A friend asked me once what I thought happens after we die. I pointed to some dead leaves and weeds and said I thought we had the same thing happens to us as happened to them. Sometimes, people say they don't believe in an afterlife. It seems clear that we do shrivel, become insensate and unconscious. My mother's ashes and those of my daughter have been in our house for more than 10 years. If there had been no cremation, their bodies would have shrunk and transformed in other ways but little bits of them are still around, in the house and in the atmosphere.
The Buddhists and all other religions wonder, speculate and postulate about events after death. The TED talk by the Indian/British researcher Anil Seth shows a scientist who studies consciousness. In his talk, he says that it is clear to him that when our consciousness ends, "there is nothing, nothing to be afraid of."
The Buddhists often assert that there is no "self". Others, such as scientists, also find nothing in our heads that is THE self. Seth is convinced that we work with our brains, our minds and our bodies, we interact that our mothers, and others and over time, during those first years of learning to use our hands, legs, and our speech to the point of developing a comfortable sense of who we are, what we are and what we can do. Whether we refer to the self or the soul or our consciousness, most of us have a sense of continuous identity. The identity is so familiar, so precious, so delightful, so US that we normally have a difficult time even supposing that that it might not last forever. It ought to last forever, it deserves to last forever, however long that might be.
I can think of "cyberspace" as the stuff, codes, messages, bits that can be decoded into a picture
