating. Even here in the secularized West, where the afterlife is dealt with only through horror movies and too-good-to-be-true TV mediums, it is a question which privately gnaws at most thinking people. But let’s assume one of the many research projects into consciousness ‘beyond brain-death’ strikes gold (yes, these projects do exist; and no, they are not run by faux-credentialed peddlers of ‘woo-woo’). Having then some proof of the extradimensional object religious folk historically called the ‘soul’ – what then? What would it mean for our day-to-day lives? The problem is that the answer to this question is entirely dependent on the nature of the afterlife discovered. There are more possibilities here than we can parse, so instead let’s look instead at a few broad options and what they would mean for our lives, here, as 3-dimensional meat-bag extrusions of our glorious higher dimensional selves…
The first and most obvious option is that which roughly aligns with various religious conceptions of the afterlife, namely, judgement by some divinity followed by just reward or punishment. This is familiar to most people, and as the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt. In our Western post-Death-of-God world, the ‘autonomous self’ (auto=self-giving, nomos=law) does not like the idea of being beholden to anyone or anything other than itself. So, it will come as a shock to find out that such an afterlife scenario actually means we have to follow a moral code other than that of our own ego’s design. The overriding implication would be that our own desires, goals and preferences would now have to be hammered into a shape acceptable to the one doing the judging, and, depending on the degree of difference between your lifestyle and the enforced moral code, this might mean huge personal changes and challenges for you.
But what if it is not so straightforward? What if the afterlife is merely the metaphysical diminishing of whatever consciousness is? This view is not without precedent. The ancient Hebrew and Greek visions of the afterlife (Sheol and Hades respectively) painted pictures of a gloomy shadow world populated by feeble spirits longing for the lives they once lived. The implications of this would be clear: this life ‘here and now’ is of supreme importance. It is our soul’s proverbial day-in-the-sun and should be enjoyed to the fullest. Better to look back from the other-side to a life well lived, than to gaze back at opportunities missed for all eternity.
Opposite to this is another, somewhat unnerving, possibility. What if the world is actually an illusion that must be resisted because the afterlife is where we are meant to be? This is the Gnostic view of the situation, and it sees worldly existence as a trap and your body as a prison for a soul that should be free. The moral consequences would be that you must do all you can to cease bodily pleasure and the enjoyments of this life, to break the connection between your soul and the traitorous lure of the flesh. The goal of life is to get out of it – few things could be more repugnant to our culture’s view of daily living.
A final consideration: what if reincarnation is found to be true? If we are to come back again and again to live out various lives, then surely it would become a huge motivation for us to leave the world as we would want to find it. It is easy to see how confirmation of this kind of afterlife would make us take the condition of the natural environment and the reality of political and social justice very seriously, since those are the conditions we are going to be born back into.
Overall, we can see that, taken seriously, our view of the afterlife fundamentally shapes how we live on a day-to-day basis. As an interesting aside, we also perhaps have a sense of how our culture’s current underlying ideology of Materialism might have shaped our sense of self, our desires, personal relationships, and our relationship to wider nature…
What do you think? If you knew there was (or wasn’t) an afterlife, would you act differently? Let us know in the comments.
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I studied at the University of Lancaster (1999-2003) where I gained a BA Hons in Religious Studies & Philosophy, and a MA in Religious Studies. I gained my PhD in Religions & Theology at the University of Manchester (2004-2010) and the thesis was published by Gorgias Press as Antitheodicy, Atheodicy and Jewish Mysticism in Holocaust Theology (2012). I lectured for four years at the University of Manchester in the Department of Religions & Theology (2013-17) where I taught the History of Western Philosophy among other courses. I particularly revere the thought of Parmenides, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Peter Kingsley.