Being and Death

Hey- i recently thought a lot about this too ! Like, people say it is impossible to experience 'nothingness,' but we experienced it before we were concieved , surely we can not just have consciousness all of a sudden, it must either have developed in the womb (grew more and more ) or that whether we can remember it or not we have experienced nothingness. I have this slightly mad idea sometimes that consciousness is created through mother to child ! Although I have that thought on on and off days at a time.

^To second poster, in what way have you experienced before being born? The closest analogy during life, coma and sleep, involve no experience. You fall asleep or go unconscious and suddenly you hear your alarm ringing. No sense of time passing, no self or external awareness. That’s how it is for me. I don’t see any reason to assume consciousness comes on gradually, in every case when it’s lost it’s clear it simply turns on

To OP, I think you are right. Empirically it makes sense to assume we’d only ever be aware of experiencing, just simply by definition.

I can't recall being dead before I was born, oddly.

Quoting praxis

I can't recall being dead before I was born, oddly.

can you recall being 1 year old much or at all?

Reply to wax

Not at all. Anyway, I’m thinking that losing your sense of self may feel like death, in a way. They say the experience can be terrifying.

Buddhists often use phrases like ‘death on the cushion’, when referring to their meditation practice. I’ve endeavored to have such an experience but so far haven’t come close.

Quoting praxis

Not at all. Anyway, I’m thinking that losing your sense of self may feel like death, in a way. They say the experience can be terrifying.

Buddhists often use phrases like ‘death on the cushion’, when referring to their meditation practice. I’ve endeavored to have such an experience but so far haven’t come close.

I've often felt that Buddhist practices are linked with death.

I think that might be attractive to some people, as for some people life is quite often suffering, so in a death process by following Buddhist practices as well as leading to a kind of deader state, also may lead to a dying of some of the suffering.

I think you are right.

The Stoics used the phrase, "Death means nothing to us." Why? Something you can look into...

There are many things that are dead, that probably don't experience being or time, but rather are dead to both. If most of the world is dead, than it is right to conclude that such a state of existence is entered upon the termination of a life.

However, there are many spiritual philosophies out there, and I weigh the truth of them myself as you might if you explore such possibilities.

Reply to Nils Loc What about the concept of a soul?

There are two things that we associate with life:

1. The thinking mind
2. Perception, through our senses, of the external world

1 has priority over 2 since we seem to be inner beings i.e. live in our minds and use the external world only to gain sustenance for our bodies. That's the reason why we identify the soul as the thinking mind - the consciousness that everyone is aware of.

What if that's wrong?

The soul could be something that doesn't think and yet persists after death. It doesn't think, it can't because it needs a brain to do the thinking for it. It drifts through space-time and awaits another body to reincarnate in.

Let me explain this better:

2 above is an important aspect of the self, the part which supposedly becomes nonexistent at death. Our sensory system is very important to our existence. Here's where Buddhism comes in. According to Buddhism we have 6 senses, 1 more than the classical 5 senses. The mind is considered the sixth sense organ in Buddhism. This means that there's something, the soul(?), that doesn't think by itself and exists even in the absence of consciousness.

Quoting Nils Loc

Being dead for some is presumably an impossible state from a 1st person point of view.

Yes, exactly.

Quoting Nils Loc

it may be that there is nothing that it is like to be dead

Of course.

Quoting Nils Loc

just as there is nothing that it is like to be asleep.

I presume that you're referring to deep-sleep. But don't be so sure. Even if we don't remember anything from deep-sleep, that doesn't mean that there's no consciousness or awareness of any kind. After all, the body isn't shut-down, so who can say that there's no consciousness at all. So that has to e admitted to be a question whose answer is unknown.

Quoting Nils Loc

Presumably, being dead is no different than being asleep from the absent view of the one sleeping.

There's no such thing as being dead. It's a contradiction in terms, a logical impossibility. You can't experience a time when there's no experience.

Quoting Nils Loc

Do you believe that a certain proportion of living species today, let's call them "simpler" organisms, have nothing that it is like to be alive?

Of course not. Not all consciousness has to be like ours. Often what we mean by consciousness isn't well-defined, but tends to have human-chauvinism, mammal-chauvinish, animal-chauvinism, or biological-organism-chauvinism.

So let's not jump to the conclusion that other biological-organisms don't have consciousness.

I define "consciousness" as the property of being a purposeful-responsive device, similar enough to the speaker to give him/her the impression of "consciousness".

Quoting Nils Loc

Do creatures require some form of consciousness to be at all?

Of course. See above.

Quoting Nils Loc

eing must include the sleeping being that is not the dead being, but there is no necessary discernment between states for the organism experiencing these states.

There's no such thing as experiencing the state of being dead. As for deep-sleep, no one knows.

Quoting Nils Loc

If there is nothing it is like to be dead, will there always only ever be what is it like to be alive (the phenomena of being)?

Yes. But of course it eventually won't be waking consciouisness. At the end-of-life, there will be ever deepening deep-sleep. Eventually the person won't know that there ever were, or even could be, such things as waking life, worldly-life, identity, individuality, time, events, danger, fear, loss, lack, or incompletion.

Because there'll be no awareness or knowledge of any such thing as time or events, the person will be in timelessness. Though, as judged by an observer, that person is about to completely shut down, the dying person in timelessness won't know or care about there being shutdown or anything to shut down.

Quoting Nils Loc

Is this a metaphysical, lame or nonsensical inquiry?

No. But, by the way, I don't believe in any metaphysics, including Materialism, because "Exist", "There is...", and "Real" are metaphysically-undefined.

Michael Ossipoff

11 Tu
0406 UTC