
Your complimentary articles
You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please
If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.
To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.
If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.
Articles
Can The Multiverse Give You An Afterlife?
Rui Vieira says yes it can, of sorts.
The idea of an afterlife is central to many of the world’s religions, and understandably so, since the thought that eternal oblivion might await us after death can be terrifying. But to many skeptics the notion of an afterlife as put forth by most religions seems implausible, leaving eternal oblivion as the only possibility. However, they need not be so pessimistic. Maybe science itself could provide us with a coherent, even plausible, account of a kind of cosmological afterlife, especially if we throw some philosophy of mind into the mix.
How might science help assuage our fear of death? Modern physics has provided us with theories which claim that we may be living in a multiverse, in which our universe is only one among a potentially infinite number of universes.
…