What do atheists think of death?

Don't forget the electric potentials of all those nerve cells preparing to fire at all sorts of interesting intervals. That's where the core information of the consciousness and self is to be found.Your question is surprisingly similar to one recently posted at the Skeptics forum -- here: Thought Experiments on Uniqueness of Consciousness - The Skeptics Society Forum (hmm... was that you?). To repeat what I said there: I would agree with the others here that atheism does not entail outright denial of afterlife or extra-sensory anything. It's just that there isn't any evidence that we can "get our hands on" to support these things or indicate their nature. As for your suggestion (similar to the one in the Skeptics thread) about the possibility of a complete "replica" of me existing somewhere else, I don't really see this as being at all relevant to any sort of afterlife issue that would be interesting, either to the faithful or to skeptics/atheists. Given the remoteness of any such scenario, what difference does it make to the "me" that is here now?Meanwhile, there is another sense of "survival of death"... Who says I no longer exist? There are all the patterns (and perturbations of patterns) that I have imposed on my surroundings and on other individuals, there are the genetic selections that I have passed on to my children, there are all the records of my own individual activity that continue to exist after my own active impulses stop and my body gets recycled. Sure, it's incomplete and imperfect, but there's something to it.People (well, not the population as a whole, but an increasing segment of the population) have actually been getting better and better at surviving death, in the sense that the individual is still uniquely recognizable to more people for longer periods after death, by virtue what he or she has left behind. With some effort, you can still get pretty well into the brains of Ovid or Aristotle; lots of musicians, despite all being different from each other, can evoke a vast assortment of long-dead composers as distinct individuals; and of course they can try, but rarely succeed, to replicate exactly what Elvis or Benny Goodman or Bix Biderbeck recorded onto vinyl decades ago. In my book, that's the sense of afterlife that matters. It's not a matter of just fame, it's a question of sustained impact and continued activity by "proxy".This strikes me as a lot more sensible than any promise of afterlife offered up by any variant of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim family of mythologies, and it has the potential for demanding a much stronger moral imperative. (Not that I personally spend all my time maximizing my own realization of that potential -- that's hard -- but I certainly do my best to do no wrong, at least as much so as any theist I know.)Of course, understanding the moral imperative of this view involves accepting the concept of expanding, as far as possible, one's sense of who (and what) is included in one's "home-group" (i.e. what range of interests/concerns does one need to take into account when choosing what action to take).The Hindu/Buddhist notions of reincarnation come close to this in their rationality, but they still end up with sort of a cop-out... You missed hitting the mark this time around? Well, just keep going, your next cycle might be relatively uncomfortable (maybe not), but in any case, you'll probably break out of the loop one of these times, or maybe not... I think it is interesting that reincarnation is the one afterlife scenario I know of where there have been plausible attempts to cite positive evidence, and this is worth more careful attention.