I apologise for being late to this thread; I have just discovered it.
Tibetan Buddhism has the idea of a Bardo, or transition. A baby in the womb undergoes a transition when it is suddenly thrust into the outer world. There are other transitions when the child grows up and becomes an adult, when the adult grows old and can no longer work, and an important transition at death. Buddhists believe that after death, the person is either reborn in this world, or moves on into a spiritual way of life, or becomes a celestial being. We cannot know what happens after death, any more than a baby in the womb can know of the outside world, so agnosticism is the only honest attitude.
In J K Rowling’s’ Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, chapter 35, Kings Cross, Harry briefly dies and meets the spirit of Dumbledore at what looks like Kings Cross Station, except that there are no trains, and the two are the only ones there. Late in the chapter, Dumbledore suggests that if Harry did not go back to material life, he might catch a train.
‘And where might it take me?’
‘On,’ said Dumbledore, simply.
Another transition.
When I started programming computers, about 1970, computer memory was scarce, so to save space some code was written in Assembly language, a second generation computer language. The code was primitive, but it allowed me to see exactly what the computer was doing, and I realised that the computer was entirely deterministic. Accordingly, I am sceptical that a computer will ever become conscious and introspective. Carrying this idea over to our brains, I suspect that we will never be able to point to one area of the brain, and regard our consciousness as residing in that area.
This brings us back – amazingly – to Cartesian Dualism, where body and spirit are joined, but the body is just a body, like a zombie which is infused by a non-material spirit. At death, it may be that the body falls away – shuffles off this mortal coil – and the spirit is released.
