Is there a heaven or hell? The answer by this argument is no. Consciousness survives death but does not get an eternal reward or punishment no matter how much it may deserve it. Heaven means different things to different people but basically it's a place of bliss. There can necessarily be no misery. Yet, undoubtedly, some who have died, while they may have been good people, lived miserable existences--an innocent child who grew up badly abused and died from the mistreatment, for example. What memories can this child have that are not painful? So he enters heaven at T1 where he can have no painful memories and yet nearly all his memories are painful and he has to remember them that way or his consciousness has been altered--contradiction.

If heaven is a place of infinite bliss, our consciousness cannot experience it. We max out at some point. A heaven of infinite, unlimited bliss would be wasted on us. If I attach you to a pleasure-giving machine, you will have pleasurable sensations initially but you will start to develop a tolerance to it. So I have to up the amount to keep you feeling the same amount of bliss but you will eventually develop a tolerance to that. So I have to keep upping the amount, at some point my machine maxes out and even if it didn't you would. You just can't keep on feeling unlimited bliss, you max out and it starts to decrease. All our sensations eventually decrease to zero after their limit has been reached.

Perhaps heaven is a place of a surplus of bliss. There must necessarily be more bliss than we experience now in order for it to be worthy of being called heaven. Even so, even our most pleasant memories during our earthly life seem less pleasant in comparison when we are in heaven because everything is more blissful there. Again, it would amount to an alteration of our consciousness.

And the same hold true for hell and eternal punishment.

But wait--the memory is still intact so it wouldn't violate the premise of this argument, we're still in heaven recalling our experiences, right?.....Except we're not. We are recalling experiences that we never had. The memory of them may be there but the sensations have changed and effectively made it a different experience.

Consciousness isn't just about recalling experiences. It is also about re-living sensations. Every experience is accompanied by a unique set of sensations. Sensations are qualia--feelings that we have that we cannot communicate to others. For instance, if I tell you the sky is blue, you have to know what blue is to know what I mean. If you don't, I can't explain it to you. Blue is just blue. If I am in pain, I can't explain the pain to you to make you feel it, you would simply have to feel it.

If you bungee jump off a bridge, it is heart-pounding the first time you do it. Later on, you don't simply recall that sensation. You remember how scared you were but you don't feel the actual sensation. In order to do so, you simply have to re-live it. When you bungee jump again, that terror will return but with minor changes because you gradually get used to it because all sensations eventually dwindle to zero. Now every time you jump, you will feel some degree of that fear (that's why those who jump do it all--for that thrill).

Ever drive down a slippery road and suddenly your car goes into a spin and there is that moment of panic when you realize the car's tires are not in contact with the road and you have become a huge hockey puck? What goes through your mind at the moment? If you think about it, what went through your mind was a memory of every other time you ever felt that panic. You remember all your previous spin-outs. Why? Because you were conscious during those experiences and the return of that sensation sparks that memory.

This is necessary because if you couldn't re-live sensations, you could not have been conscious during that initial experience. Without re-living the sensations of that experience, you have no way of know you ever felt them before. To be conscious you must re-live sensations.

Another example is when you hear a song from your childhood that you haven't thought about since you were that child. You seemed to have completely forgotten it. Now all these years later you hear it again and what happens? It's like a trip back in time, you not only remember things you realize you had nearly forgotten but the sensations are come flooding back--the way it made you feel good or the way it made you feel while riding the bus to school or the way it made you think of that girl or that boy in class that you had such a crush on--it all comes back in a huge rush. When you play that song for your kid brother or sister, you see that moment their eyes light up hearing that song again after all this time. If you could not re-live sensations, that wouldn't happen.

Just as your life seems to be one long waking episode because you can't remember blank spots of total unconsciousness, your life is also one long series of sensations. You never stop having them and will go on having them up to the moment of death.

But just as you must remember all your experiences, you must re-live all your sensations if you are a conscious being. So what happens if you die without re-living certain sensations? Since death does not extinguish consciousness, you must re-live them in a future time after your death. And how are you going to re-live them if not in a human body on a planet exactly like earth? That's how you experienced them before so that's how you must re-live them. But you've died so what must happen? Well, we know you don't go to heaven or hell and you can't re-live your sensations that way anyhow. So what then must happen? You guessed it--you have to come back. You have to reincarnate.