What happens to us when we die?

[Jan Sand]

Nicely illustrating that most bosses highly over rate themselves. That's why 90% of business start-ups fail rather quickly

[Sy Borg]

Agreed James. Like all bosses, the brain provides 2% of the mass and takes 20% of the resources.

Jan, what is the brain's function, if not to control everything else? A factory cannot operate without security guards or technicians but that does not give them even remotely the same influence as the executive team. Suicide says nothing about the brain but everything about our existential situation, that it seems preferable to die than to live with (seemingly) incurable suffering.

Since we are talking brains, I'm hoping to derail this conversation and digress to the question: "What happens to us when we die?" (without great expectations hehe). I am fascinated by the idea of that moment that so many people must face where they have ostensibly died but the brain still retains oxygen and the self is still present - and aware that they are dead. It's hard to imagine a more profound and daunting situation, one where the objective world loses meaning and the subjective is almost everything.

[Jan Sand]

I agree that the direction has wandered a bit but wandering is a great educator. When you start to subjugate a whole to the domination of a part something very precious gets lost. Evolution did not start with a brain and work up an organism to support a master. It started with a process that was self sustaining and proliferating and very gradually it developed a nervous system to coordinate and make more sustaining the process of life itself. If anything is boss, it is the process of sustaining life and proliferating. There are lots of organisms that do very well without brains or even nervous systems. In general the whole plant end of life is more of what life is about than humans. How does a cabbage feel about being turned into sauerkraut? Humans with their brains can abstract the necessities of efficiency and turn a living creature like a human baby with huge possibilities into that Charley Chaplin character in "Modern Times", a mechanical robot that whacked a rivet as it passed by on a belt. And it turned him insane. And that's what current civilization is doing to everybody. Until it rejects humans altogether because it can invent machines to do it better. What does it matter if a human designed by evolution no longer washes dishes all day or drives a truck all day or merely watches TV all day and wears out and dies. What kind of life is it leaving that was not worth living anyway? Will it have thoughts about the wonders of chopping rocks in a coal mine or fighting with his wife because the money he earns cannot any longer support a household? Maybe death will be a final sigh of relief and gratitude that the meaningless series of doing nothing sensible for many boring years is finally over.

[Sy Borg]

Re: brains I'll agree to disagree. Digestive and respiratory systems were once boss and gradually the nervous system took over, hence the body's favouring of the brain's oxygen supply over every other body part.

Actually, if you are to create a hierarchy, most of the Earth is geology, with only a small proportion being biology. Most of biology consists of microbes with only a small proportion being multicellular. Most multicellular organisms are plants and fungi, with only a small proportion being animals. Most animals are invertebrates, with only a small proportion being chordates - and only a minority of chordates are mammals, and so forth.

Jan, one would expect that the remainders of humanity after The Great Culling will progress rapidly when freed from drudgery, just as humanity made great strides when they increasingly secured themselves from predators and other overt dangers of nature.

[Jan Sand]

Both my parents were trained as artists back in New York City in The Art Student's League back in the 1920's and, although they operated as commercial artists their intense interest in watercolor painting was their central devotion. I grew up in that tradition and got involved in technology as a radar technician in WWII but the driving spirit in our lives was separate from the core financial driving force that was and still is the dynamic of much of civilization and most forcefully in the USA. My life during the depression of the 1930's was surprisingly quite a delightful experience although there were times we couldn't afford coal to heat the house in Brooklyn's cold winter. Food was relatively cheap and my mother was an extraordinary cook so the basics were something of an adventure and we all took full advantage of the adventure of being alive. I never lost that spirit of gulping down the wonders of ordinary life and though economics cannot be denied, I never succumbed to the drudgeries of merely earning a living and whenever my work descended to just making money I fled to some area that offered real delight in being alive. I will regret dying as I so enjoyed merely being alive and not competing to compare myself to people who are far more talented than I but tied irretrievably to what is known as the rat race and personally a total waste of the opportunity to be aware in a most mystifying universe. My current 92 years seem totally inadequate for the opportunities still available and a few thousand more years might be interestingly spent but the current brutal stupidities of my rather skillful species seems forcefully determined to destroy the fundamental necessities for planetary life for no sensible reason apparent to me and the avalanche of knowledge now pouring from current technology points only to a few more decades of reasonable life at best. This brain power that you seem to so immensely admire does not offer any solutions to a species so fascinated with multiple avenues for total disaster and those leaders now in position of control are wonderfully committed to what is obvious to my limited understanding as total elimination of current civilization. I am most grateful that my time in being alive will not see the worst of that.

[Sy Borg]

Jan, thanks for your uplifting account of what appears to be a happy combination of temperament, upbringing and circumstance. I would have been less graceful in those circumstances. Then again, we are creatures of our time, optimally conditioned to the environment experienced during early development. Thus, subsequent changes can be disturbing and older generations have been predicting the end of civilisation and/or humanity for thousands of years.

I think it more likely that in the future humans and machines will increasingly meld, which is just a continuation of current trends. No one is quite sure what that will mean for death. Generally though, "the new world" of whatever generation will be commonly perceived by prior generations as sterile, overly fussy and morally deficient. Yet we keep on getting better :)

[Jan Sand]

I am not a pessimist out of choice. I grew up immersed in SF and the possibilities of our civilization expanding into the solar system and beyond. Even today an item at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 151154.htm indicated that the science fiction concept of 3D image projection into space as shown in Star Wars almost 50 years ago has achieved reality. But the overwhelming presence of global warming that is already taking an immense toll on all life on the planet and the totally foolish brandishing of nuclear weapons indicates that humanity's powers have reached a point far in excess of humanity's intellect to control and the path to total disaster is proving inevitable. I am, in no way, happy about this but I can see no other possibility.

[Ashurean]

I think about it a couple of ways. First and most obvious, we were never anything more than organized stardust, so don't worry about it. The second way I think about it is that nothing that made up "you" ever really stops existing, those atoms will end up scattered across the whole of the earth, maybe even out of it with the way things are going, so don't worry about it. And finally, I also like to think of it as simply being a different mode of existence, you still exist, just not under the same conditions you were while alive. Again, don't worry about it. There are a lot of subjects like this that don't have satisfying answers, they're inevitabilities and happen whether we want them to or not. Death, infinity, and other concepts can be fun to ponder over if you just don't let them bother your life. Just go about and do what you do, be happy, be sad, be angry, be inspired. Do unto others as you would have done to you. Be critical, but so critical that you can't enjoy life. Have an open mind, but not one so open that it falls right out of your head. And most importantly, embrace the paradox.

[Sy Borg]

I think about it a couple of ways. First and most obvious, we were never anything more than organized stardust, so don't worry about it. The second way I think about it is that nothing that made up "you" ever really stops existing, those atoms will end up scattered across the whole of the earth, maybe even out of it with the way things are going, so don't worry about it. And finally, I also like to think of it as simply being a different mode of existence, you still exist, just not under the same conditions you were while alive. Again, don't worry about it. There are a lot of subjects like this that don't have satisfying answers, they're inevitabilities and happen whether we want them to or not. Death, infinity, and other concepts can be fun to ponder over if you just don't let them bother your life. Just go about and do what you do, be happy, be sad, be angry, be inspired. Do unto others as you would have done to you. Be critical, but so critical that you can't enjoy life. Have an open mind, but not one so open that it falls right out of your head. And most importantly, embrace the paradox.

I'm pretty relaxed with this view.

In a sense we were all once an insanely dense and hot plasma. We've cooled down since then, all the time gaining experience and becoming more complex, with aspects of the past effectively attached to today's configuration.

All of this was possible because we (the universe) expanded and thus cooled down. If we had not expanded and stayed hot we'd currently still be a mass of tortured photons existing timelessly (in which case it would strictly not be "currently" but ...).

Cooling over time is what we - the bits of the universe - do. Occasionally we heat up for relatively short periods but we all ultimately cool down, and in doing so we become less chaotic, less active, less creative, less destructive and more ordered and systematised until we finally go cold and crystallise into timelessness :)

The now lies between those two timeless, homogeneous states - one hot, dense and completely contracted and the other cold, bare and completely expanded; between zygote and corpse.

[Jan Sand]

Frankly, I find this whole line of thought most peculiar. A living creature such as any one of us is a very discrete dynamic organization of a specific form of matter. The matter itself without the organization and dynamic relationship to the universe is not us. A pile of rusty iron ore is not an electric car and a piece of dead meat is not a living being. To think otherwise is, to my understanding, a lack of discrimination that is basically nonsensical.

[Sy Borg]

Jan, it appears that you see each individual as being separate addition to the Earth, as opposed to an expression of it. Then we will agree to disagree.

[Jan Sand]

What you are talking about is the way you choose to categorize your choice of breaking down the world into pieces. You can separate humanity into individual humans or view them as a mass of humanity or choose to understand them as a part of the animal kingdom or as a particular form of dynamic organic tissue and so forth, endlessly, It's a matter of viewpoint and language and personal choice,

[Sy Borg]

What you are talking about is the way you choose to categorize your choice of breaking down the world into pieces. You can separate humanity into individual humans or view them as a mass of humanity or choose to understand them as a part of the animal kingdom or as a particular form of dynamic organic tissue and so forth, endlessly, It's a matter of viewpoint and language and personal choice,

It's all just roles. We have no problems identifying as parents, offspring, employee/employer, friends, group members, of role, culture, race, nation or even species.

People only find it odd to identify as something outside of the human, I suspect, as a hangover from our assumptions of superiority and divinity. It's as though we humans believe that we are separate to the Earth and smarter than it. A more realistic perspective would be that humans are the most intelligent parts of the Earth. By the same token, the brain isn't the smarter than the totality of you - rather the brain influences the total organism's development with that intelligence.

[Jan Sand]

The animal that identifies itself as human, as you have noticed, has attempted to modify the ecological processes of the planet that produced it to favor its own desires and necessities over almost all other living things to the point that the entire biological mechanism of the life process that interacts to maintain this rather rare life process is rapidly approaching the final catastrophe of planetary sterilization. No doubt this required rather specialized and extraordinary skills and a depth of understanding natural processes not attained by other living creatures but the final goal of the destruction of almost all life does not in any way indicate intelligence but the most immense stupidity of any other form of life on the planet. If this is the ultimate product of an overdeveloped nervous system it does not seem to be a very promising evolutionary advance.

[Sy Borg]

Jan, none of that is important. Whether all of Earth's surface life dies in a hundred or in half a billion years is moot - as trivial as the difference between a person living to 80 or to 90 years. Who cares? They still lived a full life. Sure, at 90 one might be grateful to still be alive but in the greater scheme of things it's just trivia. Dad had a heart operation at around age 80 that extended his life to about 90 - a difficult, painful and sorrowful decade for him, and if he had his time again he might have preferred the shorter and kinder path to death.

Without humans, in half a billion years all of Earth's surface life will be gone, the oceans boiled into space. This disaster is apparently what those who complain about human activity hope for as the Earth's best possible destiny - innocent obliteration. They will be perfectly happy with the idea of everything that was ever part of the Earth being irretrievably annihilated, rendering the entire exercise of life as futile as a wild animal's life that does not even include mating, let alone reproduction.

With human activity, surface life may die out a tiny bit earlier than otherwise (in geological time). However, if humanity saves the planet from a killer asteroid in the future, which is a pretty fair likelihood in the next thousand years, humanity may end up improving the chances of survival for other biology.

Just as importantly, humans can prevent all life created on Earth this from being lost forever due to our star's expansion. Further, humanity can seed other worlds with Earth's genetic material and data, and probably self-improving/evolving technology that in itself may be the next step beyond biological life and intelligence.