Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
So. What happens after we die?
I'll wait.
Is it a Heaven of clouds and harps and angels? A Hell full of fire and brimstone and horrible torture? Do you get to come back again and live a new life, perhaps building on the mistakes of your previous one? Yeah, I guess that's all well and good. I mean, the classics never go out of style, right? Perhaps some pearly gates with Morgan Freeman hanging out nearby, or an place of endless torment where David Warner is ready to turn you into a cockroach. Variations on an old and well-worn theme.
But how about an afterlife where you get to live with every possible version of yourself? You know the "many worlds" theory of the universe, right? For every choice you make, a new universe is born, and in that universe there lives a different you. Perhaps one who made better choices, perhaps worse. Well, after you die, you get to hang out with them all! Including, unfortunately, all the yous who made much, much better decisions than you did.
Or perhaps you get the afterlife where you re-live your entire life, but with all moments of the same quality grouped together. So that means you get to spend thirty years sleeping, or two hundred days taking a shower. Doesn't sound too bad, except for the eighteen months you spend waiting in line, or the five months you spend on the toilet, or the 27 hours of intense pain.
Maybe you discover that there is no afterlife for us, just as there is no afterlife for a computer chip. We've all been components in a great computer, wherein every nod of your head, every word, every blink is merely a signal sent to other processing units (AKA people). Of course, the programmers don't know why we've thrived as we have - they didn't make us to be sentient, and still don't realize it's happened. But our world is the greatest of the computer worlds they've built.
There are forty other afterlives in this book, all described in two or three pages. Each one is an attempt to break free of the traditional sense of what the afterlife "should" be, and shows a great deal of creativity.
What's fun is reading this and understanding that any one of them could be true. Just as true as the traditional heavens and hells we've been building for the last few millennia. After all, why couldn't we have an afterlife where we're given the opportunity to come back - but with one change of our own choosing? Or another where we get to choose the form of our next life, but are betrayed by our inability then to remember why we had chosen it? Just because they don't have the weight of a Church's doctrine or thousands of years of philosophy doesn't make them wrong.
Because, after all, we don't know. We can't know. We may think we know, or believe we know, but that really doesn't mean anything. Hell, I came up with my own afterlife scheme that sounded pretty good to me, but does that make it true? Nope. The one big constraint that seems to apply to all afterlives is that no one ever gets to tell the living how it worked out. Why this should be is unknown to me, but that just puts me in league with every philosopher who ever lived. Not bad company.
But since all afterlives could be true, it can be argued that none of them are. And if you can't know what will happen to your soul after death, and how to ensure that your eternity is a pleasant one, then perhaps you should stop worrying about it. The nature and requirements of your afterlife are totally out of your control.
The same cannot be said for your life. That is something that you have knowledge of and control over. So appreciate that little fact and go do something with it.
Go ahead and entertain speculation about life after death. Let your imagination go wild. But don't for a moment think that you know what will come when you breathe your last. Because it probably won't be anything you ever expected.
Or maybe it will. Who am I to say?
In any case, this is a fun little (and I do mean little) book, suitable for reading in one sitting or in forty tiny bites of time. And who knows, maybe it'll spur you on to thoughts of your own afterlife. If you have one, I'd love to hear it.
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"Among all the creatures of creation, the gods favor us: we are the only ones who can empathize with their problems."
- David Eagleman, Sum
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