When you die, I suspect you wake up crying.

Great Debates
1

This post isn’t about the paranormal or whether there is, in fact, life after death. Rather, it’s about the mistaken philosophical conclusions to which atheists sometimes come. In fact, for the sake of this thread, we’re going to assume that when you die, there is no afterlife, and you are dead forever.

There are two versions of the Incorrect Interpretation of What It Is Like to Die, as I call it here: the Mean Version and the Nice Version. Both are mistaken in that it is implied or stated that one experiences death after one loses all ability to experience anything.

The Mean Version
You dead, mthfa! And you dead forever! Ain’t no sweet chariot coming down to sweep you up to Abraham’s bosom. No sir. Just you in your grave, all trapped in there–rotting piteously! The seasons will come and go, the earth itself will be swallowed up by the sun a few billion years from now, and all you’ll be is cinders in a dying star. You dead, mthf**a!

The Nice Version
Lay your burden down, sweet friend; let the reaper take you easily. When you close at last those heavy lids, all duties, all troubles, all sources of stress or consternation will dissolve like mist–and all that will remain are eons of peaceful rest. The seasons will come and go, the birds twitter in the oaks, and you shall be returned to nature, one with all, at rest for eternity.

I think we’ve all read or heard sentiments like the ones above. It all depends on the type of non-believer. Some want to taunt you because you believe naively in the Resurrection. Some want to comfort because you think that fear and loathing of death must accompany the atheist worldview. But either approach is incorrect, if we take seriously the tenets of Modern Science.

Here are the facts. If any of these is unscientific, let me know. I’ll recant!

  1. No region of space-time is any real or more actual than any other. 500 years ago in Africa has just as much being as tomorrow near Beta Centauri.

Why do we think or feel otherwise? Simply because we occupy one patch of space-time and not another. But this perspective in no wise alters what was, is, or will be. In fact, the future is already just as real as today appears to us right now.

  1. The passage of time is NOT a process. Similarly, the passage of times does NOT turn the present into the future.

With a little thought, the truth of the above is readily apparent. While it is true that all processes take time, time itself is not a process nor the product of a process. Consider a chemical reaction. We dump sodium bicarbonate into vinegar, and the process of neutralization occurs. If we dump it, it does occur; if we don’t, it does not. The process is contingent on our actions and the chemical and physical properties involved.

But time is not contingent on any actions. Would the years stop if the earth stopped revolving around the sun? No. Can we speed time up or slow it down? No. We cannot influence it, catalyze it, encourage it or discourage it. It is not a process; rather, it is a location.

Let’s put these facts together with the reality of death. We die; we’re gone. What happens?

We wake up as squawling newborn babies.

The reason is simple: We occupy a certain region of spacetime; that region never goes away (Fact 1), is never ground by time’s grounder into oblivion, as time is a location, not a process (Fact 2).

Of course, we do not remember our future, and our future is the same as it ever was or ever will be. The same life events within the same space-time.

Likewise there is no oblivion, pleasant or un-, to be experienced. We are not there in space-time to experience it. Just as I experienced no unpleasantness when supernovae eons ago exploded and thereby formed the iron running in my blood this moment, I will experience nothing positive or negative when the sun withers in the future. I will, however, experience my experiences within my patch of space-time, and nothing can ever undo that (“The writing finger having writ…”).

We must, however, consider the question of how merciful all the above facts truly are. I would hold that the negativity we experienced in the past continues to be experienced in that piece of space-time (that is, the passage of time does not obliviate it), and likewise all the good we experiened continues to be so experienced.

This is quite unfair, perhaps, to those who experienced more negative than positive. It may, in fact, be that, for some, the Mean Version of an experienced oblivion is preferable to an unpleasant life within space-time that continues to persist.

What do YOU think?

2

I could swear that Nietche (sp?) posited something similar. I vaguely remember him writing something about you better live life good the first time because you’ll be repeating it forever.

Then again, I could be horribly wrong. In any event, I’ve heard this idea before and it’s an interesting one. I’d like to think it was true on some level, but I don’t.

Is there any reason for us to assume space/time would act the way you say?

3

This statement is self-contradictory. I don’t know of any serious atheist who believes that one experiences being dead.

4

The way it seems to me is that since all we can perceive is conscious existance, then from our standpoint that’s all that exists. I’m immortal, for the simple reason that the universe that I can perceive begins and ends with my birth and death. Nothing else is relevant. I won’t claw at the inside of my coffin, or live in eternal torment or bliss, or anything else. I’ll simply be gone. And it won’t matter to me.

That’s comforting to me, because it has happened billions of times already. People come, live in a little bubble universe of their own consciousness, and then it pops and it’s gone. But someone else comes along. Your notion that ‘we die and then wake up crying’ is close to that notion, except that it implies a continuous chain from one event to the other, which I don’t think is reasonable.

Modern science leaves open all kinds of other possibilities. For example, if the universe is truly infinite, then perhaps my consciousness will rise again in the sense of a random event creating the same memories I have now and continuing on. I think Frank Tipler covered this in ‘The Physics of immortality’. His argument was the eventually we will all be ‘resurrected’ in the sense that our continuing ability to harness the universe and model information in computers will lead to the point where we can recreate everything that ever existed, including all the people who ever lived. Or something like that. It’s been years and years since I read the book, and it was fairly thick going at the time.

That leads to an existential question about what truly makes a consciousness. If I die, and a million years from now someone creates all my memories in a computer and turns it on, will I ‘wake up’ and feel exactly as I do now? Are we all headed for this form of immortality? Or are we doomed to flicker in and out of various states of consciousness as the endless patterns of an infinite universe come together and fly apart?

I think I’m rambling now.

5

Here’s a fascinating link which covers some of this material.

6

You are incorrect here. We can indeed influence time. Relativity says that by warping space one can influence time. Granted, as a practical matter we can’t affect much. However, it is indeed possible to speed up or slow down time in some circumstances.

Also, I don’t understand why one would wake up as a screaming baby. Babies are not conscious. (At least, I have no reason to believe that a newborn is any more conscious than an animal.) Wouldn’t it make more sense to “wake up” a few years old? Of course, becoming conscious isn’t a simple switch. So you’d sorta become gradually more “awake”.

Also, what Gyan said.

7

Sure, because that’s exactly how they act and how Science accepts them as acting.

8

Of course they don’t. But what they can often implies things that are not. It’s the presentation of how-one-dies at the emotional level.

9

Naaah, it was Kevin Spacey

10

I’ll grant you this, but it’s a subtle point. Can we warp the space-time of USA year 1983? Of course not. Once a location in space-time is fixed (and they all seem fixed to us except those in the present or future), it cannot be altered.

By the same token, I am “influencing” time in the Einsteinian sense just by moving my arm or driving my car (because of the principles of relativity), but this is not “influencing” time in the sense I meant in the post, and neither would the larger influence you mention here. It would simply choosing a particular reality within the laws of space-time.

Yep, you’re correct. The baby thing is just one way of looking at it. Consciousness does flow into and through us from the void; quite an unusual thing, but there it is.

11

[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
I’m immortal, for the simple reason that the universe that I can perceive begins and ends with my birth and death.

[quote]

Yeah, we’re limitedly immortal.

And yet, we can wrestle with these insights even within this limited sphere of immortality that we possess. Personally, I feel that these insights point to Something Greater. Many disagree.

I think that’s the insight: continuous evolution within Whatever We Are.

12

And how are you to know which is (was) the first time around? Am I living my first incarnation now, or have I been here before, and this life is merely an echo of things that have gone before?

13

This does not really mean anything. I think what you are trying to say is that all space-time exists at once or something. I have hears such theories but they have certainly not been proven as scientific fact. In fact, it does seem unlikely that you could travel to 500 years ago Africa like you were traveling to another physical place.

See above.

Actually, Einstein theorized and experiements have proven that we can slow time down.

You are missing a few logical steps. Assuming all these facts are correct ( a big stretch) they still do not support your conclusion.

Also, the baby is likely made from parts from a lot of folks.

If we do not remember anything about our future or past for that matter, how do “we” wake up as anything? One our memories and what makes us “us” ceases to be, we cease to be.

I think you need to look up the definition of “scientific”

14

These two and The Aeschines Version seem to all be logically the same thing. Some find one or the other more comforting or more honest or whatever, but they don’t seem to differ in particulars.

I don’t see why anyone who didn’t believe in an after-life would need to elaborate on things any further than, “Each consciousness gets one life, and when it’s over, they get nothing else.”

To quote the great philosopher and literalist Opus T. Penguin, “You’re born, you live, you go on some diets, you die.”

15

I hope no one minds if I throw a few uninformed observations out regarding the OP:

I’ve heard sentiments like these before, but I never really took them to mean anything more than expressions of the speaker’s attitude toward death, rather than any attempt to seriously describe the “experience” of death itself. Isn’t the relative “harshness” of death really just a mirror reflection of the value of mortal existence, or are there schools of philosophy that give more literal significance to these viewpoints?

I was under the lay impression that this sort of strict determinism was not taken seriously in modern physics, and that future events can only be described in terms of probability. Doesn’t this make them less “real” than past events? If past events in spacetime are equivalent to future events, then where does our perception of time as a continuum originate? How is it that I can’t percieve future events and past events identically from my position in spacetime, as I can percieve opposing spatial dimensions?

More tangentially…if the futuredoes have multiple possible resolutions, then even if I do somehow “relive” my experiences from birth in some sense, could they not be different experiences? Alternative potential futures branching from a common starting frame of reference?

However, consciousness does seem to be a process, or at least associated with a process not too different from the chemical reaction cited above. If our consciousness is contingent on our actions, then even if time is invariant, our experiences* through* time could be variable, just as the bicarb/vinegar reaction process has multiple possible resolutions based on past actions.

If this interpretation is correct, then it would seem to me to have an interesting implied corollary: if death is defined as the end of personal experience, and there is only one possible timeline that can be percieved, then each of us must individually experience the maximum lifespan possible for our own existence: a “best of all possible worlds” scenario where the only criterion is how long our experiences persist after death. In a deterministic universe, this is no problem; the baby that dies an hour after birth will only ever have that tiny fraction of experiences, because universal conditions dictate that there is no possibility for that frame of reference to persist further in time. However, if there is an alternative possible future where the child lives for an additional hour, then those experiences will inevitably take precedence, because those events can be percieved by the child as “experiences” whereas the spacetime in which the child dies cannot. The longest continuum of experiences wins out by default.

The above ramblings were underwritten in part by the Roddenberry Foundation for Spacetime Research.

16

This phrase should conclude, “…how long our experiences persist after birth.”

The idea may or may not make any more sense that way, but at any rate that’s what I meant to say.

17

No disagreement here.

18

You’re thinking of Thus Spake Zarathustra and Eternal Recurrence. It’s debatable whether Nietzsche actually believed that we repeat our lives forever, but he did present the idea as a guide for living. Live your life so that if you had to do it all over again, you wouldn’t want to change a thing.

19

An interesting point, but I think that that’s a different matter entirely. The only “reason” that the future is the future is our existence in the present. As I said in the OP, time is not a process that turns the future into the past, as though they were two different substances.

That said, the question as to whether events happen deterministically can be posed equally in regard to past events AND future events.

We perceive past events as unchangeable, but nevertheless as contingent: Had we done otherwise, the past we remember and record had been otherwise. The same is true of the future, which we anticipate but cannot yet remember or record: It will vary based on our actions.

It may well be the case that the future cannot be predicted deterministically, that there are only probabilities. But if that is true of the future, then it is also true of the past when it was perceived as the future.

A good question! Here is how I put it: Life in this universe is adapted to its varying environments: the gravity of the planet, the elements of which it can be constructed, the levels of heat and cold. But life is also adapted to the reality of TIME, whatever that may be.

Time obviously involves change and has a direction (past to future). We exist within that flow. I would conjecture that our sense of time passing comes from events in the brain and their relation to other material forces around us. It is all a matter of ratio. The earth revolves around the sun at a certain rate, which is in turn defined simply in relation to other rates of change (the decay of unstable atoms, the rate at which gravity accelerates objects, etc.).

The only reason that now seems to be NOW is that we, as physical objects, are located in this region of space-time.

I would say–and here I am not necessarily referring to Orthodox Science–that time is not a dimension in the same sense as the three dimensions of space are dimensions. Actually, there may be more than one dimension of time, just as there are more than one dimension of space; and, for that matter, there may be more than three dimensions in space.

It would be getting into the paranormal, but some believe that we CAN perceive the future to some degree. Animals may have evolved the ability to see just a wee bit into the future to avoid dangers and whatnot. www.boundaryinstitute.org has done experiments regarding this.

Seeing into the future isn’t really a problem, logically. In any case, we do anticipate the future (the sun will rise tomorrow, etc., the ball will hit the floor after I release it, etc.), and we can often do so with 100% accuracy, so I would disagree that we are completely intellectually disconnected from future events.

It seems entirely possible to me. With such questions we’re getting into rock-bottom questions about how Reality works. I once did a post in GD in which I asked “What fixes Reality? Why is the past unchangeable?” I didn’t get much other than standard answer-non-answers, but I can’t really blame anyone, since we just don’t know the reasons for a lot of this stuff.

Makes sense to me.

I don’t quite get the reasoning here, but it is quite interesting. Can you elaborate?

20

If Nietzche’s idea is true, then wouldn’t we not have free will? After all, how do I know this life isn’t a repeat?