Thoughts on death from a non-believer.
Seizing to exist. No consciousness, no thoughts. Eternal absence. Like before we were born, but without the prospect of coming to life at some point in time. So easy and yet so difficult to comprehend. We accept those short periods of absence when we are asleep or unconscious because we know we will be coming back round to being the centre of the universe. The prospect of never existing again though... Millions of years go by, the planet gets inhibited by another form of life or gets sucked into a tiny black hole. The universe continues to be there, as it always has, occupying infinity with no beginning or end, in time or space. Forever evolving, contracting and expanding. And where are we? Absent. Like before we were born but no starting point this time. Non-existent... FOREVER. Harrowing or liberating?
Comments (40)
At least you won't have to listen to Donald Trump ever again.
You managed to not exist just fine for around 13.3 billion years before you were born; you'll do fine after you're dead.
BTW, the earth probably won't be sucked into a tiny black hole. Chances are we won't get sucked into a black hole at all, and if we do, it will probably be larger than tiny.
You won't have to worry about misspelling ever again:
Like, "Seizing to exist"; "centre"; British much? "planet gets inhibited by another form of life; or maybe you meant 'inhibited' instead of 'inhabited'?
The fact that we didn't exist, and that we won't exist at any moment (maybe before the next 10 minutes is up) should stimulate us to make the most of existence while it lasts. Eat, drink, be merry; fuck your brains out; don't bother finishing dull boring books; eat dessert first; tell your son of a bitch boss to shove his head up his ass... As you have surmised, once you are dead, that's it. FOREVER.
"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of "world history" — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and
flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that it floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts. It is strange that this should be the effect of the intellect, for after all it was given only as an aid to the most unfortunate, most delicate, most evanescent beings in order to hold them for a minute in existence, from which otherwise, without this gift, they would have every reason to flee as quickly as Lessing's son. That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in a blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of existence by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have something of the same character.
[...]
What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in
an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance — hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger. In view of this, whence in all the world comes the urge for truth?"
This is one of my favorite philosophical pieces. It's profound.
Or it could be cyclical like sleep and awake. There is evidence when one understands life as continuance of memory. There is as much reason to believe in cyclicality of life as there is not. Probably more reason to believe in cyclicality.
Super-massive black holes like the ones at the center of galaxies (including ours) are many, many times solar mass. It is thought that the super-massive black holes at the centers of galaxies formed about the same time as the galaxy itself.
It might be possible to create tiny (microscopic) black holes in a big, big, big particle accelerator. Why wouldn't this tiny black hole consume the earth? Because Hawking radiation from the black hole would cause the little black hole to shrink faster than it could grow. It would disappear.
"The smallest ones are known as primordial black holes. Scientists believe this type of black hole is as small as a single atom but with the mass of a large mountain." says NASA.
When did he know this and how did he know it?
10 minutes ago he googled "how are black holes made?".
https://www.livescience.com/27811-creating-mini-black-holes.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-is-a-black-hole-58.html
Well, actually, I read about this first 10-20 years ago.
Oh, he knows his holes, especially black ones...
And lerning to spel.
Saying death is "like before you were born" almost assumes the very thing you're arguing against. As if you could compare what its like being conscious and self-aware, to what it was like to be non-existent, with absolutely no self-awareness. There would be nothing to compare it to. It's not like you could think back to what it was like before your birth and say, "Oh ya, I remember that, it was the absence of X, Y, and Z."
Yes, we wouldn't want any gobbledegook would we, like in Deuteronomy where God finds it necessary to insist that we don't boil a young goat in its mother’s milk (14:21)
Or Ezekiel, who claims to see four creatures in a storm or each having four faces (a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle) and four conjoined wings. They had human hands under the wings, one on each squared side of their bodies. The feet, which looked like those of calves, shone like brass and were attached to peglegs (Ezekiel 1:4-10)
Later god demands some bizarre ritual with his hair.
God becomes a burning bush while talking with Moses (Exodus 3:3-4).
God will kill Aaron if he goes to minister without wearing a golden bell and blue pomegranates (Exodus 28:31-35).
God says that we can cure leprosy by killing a bird, putting the bird’s blood on another bird, killing a lamb, wiping the lamb blood on the leper, and killing two doves (Leviticus 14).
Samson claims his strength originates from his long hair (Judges 16:17) yet nature teaches us that it’s shameful for a man to have long hair (1 Corinthians 6:11-14).
Don't even get me started on Revelation.
Shame we don't have so much religion anymore to clear up all that gobbledegook.
If you feel like the center of the universe....no wonder death bothers you so. Does anyone know where the center of the universe is? You say the universe is infinite and that it has a center. This couldn't be right, right?
The vitalism of life and the protean consciousness are an obvious, irreducible prodigy.. And that we change through states of consciousness while alive, as you mention even to the oblivion of seeming unconsciousness and back to waking consciousness (with the genii hypnagogic and pompic states interstitially) , is a subjective, ineffable event. Consciousness isn't in us, we are in consciousness.
Do you accept deep sleep? Funny how you can't live without sleep: the absence of a small, local frame for consciousness is required for you to continue an embodied existence. Rather, return of the state of universal consciousness to itself at night as pure consciousness appears as death/deep sleep/unconsciousness to us. Your accepting it, then, is about like your accepting food. You accept life.
I remember when they fired up the Hadron, there were some folks concerned that they might swallow the earth in a black hole. I wonder if scientists really discover particles with these machines, or simply create them.
If we just pop into existence as aware, conscious, conceptually blank organisms what's to say that doesn't just happen again?
You have missed the whole point. Death doesn’t bother me at all, which is why I don’t need religion.
Again, you took that too literally. We all feel like we are the centre of the universe because we experience the world through our senses. This does not mean that we are actually the centre of the universe. Duh!
Either there's no afterlife or there is.
If there's no afterlife I'm devastated to know that all my loved ones and the moments we shared together are meaningless flashes of fireflies in an otherwise cold and dark night.
If there's an afterlife I'm afraid it'll be worse than what I'm already going through.
So, yeah, I'm between Scylla and Charybdis on death and what follows.
But this both assumes that life is a singular concept and that ' afterlife' is a meaningful concept such that it can asserted or negated to mutual exclusion of the other possibility. If it concluded that life isn't a singular concept or that the afterlife isn't a meaningful concept, then the logical laws of the excluded middle and of non-contradiction does not apply.
I can meaningfully assert the end of someone's life other than my own in the deflationary sense of Moore, by saying "here is a dead person" while pointing to a particular corpse.
For if my definition of "living person" is this particular corpse when it was biologically active, then by definition it is now dead. I would therefore contradict myself to now assert continuing life on the corpse's behalf.
On the other hand, if by "this person" i meant the behavioural and functional roles I associated with this corpse, then these roles are still existent, for I can still meaningfully imagine these roles and phenomena after the body has expired. In this more abstract sense of "living person" it would be meaningful to speak of continuation rather than "after-life" , for the simple reason that the death of an abstract entity is unimaginable.
I can also apply the same concepts to an imaginary fictitious person, namely to my ego as witnessed in my imagination. But this is where the application of my concepts must end, for i have now exhausted my empirical criteria for the application of these concepts.
Oh...well, it's your thread so apologies. Quoting CuddlyHedgehogThat said...you neglected to address my comments. What do you mean by "accept" here? You'll die without these "short periods of absence." And, honestly, an individual is unconscious for far more than a short period of his lifetime: lets see, awake for 16 hrs/day, asleep 8 hrs/day = unconscious for 33% of your life minus hypnagogic/pompic states and dreaming, which are essentially mystical states and hard to define (there's something of the non local in them).
There's a lot to learn, metaphysically, from the universe forcing deep sleep/local unconsciousness upon the life it has engendered (as a requisite for this life). In some way, local consciousness is immersed in death, for that is what it is to be embodied. Life/local consciousness/embodiment/foreground, depends on death/non conscious/disembodiment/background. It's like the inline and outline being a part of the same lineament, a gestalt.
Death, in a way, is simply the lack of omniscience in our local consciousness. So, we're partially dead/unconscious while alive/conscious. Pure consciousness, non locally, is death/nonexistence from the vantage point of local consciousness.
It isn't so much that you once didn't exist, than that the same background that was there when "you" didn't exist is still there while you are existing. Perhaps what dies is a mere bundle of sensations and memories, an agency that mistook itself for something lasting in its relatively short duration. There are meditations when I feel this life is taking a very long time to run its course...and there are reflections when I know that, in the grand scheme of things, it takes only a little longer than the "lifetime" of a freshly hatched photon in a particle accelerator.
Or is your post to be read as verse and not at all literally? (In which case I'm sorry but it is impossible to have a discussion, and the absence of metaphor in the OP is noted).
Have I told you this before - You need to be careful what you write or people will think you're bitter and a crank.
I like this quote too. Maybe I'll have to read some Kneechee after all.
Isn't this the point in the lecture where you bring up flying spaghetti monsters?
As someone who is closer to death than most on this forum, I see death as just something that is going to happen. It's just what people do. I can see it coming closer, it's just around the other side of the planet like the death star waiting for a few more minutes so it can pass the horizon and destroy me. Or something like that.
Anyway - it's no big deal. It just gets funnier the funnier the older I get, although I will admit to a bit of sweat on my brow.
That time never arrives. It will never arrive for you. You never experience a time when there's no experience. There's no you distinct from your experience.
Your survivors will experience the time after your complete shutdown. You won;t.
What will you experience then? Going to sleep. Basically like every other time you went to sleep.
When you're asleep, and going into deeper sleep, you won't know or care about prospects, worldly life, identity, time, or events. Don't worry about it. I guarantee that it won't be a problem.
To be continued tomorrow morning.
Michael Ossipoff
I think that's in Revelations isn't it, or was that a baked-bean monster, I can never remember?
I was going to but fell asleep (unconscious) halfway through reading this thread. Can you summarise the main points?
But here lurks a problem, for our notion of sleep is empirical, even for so called "maximally unconscious sleep."
For example, the meaning of a "fully unconscious sleep" from a first-person perspective is the experience of being presently awake but without having memories of being asleep. This is the first-person empirical definition of "fully unconscious sleep".
Without the experience of being awake yet having no previous memories of being asleep, one cannot assert the existence of fully unconscious sleep. Hence the notion of an infinitely long and unconscious sleep is a meaningless sequence of words that contributes nothing to any discussion.
What do you think about the possibility of everyone's consciousness continuing indefinitely once it has been awakened? Each conscious entity has its own possibility-story that adapts to allow its consciousness to survive within that possibility-story. For example, someone could die in a car accident in my reality, but in theirs, the paramedics are somehow able to revive that someone, so that their reality can continue. Or perhaps there is no interdependence between realities - each conscious entity's reality branches off from one of many source realities at the time of birth of consciousness. Since I can only have conscious self-awareness in one reality, I guess this would mean that I would be the only truly self-aware conscious entity in my reality...?
A third party can certainly make sense of your death and say that you are "permanently no longer around to tell the tale", since your corpse can be empirically verified as being deceased according to biological definition. So your death has empirically meaningful behavioural consequences for everyone except for yourself. But that doesn't mean that you can meaningfully refer to your own expiry and say things like "i will be asleep forever", and that is nonsense even from a third-person's perspective.
It is naturally tempting to imagine oneself from a third-person perspective and pretend to witness one's own death, and to mistake this imagined thought experiment for self-knowledge. But this attempt at deriving first-person knowledge by making a transcendental analogy with the third-person creates many philosophical problems by running over the bounds of sense without any regard for principles of cognitive closure and empirical meaning.
There is an incommensurable semantic barrier that separates our behavioural understanding of other minds from our mentalistic understanding of our own experiences.
You wrote:
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It does. It never ends. None of us will ever experience a time without experience. Consciousness never ends.
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Typical Materialists and Science-Worshippers will say otherwise, but they’d be confusing their survivors’ experience with their own experience...without giving sufficient consideration to what they mean.
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Interesting idea, one that hadn’t occurred to me.
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But I think that every life always leads to the person’s death, even in that person’s own experience. The experience-story has to be self-consistent, in terms of the physical laws of the world that is part of that story. The person’s death is a consequence of the rest of the story.
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When that death arrives, the person’s experience would just be that of going to sleep. But full unconsciousness, with no experience or consciousness never arrives.
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But, strictly speaking, it can’t be said for sure that that final, peaceful, and well-deserved rest and sleep—which I call the end-of-lives, will arrive at the end of this life.
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Though it’s an unfashionable “no-no”to say so in our dogmatically Materialist culture, there’s no particular reason to believe that the end-of-lives will arrive at the end of this life.
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I’ve discussed the reason why each of us is in a life. If that reason remains, at the end of this life, then what does that suggest? Referring to what happened before, the beginning of a life, due to that reason—Why wouldn’t that happen again, if the same reason still obtains?
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That suggests a sequence of lives, for as long as the reason for birth remains.
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India’s philosophers have been saying for millennia that the sequence of lives continues until we achieve life-completion, after many lifetimes.
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Every life-experience possibility-story is timeless, as are the abstract if-then facts of which it’s composed.
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Yes, each life-experience possibility-story is a completely separate, independent logical system.
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The relation between all of our life-experience possibility-stories is that they all take place in the same possibility-world. Inevitably, for self-consistency, your story’s world must include a species to which you belong, with other members of that species. Among the infinity of life-experience possibility-stories, of course there’s one for every possible being, including the other people in your life-experience possibility-story.
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Yes and no. You’re the protagonist of your story, which is a completely independent logical-system story entirely about your experience. But the physical reality in your experience includes other conscious beings, of many species, including your own species.
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Michael Ossipoff
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Sime says:
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Nonsense.
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There’s no “empirical” evidence for “maximally unconscious sleep”. The fact that you don’t remember it doesn’t mean that you weren’t conscious to some degree. Maybe so, or maybe not. You can’t know.
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Maybe there’s a sleep in which you’re genuinely completely unconscious, or maybe not. You have no evidence one way or the other.
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It goes without saying that your experience is “empirical” :D …if, by empirical, you mean based on observation instead of numerical calculation.
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Again, nonsense. That isn’t evidence of “fully unconscious sleep”.
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Having no memories from deep-sleep doesn’t mean that you were “fully unconscious”.
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Maybe you were, maybe not.
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Ridiculous. There’s no empirical evidence of “fully unconscious sleep”. See above.
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“One cannot assert the existence of fully unconscious sleep” because absence of memory from deep-sleep isn’t evidence that one wasn’t at least somewhat conscious during sleep.
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I don’t guarantee that there’s no awareness, no consciousness at all during deep-sleep, including the (eventually) deep sleep at the end-of-lives.
Obviously complete shutdown will occur. You won't experience it...or any time after it. Only your survivors will experience that time.
Not only will you not experience it. You won't know or care about its impending arrival either, because you will be without waking consciousness of such matters, while you're still aware and concsiojs to some degree, before the shutdown of consciousness and awareness.
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I haven’t made any such claim.
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But it’s obvious (or should be) that you’ll never experience a time when you don’t experience.
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Eternity isn’t an infinite amount of time. It’s timelessness.
I haven't claimed that deep-sleep is completely unconscious. I've emphasized repeatedly that you never experience a time of complete unconsciousness. ...in ordinary deep-sleep, or in the final sleep at the end-of-lives.
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Other than in Biblical Literalist interpretations, it’s pretty much agreed that there’s an end-of-lives (even if it’s just at the end of this particular life), when you’ll go to sleep without waking.
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We can agree to disagree about whether, at the end of this life, you’re likely to wake into a next life.
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You need to get it straight about what you mean. Rather than waste everyone’s time, it would be best if you would do so before continuing to post on this topic.
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Michael Ossipoff
Yes.
We'll be there until complete shutdown of consciousness, awareness and perception, but, before that, we'll be in sleep, maybe deep-sleep (because it isn't known whether or not deep-sleep is fully unconscious). ...and, in that sleep, we won't know or care about such things as life, it's problems, menaces, striving, lack or incompletion. ...or time or events. So we also won't know or care about the matter of whether we're going to wake up later.
...because we'll just be in comfortable, restful, peaceful sleep.
I say that's our natural state. Eventually we return to it.
Michael Ossipoff
You can't be sure that there's no prospect of a next life. I'm not trying to make an issue about that, but it can't be proved that there isn't a next life.
In the East, it's widely-accepted that there's reincarnation. At these forums (as I said in my other reply), any mention of it is an unfashsionable "no-no".
Though reincarnation is implied by my metaphysics, the question of reincarnation doesn't much bear on our topic here. But I just wanted to briefly comment that we can't be sure that it doesn't happen.
As I was mentioning in my other reply, even if there isn't reincarnation, or even if this life is a person's last life, the person won't know or care about the matter of a prospect of existing in another life, because s/he'll be comfortably, restfully, peacefully asleep.
Liberating. You won't know or care about whether you're going to wake and live more. ...or any other concern, worry or incompletion.
Mark Twain said something that I like:
"I was dead for millions of years before I was born, and it didn't inconvenience me a bit."
Michael Ossipoff
On the other hand, if there is an after-life, then 'being asleep' might be the closest analogy. It's the big sleep. Then the trumpet sounds and we wake up. Then it's judgement day. It may or may not be piffle but it's not logically incoherent. So I submit.
Death will be like going to sleep. If there isn't reincarnation, then death will finally become sleep. .
...and that doesn't depend on there being an "afterlife" (if I can borrow a term popular with Atheists and Materialists).
Forget about "not existing". You never reach time time of your complete shutdown at death, or any time after it. Only your survivors experience that time.
When people say that (even from their own point of view), they "won't exist", one can only wonder what they think they mean.
Michael Ossipoff