Is this one of those questions like “If a tree falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound”?
Actually, we’re all just a part of the Red King’s dream. When he wakes up…
You think you are aware of the universe, but it is the universe that is aware. Consciousness is a fluid that fills the vessel of your mind, a tiny pool unto itself, unique and isolated. Fear not, for your death merely pours that fluid out to join the ocean of those who have gone before. Does a raindrop cease to exist when it meets the sea?
This is my own theory, as in I made it myself. Copyright me, now; take with salt, one grain; subject to change without notice:
Consciousness as we know it can be construed as the combination of three things: the basic germ of self-awareness (that there’s anything that can know that it’s feeling), sensory input (which appears at the front of the neuron chain to be largely through the reaction of the electron fields of the molecules of your sense organs to… light, pressure, trauma, motion, & so forth), & memory (or the storage of past information in the nervous system).
I’m not convinced that the basic “awareness” component is reducible. In fact, I suspect that all matter, & everything with an electromagnetic field, has that germ of consciousness. But for a molecule of silica in the middle of a lump of concrete, the lack of a brain-type system to store memory & the lack of variable stimuli means that there’s not much data going in, so it’s sort of like a capacity to feel without anything to feel, or any way to remember, compare, or gain perspective. Even a piece of copper wire, which gets a lot of stimulation, probably doesn’t remember it as we do, so the consciousness at a particular point is “Ow, I’m hot!” or “La la la” with no (or very little) sense of comparison, & no sophisticated retention (there may be burns & deterioration–damage from past abuse–but not memory in the full sense that a human–or a bee–would have).
We as organisms are able, due to the organisation of stimuli from many points through a neural network, to feel much more, & make pictures of it. But where it gets really interesting is memory. Only by storing & comparing these pictures are we able to gain perspective, & ultimately reason.
So. As far as I can tell, every molecule, or every electrical field, probably senses what’s happening to it right now. But how it feels about that, what it knows, depends on it having an accessible & interpretable memory. Are there kinds of memory that don’t rely on “organic” wetware? Probably. Is there, otoh, a fundamental psychic record of what has happened to all inanimate objects (the idea of parapsychological psychometry)? … I don’t know, & I don’t know how. Maybe there is a record on a plane of reality we don’t perceive, on the theory that matterspace as we perceive it is overlaid on a substrate that we do not see. But maybe not.
BZZT! Wrong, but thanks for playing. According to a physicalist paradigm, your component parts will remain. So in a larger sense, you simply cease to be in this form; the stuff that allows you to be conscious is still there, in fact may still be partially conscious after your organism-death, & will go on in fragmented parts to live again. The universe doesn’t end, not even for you, because there’s something left of you that’s becoming something else. Your present bio-organisation ends.
Non-physicalist paradigms can go much further, ranging in different theories from the transmigration of souls to psychometric echoes to planes of the afterlife. Of course, you could subscribe to idealistic solipsism, in which everything is in your mind, & only you exist, but this does no job at all of explaining its own necessary conscious substrate & seems largely to serve the purpose of avoiding examination & criticism of one’s own self & appetites; you might be taken seriously in some quarters, but I think it’s self-deluding convenient bullshit.
If all sentient life in the universe ceased to exist then in a sense the universe itsself would cease to exist,because there would be nothing to know it was there.
Aren’t we rather egocentrically overlooking the philosopher/scientists of Rigel IV?
AHunter3, I don’t know how many ways you can find to say it, but you continue to put words to things that I didn’t think could be expressed verbally. You are the only person I know who can do that. It is as if you are able to combine two or more senses in your words. Again, I am in awe of your insight and your gift of expression!
Huh! Thats easy for you to say.
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Now if I only inspired that reaction in a significantly high % of the folks who read my stuff, I’d be a much more successful esoteric-religion-starting-person. Prophet, messiah, [del]fruitbat[/del], etc… Well, it’s extremely gratifying to hear it, and to think that at least some folks do find me expressive and good with complex concepts and whatnot. I would tell you it puts you among the ‘chosen few’ but your most rational reaction to that might be to look around nervously and say ‘chosen? for what?’ 
A body decomposing isn’t me. I am not my bones and flesh. I am my consciousness. When my consciousness ceases to exist, I cease to exist. You may argue that consciousness continues after the body dies, but that’s all speculation. So if you can’t prove that consciousness exists after death I think your dismissal is condescending an unnecessary.
The Universe responds.
[sub]Speaking of huge hands… and they can touch anything except themselves! Oh, wait…[/sub]
Hands, hell! Did you get a glance at that huge fuckoff-buddy finger?
whoooooooosh… 
This is what I was trying to say. We Are part of the Universe, observing itself. (Ourselves?) Why would the Universe (Us) do that?
I wonder if they’ve ever made a Despair.com poster of that shot of the Carina Nebula paired with a quote from the Deteriorata:
Cite?
Come on, people. The chances of humans being the only intelligent life in the whole damn universe are so utterly vanishingly minuscule as to be negligible. Billions upon billions of stars, many of them with solar systems, and a few people on one grubby planet orbiting one star in the frankly less fashionable end of one backwater galaxy in a not terribly well-to-do cluster… have the temerity to wonder if the universe cares about them.
Heh.
Bear in mind that for most of this planet’s history, there was life but no intelligent life. If we discover any other life-bearing planet, what we see there will be but a snapshot of one moment in the billions of years in its biosphere’s evolution. It is possible that we are the only intelligent species in the universe at the moment even if there have been others in the past and will be others in the future.
We could calculate the probability using the Drake Equation, but too many of its variables are not only unknown but imponderable – especially L, the lifetime of a technological civilization capable of radio communication.
Yes.
Dammit! I read a Stephen Hawking-related book many years ago that touched upon the ______ theory of the universe. For the life of me I can’t remember the name of this theory, but it proposed that the universe only exists because there’s someone around to observe it.
Anyone remember this? If I could remember the name, I could look it up and sum it up better.