“Is there life after death?”

The edge of my thoughts points to the invalidity of this question. “Is the number ‘three’ blue?”, or “Is my chair larger than the square root of minus one?”  — these are questions that resist a yes/no answer by virtue of their meaninglessness.  They can be raised though, as I have just done, and each question is grammatically correct, only context-obscure.  Think about it: a computer could have formed every one of these questions owing to lack of comprehension as to the notions that these questions refers to.  Similarly, I believe, the question of life and death while sounding legitimate, is really not, because however pale our comprehension of life — the no-life, death state, is something we can imagine only from our while-alive state.  It looms as life without  outside communication, life in a continuing darkness, life that nobody else knows about it, a prison with no exit.  But such is akin to our imagination propping in our mind the number  ‘three’ as blue or green. It is not anything really meaningful.

It has been often said that asking the right question is half way or more towards its answer, suggesting that one has to be quite learned about a subject in order to ask a pointed question. Or, alternatively, profound ignorance is a a pre-question state.

When it comes to life and death, we are, I believe, in a pre-question state. I would assess that we have a long way ahead of us, building cognition, studying the reality as it shows itself up around us, constructing and replacing theories of life and death — before we know what to ask about what is going on in an objective way.

And until such time, we must acknowledge a reasonable mix of fear and hope, while we are digging further into mother earth on which we walk.  Getting overly impressed with bodily decay (death apparent) is akin to painting a drawn number ‘three’ with the color blue, and answering in the affirmative on the above question.