thanks. Appreciated just so you don’t step on my toe.
I take the Zen approach. If it looks like a river, it’s a river. If I feel not dead, I’m not dead. Even if it’s a very realistic illusion, the illusion is the reality.
(Ever wonder what would have happened if Decartes studied Zen?)
Death is a state of nonbeing. As I know I exist, I am alive. If I was dead, I would know nothing.
Ghosts are nonsense, but if they did exist, they wouldn’t be dead. They’d be a different form of life. The concept of being being “undead” is, if you think about, it, kind of silly; ghosts, vampires, zombies and the like are merely different types of living things.
Well, when people see me they go “Hey, Larry!” and not “AAH! A ghost!”
I was stabbed in the chest and passed out due to blood loss, thought I was dead. Wasn’t sure I was alive until I awoke in the hospital and they pulled the tubes from my nose and the catheter out of my wanker. :eek:
Well, other people keep asking me to do stuff. They interact with me as if we (mostly) share a common framework of physical reality, like dishes that need to be washed, rent that needs to be paid, and work assignments that need to be done. If these are genuinely other minds interacting with me, then we’re all on the same plane. Whether we call it ‘dead’ or ‘alive’ is immaterial, since there’s no way to tell the difference.
On other hand, if I am truly passed out of the plane of the living, then all of these other ‘people’ I’m interacting with are merely hallucinations, including the one who asked this question. If I’m just talking to myself here, then I can win my argument against myself by admitting that I was right all along, and apologizing to me for being too blind to see it. 
Not necessarily. Suppose “you” become a zombie. According to the genre, you’re just a mindless animated corpse that goes around eating living people. You have no mental functions above the plant level.
As far as I’m concerning, you’d be dead. Whatever made you a living person is gone. The fact that your physical body is still moving around is irrelevant because you’re not inside it.
Similar arguments could be made about ghosts or vampires or mummies or whatever. If they were real, they’d only be alive to the extent they still contain some portion of the living person they were made out of. Otherwise they’re just supernatural robots carrying out their programming.
At least i’m breathing!
Returning the same question asked to you does not make your theory real.
If you’re speculating on whether we’re all deluded into thinking we actually survived a life-threatening experience and are continuing on with our lives, how would such a situation occur? Who set this up? Why would they do that? What’s in it for them?
I have a feeling you’re going to duck those questions, so I’ll try to flesh it out.
Maybe you’re thinking of the Star Trek episode where Riker has been captured by the Romulans, and they hooked him up to some virtual reality thingamajig so they could trick him into revealing secret Federation info. They couldn’t plan for every contingency, and he eventually caught wind of their inconsistencies and the project failed.
Maybe one Doper out of the Teeming Millions is actually experiencing this mind fuck. The Really Dead Doper (RDD from here on) thinks he is reading and interacting with the SDMB. The RDD also thinks he is experiencing life outside of the SDMB, but he’s actually entombed in a tube of goo with his thought centers wired up to a console to measure his nerve activity. How are the Romulans (or whoever is orchestrating this setup) typing his thoughts for him online? Maybe they’ve got a sock to take care of that.
If the RDD has committed some vital secret to memory that they’re trying to extract, they’re wasting an awful lot of time and resources on him. They’re simulating his daily routines, arranging for random encounters, and playing the roles of his loved ones and acquaintances. They’re aliens that have little idea what goes on in a single human’s life, but are somehow able to recreate an entire human life from birth to grave. They could have easily just hired hackers to get the info.
Abe Vigoda has it easier.
I tripped across that page when I was researching my Death Pool list for this year. The fact that it existed made me leave Abe off my list.
Not that it made any difference, of course.
They’re doing it just to humor you.
You’re still describing a form of life. It might not be a HUMAN BEING anymore - but you yourself used the term “plant level.” Plants are not sentient, but they are unquestionably a form of life.
If zombies, vampires and mummies actually existed they would not be supernatural. They would be natural, living things animated by forces we don’t presently understand. And if they were simply carrying out their programming (which isn’t consistent with most portrayals of vampires, but is with zombies) then so what? Ants are essentially just running a program, but they’re life.
I have the definitive answer on this. I am clearly not dead, because were I dead, my wife wouldn’t be keeping me awake wanting to talk as I am trying to get to sleep. Every.Single.Night.
I’d ask, when’s your novel coming out?
Been dead and it really didn’t work out for me.
So, I’ve come back.
If I’m dead, does this mean I shouldn’t have to pay medical bills and copays?