Day 23 - Fnord

Happy Boxing Day everybody! I hope you've treated your servants well, and given them plenty of Turkish Delight. As noted in yesterday's post, today there was a lot more of family seeing; lots of food; a Christmas quiz; secret santa; and a ridiculous amount of truffles and socks.

I just cast (casted? cost?) my eye around for what to write about, and spotted "Death's Domain" immediately. Fate has dictated a brief explanation of what I think about death, it seems.

Death is, at the very least, the end of life as we understand it. The brain stops sending signals, the heart ceases to beat, and the brain generally shuts down. If the individual survives in any meaningful way, then the mind (or at least a substantial portion of it) must be independent of the body, and can go on thinking.
Thinking's all well and good, but to keep things interesting (and preserve our sanity), we'd also need to perceive things; get some kind of changing input. Ideas that I've considered:

1) The mind stays in the world, but is no longer attached to the body. We float around and watch people, see the world, presumably forever. There might be a lot of very bored ghosts when the Earth explodes.

2) As above, but we can also travel through Time as well as Space. Past, present, future: all will be available for voyeuristic exploration by the enthusiastic spectre.

An obvious question that arises, is the relationship between ghosts. Would we be cut off from all the other dead people, or once we have died, can we suddenly see and talk to all the other dead. If so, the world is extremely crowded.

3) More scary: we cannot move in Time or Space. While we can continue to think, we are stuck in the moment and place of our death. Not good for deaths under traumatic circumstances (or, in fact, boring ones). Sadly, exciting and fun deaths are hard to come by.

4) Usual heaven-based answer - we leave the world altogether, and go to some other place. Since we're not very good at thinking in new ways, this is usually pictured as us in some other physical place. Then again, since we do perceive things in a very specific way, to preserve our identities, perhaps heaven (or hell) would need to be this way. All this talk about "planes of existence we cannot conceive" is rubbish, since then we wouldn't really be ourselves in this bizarre reality.

5) Nothing. Zip. Nada. The mind is not independent of the body. Death, and then no self, no thought, no anything. Either comforting or terrifying, depending on my mood.

My preferred option: transported to a universal library, infinitely large, with all eternity to read them. Plenty of reading rooms, with big fires, and food stalls serving all kinds of deliciousness. Doors to the personal heavens of others, so I can visit them and vice versa. Mine is the best, of course.

The Word of the Day is Elliptic.