This is my second morbid thread started in the last few days. It’s not intentional.
Anyway, I never really had any fear of death until this idea occurred to me last night. I figured, however I die, there may be some temporary pain and then nothing…I’ll be done and goodbye. After this thought I had, I think I actually fear this happening to me or someone I care about.
Let’s assume that the process of “dying” takes a discrete amount of time. In a plane crash or bombing, this may be 5 seconds. After a heart attack, it may be 20 minutes. Whatever, we just know that it’s some specific amount of time.
As you’re dying, all of your body’s systems are failing. Your heart shuts down cutting off oxygen to the brain, and eventually killing off all brain functions. That’s when you’re dead and, unless you believe in some sort of afterlife, your existence is finished.
It’s the process of the brain functions shutting down that scares me. The brain is, essentially, a computer. It takes inputs (from our senses), perceives them (interpreting the sensory inputs) and then makes decisions. But when someone is dying, this computer is basically malfunctioning.
As the brain is malfunctioning, what happens to our ability to perceive time? And more importantly, what could happen to this ability? When we’re alive and conscious, we can basically tell when 1 hour has passed. We may perceive this hour as a long 60 minutes at a boring opera or in a flight delay. Or we may perceive it as a short 60 minutes if we’re doing something fun. We can pretty much tell when an approximate hour has passed.
But when the brain is not working correctly, I suspect that this can change. 5 seconds may feel like 10 seconds or 10 minutes or even (gasp!) 10 years. People may say that a loved one died peacefully and quickly in their sleep. But they can never know if it felt peaceful and quick to the person that died. We can’t assume that the person perceived time correctly, whether the real world time that elapsed was 5 seconds or 15 minutes. Maybe the 15 minutes felt like 15 centuries. And if there was pain, it would have felt like 15 centuries of pain.
People that undergo a surgery with general anesthesia sometimes feel like they were only asleep for seconds, when in reality it was much longer. This tells me that our perception of time can change significantly when unconscious.
Additionally, evolution doesn’t protect us from anything when dying. While we’re living, it protects us from external threats such as diseases. For the most part, it allows us to live relatively pain-free and happy lives so that we can continue to propagate our species. Natural selection already killed off the ancestors that didn’t evolve along with us. But when we’re dying, there are no advantages. At that point, you’re useless to the species and we probably didn’t evolve to die pain-free or to die with any comfort at all.
Any thoughts?
