All in my head?

I've been in a slightly melancholy mood today, during which my mind inevitably drifts to the topic of death. I am a young, physically active young male in a postindustrial nation with a very good health care system so I am not at risk at dropping dead in a heartbeat. However, in six decades, or less if I am unlucky, I, probably, won't be around anymore.

Sartre said that life loses all meaning when you lose the illusion of being eternal, or something to that effect. Granted, there are existentalists who never feel despair or hopelessness in the grand face of eternity. When I was eighteen, inspired by the works of Camus, I was on an existenalist high. I've never been a churchgoing type, and have waivered between the most softest shade of deism and the lightest shade of atheism throughout my life. I have never had any interest in organized religion, neither the obtuse belligerency of Islam, nor the sanctimonious smugness of Christianity, or any other shade. Buddhism, probably, would come closest to satisfying my spiritual needs, since it largely exists without complicated creed or alienating ritual.

I do not believe in the Abrahamic God or any sort of active creator: I don't think there is any empirical evidence for such a supposition. I can't go through life saying that a tiny flame of faith burns within me and use that as assurances that a God exists. I don't put stock in anything that can be easily explained as delusion or imagination. A lot of philosophy about God seeks to establish that there is this force that exists outside the universe, who flipped on the switch---and walked away.

My opinions on Near Death Experiences are complex. Yes, I want to believe that an afterlife exists but the wanna-be scientist located within me is hesitant to accept stories of going into the light as evidence. Of course, it can be countered with evidence (which I will not get into right now) that maybe, just maybe, there this something to the NDE phenomenom; and I do agree that materialism has a superiority complex. We don't know everything about the brain, that is obvious.

When I was twenty I was really interested in the mind-body problem, and the Peterborough public library had a copy of Sir John Eccles and Karl Popper's The Self and Its Brain which argued for a nonmaterial theory of mind. I skimmed the book, the neuroscience confusing me. I wanted assurances that the mind was immaterial and there was life after death. I was in a morbid place---Terri Schiavo and the death of the Pope dominated the news at the time.

But what would noncorporeal existence would be like? I don't put much faith into religious explanations of an eternal paradise. Most of what makes us human (our drives for food, sex, our sense of self preservation, etc.) would naturally be discarded in a world where they were not needed. That would not appeal to alot of people. One part of the afterlife I find interesting is what would such a place be like where medieval serfs could rub shoulders with modern people---could you coexist with such people?

What evolutionary advantage would life after death grant us? There must have been one. Granted, it could be argued that our brains collapse consciousness into a waveform, or something to that effect. Something wibbly-wobblyt-timey-wimey. Something vaguely plausible. Mario Bureaugard and Pim van Lommel immediatley spring to mind, but I cannot endorse them whole heartedly. Not without more evidence confidently defended.

I'm not a very spiritual person: that much is obvious. I cannot consider myself a staunch materialist either.

Six decades or so until I find out.