Can you imagine to be dead?

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.

The closest thing probably is understanding how it was before you were born, that state of nothingness. So, yes, you can, based on the logical example of what death is, ceasing to exist.

The uterus is not the “nothingness”.

Fine, before we were conceived.

I never said “Are” can’t exist. I said “you and i ARE.” We exist. Forgive me my error of saying “One is or one isn’t”. You are right, that isn’t correct. One is, pure and simple.

The point is, can their “be” a non-existence? Well, of course not, for if anything is to “be”, “is”, “are”, there must be existence. So what can happen to someone who dies? We can say that death exists, but not that it doesn’t. We can say that death is something, but not that it is nothing.

Non-existence is utter gibberish. We can neither observe it nor conceive it. The whole idea of it has no merit.

Do not confuse non existence with non consciousness since they are not the same
For when one dies they are no longer conscious but their physical body still exists

Indeed. But since we do not identify people as merely their physical bodies (I have seen none of your physical bodies yet I surmise that I am speaking to humans, for your minds, your language, etc. displays itself), we can’t say that when someone’s physical bodies dies, that they altogether die, for it is quite obvious that the physical body is but one aspect of their total being (which includes mind), and that their mind cannot be tasted, touched, smelled, heard, nor seen.

So it is clear, via our senses, that the material aspect of the being, the body (including of course, the brain) rots away and dies. But we can’t say the same about mind, aka, that which see’s but can not be seen. That which tastes but cannot be tasted. This isn’t mere semantics, it’s quite real. We are talking about the exterior on one hand (the body) and the interior on the other hand (mind, or soul). We cannot say what happens to the interior of an organism that dies, only the exterior. But we can say, via logic, that non existence can not be seen, nor comprehended, and therefore, is logically unsound, in the same way that “God” is logically unsound.

The counter argument to this is that the mind and brain are one and the same. That everything can be reduced to matter, and therefore when we see that matter is dead, we can say that the mind is dead. I find this view to be reductionistic to the point of absurdity. For again, we can never reduce matter to that which observes matter, for we cannot see, cannot touch, cannot hear, cannot smell, and cannot taste what we call “mind” or “consciousness”.

One more thing, I find (or rather, suspect) that there is a pathological aspect to the belief that when you die, that you will cease to exist forever and ever more, or that you will be unconscious for ever and ever more. And that can be called the UTOPIA of the once-and-for-all end of suffering, of pain, of aversion, and so on. I find (or rather, suspect) that the pathology that rules the materialist is in many cases the same as the pathology that rules the Christian, the Islamist, and so forth. The desire for an eternity of everlasting non-suffering. Existence has shown us no such thing, and we ought not presume such a thing if we take this question seriously.

Mind is a function of the brain and so when the latter ceases to function then so too does the former. And while eternal non
suffering cannot be proven there is precisely no evidence to suggest otherwise. Until there is it remains the default position

The notion that eternal non-suffering (a complete fabrication of the mind, totally at opposite to what we know or can conceive) should be the default position is ludicrous to me, unless one takes religious utopianism as ones default position, rather than empirical reality (which shows us that suffering comes and goes)

The mind isn’t the outcome of the brain anymore than heads is the outcome of tails. They are mutually dependent, yes, but neither is the “prime mover” so to speak. To perceive (mind) is CLEARLY different than to be perceived (brain).

To exist - existence - has to do with BEING.
When one has died, there is no existence since there is no being. That’s the way I look at it anyway.

The default position seems to be existence, rather than non-existence. After all, we are alive right now, aren’t we?

existence is the only position.