What happens to us when we die?
- Sy Borg
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
Yet we care not a jot about existence, nor about life: who would prefer to be in a permanent vegetative state to death? So we only care about conscious existence, and yet we crave its dissolution every night. So, basically, for a while we defy the constant attempts of our environments - natural, cultural and social - to break us down and reclaim us into their relative homogeneity. When the outside world has taken enough pieces of us, being consciously aware ceases to be desirable too. So then consciousness goes away. Yet again.
What is this consciousness that goes away? Our consciousness of a year ago, ten years ago, certainly our minds of thirty years ago are "dead" too. There are many people who are more like us today than the children we once were. This begs the entire question of identity (as obsessed over by numerous philosophers).
Once we die, simply probability ensures that numerous other consciousnesses will continue to develop and emerge that share many similar qualities to those that were lost with our deaths. They will display qualities that may have been seen in us during any given phase of our lives - but they are obviously not the same, given that we are not even the same person we were [x] years ago!
This approximate repetition of qualities, Jung would say archetypes, appears to be the essence of reincarnation. It's seemingly not about the physical transmutation of one's qualities to another body, but their probabilistic relative repetition in any given population. Thus, the relationships between the dead and the "reincarnations" would seem to be abstract.
Re: freezing parts of the Earth during global warming: https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather- ... e/70003753
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
- Sy Borg
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
When I'm asleep I rarely notice any fantasy patterns (dreams). I simply black out and at some point wake up needing to go to the toilet. That's where our consciousness is going - blackness. However, numerous consciousnesses of similar ilks will continue to exist after we go away. While no one will ever look through your same eyes again, you are looking through different eyes to those of the past anyway, linked tenuously merely by the function of some brain cells required for long term memory.
However, some people will be perceiving reality in a very similar way to you, right now (scattered amongst the 7 billion) and in the future, just as you have effectively been the expression of certain tendencies displayed by those in the past. None of this has anything to do with perspectives and everything to do with probability. We humans are ultimately expendable, readily replaceable, portions of society. In Game of Thrones the Night's Watch say "We shall never see his like again" as a requiem. Certainly those who are close will probably never see the likes of their dead again, but strikingly similar kinds of personalities and characters will continue to appear from time to time around the world at different times.
Still, you gents seem to be most keen to talk about the most boringly obvious aspects of death. Yes, dead bodies decompose. Noted. None of that addresses potentially and arguably the most profound moments of our brief lives - when we are effectively dead, but with the brain using its last minutes of oxygen supply.
There have been many reports of blankness before resuscitation from near-death, as with my sleep, but also many extraordinary tales, some with seemingly with a significant sense of time dilation. At the edge of death, whether time dilation is actual or not is moot; it's the sensation of time that matters. Might the sense of an eternal afterlife be crammed into a few minutes?
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
- SimpleGuy
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
- TigerNinja
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
I agree with you that there is a continuum from things that we generally agree to be alive (e.g. humans) to things that we generally think of as not alive. But I don't think that just because things exist on a continuum it automatically means that they are the same. I'm trying to make a similar point, in a very different context (gun control) to GE Morton on another thread.TigerNinja wrote:...I believe we were never alive to begin with as there is no difference between you and a table. They are just atoms. You can't already be dead since you weren't alive to begin with. You can't be alive since there was nothing to determine you as providing the functions for life. You are 'more alive' than other things, but everything is in an intermediary state between the two, whereby you are just a bunch of atoms which has some self awareness, and therefore (foolishly so) you believe that everything that is complex and portrays a few signs is alive. Despite everything being made out of the same thing.
If there is a continuum, as there is for many things in life, then we simply draw our own dividing lines, to suit our own purposes, on it.
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
That contains my fingertips and face
Determining here I am and will be and was.
Durations of expectations, collections of regrets
That are best installed and stored in dark mementos.
A life is that and more. Patterns to come, shapes before
That flash and flame in delight and shame that cannot be
Discarded. These are the evanescent solidities of me.
The universe no longer spans vacuums of nothingness
Between the sparkles out of stars but is full filled
With dark mysteries who ghost the emptiness in nets
Between the galaxies that we can barely sense.
Odd distortions of the ways that photons streak,
Incoherent revolutions not to be accounted for
Of galactic spins that betray something odd out that way.
Thus do our lives as well encounter elements of occult spell,
A magic out of random unexpectedness from dark woven strands
That shadow through our lives to strike with lightning bolts,
Jolts of horror to rip away quiddities into what has occurred
Conferring upon all creation that all basics have become absurd.
- Barry Sears
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
Love the poem Jan, was it inspired by this thread, or written in another moment. Just a question that has popped up recently. Is sand called sand because it sits between the sea and land? hence sand.When I sleep my consciousness has all sorts of fascinating adventures in fantasy patterns invented by my brain. Being awake is somewhat similar but the consciousness reacts to the more permanent patterns out of nerve impulses. Reality is merely another form of brain pattern dynamics.
Also a little off topic. I have been captivated and have studied for years a pattern that seems to pass through all of life. This has been captured in glass and stands as my avatar. Discovered by our ancient predecessors, set in stone around the World and painted on our surrounding stars, connected to all of our animals and all aspects of life. A pattern of life.
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
- Gnybus387
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
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Re: What happens to us when we die?
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023