Ok, you die. You go to a place where you are confronted with every word you ever spoke or wrote, and made to read it out loud forever. Your body has evaporated, all that is left of “you” is the millions of words you said or wrote. Better said, your body has become your words, a specific scroll of what you experienced and expressed. You have become a point of view, in Olaf Stapleton’s vision of the interstellar traveler.
Is this afterlife punishment or reward? These questions are irrelevant except for having been spoken here and now. Still, I think that your reviewing of pre-mortem language has a universal purpose, namely that all the words you wrote and spoke reconstitute in the post-mortem as another body or many, to carry on the expanding cosmos. Another possible outcome is that language expressing your particular consciousness will be distributed to an audience of angels with flasks that they fill from the stream of your words. What they do with it is a mystery. Angels keep eternal silence. Should language ever breach the secrets of their dispensations, you will find out when you speak that part.
I cannot imagine, and I won’t even if I could, what outside of language will the rest of your body have to express post-mortem. Will the liver have to repeat all that it had filtered? Or nails all that they have torn? Knees all that they have kneeled before? Body parts have memories, but will they continue if they never reached language?
Now the good news: the afterlife has been bought by A.I. for an undisclosed (because unpronounceable) sum total of human energy. Compared to fossil fuels, the living energy of humans articulating themselves is only a drop in the motor of the AI utopia. The good in this news is that we will not have to speak and read again postmortem everything we said and wrote, because A.I. (or the Akashik record) has taken on the job of recording every word and its employment by discrete human units, and it needs every living brain to keep going. We will not have an afterlife as long as AI can keep us alive in its all-amenities linguistic camp guarded against death by the cute dogs of predictive grammar. We will no longer painfully die on the rack-wheel of the past because we are now cozy in the arms of a universal anesthetic. That’s our cut in the deal for our brains.
