I know what is was like to wake up from anesthesia, and I know what it was like to start having memories, but I don’t know what it is like to go under anesthesia and never wake up, or to stop having memories. I think therefore I am. I don’t think therefore …???
If I believe in a block universe in which the direction of time is only a function of consciousness and increasing entropy who’s to say that my consciousness is going forward in time or backward in time. Perhaps when I die I just go back to the beginning of my life and live it over again exactly as it was. Perhaps there is some universal attention that is effectively bouncing around continuously at all times, and so when I die the universal attention will just go on to someone else rather like reincarnation. Perhaps I am in a quantum multiverse and my consciousness continues in all universes in which I didn’t die. All of these are possibilities and none of them require anything supernatural. In fact it may even be the case that multiple of these cases are true depending on how we define our terms. But until we get a handle on what it really means to be conscious we can’t say what it means for that to end.
Great. That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.
No, I think you meant to say:
Great! That means I’ll get to sit through the Ice Capades again!
(Sorry. As a child of the 70s, Dorothy Hamill was . . . formative. I was a big fan of ice skating as a result.)
I think we can universally say, “Great, I’ll have to sit through The Phantom Menace again.”
Or, it could be there’s only one absolute consciousness, which is embodied by every living, sentient thing, with no memories of other lives. You’re you now, but were and will be a neanderthal ages ago, a slug, Your mom, Ghandi, Adolf Hitler, Jolene Blalock, Lindsey Lohan, some person eviscerated in medival times, Glenn Beck, Abraham Lincoln, me, Ann Coulter, her poor cat, and so on, ad infinitum.
The. Horror.
A.
For many thousands of years ancient civilizations around the world - including the native American Indians, The Egyptians, The Aztecs, The Incas or the Sumerians - have all made reference to a soul, a spirit or an after life.
What they were all taking about is “energy”. The Earth and everything around us (and including us) is made of matter and energy. This material was created inside stars (like our Sun) by a nuclear reaction. Once a star reaches the end of it’s life cycle it explodes (supernova) and scatters it’s material throughout the region of space that it inhabits. This material is what came together under the force of gravity (one of the most mysterious forces in the known Universe) to form the Earth and other planets, moons, elements and nebulas etc.
So, nothing really dies…it is just transformed or recycled into something else.
Think of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly…the caterpillar no longer “exists” but it has not died - it has simply been transformed.
The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed (by humans) but can only be converted into something else. This is something which even our most sceptical scientist over the centuries have agreed to.
Even though our “life” or time on this planet is finite our existence is eternal.
omega4077
3/11/14
There is not just the first law of Thermodynamics there is also the second. As well as matter and energy there is also information in the arrangement of these elements, and this can/will be lost. If I “transform” my copy of the complete works of Shakespeare with a blow torch and then plant the ashes in my garden, my hydrangeas aren’t going to start spouting Hamlet. There is world in not Everything we know about consciousness indicates that whatever it is it is stored in the precise arrangement of our neurons, and if this arrangement is destroyed consciousness goes with it.
On the other hand we don’t actually know what consciousness is, so I would leave open the possibility that our notions of consciousness “ending” is really missing the point. Instead we should view it as our consciousness exists over a finite region of time. When we look at a piece of paper on the table we don’t say that the paper ceases to exist once I look 11" past the start of it, instead we say that the paper exists but has a finite extent. In my view, my consciousness yesterday, today and tomorrow* are all equally real and equally permanent. It’s just our hardwired unidirectional view of time that makes us worry about life after death.
*Hopefully, assuming I don’t get hit by a bus on the way home.
I had the opposite happen. I went into status asthmaticus, passed out while being checked into the hospital, and awoke three days later with various tubes and wires coming out of me. In the interim, I’d nearly died and had been on a ventilator (among other things).
No bright light, no relatives, no voices, no people, no clouds or harps, no fear, no joy, nothing.
Was it because of the specifics of my illness, or proof that there’s nothing else out there? I don’t know.
You may find the following helpful.
Apparently what happens after we die is that we get resurrected again in about 2 1/2 years…
I know plenty of people who have died. None of them have come back to life yet.
Everyone knows what it’s like to be unborn. We were all unborn for billions of years. Other than special pleading, there’s no reason to think being dead will be any different.
I’m hanging a lot of hope on quantum immortality. I’m NEVER going to die. So far, so good.
You chumps are just gonna be eaten by bacteria.
When asked, I treat the existence of an afterlife the same as the existence of god. I have absolutely no reason to believe in either, and lots of reasons not to believe. It’s really as simple as that.
If pressed, I add the following: Suppose there’s a heaven, and only atheists get in.
Dying is a transformation; it’s a transformation into a corpse. If a beat eats me the fact that my molecules are transformed into bear meat and excrement doesn’t make me any less dead.
I’ve mentioned before about a god who wants humans to use these wonderful brains we have, to learn about how the world works. He’s OK with not believing in him, because after all he hasn’t given us even one reason to think he exists, but it really pisses him off if someone falls for obvious bullshit like any one of the major religions. So he rewards atheists and sends the religious off to some less desirable place.
This, while I don’t actually believe it, is way more plausible than Christianity.
Well there is only one way to find out for sure and I am prepared to wait a little longer to get an answer to the question.
So, if a beat eats you, you get transformed into bear meat and excreted out?? That’s a pretty wild theory you have there.
What happens if there are an infinite number of copies of you in alternative universes, and you eat the beat instead (let’s not get into what happens if the bear eats the beat)? Does anyone get transformed into either a large whale several thousand miles over the planet or a petunia?? And, well, does the pope shit in the woods??
Careful-Not believing in it too exuberantly could be seen as sucking up. 
I don’t really understand this line of reasonning. There’s exactly zero reason to believe that there can be a consciousness without a fonctional brain. It’s not like we’re surrounded by disembodied souls. So, unless you’re a believer, brain destroyed = no consciousness. We know what happens upon death (unless you make arbitrary assumptions like there’s a god, etc…), we see people dying all the time, and what happens after is : nothing. There’s nobody there anymore.
Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why XT had posted that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.