Being is being. You mean that there is no living being then. Okay. But there is being. Being is being. Thus being does not necessarily mean living being.
Are “YOU” a dead body? Or are “YOU” a living consciousness?
A living consciousness cannot be dead. Which one is “YOU”?
When “YOU” is not “YOU” any more, “YOU” are not “being”, but rather simply do not exist (although perhaps left behind the body that “YOU” used to inhabit).
If the soul physically leaves the body after death, perhaps the process of rebirth can be determined by the first person to walk into the corpse’s room.
I think Mr. Watts lives in a bubble, unaware of the concepts of pain, hell, investment, recurrence, or rebirth.
If we all had Mr. Alans attitude, I doubt there would be many great achievements…scientists, in the middle of building machines to better the quality of life, would say, “Doesn’t matter if I die, making scientific progress and improving the quality of life is not important. I’m okay with drinking mud water being chased by hyenas if and when I’m reborn into this world. The idea of making the world better before I left it doesn’t really matter, helping future generations doesnt really matter, death doesnt really matter, s’all good.” There would be no reason for philosophy and researching the afterlife, because hell and recurrence into bad worlds are thought of as neutral outcomes, that don’t really matter. Sort of like extreme frothing lunatic Nihilism.
Do you think that a consciousness can never be dead?
It can imagine dead, feel death.
Yep.
I have imagined what it’s like to be dead on several occassions, simply timeless consciousness staring at the sun, no needs no worries, only a pleasant pain.
However, my theory is that we are linked in the higher plane which is the sim realm, then above that the sou realm where we are all one.
The sim realm we have a higher genius ego that is all knowing, and are not limited to avatars but still there is a seperation, we are not our friends they are in seperate timelines. However, we do share the lives of several people in Earth realms, but not our friends they have seperate egos.
Higher than the sim realm is the soul realm where we are all one, however this takes a while for the recursision since there is a seperation of timelines between our friends and us, sometimes even millena goes past until we live each other’s lives. You have the option to not participate however there has become viruses in the programming causing Earth realms to degrade from original coding.
We, passengers, marvelled at the beauty of the coding enabling us to feel the illusion of free will and fell in love with our own ignorance, for the burden of knowledge left nothing to ego delusion, nor could we enjoy animal pursuits. However a virus in earth realms has prevented the fulfillment of coding.
I have absolutely no evidence of my theories and it is all blind faith based.
Some other philosophers say they know what happens when you die, but they appear to be dishonest and too rude to share their theories with the world.
You might want to define what YOU mean by consciousness here.
Doesn’t the word itself presuppose an awareness of some sort? having the capacity to experience, to think, to observe?
That requires a living organism. It also requires a “living” consciousness.
If you’re speaking of immortality, of a person who has died, if you believe in a soul, then perhaps it’s possible that one’s consciousness, IF housed ina soul, lives on somehow, somewhere.
Either way, Arminius, I don’t see how a “consciousness” can be dead - ever.
The very word consciousness stands for awareness.
Con - with
scious - knowledge
Of course, books have knowledge but we speaking of “living” “breathing” knowledge.
I can imagine what it’s like to temporarily be dead as I have been killed in dreams countless times in my life, starting from when I was a child.
When I actually die in my dreams (not wake up before I die, but actually die) the feeling is always the same. I get past the initial fear by ultimately accepting my fate, and I peacefully go deeper and deeper into a state of deep sleep/deep peace, and then I wake up.
I imagine the death of my body will be something similar, albeit more intense, more lucid, etc. because it will happen in both the material and subtle body, and not just the subtle body. That includes the waking up part, although I’d imagine that in what we call “actual” death, once I “wake up” I will have no recollection of what happened before, since I have no recollection of before birth.
And if someone asks “why put so much stock in what your dreams have informed you of?”, well, the answer is pretty simple if not infallible. I have experienced moments of deep romantic bliss in dreams when I kissed girls that I had deep crushes on. In fact, for many, many, many years the most euphoric moments of my life had happened in dreams when I had experienced that great, romantic, euphoric feeling of kissing a girl I had fallen in love with. 20 or so years later after the first time I experienced such a sensation in my dream, I finally kissed a girl I had fallen in love with and the sensation was identical, albeit amplified. Therefore, dreams have truly informed me of knowledge a priori.
Not that I am 100% certain, of course, that death will be relatively similar to how it has happened to me in dreams, but I’m pretty damn sure. The consistency of being killed/feeling fear, accepting the fate of death, and falling into a deep sleep/deep peace, and then waking up, has been entirely consistent many times throughout my life, with no deviation to speak of.
Yeah, a bright white light appears and you just get lifted, then transported to the inter-space, then temporarily held there. Death is just a process that takes place when the body dies…no big deal
I get where you are coming from and empathize with what you are trying to communicate, but I will have to challenge you on the notion that when people think of death, that they think of the body. It seems to me many people think of death as the end of everything, an eternity of “non-being” which to me is utter nonsense. One can imagine, like you said, the “I” no longer being part of the equation, even though it is still the “I” that is imagine it.
But when people ask “can you imagine being dead” I presume (wrongly?) they mean the “experience” of “nothingness” (again, I believe the “experience of nothingness” is bullshit, since nothing is not an experience, and therefore the whole concept of “nothing” to me, is utter nonsense).
One can only imagine decreased forms of life and call it “death”. Even when I describe what happens in my dreams when I “die”, as in, when I am dying and going into a deep sleep/deep peace, there is still an element of consciousness, some very depleted form of sense perception, and once it goes to near zero I wake up (out of necessity).
Question: Do you think/believe that after death there is “nothing” or do you, like me, find the concept of “nothing” to be nonsensical?
A sleep has an end. And the death? Is it endless? And if it is endless: How do you think or imagine an endless death?
One can’t imagine an endless death because it doesn’t exist/is utterly non-sensical.
Nature/existence is embedded in certain patterns. Such as day and night, winter and summer, death and birth, sleeping and waking, pleasure and pain, front and back, and on and on and on and on.
Everything that has a beginning has an end. So while death is the end of life, life is also the end of death.
While I obviously can’t prove to anyone, convince anyone, that this is the case, to me, this is about as factual as anything. Eternal non-existence is the single most incomprehensible concept I can think of, even more so than the Abrahamic God. To believe in something that the human mind can utterly not comprehend takes an enormous leap of faith, and thus I find it ironic that so many so called empiricists believe that when they die “they” will be dead “forever” as if there is still a “they” that “can” “be” “dead”. In other words, one cannot “be” dead. One is or one isn’t. And you and I ARE.
Wait …, “be” is not possible, but “is” and “are” are possible? You know that “is” and “are” are the inflected forms of the same Infinitive: “be”.
I think it can only be imagined in terms of the human experience and memory.
An endless death to me - since time is relative - would be when one’s child is so very sick or in trouble that the parent feels that he/she has died almost, where there is almost no hope. Perhaps not a very good analogy.
Can we actually think in terms of death being endless though? If there is no immortality, then dead is just dead. There is no beginning or end to it. There is a beginning to dying but not to death itself. If there is immortality, then it is not that there is an end to death – death is in itself a cessation of life – but that there is a beginning of new life.
One time, a long time ago, I got ran over by this truck while I was riding a motorcycle and I was pretty badly injured and I went about 90 feet down the road just sliding and rolling and what have you. So I was bleeding from all over the place and I was laying there in the street and I just thought for a second, “am I dead?”. Then I was like, “I don’t really know, I mean…how could I tell, I have no basis for comparison because I have never been dead and so I really can’t know what it’s like so I can’t be sure if I’m dead right now.” Then I started to think, “maybe my back or neck is broken, what if I try and move but I paralyze myself?”. Then I started thinking, “what if I don’t move and someone comes down this street at night right now and doesn’t see me and runs over my legs?”. So I took some slow deep breaths to see if I felt any ridiculous sharp pains that might indicate my back was broken, and I didn’t feel those pains so I slowly, delicately tried to sit up straight. Then all the endorphins kicked in and I thought that I’d just get up and walk around and call myself an ambulance, because this crazy lady who hit me was trying to leave the scene and I would have probably bled to death out there if she’d gotten away. So I walked around for a few minutes and some good samaritan types blocked her in so she couldn’t leave, which was lucky for me because I’d lost so much blood at this point that I started to have all these convulsions and go into shock and I ended up collapsing back onto the ground unable to get back up. Then these guys came and cut all my clothes off, and strapped me to a board, so now I"m naked, strapped to a board, and convulsing on the side of the road just waiting for an ambulance, (the 1st responders were some local volunteer guys who did not have an ambulance). So then the ambulance gets there, and they toss me into the back of it, and the last thing I remember is this lady in there looked at me and said, “are you in any pain?”, and I said, “yes. are you fucking kidding me? you’d better not let me die you fucking bitch.”. The I really don’t know what happened but they shocked me with those shocker things that they use when people have heart attacks and I woke up in a hospital being held up in front of an xray machine by these 2 huge dudes and dripping blood all over the floor which formed a nice puddle underneath me there.
All that being said, I don’t think someone can imagine what it’s like to be dead. You can imagine what it’s like to be close to dead, but imagining you’re actually dead, at least from your own point of view just seems like something a person can’t do. Maybe you can imagine something like, “if I were dead my mom would be sad or those mean bullies would learn their lesson” or something like that, but imagining, “if I were dead here’s where I’d be and this is what I’d see” just doesn’t make sense.
As the conscious mind is in metaposition, when you die you cease to inhabit what is otherwise the sleepwalker [zombie]. This thing, the body and brain, can be seen in hypnotism and sleepwalking, as the causal being. If we imagine that when both that causal being and consciousness are engaged, we are awake, but somewhat being taken down a causal road, then being dead you would be awake but without that body. Sleep and unconsciousness generally are existential, and they are induced by brain/bodily function.
When dead there will be nothing [body/brain/existence] there to make the consciousness take that state, or there will be nothing there et al. I don’t see a third option where consciousness would be asleep or suffering things which relate to bodily function?
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Imagination requires consciousness but if you are dead you have neither
And so while you may imagine being dead it is not really at all the same
We can imagine all variety of things. But we don’t know what it is like to be dead, so we can’t know if what we’re imagining is it. Lots of people imagine themselves hanging out on a cloud with their grandparents, or being reincarnated as a bull, or any number of other things, and that is ‘imagining what it’s like to be dead’ as far as they are concerned. If we’re presuming that to be dead is to be nothing at all, well- we can imagine our corpse lying on the floor. We can imagine darkness and silence. Are these imagining being dead? They are, after a fashion.
Can we imagine what it’s like to be a fish? We can imagine swimming around in a fish body. But we can’t really imagine what it’s like to be as dumb as a fish is, and to lack the capacities a fish lacks. At least not very clearly. So it’s kind of like that.