What I think happens after death
I think that when one experience permanently comes to an end, another one immediately follows it with nothing linking them together. No soul, spirit, self, memories, or any other form of identity carrier transmigrates between them. It’s just that there cannot be an absence of experience if there are experiences occurring anywhere at any time, so when one experience permanently ends, another instantaneously follows it.
Comments (60)
You bring up a good point. In my opinion, I think it all depends on whether there actually is an aspect of our individual being that continues on after this life ends, which is currently unknown. It seems to me that it would have to be some aspect of our consciousness or mind that isn’t strictly tied up in our brains or bodies. From a naturalist perspective, there really is no such thing — when you as the body die, everything that makes you ‘you’ permanently ends as well.
If we’re taking a strict naturalist point of view, then it could be the case that the experience of a fully grown adult human could follow someone’s death, for example, and neither the person who died nor the person who’s experience followed that death would be aware that this happened. In other words, it doesn’t have to be a newly born human’s experience that follows death, it could be any living experience.
So are you basically suggesting a 'reincarnation' wherein your previous life experience is present but hidden but it acts as a depository which may/will influence decisions you make in your new incarnation?
I agree with your opening statement. Consciousness is permanent. Even while asleep you still have some hold unto the fact you exist
We already know what happens after death, have the cadaver farms to prove it, and it ain’t pretty.
That 'we know' what happens after death in the sense to which you refer, is a valid, albeit tautological conclusion relative to the biological definition of death. This 'conclusion' however, is not a conclusion in the sense of an empirically inferred contingent proposition, given that it is more or less a restatement of the premise that death means biological extermination in the sense that is ascertainable by third-parties.
Such behavioural definitions of death are therefore not in conflict with the supposedly conflicting conclusions arrived at via other definitions of death in relation to other conceptual frameworks, such as solipsism, phenomenology and presentism which present a different tautological conclusion.
Yes, something like that. This transition would be just a more extreme version of the changes re-make the self on a continual basis. We aren’t the same person from
day to day, and certainly not from year to year, but there is a continuity through change, a slowly changing thematics.
Neither destination nor direction, this north of the north pole (i.e. "life after life", "you after you") fetish is the delusion.
:death: :flower:
The other conclusions beg the question. They assume that an entity or substance exists within the biology but is not the biology, and second, that this entity or substance can somehow persist beyond the biology itself. It seems to me one should be proven before contemplating the other.
Consciousness is not an object or a subject but experience. We experience life as a body but can experience life in an alternative way too. All that is required is for the biology to die.
An experience of what? It is the experience of a body, by a body. It’s body all the way down.
Non-existence is not a state. It's nothing, so nothing can't be because it is not anything at all. The afterlife flows from Descartes's cogito. Body is substance, experience is states.
The presentist/idealist alternative doesn't speculatively assume a soul substance, rather it simply treats first-person experience as ontologically fundamental and unchanging. Of course, it's conclusions beg it's own ontology, but this is unavoidable whatever stance one takes.
The question one needs to ask, is given that different ontological assumptions about life lead to radically different conclusions about death that are in large part tautological, why choose a single ontology as being correct? Why not accept all of them and accept their respective conclusions relative to their respective ontology?
I agree with this quote completely. However, when a body dies and all of its experiential states dissolve, there are still other living bodies having experiential states, either now or in the future. I don’t think there would be a continuation or transference of any experiential states from a body that dies to a body that is living, but I do think the entirely distinct and separate experiential states of a body that is living would follow the cessation of the experience of a body that died.
This, of course, assumes that there really is no dualism — no souls, spirits, or permanent selves that inhabit bodies, just bodies having experiential states.
From everything we know, you are a physical entity. If we damage the brain in particular areas, you will lose capabilities. There are several examples. Phineus Gage had a complete personality change when a rebar shot through his skull. There are people who cannot remember longer than a few minutes, which of course limits who they are. There is an example of a man who had brain damage and could no longer see colors, everything was black and white.
Barring extremes, diet and proper firing of the brain result in a happier and different person. A person without depression is very different from a person with depression. When you get drunk, your brain hinders your ability to think. That isn't your soul being affected by alcohol.
Finally, there's death. We have countless cases. In every case of a person dying, they've remained dead. The brain is gone, and so is the person. There is no field of consciousness. No electromagnetic transportation of our consciousness. There is only the belief and desire that such things will occur.
I am not trying to be mean, or get you down. On the contrary, understanding the truth of your own inevitable death can help you in how you approach life. Make sure you make the best of it, one day it will be gone forever.
However, I am open to the possibility that when I as a body die and the experience that I as a body am having permanently comes to an end, another living body’s experience follows it. Under this view, the two experiences (i.e. mine that ended and the one that follows it) would in no way be related to each other nor would there be any connection between them. My experience stops occurring, and an experience that is occurring follows it with nothing connecting them.
It doesn’t have to be the case that the next experience is that of a baby or child. Maybe the next experience after mine ends will be that of a fully grown adult or an entirely different species.
I will be the first to admit that this is speculation, but I think it’s at least a possibility.
However... There is the possibility that once all matter in our universe has turned into black holes, accelerating away from each other in a couple of trillion of years while turning into EM radiation, so there will be nothing left tha vague massless remembrances turning into oblivion, that it all starts again. With the same you and me. Maybe we had this conversation before. Once all matter has gone in our universe and only the interaction fields are left, then why can't newly appeared matter at the Umbellicus not give birth to new particles leading to us?
On the contrary it very much does, considering the fact that all moral and ethical conclusions are relative to the premise of death that one adopts. In my opinion, society's beliefs regarding death are very much decided according to the behavioural advantages that result from holding those beliefs, which under capitalism tends to favour beliefs that motivate someone to work and spend intensely, as if they only lived once.
On the other hand, if the general public believed in reincarnation, and hence that there is no escape from the physical suffering perpetuated by unfair economic outcomes and environmental destruction, then I cannot see why they would continue to accept the current system of capitalism.
Cultural atheism under capitalism is more a less a sect of Protestant Christianity rather than being it's antithesis. The myth of the afterlife has only slightly changed, with ethereal promises of a heavenly paradise being substituted for an equally ethereal promise of perpetual nothingness - which most boomers are banking on for their post-humus escape from the mess they created on Earth.
Your point about the atheist afterlife of perpetual nothingness makes a lot of sense.
Simply because observation and study confirms the one and not the other. I am just unable to take the leap from assumption to conclusion.
This chance is almost certainly zero. Even if the universe happens again, even a slight fluctuation would result in a different outcome. You only happen once. You will never happen again. Embrace that.
On the contrary. The chance is exactly 1. I happen in an infinite variety of ways.
After death
The body (brain included): Decays and, as some spiritual folks like to describe, poetically, returns to the earth.
The mind: Supposing it survives physical death, its fate is unknown.
If you considerate the vexing mind to be situated inside matter, then it becomes blatantly and unrefutably clear that reincarnation won't happen in the lifetime of present universe. The existent universe basically renders active reincarnation inoperative. The very constitution of the present universe militates against the concept, proving it an unacceptable notion. The reincarnated will be subject to it while the universe plays a leading role and gives rise to disconnected forms of the incarnate. The present universe makes itself felt and serves the purpose of the disconnected incarnates while offering no ground for the reincarnate. The inexorable dual ejaculate, that epic clarion of dual delight, serves the purpose to rigorously divide the realms between which true reincarnation takes effect, thereby effectively eliminating the naive notion of the soul transmigrating through bodies.
The higher dimensional erect, that strict domain on which the dual ejaculate propagates, combined with the triumphant and objective analysis of the ejaculates, categorically liquidates the phenomenon of a reincarnation in the current universe.
We are inevitably led to the trident conclusion that the age-old shields, swords, and banners utilized to sustain the irrational image of a reincarnating soul, should be merciless eliminated and be replaced by the more modest notion of eternal reincarnation.
Let's all celebrate this historic victory of science pure and simple!
Though your assertion is questionable, Gage was only used as a popular reference. His contribution to our understanding that the brain is who you are is so insignificant, it doesn't matter whether you doubt the account or not. Here's a link that covers a brief history of lobotomies since the 1880's.
https://www.livescience.com/42199-lobotomy-definition.html
Here's a quote from it:
While a small percentage of people supposedly showed improved mental conditions or no change at all, for many patients, lobotomy had negative effects on their personality, initiative, inhibitions, empathy and ability to function on their own, according to Lerner.
"The main long-term side effect was mental dullness," Lerner said. People could no longer live independently, and they lost their personalities, he added.
:death: :flower:
But there is above the North Pole. North is up, south is down. Reflecting the Boreal Imperium being on top of the globe. Like after this life is a logical necessity actually.
Does tomorrow come after today, or is today always today?
You are thinking of yourself as object instead of treating yourself phenomenologically
I am – highly corroborated by the extant physical, biological, neurocognitive & existential evidence – an 'ecology-bound, phenomenal self-modeling, agent' object ... and not (merely) a woo-of-the-"explanatory gap" idealist/subjectivist (re: "bracketed" phenomenology, etc).
Worm's fest is what happens.
But what if a new universe comes to be behind this one, in a new big bang. Why shouldn't the new particles there condense in a new me? This wouldn't be possible in two parallel universes because my parallel copy can't be me. Suppose all particles in our universe get lost, leaving photons only. Wouldn't the collection of newly condensed particles into me actually be me?
Anatman suggests we come from our body but death has nothing to do with consciousness
:up:
For the individual there is nothing, then there is life, then there is nothing. Everything that composed one's life -- muscle, senses, memories, ideas, dreams, fears, hopes... disappears forever.
My view rules out the existence of an after life; it doesn't rule out the existence of God. Perhaps God thinks that one life is sufficient, is gift enough. I haven't checked with God on that point. I don't find the idea of an eternal life all that attractive.
Some things, once is enough (visit to the dentist).
Some things, we want more and more (horizontal dancing).
We don't ever want to see our dentist, die! You want coitus, live! Hmmmmm... Diabolical!
Are we in hell?
That's what you think. The body brain and physical world can reappear again after a new big bang. How much we don't like this, it will still happen.
That's what you think.
We were dead (pre-life nonexistence)! There was something and we can't remember OR there was nothing, that's why we don't remember. Memory is the key to solving the mystery of death. However false memories, confabulation, Mandela effect, poor recall (memory isn't perfect). Even then, re Socrates & rationalists, what we don't recollect is physical in nature; we still seem to be perfection-oriented (Platonic Forms)...some of us at least.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum
Everybody loves you when you're dead. They crucify you when you get it wrong, when things are fine they put you ahead.They laugh at you with your trousers down or pick the stones and aim them at you're head. When you're alive, they won't care what you said or what you deserve and all the blood you bled.
It doesn't matter what you try to hide, the sun comes out and then the truth is read. Your fans will love you while you're alive, but the wreaths are laid by the rest instead.
Everybody loves you when you're dead.