My Personal Theory on an Afterlife

Authors Avatar by wisefire (student)

In the normal stages of death the heart stops beating and respiration ceases. Without a supply of oxygen, the body’s various organs stop functioning and start to die. The brain, also starved of oxygen, begins to shut down. Death occurs when the brain ceases to register any activity. All straight forward stuff. So the difference between being alive and being dead is activity in the brain. We are our brain. Get that in your brain now. The irony is apparent there… What is the very essence of us - what makes me myself and you yourself - is our brain. So what is it?


The human brain is a collection of cells that for the typical adult weighs about 3 lbs. It contains 100 billion neurons. The neurons form connections to each other called synapses. These synapses produce chemicals called neurotransmitters. There are 1,000,000,000,000,000 synapses in the brain. A neuron is activated and the synapses connect to another neuron via a neurotransmitter through its synapses. Every thought you have, every movement you take, every memory you possess, is nothing more than a particular sequence of synapses. This is what we are, a collection of neurons sparking off a chain reaction to other neurons. When the brain is no longer activating neurons, we cease to exist. The rest of our body serves no other purpose than to keep the brain alive and to reproduce, then, when you consider the fact that WE ARE OUR BRAIN, a subjective phenomenon of thought (that we have).



So if that's all we are, then to propose any answer the thought of “is there ‘life’ after death”, the answer would have to be no. The real question then is, is that all we are?


Those of a religious nature would argue that we are far more than that; they would argue that we have a soul. Brilliant, for that is surely, most definitely TRUE. A ‘soul’ refers to us having emotion, and the ability to emphasize (not sympathize, that is an emotion in itself. Empathy is us recalling that emotion and looking at a particular circumstance in one’s unique way). However, a soul is, for me, hard to imagine. How do you describe it? It is not something that we can detect, it is a spiritual thing without any physical substance, and it is this that supposedly lives on after our mortal bodies have died. So where is the soul while we are alive? I assume it must reside in the brain, as that is where we reside! That’s a human thought process there, logic, a form of intelligence, which I’ll come onto later. I can only assume again that when the brain does die the soul is released. That being the case, if one were to argue if the soul is able to survive without the need of a body, it is obviously independent of the body. This is part of the definition of an ‘afterlife’; a being/a ‘soul’ outside this limited body of ours. So why does it need a body in the first place? Perhaps it needs a body to develop and is unable to leave it until the body dies. Perhaps our final destiny is immortality? That’s speculation. Don’t worry, for the rest of this writing of mine starts to delve into things with a bit more backing up then that…

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According to popular belief only human beings possess a soul, animals apparently do not. So what is the difference between humans and animals? As far as I can tell it's just a question of intelligence, as measured by us. After all, it's not that long ago that we were animals; our species of life (or simply, ‘we’) weren't created human, we just evolved along different lines than the others. That being the case there is nothing special about us that should warrant us having a soul and animals not, after all, some people are born with severe brain malfunctions that, ...

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