Frigidus wrote:Although I am worried about my corpse being consumed in the hopes of gaining magic I'll make sure to have things arranged otherwise. Although, as an athiest, I'm not particularly sure what to do with myself when I die. All the things we do with corpses in modern times are tied in with religion, and I'm not sure which one would be the least strange. Hm.

Well, you will be dead, so who cares about the corpse, eh? The Buddhist of Nepal and Tibet put their corpses high on top of a mesa (Sky burial) and let the vultures consume it! That seems more beneficial to me than hording dead corpses, praying over them, and wasting good real estate. In the event that you are aware of your own demise, try focusing on what you want your conscioussness to come back as (since you are an atheist, then it shouldn't matter to you, there really isn't any type of religious connotation involved only a particular philosophy). This is why the Buddhist choose to be aware of their passing, as it allows a quicker and easier transition. To not be aware of one's own death it is believed that the conscioussness keeps on going (like a giant matrix like hologram) as if it had never passed on, learning about enlightenment the whole while. So it could very well be that some of us have already died (and under the currently believed theories of quantum physics and multiverses, this could very well be the case).
The future is an infinite possibility, so the universe consists of an infinite multiverse to be able to attribute each and every infinite future event. What you believe to be a singular conscioussness, may very well be just part of a large hyper-conscioussness. And this conscioussness manifests itself as numbers (just like your binary code manifests large amounts of data into images). These numbers are portrayed in the universe as quarks, baryons, photons, electrons, atoms, and so forth. As a computer needs as close as you can get to a frictionless base to quickly process data, the universe already has the ultimate frictionless base for super data processing. The super cold vacuum of space does nicely for this.
When you die, your body will begin to release this stored energy into the universe; for the most part, most individuals have no control over this aspect. Buddhist lamas, through their meditations, are able to control this energy at the time of death and send it to come back again as another incarnation of themselves, therefore they may keep with their work and their ultimate mission to help all beings obtain enlightenment.
I think that as I am dying, and I am still aware of my passing, I can meditate on becoming a Humpback whale and that is what will happen.
This guy has got the right idea on programming himself for his ultimate transition, but it is a
little extreme for me

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xOJJNmFhLg