How do we know there is no afterlife? I think there’s a chance there is.
Some examples of situations in which there is an afterlife:
We live in a simulation and whatever is running the simulation decided to set up an afterlife of some kind. Could be a collection of its favourite agents, or a reward for its best behaved ones, or etc.
We do not live in a simulation, but after the technological singularity an AI is able to reconstruct humans and decides to place them in a simulated world or to re-embody them
Various possibilities far beyond our current understanding of the world
But I don’t know what your reasoning is—maybe you have ruled out these and the various other possibilities.
Let me amend my statement: the afterlives as described by the world’s major religions almost certainly do not exist, and it is foolish to act as though they do.
As for other possibilities, I can address them with the “which God” objection to Pascal’s Wager; I have no evidence about how or if my actions while alive affect whatever supernatural afterlife I may or may not experience after death, so I shouldn’t base my actions today on the possibility.
There is no reason to live in fear of the Christian God or any other traditional gods. However, there is perhaps a reason to live in fear of some identical things:
We live in a simulation run by a Christian, Muslim, Jew, etc., and he has decided to make his religion true in his simulation. There are a lot of religious people—if people or organisations gain the ability to run such simulations, there’s a good chance that many of these organisations will be religious, and their simulations influenced by this fact.
And the following situation seems more likely and has a somewhat similar result:
We develop some kind of aligned AI. This AI decides that humans should be rewarded according to how they conducted themselves in their lives.
How do we know there is no afterlife? I think there’s a chance there is.
Some examples of situations in which there is an afterlife:
We live in a simulation and whatever is running the simulation decided to set up an afterlife of some kind. Could be a collection of its favourite agents, or a reward for its best behaved ones, or etc.
We do not live in a simulation, but after the technological singularity an AI is able to reconstruct humans and decides to place them in a simulated world or to re-embody them
Various possibilities far beyond our current understanding of the world
But I don’t know what your reasoning is—maybe you have ruled out these and the various other possibilities.
Let me amend my statement: the afterlives as described by the world’s major religions almost certainly do not exist, and it is foolish to act as though they do.
As for other possibilities, I can address them with the “which God” objection to Pascal’s Wager; I have no evidence about how or if my actions while alive affect whatever supernatural afterlife I may or may not experience after death, so I shouldn’t base my actions today on the possibility.
My thoughts:
There is no reason to live in fear of the Christian God or any other traditional gods. However, there is perhaps a reason to live in fear of some identical things:
We live in a simulation run by a Christian, Muslim, Jew, etc., and he has decided to make his religion true in his simulation. There are a lot of religious people—if people or organisations gain the ability to run such simulations, there’s a good chance that many of these organisations will be religious, and their simulations influenced by this fact.
And the following situation seems more likely and has a somewhat similar result:
We develop some kind of aligned AI. This AI decides that humans should be rewarded according to how they conducted themselves in their lives.