I’ve been told by christians there is ‘something’ after death. They tell me its love… and whatever. But, they believe in the same fundamental desire to be in an ‘acceptable state’. To me dying is like blowing out a candle, or ascending to nothing. There is no pain or ‘darkness’ involved. The painful part is the process of dying… After that, along with consciousness, the body and mind cease to be.
who else in here believes consciousness ends at death?
I like to see people abandoning old, poorly justified, doctrines by confronting their insecurities about death and not letting any optimistic passage enslave them. “There is a god to protect you, you are immortal, but do everything we say.”
Still- I think it’s also sad to assume that concsiousness is defined well enough to explain when it exists or ceases. What do we really understand about concsiousness outside of neurotransmission? We do have evidence that there’re pretty strange mysteries to say the least. Like “Spooky action” of which your ipod (spintronics) is an example.
If we believe the explaination ends with neurotransmission, then we were never really “alive” or above plain chaotic computation anyways.
I think it’s worthwhile to develop a spiritual sort of contemplative on immortal concsiousness. It’s just that topping it with doctrines like a banana hat and a candy-cane stick and sandals and beards and etc. are all damaging wild assertions (not to mention annoying jerks and “Catholic school boards” like weeds in the way of progress . . . I’ll be getting attacked on that one).
In conclusion- I think concsiousness continues. But I’m feeble to say it because I don’t even know what concsiousness is and may never in my lifetime.
I think there is only one life being shared by all, we live and die as every one of them. As long as there is life we will be alive.
Without life we will just be matter, without matter we will just be space and time.
At this moment death seems to be the same state as the state of being unborn. I would not rule out future technologies to bring back some type of conscious continuation, but I’m not sure if that could happen for those who have already died before it comes to be.
How can you have space and time with out matter. At least for Schopenhauer, matter is the unity of space and time.
I can’t imagine myself sleeping. I don’t think is in the limits of our brain to conceive ourselves non-existent.
You must be thinking: “It’s not THAT hard to imagine myself sleeping.” Then you’re missing my point.
Hi, I’m Adrian and I’ll be your reader for the next couple of weeks. After that… who knows.
Pure internalized postulation on the moment we die, forgive the speculation: I can’t help but feel that when we eventually undergo somatic death, what with the speculated five minutes or so of further biological activity prior to the commencement of cell death, that the chronological relativity which we experience in dreams has the potential to manifest itself on an immeasurable scale in the final second of brain activity.
We know that the year, month, week, day or hour we’ve just experienced in the, say, twenty minute time window we know we’ve just spent napping lasted twenty minutes because of the undeniable tick-tock of the clock when we return to waking. When you don’t wake, when does it end?
Why should it end? Why shouldn’t every action we’ve taken throughout our life, of which our subconscious forgets none, be accumulated into one arbitrarily grand scene, which due to the biological impossibility of experiencing the ‘finish’ or wakening, lasts for eternity?
Could the virtue of all the actions undertaken throughout our wakening life culminate in some sort of judgement? Self-imposition of an after-life? Karma?
According to EEG and other medical reports, chemicals are released at the moment of death; dopamines? serotonin? If true would that not equate to one second of euphoria, relative to no measurement of time?
I thought matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. In the beginning i would think it would all be in its purest form, energy.
I have no problem with consciousness being part of the body, the mind/body is one thing, both are born, both die. I think we all experience the mind and body, the life and death, the joy and pain of every life.
To understand life and death one has to understand that one just goes back to “seperate existence” i.e. you fall apart, but before you were born you were ‘fallen apart’ strewn across the earth as atoms in other forms.
If you want to understand death I think understanding the physics of relativity is a good place to start, according to relativity their is no "seperateness’, what we experience as conscious separateness from others or the ‘outside’ universe is an illusion, all reality is one big giant field of energy always connected, all the time, everywhere.
View life like this
Alive = + existence
Death = - existence
But you still exist as an “existence” in a stored form (existence potential) if it wasn’t you couldn’t ever have been born (it follows from the logic). You already existed before you were born as matter and energy, you just experience reversal of consciousness back into the field.