Is there life after death?

If one applies the idea that there is no life after death to Sociology, one will encounter great difficulty. The fact is that by his innate disposition, man believes in continuation of life after death. His instincts tells him that there is happiness and unhappiness in the other world where he goes after death; and if he wants to enjoy happiness there, he will have to sacrifice many comforts of this life. This is specially true about great affairs and ideals which cannot be established except when their supporters and adherents are willing to die for them, to sacrifice their lives for the cause. They have to die so that others may live.

Now, here is a question for those who do not believe in life after death:

If death is the end of life, if man, after his death, is lost for ever, then why should he sacrifice his life so that others may live? Why should he deprive himself of the comforts and enjoyments which he can easily get through injustice and tyranny? Just to let others live in peace? What has he got to gain by his sacrifice? Nothing. No sensible man gives something if he is not getting something in return. Human nature rejects the concept of giving without receiving, of leaving something without getting something in exchange. It rejects the idea of dying to enable others to live, the notion of denying oneself the enjoyment of this short life so that others may enjoy it.

This is the most difficult and unanswerable question Humans will ever deal with. Even if we solve every problem we have, I think we still will not be able communicate with the dead satisfactorily. This is a very complex and very strange concept.
Despite the above statements, I "Mostly Agree" because you do live on through your friends and family, through the lives you have touched and through things you have written, and, with the advent of the internet, through a great many more things. I honestly believe that if one thing you said at any point changed any part of someone's behavior (or even existed, for that matter), you live on. I think that view would fit very well with chaos theory. (think about it)

Note: There must be philosophers debating the following type of thoughts. Can someone point me to a source?

If we can't precisely determine what identity means, we can't precisely determine what death means.

Neural connections are continually made and lost; if our identity was dependent upon an exact configuration of neurons we would continually die and be reborn as a different person. For the question of our death to have any significance, there must be something that ceases to exist that actually has some permanence. But exactly what about me must be permanent for the past me and the future me to both be me? I'd argue no one thing. Our identity is more like the kind of thing that would be described by a Naive Bayes classifier (where the relationship between past mes and future mes bear a Wittgensteinian Family Resemblance).

Let's define I(p,q) such that I is a function that determines how similar the identities of person p and person q are. I(p,q) = 1, where p and q represent the same person at the point in time. I(p,q) = 0 where p and q represent entirely dissimilar people (or perhaps q is not even a person). We can now say I have life after death if the sum of I(p,q in Q) > 0, where p is me just before I die, and Q is all people living after I die. Under this conception, a famous author really does live on after they die; in fact they live in other people even before they die.

To be explicit about this model: physical death is replaced with information death, holistic death is replaced with partial death, and abrupt death is replaced with continuous death. For evolutionary psychological reasons, I see why we're predisposed to care more about abrupt holistic physical death than continuous partial information death, but it's not clear to me this restrictive view is rational. (Alzheimer's seems to be better described as continuous partial information death.)

Now how would we define function I?

It seems pretty clear from everything we know about human beings that we live in our bodies - chiefly in the brain. At least in the ordinary course of events, this means that disruption of this body destroys the human being, just as destruction of a computer halts the programs running on that computer.

Mostly answering because it's projected my answer to this as "mostly agree" and I do not know why (the suicide question, maybe). That is wrong. No evidence, doesn't fit my paradigm, etc.

Once again, I agree with JGWeissman.

(On a side note, I'm not sure the Steve Jobs quote is applicable here. All he says is "Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there", which isn't an explicit denial of an afterlife. I don't think he believes in one — I think he still considers himself a Buddhist — but we'd need a better quote to support that.)

Expanding successful theories describing the universe to include an afterlife requires adding complexity that is not supported by any evidence.

its irrespective of any caste or been dead or alive !
its mere ke we are EXISTING TODAY and not alive, we have created a own hell here .
we have no relations but only money matters.
we have money but no time.
we have time but no life to enjoy wht we are doin.

soo i suggest request please look at the present and live rather then jus been existing!

Your "mostly agree" answer on life after death is (no pun intended) dead wrong for Einstein. It should be disagree, pure and simple. Google this; better, try Google Books/Google Scholar for credibility: Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it. And your quote supporting "mostly agree" is weak; even atheists admit that they "survive" through their children. That's not the survival the question is talking about.

Many years ago I clinically died and had a NDE/OBE so I 'know' life continues after this life.