I would dare say that a major portion of the earth’s population disbelieve in the existence of a life after the current one.

We may resemble our ancestors in having the common reason for such disbelief to be the difficulty of grasping the possibility of another life, particularly after our biological reduction to waste materials, which is further enhanced by the absence of solid evidence of such life — no ‘returners’ to narrate its existence.

So no chance of ‘another’ life? Well, some theories feed the alternative prospects.

Nick Bostrom, an Oxford professor, philosopher and director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, is known for his popular paper ‘The Simulation Argument.’

The argument postulates the possibility (and favors its probability) that we may be living in the likeness of a computer simulation, controlled from another dimensional level.

When asked about certain implications of the simulation hypothesis, here is what Dr. Bostrom had to say: “The last section of the original paper speculated about certain parallels that could be drawn between traditional religious conceptions and our relations to our hypothetical simulators.

These simulators would have created our world, would be able to monitor everything that happens here and would be able to intervene in ways that conflict with the simulated default laws of nature. Moreover, they would presumably be superintelligent (in order to be able to create such a simulation in the first place). An afterlife in a different simulation or at a different level of reality after death-in-the-simulation would be a real possibility. It is even conceivable that the simulators might reward or punish their simulated creatures based to how they behave, perhaps according to familiar moral or religious norms (a theory that gains a little bit of credibility from the possibility that the simulators might be the descendants of earlier humans who recognized these norms).

In that analogy, death is merely a transfer process from one simulated existence to another and we are sheer ‘characters’ downloaded from one existence, ending our presence in it, only to be uploaded to another to continue our existential progression.

Similarly, there is the dream argument, which eventually leads to the query: How do you distinguish a dream from reality?

As Rene Descartes puts it, “There are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep.”

Given that in a dream all your senses can be fully engaged, how do we know that we are not living a dream, and hence ‘waking up ‘ to a new world at our final eye lid closure?

Ahmed AlNomany is an ISU alum.