[Toy Soldier]

Giving it consideration I've gone with "other".

I stand by what I said before; "personality" is so firmly linked to the physical structure and chemical makeup of the brain that I don't think, in the absense of that brain, anything that's left behind could feasibly be thought of as "that same person". After all, what is a person? It so fundamentally affected by things like hormonal changes - and even just time - that surely it's impossible to take a snapshot of "a person" and say that it persists. Which version of the self? You today? You 5 years ago? You when your adrenaline is spiking? You when your serotonin is low? All very "different people" and you can take that to an extreme with dementia and brain injury. Brain injury has been shown to RADICALLY alter personality; turning the nicest people you'll ever meet nasty, or the gentlest of "souls" dangerously violent. So what if that happens to someone, and then 5 years later they die? "Who" is in the afterlife? Is it that "good" person who once existed, or is it the "bad" violent one that existed at the time of death? What of dementia? Does the healthy adult they were 30 years before they died live on in the afterlife, or the confused 90 year old with no memory of their loved ones who existed in the years leading up to death? And if we say it's the younger one - then what of that older personality? Did they simply never exist? Is their existence doomed because they're a less desirable version of "them"?

I can't get my head around that. I just don't know that identities are strong enough to persist in any meaningful way even DURING life, let alone beyond it. People who existed 10 years ago don't exist today - and it's not because they died. Where are those individuals?


So then I get onto, what IS possible in terms of persistent life... because I'm not dogmatically atheist and I don't think we as human beings have even scraped the surface of science, let alone having "all the answers".

There's a lot of pretty solid theory that "time" is nothing like we perceive it or understand it... and that's where I think it gets interesting. In theory, there is no such thing as now, or then, today, or yesterday... and thus no such thing as alive, or dead. If time really isn't linear then everyone who exists today, has ever existed, or will ever exist as we perceive it actually all exist concurrently and infinitely. So I suppose that's believing in life after death, or rather, life alongside death? "After" is a meaningless word if you're talking about non-linear existence though so I guess not technically an afterlife... just "life", no before or after. Just existence, all at once.