Do you believe in Reincarnation?

[orthodoc]

I don't know that Trilby is necessarily thinking of waiting for a do-over so much as wanting an assurance that we exist beyond the chemical and electrical impulses that make up physical brain activity. The extinction of personality seems to be the issue (correct me if I'm wrong here, Trilby). In that sense, reincarnation doesn't meet the need - it requires extinction of personality in favor of a different personality, memory, and learning experience, ending up with a conglomeration of multiple experiences that don't add to anything coherent (since people don't normally recall 'past lives').

So, do self-awareness and personality survive, even though probably in a somewhat different form or type of existence? Or are we just bags of chemicals and synaptic transmissions that eventually short out? Do our physical processes - the electricity etc. - constitute our entire being and thus we're just carbon-based machines that can be shut down and decommissioned? Or do our physical processes merely let our pre-existing selves function within the physical constraints of this world?

If we're just bags of chemicals with an inevitable decommission date and no further existence, I understand Trilby's question: why bother? It truly shouldn't matter what we do in our short time of awareness. Whether we destroy the planet or each other, or not, is immaterial. There is no morality, no sense of 'ought to' for machines.

Do we continue in some non-physical or differently-physical way after/before/outside the time our physical body breaks down here? This will probably degenerate into argument, as regular joe says. It's not something we have enough empirical evidence for or against to be able to debate logically.