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What is death like?

Have you seen the movie beatlejuice? Kind of like that. If you need specifics you will have to ask me privately
 
It is exactly the same as the time before I was born. I didn't fear that, and I don't fear death.
 
Haven't read the entire thread, but I would like to place this thought on the table.

The individual "I", is derived from our own individual brain, and that particular "I" will cease to be on death of that brain.

However, if somehow my personal consciousness, the empirical awareness of being a sentient living being, interacting with an external environment, was somehow retained and transferred into another brain, newly born or already existing, that "I" would never know it, unless of course, memories were also retained from the old brain (as in some cases of reported reincarnation).

This is symptomatic of my wishful dualistic thinking perhaps, and a problem for me when postulating my own death. I cannot get my head round the fact that, probably, I have a unique consciousness, that will die with my brain, and not somehow exist in a separate form with a separate existence.

This kind of wishful thinking, as others have inferred above, is surely one of the major contributors to the religious comfort blanket manufacturing industry.
 
Explorer said:
Haven't read the entire thread, but I would like to place this thought on the table.

The individual "I", is derived from our own individual brain, and that particular "I" will cease to be on death of that brain.

However, if somehow my personal consciousness, the empirical awareness of being a sentient living being, interacting with an external environment, was somehow retained and transferred into another brain, newly born or already existing, that "I" would never know it, unless of course, memories were also retained from the old brain (as in some cases of reported reincarnation).

This is symptomatic of my wishful dualistic thinking perhaps, and a problem for me when postulating my own death. I cannot get my head round the fact that, probably, I have a unique consciousness, that will die with my brain, and not somehow exist in a separate form with a separate existence.

This kind of wishful thinking, as others have inferred above, is surely one of the major contributors to the religious comfort blanket manufacturing industry.
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Yes, it illustrates our inability to address the notion of our non existence (or death).
 
gentlehorse said:
I'm hoping there's a really cool realm where we live happily for eternity without the need for brains. I'd fit right in.
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Me too;)

A place where your environment can be shaped by thought would be nice. It would be heaven (not literally).
 
punshhh said:
But I can't remember what it was like before I was born.
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How can you really not understand this answer as a possibility? Even if you suspect something else happens, how do you not understand that you're asking something as nonsensical as asking what it's like to not be in Australia?

Either you're just being playful, or I think this demonstrates something about why you seriously entertain things like afterlife and reincarnation as plausible. It's such a simple concept, why do you complicate it with ideas like numbers approaching infinity, it comes off as a distraction from an uncomfortable truth or an actual inability to understand a very basic idea.
 
punshhh said:
But you say an answer has been given, I see no answer anywhere in the thread. Apart from what can be supposed from a scientific analysis of the experience of being alive.
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I suggested an answer: the question What is it like to be dead? means, if it means anything at all, exactly the same as What is it to be dead? If you know how to use the word dead, you know the answer.
 
Halfcentaur said:
How can you really not understand this answer as a possibility? Even if you suspect something else happens, how do you not understand that you're asking something as nonsensical as asking what it's like to not be in Australia?
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Two points, firstly does anyone know what it was like before they were born? Its just as unknown as what its like after you die, surely.
Secondly, I see know way in which the question is nonsensical. Precluding the possibility that we cannot comprehend or understand what it is like, it is a legitimate question. For example my grandmother died twenty years ago, I sometimes wonder about her experience know. Or if one assumes that existence for her ceased when she died, what that means for her or anyone still alive.

Indeed it is the notion of non existence which seems nonsensical to me.

Either you're just being playful, or I think this demonstrates something about why you seriously entertain things like afterlife and reincarnation as plausible. It's such a simple concept, why do you complicate it with ideas like numbers approaching infinity, it comes off as a distraction from an uncomfortable truth or an actual inability to understand a very basic idea.
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I do understand the basic idea, but it somehow fails to address the issue. It only closes down the issue through assumptions based on science.
I only mentioned reincarnation and infinity as these where what I was using to think about this issue when I was a young child (5-7 years). When I first thought about the subject seriously.
 
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Death is a contradictory concept. Asking what death is "like" is akin to asking what it was "like" to be "you" before you were conceived.

Death, as a condition or state, simply cannot be. Simply put, there is no one to "be" dead. In the conspicuous absence of anyone who can "be" dead, there is no condition consisting of "death".
 
Toontown said:
Death is a contradictory concept. Asking what death is "like" is akin to asking what it was "like" to be "you" before you were conceived.

Death, as a condition or state, simply cannot be. Simply put, there is no one to "be" dead. In the conspicuous absence of anyone who can "be" dead, there is no condition consisting of "death".
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So there is not such thing as being dead?

Perhaps nothing has changed when one dies, just a lack of the illusion of existing, or existence.
 
punshhh said:
Yes, it illustrates our inability to address the notion of our non existence (or death).
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The inability to address the notion of our nonexistence is probably founded in the absence of anything to address.

The fear of nonexistence is probably founded in the irrational notion that something unpleasant might happen to our wrongly imagined nonexistent selves.
 
punshhh said:
So there is not such thing as being dead?
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There is no such thing as "being" dead, unless you irrationally define being dead as somehow being in some kind of altered state of consciousness - in which case you would simply continue to exist in the altered state of consciousness.

punshhh said:
Perhaps nothing has changed when one dies, just a lack of the illusion of existing, or existence.
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That state of affairs would be strange indeed. A nothing lacks the illusion of being something? I suppose so, if you want to look at it that way...

...but that's a contradictory way of looking at it. A nothing which lacks an illusion is not nothing. It is a something which has a property of not having a specific illusion.
 
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If you were dead you would never know it since your mind would quit working.
 
punshhh said:
Two points, firstly does anyone know what it was like before they were born? Its just as unknown as what its like after you die, surely.
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And this demonstrates exactly what I implied and satisfied my notion that you really are stuck here. You demonstrate an inability to understand the concept that "you" can be gone while the things which you rose from are not. You cannot imagine what it's like to experience being gone, because you're gone. It's that easy. But now you split hairs and get trapped in a "nearly infinite" regress of hair splitting, unable to accept you might just go away and that's it. As if there is some secret place you go to you can't remember or understand when you sleep without dreaming. You're gone, it's that simple.

punshhh said:
Secondly, I see know way in which the question is nonsensical. Precluding the possibility that we cannot comprehend or understand what it is like, it is a legitimate question. For example my grandmother died twenty years ago, I sometimes wonder about her experience know. Or if one assumes that existence for her ceased when she died, what that means for her or anyone still alive.

Indeed it is the notion of non existence which seems nonsensical to me.

I do understand the basic idea, but it somehow fails to address the issue. It only closes down the issue through assumptions based on science.
I only mentioned reincarnation and infinity as these where what I was using to think about this issue when I was a young child (5-7 years). When I first thought about the subject seriously.
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You are conflating nothingness with change and hiding human experience in a gap between the two.

When I smash a rock, it becomes what we call sand, but we only call a bunch of particles arranged together as an object a rock, it's not intrinsically a rock.

Your consciousness is not a thing, it is not an intrinsic object no matter how much it feels that way to you. It is a temporary arrangement of components which functions as a whole just like a tornado or a whirlpool. You're trapped wondering where all the past and future tornadoes go when the wind is all over the place and there are no current tornadoes, as if the wind is still always a potential tornado and that gives you a gap to hide your hopes of eternal life within.

Which makes it seem like you are psychologically blocked. Rather than understand that things can be forever in flux with no permanence, you choose to make this an issue about nothingness not being able to exist. But nothingness has nothing to do with anything here.

It is impermanence you can't seem to deal with. Romanticizing the idea that your parts will always be shifting as if the potential for you will be preserved. But you are no more able to be preserve than a temporary current in the water. There may be countless currents that end up arranged which are similar to you, but they are not you, and they will be gone just like you were unless somehow everything stops happening as it has in every aspect we are able to describe.
 
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punshhh said:
So there is not such thing as being dead?
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Well... might be better to say that there's no such thing as a dead person. Lots of dead bodies exist, but you are not your body, you are the processes performed by your body's brain.

So while your body can be dead, your mind (the bit that makes you "you") is nonexistent rather than "dead".

Anybody can die. But "you" cannot. There is no such thing as "being dead", because upon death you become a non-being.

(Okay, I'm being whimsical here, so don't try and pick it apart by asserting more mundane definitions.)
 
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