MICHELLE THALLER: Einstein thought that the
beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, created all of space and all of time at once in a
big whole something. So every point in the past and every point
in the future are just as real as the point

of time you feel yourself in right now. Einstein believed that literally. One of his best friends died and he wrote
a letter to this person's wife, talking about how his friend still exists. Time is a landscape and if you had the right
perspective on the universe, you would see

all of it laid out in front of you. All past, present, and future as a whole thing. And he said, "Your husband, my friend, is
just over the next hill. He's still there. We can't see him where we are now, but we
are on this landscape with him and he still

exists just as much as he ever has." Einstein believed that you, right now, had
been dead for trillions of years, that you haven't been born yet, that everything that's
happened to you—if you could get the right

perspective on the universe—you could see
all at once. SAM HARRIS: Death is in some ways unacceptable. I mean, it's just an astonishing fact of our
being here that we die. But I think, worse than that, is that if we
live long enough we lose everyone we love

in this world. I mean, the people die and disappear and we're
left with this dark mystery. There's just the sheer not knowing what happened
to them. And into this void, religion comes rushing
with a very consoling story, saying nothing

happened to them; they're in a better place
and you're going to meet up with them after you die. You're going to get everything you want after
you die. Death is an illusion. There's no question that, if you could believe
it, that would pay emotional dividends.

I mean, there's no other story you can tell
somebody who's just lost her daughter to cancer, say, to make her feel good. It is consoling to believe that the daughter
was just taken up with Jesus and everyone's

going to be reunited in a few short years. There's no replacement for that. There doesn't need to be a replacement for
that. I think we have to be... We have to just witness the cost of that. I mean, there are many obvious costs of that
way of thinking.

One is we just don't teach people how to grieve. Religion is kind of the antithesis of
teaching your children how to grieve. You tell your child that your grandma's in
heaven and there's nothing to be sad about.

That's religion. It would be better to equip your child for
the reality of this life, which is, death is a fact and we don't know what happens after
death. And I'm not pretending to know that you get
a dial tone after death.

I don't know what happens after the physical
brain dies. I don't know what the relationship between
consciousness and the physical world is. I don't think anyone does know. Now, I think there are many reasons to be
doubtful of naive conceptions about the soul

and about this idea that you could just migrate
to a better place after death. But I simply don't know about what... I don't know what I believe about death. And I don't think it's necessary to know in
order to live as sanely and ethically and

happily as possible. MICHAEL SHERMER: There's hardly anything bigger
than offering immortality or the afterlife, because, so here's the problem. We are all aware that death is real because
we see it all around us.

100 billion people have lived before us. They're all gone. Not one of them has come back, not even Jesus
in my opinion, but that's a different video. And yet you cannot conceive of what it's like
to be dead.

Because if I asked you, "Picture yourself
dead, what do you see?" Most people say, "Well, I see myself there
at the funeral and the coffin and my loved ones are hopefully grieving and there..." No, you wouldn't see that, you wouldn't see
anything because to see anything you have

to be conscious. To conceive of anything, you have to be a
sentient being, you have to be conscious. And if you're dead, you don't have any of
that. Really, death is just nothing. And the whole idea of the afterlife is fairly
new.

I mean, the ancient Hebrews, their idea of
the afterlife was nothing. You're just nothing. You're just gone, that's it. There's no place to go with angels and flowers
and whatever. It's just nothing.

All that was added on centuries later. And probably for socio-political reasons, you know. Offer the peasants something nice so that they'll keep building our pyramids or whatever. So again, we can't conceive of what it's like to be dead and yet we see it all around us,

so this creates something of a paradox that we have to resolve in our minds. Most people resolve it by thinking, "Well, I'm not actually going to die. I'm just not going to do it. I'm going to live forever.

Or I'm going to accept Jesus or whatever and I'm going to heaven." Okay, yeah, but what if you're wrong? It's not a Pascal's wager where you can say, "Well, I have nothing to lose and everything to gain," because which religion and their version of the afterlife is the right one?

Which one are you going to pick? And while the Christians, "We're the right ones." Yeah, well, there's a billion Muslims who disagree with you. They don't accept Jesus as a savior. They don't think he was even the Messiah, the Son of God.

Okay, so now what? And they believe just as strongly as you do. So what if your God is the wrong one? Your version is the wrong theory and they have the right one? You wasted your whole life investing in this idea and you turned out to be wrong.

Why not jettison the whole idea entirely and appreciate the here and now, because that's all we have, whatever is in the hereafter. ROB BELL: If you look at, well, the Bible, which for many people in the Western world

was sort of the guiding... in the Old Testament,
there isn't really any sort of view of the afterlife. The closest you get is a word for pit, a word
for 'abyss', which basically means you die and you're not here.

So this idea that the whole thing is about
when you die is not really the way that lots of people have thought about it. And that the phrase "eternal life" was a very
first-century Jewish way of talking about living in harmony with the divine right now.

So eternal life wasn't a kind of life that
happens when you die. Eternal life was understood to be a certain
quality of life that you're experiencing right now, where you're in right relationship with
the earth, with the environment, with each

other, with yourself. That was considered eternal life. One of the things I found most interesting
is that Jesus used the word hell, but when he used the word hell, he was referring to
an actual place in the city of Jerusalem in

the first century. The word he used was the word Gehenna and
Gehenna means the Valley of Hinnom. And the Valley of Hinnom was the South Valley
on the south wall of the city of Jerusalem. That's where people toss their trash.

So he's pretty much the only person who used
it. And when he used this word, he was referring
to a real place where this trash was burning. So essentially, he was saying, you as a human
being, you have this power to make choices

about whether you will move towards others
in grace and compassion and kindness, or you will move towards people in violence and degradation. And when you do that, when you mistreat others,
when you are indifferent to their suffering, you're essentially creating a Gehenna on Earth.

And so you're creating a hell on Earth. The idea that has animated a lot of religion
for a lot of people, that there is some divine being somewhere who if you don't say or do
or pray or believe the right thing is going

to send you to hell. Life is difficult enough without believing
that the deepest, strongest forces of the universe are against you and are going to
torture you forever. BILL NYE: Everybody is going to die. I have never met anyone who is not going to
die.

I've never met anyone who is of a certain
age who's not already dead. It sucks! Now here's the evidence for why I don't believe
in an afterlife. It would be a fine thing if you could... If I could have the capabilities, athletically,
that I had when I was say 23, with the life

experience and intellect that I have right
now, that'd be fantastic. And then live forever? I say, bring it on. But my beloved grandmother who was brilliant
didn't have that happen. She faded away, losing her faculties as she
went.

People my age have a lot of grandparents and
parents who are not as sharp, certainly not as athletically capable or physically capable
as they were when they were younger. And so watching ourselves die is to me, overwhelming
evidence that there is no life after death.

There's certainly no—it doesn't seem to
be any reason to think that when you die, you go back to your optimum age at your optimum
athletic ability in your optimum intellectual sharpness. And if it turns out that that's true, then
you do die and have all this intellectual

sharpness and athletic ability, cool, bring
it on. That'll be great, but what would you do differently? What would you do differently if you knew
for sure that you were going to be immortal when you died somehow? Would you start committing crimes?

Would you jump off a cliff so that you can
hurry to your immortality optimal state? I just don't think so. Instead, the finite length of our life is
what drives us. It's what makes us go. And it's what makes you try to accomplish
things or decide to have kids or not have

kids or decide to live in another country,
on another continent or not or decide how to invest your money or what you're going
to do with your resources. All of this is driven by the limited length
of life we have. So furthermore, if evolution is, in fact,
how the world works—and it absolutely seems

to be, from my point of view—one of the
fundamental things about evolution that is so troubling is this whole idea of survival
of the fittest. That's really a 19th-century usage, a British
usage of that expression: fittest.

It doesn't mean that you're able to do the
most weightlifting or run the fastest 1500 meters or something. It means you fit in the best. And the troubling, troubling consequence of
this is you don't have to be perfect or a

super person. You just have to be good enough from an evolutionary
standpoint. You just have to be good enough to pass your
genes on. After that, evolution, if it were an entity,
doesn't really care about you, man.

You had your kids, your genes are passed on
and you expire. You lose your faculties as you run out of
steam and that's just how it is. Evolution, certain diseases catch up with
you. Certain autoimmune problems show up, certain
viruses and bacteria, parasites get you.

Nature doesn't care. You were good enough. And so I encourage you to live your life as
best you can every day. And as far as putting my brain in an electronic
receptacle for all time, it sounds great, but I will evaluate it on a case-by-case basis.

Do you want to be stuck in an Apple product
the rest of your life or do you want to be stuck in a Microsoft product? It's a tough call. I'm sure books will be written, we'll see. MICHIO KAKU: Digital and genetic immortality
are within reach.

Already in Silicon Valley, there are companies,
which for a price, will digitize everything known about you: your credit card transactions,
your emails, Instagrams, everything known about you can be digitized. And we have something called the Connectome
Project which will map the pathways of the

entire human brain, all your memories, all
your quirks, personalities, everything digitized, and we'll put it on a disc and for the most
part, we'll put it in a library. Today, you go to the library and you take
a book out about Winston Churchill.

In the future, you'll go to the library and
talk to Winston Churchill because all his speeches, his mannerisms, his memories, his
letters have been digitized. I would love to talk to Einstein. I would love to talk to him, even if it's
a computer program that has digitized everything

known about him: his work, his writings, his
speeches, everything, and a holographic image so that I can talk to him. And one day we might be digitized as well. We'll be able to talk to our great, great,
great, great, great-grandkids.

And they'll be able to talk to their great,
great, great, great-ancestors as well because we become immortal.

Is there life after death? | Sam Harris, Bill Nye, Michio Kaku, & more | Big Think

Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life. Other Frequent contributors include Michio Kaku & Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Head to bigthink.com for a multitude of articles just as informative and satisfying as our videos. New articles posted daily on a range of intellectual topics. ​Join Big Think+ to gain access to an immense library of content. It features insight from many of the most celebrated and intelligent individuals in the world today.

   - Subscribe for daily videos.
   - Business inquiries and fan suggestions welcome.

Big Think

아인슈타인은 빅뱅이 모든 공간과 시간을 한꺼번에 창조했으며 과거, 현재, 미래가 똑같이 실재한다고 믿었습니다.

그는 모든 시점이 동시에 존재하는 시간을 풍경으로 시각화했습니다.

그는 죽은 친구가 우리의 현재 인식 너머에 여전히 존재한다고 믿었습니다.

아인슈타인은 우리가 이미 무수히 많이 살았다가 죽었고, 동시에 존재한다고 믿었습니다.

죽음에 직면했을 때 종교의 위로 역할

죽음, 특히 사랑하는 사람을 잃는다는 것은 받아들이기 어려운 일입니다.

종교는 사랑하는 사람들이 더 좋은 곳에 있고 사후에 재회가 가능하다고 말하며 위안을 줍니다.

이러한 믿음은 특히 슬픔의 시기에 정서적 위안을 줍니다.

이러한 믿음은 위로가 되기도 하지만 현실을 슬퍼하고 받아들이는 과정을 방해합니다.

종교는 아이들에게 슬픔과 죽음에 대처하는 방법을 가르치는 데 방해가 됩니다.

죽음의 현실과 상상할 수 없는 현실

죽음은 보편적인 현실이지만, 우리는 죽는다는 것이 어떤 것인지 상상할 수 없습니다.

죽음에서 살아 돌아와 그 경험을 설명할 수 있는 사람은 아무도 없습니다.

지각에는 의식이 필요하기 때문에 자신이 죽었다고 상상하는 것은 불가능합니다.

사후 세계라는 개념은 비교적 최근의 것으로, 초기 신앙에는 존재하지 않았습니다.

고대 히브리인들은 죽음을 단순히 허무로 여겼습니다.

종교적 개념에 대한 대안적 해석

구약성서에는 사후 세계가 명시적으로 묘사되어 있지 않으며, 죽음은 단순히 존재의 중단을 의미합니다.

'영생'은 현재에서 신과 조화롭게 사는 것으로 이해되었습니다.

예수님이 '지옥'을 사용하신 것은 문자 그대로 예루살렘의 힌놈 골짜기라는 장소를 가리켰습니다.

지옥의 개념은 해와 고통으로 이어지는 선택을 나타냅니다.

지구상에 지옥을 만드는 것은 고통에 대한 학대와 무관심을 통해 가능합니다.

사후 세계와 유한한 삶의 가치에 대한 증거

보편적인 죽음은 사후 세계에 대한 부인할 수 없는 증거입니다.

나이가 들면서 신체적, 정신적 능력이 저하되는 것은 사후 세계가 없다는 것을 뒷받침합니다.

노화 과정을 관찰하면 사후 세계에 대한 압도적인 증거를 얻을 수 있습니다.

사망 후 최적의 상태로 돌아간다는 증거는 없습니다.

인생의 유한한 특성은 성취와 삶의 선택에 동기를 부여합니다.

디지털 및 유전적 불멸의 가능성

기업들은 개인 데이터를 디지털화하여 개인에 대한 디지털 표현을 만들고 있습니다.

커넥톰 프로젝트는 인간의 뇌를 지도화하여 잠재적으로 기억과 성격을 디지털화하는 것을 목표로 합니다.

미래의 도서관에서는 디지털화된 역사적 인물과 상호작용할 수 있게 될 것입니다.

개인을 디지털화하여 세대를 아우르는 소통을 가능하게 하는 가능성에 대해 논의합니다.

디지털 불멸은 미래 세대와 과거 세대와의 소통을 가능하게 할 수 있습니다.

Is there life after death? | Sam Harris, Bill Nye, Michio Kaku, & more | Big Think

Is there life after death? | Sam Harris, Bill Nye, Michio Kaku, & more | Big Think

스크립트