When we all fall asleep, where do we go?

Hello dear y’all, I am confused and scrolling through Instagram apparently isn’t the way to put my mind to rest. Who could have guessed? So it seems this white screen and I will be blabbering at each for a couple of hours. Enjoy the ride, I guess?

Sleep. Death. Potato.

The first two I find to be related, and the last one I wrote just because I really love fries and am hungry rn, at 06.05 in the morning. Rome desperately needs 24/7 open restaurants cause there is no way for me to bother cooking my own food right now. If a task does not grant me immediate satisfaction, my brain simply won’t electrify them nerves.

So, I know sleep is what we are supposed to do every night, to remain healthy and stuff. Death is what we get, when we can no longer be Healthy™. Surely, the science gets into quite some detail, but that’s not relevant for the question I pose. My question is, whether death is an eternal sleep without dreams or if there’s an afterlife?

Say, there is an afterlife, to be able to get there, we should have something separate from our bodies, right? Something that will not rot 6 feet under following our death, a “soul” perhaps?

Science has yet to answer whether we have those. However, if we think of our minds, our consciousnesses, as souls of a sort, would our knowledge of how they function not be able to prove or disprove an immaterial self?

Put more simply, if we discover how the brain-goo produces consciousness, we can determine if our body holds our ‘’minds’’ and therefore, selves. If consciousness is a biological process, then we could put forward the idea that ‘’we’’ cease to exist after we die. Death is then final and we go back to the dark void of non-existence, the place we were before ‘’we’’ were born. Though, if consciousness is NOT produced through a biological process, we can’t eliminate the idea that ‘’souls’’ exist. Unfortunately, current research can’t yet tell how ‘’ the mind ‘’ works.

So where is my answer? I still don’t have it, yay!

Then, I will continue my train of thought with the assumption that we do cease to exist after we die. Yes, I answered my own question with a guess, shame on me. Now, I have another one. If we do die and perish, why bother to do anything?

Can anything have meaning without permanence? Is ‘’ meaning ‘’ a necessity? Does something that’s not permanent even exist? Let’s say, you live today and do stuff, will anyone remember that stuff in 500 years time? Who can prove you did it? Even if you’re Socrates or Einstein and your teachings will be taught for quite a long time, what happens when the universe ends?

Oh the great wide universe, never fails to absolutely screw my mind. How will it end? There are a few common theories, but I’ll concentrate on one for now: The Big Bounce. I chose this one, because if I am up to date on basic cosmology (I may not be, seriously), Big Bounce is the only theory allowing the universe to be permanent. Basically, it is the idea that at some point the universe will stop its expansion and shrink to its size at the time of the Big Bang(the beginning), then explode again to create another universe. Potentially, this could be an endless loop.

The question is then, are all the universes created in this process the same? Do you read this article in each one? Or does the new universe differ each time, affected by the events of the previous universes? This could suggest that the universe has a memory. Perhaps, existence is permanent and therefore, all existing things do or can hold importance?

If we can find meaning in existence, what do we do with non-existence then? Is there a way to eliminate either? Is either of them inherently good or evil?

Idk, good soup my brain do be.

See you again on another one of my ramblings:)