Guest wrote:
@Logrus: By Occams Razor and classical logics the simplest hypothesis is that there is afterlife (something "after life"), meaning that something outlasts death and that this "something" is governed by laws just like life is. Saying that there are gods, that the gods create the afterlife, that every god creates his own afterlife, that souls get to/don't get to choose their afterlife, that consciousness and soul are the same, that afterlife is in fact a PLACE, all that would needlessly complicate it and mean a whole lot of assumptions that are not directly falsifiable, so I stuck with the theory most close to baseline. Philosophic methodology and religious dogma are not one and the same, and D&D cosmology isn't all that coherent anyway.
you seem to misunderstand mr Occam. Occam's Razor does *not* state that the simplist hypothesis, of those consistant with available data, is the accurate one, only that it is the
preferable one; ie that so long as it continues to hold consistant with all available data, it remains the best hypothesis on which to base ones actions and decisions. occam's razor is not about the accuracy of the *model*, it is about definition of a desirable trait of a decision-making method, based on the interaction of *probability* of accuracy, and degree of resources consumed by the decision-making method in question.
anyway, occam's razor states "the SIMPLEST hypothesis", not "your hypothesis, so long as its simpler than that of your debate opponent". the simplist available hypothesis for the afterlife component of a cosmology, at least regarding the real world, is that there is not an afterlife at all, as any afterlife is, by its nature, an instance of increased complexity in the model, relative to a model in which a human's self simply ceases existance at death.
not that any of this matters for the situation at hand. this isn't about what the accurate cosmology is for the real world, it's about selecting a cosmology for a fictional world, a world where whatever ISNorden decides will
inherently become the accurate cosmology. and if we go with the simplest possible cosmology of those which Ms Norden has the option of choosing, we'd be sticking to the Empty Universe model widely used in physics though experiments, which i personally think would make for a pretty boring game.