I wrote this post a long time ago, but forgot to publish it. Better late than never, huh?
This is a topic I have spent an extra long time thinking about, one which was recently brought up by Jeph Jacques in his strip Questionable Content (which I enjoy very much). Jeph posed the question in this strip:
…I wouldn’t want to make up a bunch of stuff about an afterlife or use some religion’s version of things, since I don’t believe in that myself, but I also wouldn’t want to completely horrify my kid by being all “oh there is just nothing. You cease to be aware and that is it.” I know that concept freaked me out nearly as bad as the concept of hell when I was little. I guess “make up something comforting” is the lesser of the two evils, but still…
Atheist/nonreligious parents, what do you tell YOUR kids? I am curious to know!
I am not a parent, and I’m not sure if I will ever be one, but I have spent an awful lot of time thinking about this very question. I am a big believer in Douglas Hofstadter’s take on intelligence and sentience as presented in Godel, Escher, Bach and I am a Strange Loop
Specifically, intelligence and sentience and everything about us that makes us who we are – the “spark” that so many people attribute to souls, lives exclusively in our brains, and in the physical world. It requires no metaphysical explanation. He goes on to suggest that if that is true, there is no reason why parts of us couldn’t live in *other* people’s brains also. He talks about the bond developed by close family, especially husband and wife, how they finish each other’s sentences, know each other “better than they know themselves”, and when the worst happens, often remark “it is like I lost a part of myself”.
The point I am finally about to reach is, if sentience is just a “strange loop”, a complicated feedback system in our brains which causes us to feel and experience life as we do, anyone we make contact with over the course of our lives carries with them a “granular copy” of that pattern. The more time we spend with them, the more detailed the copy. When I die, I will live on not just in the memories, but in the active mind of those I cared about, and who cared about me. That is something I could tell my children without being disingenuous or depressing.
I discuss this from the perspective of love and relationships in a recent blog.