Any exploration into strange realms of life, memory or consciousness (and there have been many of those) might shed useful light on the subject for speculation.
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.
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.
A natural internet maybe. Discarnate dreamers drifting around, talking, looking for fun, spaceless, bodiless, timeless. Until a really good game catches your eye. And then there are rules.
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.
In the OP I asked for something other than concentrating. But all the replies so far refer to the fruits of concentration.
Like talking about sticking out your index finger, and then talking about all the amazing things that you can poke with it (and yes the horrors of fingercramp etc).
That is arguable. Depending on the person the control can vary. And with practice (which is what meditation is all about) the control can improve. And meditation (one form anyway) is all about cultivating depth and control. So these people might definitely have a rare and advantageous degree of experience, with the depths at least. So yes, hand and glove.
But that much is either ambiguous or obvious. So wtfe. I swear you people fetishize this shit and its associated victimhood. I blame society.
If there was an afterlife, how would it work?
Rational replies only, please.
Some people are really good at concentrating their attention. (when writing software, playing games, reading etc). It's a superpower. What are other attention superpowers?
When playing Super Mario Bros I ignore my job, and vice-versa. That's two realities, oblivious to each other. What separates them?