First, I'll just say that I think it's highly unlikely there is an afterlife. From a very young age we are told stories about an afterlife. But most of us don't really believe them or take them seriously until after our childhood. Actually children might even be more likely to believe in the possibility of an afterlife than adults because they haven't been given enough time to see through all the lies and falsehoods people tell each other everyday.
If there is an afterlife, then the person who dies must continue existing in some form after death. Since everything is bound by laws of physics and chemistry, it seems logical to assume that when we die our consciousness will cease to exist because our brains are no longer working.
In a sense, our consciousness is like an electrical current. If the wires are cut then the "current" is no longer able to flow.
What happens in between the time an unconscious person is pronounced dead, and their brain stops working? I think it's inevitable that during this period of unconsciousness, a person would experience some sort of dream state. This might be why people sometimes claim to have had "near death" experiences when they come back from experiencing extreme trauma.
A reported near death experience is remarkable. But I think it's more likely that the trauma experienced by someone who is close to dying would cause them to see things in a dream-like state rather than actually crossing over into an afterlife.
A lot of people talk about seeing their dead relatives or friends in heaven. But they're not necessarily talking about a literal place. They might just be remembering the person fondly, and recalling memories of them which are stored in their brain.
Log in:
You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.
This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize GPT-3, a neural network trained and hosted by OpenAI.
GPT-3 is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.
Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.
Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.
