If you believe that all effects have causes, then births and deaths and identities and consciousness are all perhaps contained and encoded in the initial condit

If you believe that all effects have causes, then births and deaths and identities and consciousness are all perhaps contained and encoded in the initial conditions of the universe and its physical laws. Your particular identity is a mode or process by which one local part of the universe experiences itself in a certain way (through your eyes, as it were). When you die, countless other lives and existences will continue to be modes through which the universe experiences itself, but not through the same identity. This was captured by Carl Sagan, who said: "The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."