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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

What if you don't want to be reborn into a possibly horrifying/painful/miserable existence? What is option B? An eternity of watching? At some point time has to stop, and then what, things just repeat?

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What makes you think you have optionality?

Getting philosophical, if there isn't an option, then you could extend that to say free will doesn't exist at all. At some point you will run out of "lives" to respawn into, at least intelligent ones.

I don't know if that tracks that lacking some optionality indicates total lack of free will. You lack infinity options compared to the ones you have but you can still make plausible arguments for free will.

For example you can't teleport to Mars. You can still choose what you want on your pizza.

Right. You might not be able to pick your afterlife. Atheist materialists believe that you definitely can't. Except maybe for some kind of digital upload shenanigans maybe, but I don't see how that's an afterlife and not just a copy that is its own separate entity. Christians like me believe that you have a binary option for your afterlife. Buddhists and Hindus believe that you have a continuum of options. Bear in mind I mean specifically believing that you have optionality. Socrates for example was agnostic on what happens after death, but he never indicated, at least not that I recall reading in Plato, that he thought he had a choice. Rather he thought none of the possibilities were worse than capitulating to the court.

> Christians like me believe that you have a binary option for your afterlife.

But other Christians, obviously not like you, believe in more than a binary option for your afterlife.

This is one of the annoying thing about religions. Not all true Christians (even Scottish Christians) hold the same beliefs, even about something like heaven and hell.

I didn’t say that this was good or bad.

I think it’s bad and hope that the Fourth Noble Truth of Buddhism is true.

Why does time have to stop? How would that even work?

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