Most religions that believe in reincarnation believe people can be reincarnated as animals, which would also mean animals can be reincarnated into humans. There are a lot more humans now, but also a lot less bisons and dodos.
It’s very small thinking that earth is the only planet with life, what’s to say that souls don’t reincarnate from one planet to another?
Most religions that talk about reincarnation mention a dimension above time when you’re not incarnated, as such it might be possible for a soul to reincarnate at the same time it’s already incarnated. In fact certain religions take this to an extreme of saying we’re all the same.
There are plenty of rational answers to that problem.
I’m a Thelemite, and we’re pretty big on the idea of willpower. The primary public ritual performed by the Ordo Templi Orientis includes the phrase:
“Unto them from whose eyes the veil of life hath fallen may there be granted the accomplishment of their true Wills; whether they will absorption in the Infinite, or to be united with their chosen and preferred, or to be in contemplation, or to be at peace, or to achieve the labour and heroism of incarnation on this planet or another, or in any Star, or aught else…”
Though other Thelemites have different opinions, I think we choose to incarnate, and may have some limited control over what happens next through the refinement of our consciousness. It’s similar to the Buddhist perspective, but with additional potential goals beyond escaping incarnation altogether.
As a practicing Frisbeetarian, I believe your soul lands on a roof and gets stuck there. You just get to watch as time and people pass by for all of time.
Philip Jose Farmer explored this idea in a few of his stories.
In one there was an alien race. They thought it was tragic that people would die and be gone from the world forever. So they invented an artificial soul (called a “wathan”) and hooked it up to all the sentient beings. Then they managed an artificial afterlife too. Reincarnated everybody.
The Frisbeetarian concept actually comes from a George Carlin joke, but I genuinely thought it was one of the most beautiful afterlife concepts I'd heard so I choose to believe it. That our souls are still here, but also at rest.
Not exactly an “afterlife” per se. But stay with me on this.
Space is most likely infinite in extent. The amount of information in the part we can see (our “Hubble Volume” – the part of space where light has had a chance to reach us) is finite. Given an infinite number of trials, every possible outcome will happen an infinite number of times. (Given infinite D20 rolls, you’ll get an infinite number of natural 20s. Not only that, but an infinite number of 1,000,000-roll natrual 20 streaks.) So, there’s a good case to be made that there’s an infinite number of exact of copies of our Hubble Volume out there.
But also, something interesting about Quantum Mechcanics is that it predicts that the goings on in spacetime (hand wave, qualifier) aren’t deterministic. Sometimes the exact same same initial conditions and the exact same laws of physics can have different outcomes. So if you could check the state of two Hubble Volumes that are exactly identical now, there’s a likelihood that after some time has passed, the two will no longer be identical.
So how likely is it that you’ll live to be 100? Probably a little under 1%. What about 110? I don’t know off the top of my head, but let’s say it’s around 0.1%. 120? Maybe 0.01%. (Yes I’m making these numbers up, but what the numbers actually are doesn’t matter that much for this thought experiment.) How likely is it that you’ll live to be 200? Pretty unlikely, but it’s definitely not zero.
Given infinite exact copies of you and a non-zero chance that each one will live to be 200, you can expect an infinite number of copies of you to live to be 200. And why stop there? 300? Still an infinite number. 400? Still infinite. Is there any ceiling? Only if there’s an age at which there is a truly 100% chance that you won’t survive to. So, maybe the heat death of the universe, then? Asserting that the chance of living that long is zero assumes we won’t find a “loophole” in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (In fact, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a statistical law, not an absolute one. It’s not true that entropy always increases in a system. Only that it does the incalculably vast majority of the time. There’s always technically a chance that all the air molecules in the room you’re in will happen to meander to one half of the room, which would be an example of entropy spontaneously decreasing. It’s only a technicality, but we don’t need more than a technicality for this thought experiment.)
All that to say, there’s a case to be made that there’s a possibility that at least one version of your consciousness will “live” forever.
I say “there’s a case to be made” because indeed what I’ve said above depends on a few assumptions. (For instance, it is possible that for any one particular person, there might be some unknown reason why there’s a truly 100% chance that they’ll die before a certain age.)
This whole train of thought is related to the concept of “Quantum Immortality.” And if it intrigues you, I highly recommend Max Tegmark’s book “Our Mathematical Universe.”
And again, it’s not an “afterlife” per se. But might go at least a little bit in the direction of the question you’re asking.
My copy lives forever. How does that bear upon me?
There’s got to be a connection between identical systems. That just feels right. A kind of perfect sympathy. And add consciousness to the mix and it seems inevitable.
And given that there will always be infinite cases of total entropy reversal, there will always be a “plausible narrative” for resurrection available for every corpse. So if “immortality via copy” doesn’t do it, that will.
Here are 2 authors who explored the impossibility of subjective death. IE while everybody else sees you die, you actually travel to a universe where your survival is explained by a plausible narrative (and progressively less plausible). Or thereabouts.
GREG EGAN. Permutation city. He called it “dust theory”
ROBERT CHARLES WILSON. Divided by Infinity (in “The Perseids and other stories”). I forget what he called the theory.
I remember watching this interview about this guy who had to be resuscitated and he said that what he felt was "nothing", as in kind of like when you're sleeping and you know nothing, except turned up to a thousand. He said he had to go through some serious therapy to get over it because when he "came back", he just couldn't believe that he had lost that sense of not having anything to worry about. I would venture its something like that, just like going to sleep but you just don't even know it.
If we assume that all we are is just electrical impulses in our brains and those cease when we die, I don't expect there to be much after that, you're just gone and there's nothing, so there is no suffering either.
Some sort of psycho set us up in a simulation and everyone who likes eating beans on Tuesdays, when they die in the simulation, they get moved to a much nicer simulation, with black jack and hookers. Everyone else gets sent to the Matrix, to power the other simulations.
When you dream at night your dreams tend to take the form of your fears, obsessions, desires, hangups, big emotions etc. But you return. The physical world could be called a moderator. It keeps you from descending too far into your personal dreamworld.
But then you die. Same dreamworld, but no moderation. You troll yourself to exhaustion. Might take a million years. Then the physical world draws your attention again, or something.
In greek mythology there’s a forest in the afterlife. Each tree is a soul locked in a catatonic dream-passion. Each fugued out in his personal hallucination. The forest is vast.
If we were to go by Judeo-Christian scripture (aka first-century Pharisaic Judaism)…
When you die, you are dead. There is no magical, supernatural “soul”, just you (your mind, identity, sapience, consciousness, etc).
At some point, each person will be restored and judged. Those “consciousnesses” that are judged to be righteous (which mostly amounts to how you view and treat others, especially those less fortunate) will be restored, given new-and-improved bodies, and placed in a new creation… a new universe, as it were.
Those not found righteous will be treated like the trash, disease, and rot they have been measured as; destroyed for good with cleansing fire. Death, and no more chances.
There is nothing rational about speculating on the afterlife. Ultimately, it’s human to speculate on the unknown. For me personally, “the egg” helped tremendously to overcome my own fear of death, and it turned into an optimistic nihilist.
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