What happens to us when we die?

Discuss any topics related to metaphysics (the philosophical study of the principles of reality) or epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) in this forum.
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gimal
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by gimal »

First of all you must define "life".
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Sy Borg
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Sy Borg »

Sealight wrote:
Marsh8472 wrote:How "us" is defined is unfortunately a factor in this question. It's theoretically possible that after I die a bunch of atoms can be assembled together by aliens to make an exact duplicate of me in a living state. From the point of view of that assembled me, it would seem like an afterlife if they used a copy of me right before death. But it's only going to be "me" if my identity is defined by my atom arrangement in this scenario. If an atomic copy of me is not considered me then this is not considered an afterlife for the entity typing this message right now.
Definitely this is the key question. To me a person is made of three main parts, not classical two, a body, a consciousness, and an ID (identity). I think the first two can be recovered on atomic level by aliens (or people in future), but not the ID. Why? I don't know the answer yet. Just some feelings. Basically there is a big difference between my consciousness and someone's else. So, if an ID is not recovered then neither a person is recovered.
What do you think?
Interesting. I too have an intuitive sense that "I" am not who I seem to be - in some ways more, in many ways much less - more part of an aggregate than a real individual.

However, if all information is stored on the Planck scale (a "big if" but the thread is speculative by definition) then perhaps retrieval of the ID is possible, either as a return of the "spirit" or simply the use of high level technology to unravel an individual's information like analysing fossil DNA.

Otherwise, yes, at death individuals become consigned to others' memories, history and the numerous unbeknownst knock-on effects of things we did during life that we glossed over as mundane or unimportant. The latter aspect of our lives - the incidental - is hugely underestimated because it is out of our control to a fair extent. However, these mundane instances can result in our most profound effects on the world.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, I wonder about the subjective experience. So many patients on the verge of death feeling as though they are in a void and then seeing a welcoming light. How long does that experience last, and if it stops at brain death, in what way would that narrative end? What happens subjectively (or objectively?) when they go into the light?
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Rayliikanen
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Rayliikanen »

The judgment.
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Sy Borg
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Sy Borg »

Rayliikanen wrote:The judgment.
Any deity that would judge inherently flawed humans for being inherently flawed would entirely lack any understanding of its creation. A god that can't even understand basic psychology is not qualified for the job.
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Ormond
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Ormond »

Saw038 wrote:Therefore, when we die I think we will return to nothingness, but I think nothingness is what we have been seeking the whole time while we have been living in the small world of somethingness.
Yes, that's it, well and wisely said.

We don't need to agree with this, we can see it for ourselves in our ordinary day to day lives. If we observe those activities that we are reaching for, we can see they typically contain a quality of nothingness.

As example, sex. What is an orgasm but a quick trip to nothingness? It's so incredibly brief, and yet much of the world revolves around it. As example, love. What is love but an experience of nothingness? That which creates life is grounded in death.

And the reach for nothingness is so much more subtle and pervasive than sex. We are constantly reaching out to little ordinary experiences throughout the day, and what makes these experiences magnetic is the little bit of psychological nothingness they come with. A stranger enters the restaurant where you're having lunch, and you turn to look. You have no need of this information, it's the experience of looking that is the draw, for in that moment of looking nothingness replaces you, you are briefly dead. It is these moments of death that make life worth living.

We all understand the life force within us, the urge to be. There is an equal and opposite death force too, the urge not to be. It's like when you throw a ball up in the air, the force of gravity is there acting upon the ball in every moment, even as the ball races skyward.

Saw is so right, we spend our entire lives fearing that which we most deeply desire. Such is the human condition.
If the things we want to hear could take us where we want to go, we'd already be there.
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Carol
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Carol »

The answer to your question might depend, in part, on what happens to your organs. I can not post a link but if you google the following you should get scientific information confirming at least some aspects of who we are continues.
can-organ-transplant-change-recipients-personality-cell-memory-theory-

Organ transplants is one way our being may continue and so is having children who carry our genes. Another thread asked why we might have unreasonable fears, and genetic studies conclude the experiences of our ancestors can be carried in our genes. Our emotional state may come from an ancestor's trauma, or joy of gardening or writing or whatever.
Youngeqp
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Youngeqp »

Heaven or hell? In my more gullible days, I believed that you could burn in eternal torment in hell. However, pain is a physical sensation sensed through the nerves in your body and brought to realization but the brain. I know people who can't feel pain and their still alive.

Also, whether heaven or hell there is no sense of self after death. Your sense of self is in your consciousness. When you die, so does the brain. And the electrical currents that run through it cease to flow. Wipe the hard drive of a computer and see what it remembers of itself. See what games it had kept, what files it have saved.

After all the human mind and computers are the exact same thing. It's just that one is biological and the other is a machine.
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Atreyu
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Atreyu »

Ormond wrote:
Saw038 wrote:Therefore, when we die I think we will return to nothingness, but I think nothingness is what we have been seeking the whole time while we have been living in the small world of somethingness.
Yes, that's it, well and wisely said.

We don't need to agree with this, we can see it for ourselves in our ordinary day to day lives. If we observe those activities that we are reaching for, we can see they typically contain a quality of nothingness.

As example, sex. What is an orgasm but a quick trip to nothingness? It's so incredibly brief, and yet much of the world revolves around it. As example, love. What is love but an experience of nothingness? That which creates life is grounded in death.

And the reach for nothingness is so much more subtle and pervasive than sex. We are constantly reaching out to little ordinary experiences throughout the day, and what makes these experiences magnetic is the little bit of psychological nothingness they come with. A stranger enters the restaurant where you're having lunch, and you turn to look. You have no need of this information, it's the experience of looking that is the draw, for in that moment of looking nothingness replaces you, you are briefly dead. It is these moments of death that make life worth living.

We all understand the life force within us, the urge to be. There is an equal and opposite death force too, the urge not to be. It's like when you throw a ball up in the air, the force of gravity is there acting upon the ball in every moment, even as the ball races skyward.

Saw is so right, we spend our entire lives fearing that which we most deeply desire. Such is the human condition.
It sounds like you're basically saying 'Death is Freedom'. Is that correct?
Tamminen
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Tamminen »

To be honest, I do not know what happens to us when we die, and maybe no one knows, but I have a hypothesis, a bit wild perhaps, that answers many questions and is, as far as I can see, logically consistent, although it may seem paradoxical at first sight.

This is the first part of an aphoristic text I have on the web, which presents some of my ontological views, but unfortunately I cannot refer to it because of the forum rules.

*****

I exist, and there is no such thing as nonexistence. My non-being is unthinkable and thus impossible.

The thought of my non-being is self-contradictory.

If the thought of my non-being were meaningful, I would have to be able to think it. I can try to think it because I exist, but just for that reason the thought collapses into absurdity.

I may think that it is logically quite possible that I do not exist. However, this is a strange and erroneous thought, for existence and logic presuppose each other: existence follows the laws of logic, but if I did not exist, there would be no logic either.

Being has no opposite. Non-being is not.

Existence means 'being of anything', but non-being means 'non-being of something somewhere'. We cannot speak of non-being in general in a meaningful way.

The proposition ”There is no such thing as non-being” is, of course, a tautology. Nevertheless, it expresses a basic property of existence that we seldom think of.

My existence does not depend on time. I exist eternally.

Endlessness is a logical property of my existence. The proposition ”I exist” is always true.

Perhaps I am no longer young. But what does it mean that I exist no more?

Someone is perhaps no more with me in the world, because that someone is dead. But I exist always.

Expressions like ”If I did not exist...” and ”When I shall not exist any more...” have no rational content.

Existence means that I am experiencing something here and now. Existence is my existence.

Only I exist. Being of others and objects is the consequence of my existence.

Others and objects constitute the world. The world is, because I exist.

Everything that is, is connected to my existence.

If I did not exist, there would be nothing.

Existence means that my present experience changes to a new experience.

There is nothing between two successive experiences. There is only an experience and then another experience.

Every experience is followed by a new experience.

There is no last experience.

If there were a last experience, that is, an experience after which there would be no experiences, there would be no experiences at all, present, past or future, including this experience that I have now.

All experiences are my experiences.

An experience takes place here and now. Therefore only I can have it.

There are no experiences foreign to me. This is a solid basis for ethics.

What I do to another, I do to myself.

What I do to another would make no difference if I were not the object of that act.

Those who have understood that the soul transmigrates, have also understood that if they step on an ant, they disturb the stream of existence along which they themselves flow.

The experiences that I do not have at the moment, are in the past or in the future.

The past and the future are determined in relation to my present experience.

Time is the basic property of my existence which determines that my present experience is followed by a new experience.

Time is the nucleus of existence.

Existence without time is a conceptual impossibility.

Time is the necessary form of having experiences. I can exist only if the content of my experience changes to another content.

All experiences are in temporal relation to each other. They make a series.

Experiences are like a row of lights that one after the other and one at a time go on and off. The light that is on, is my present experience.

As I am writing this, lights go on and off. As you are reading this, other lights go on and off.

Time and eternity are not opposites. Time is eternal.

Time is eternity built by successive presents.

Eternity is endlessness of experiences. It realizes itself in time. Here.

Someone has said that a moment is the intersection of time and eternity. But this thought mystifies eternity. Time builds itself from present moments that follow each other eternally.

Now is always. And now is always something.

Our fear that time will come to an end has no rational ground. Our hope that time will change to timelessness is absurd. Our hope for eternity has already come true.


An experience can refer to earlier experiences. Memory is built up from these references.

Memory defines an individual.

An individual is the series of those experiences which memory connects to each other.

Individuals make a temporal series.

On one hand I am an individual, on the other hand that which goes through all individual forms.

As an individual I am mortal, but as that which has experiences, as the subject, I am immortal.

Forms disappear, but that which changes form does not disappear.

As an individual I am my memory, as the subject I am nothing.

All that is disappears, hence also the individual that I am. Only the nothing for which all being is, is eternal.

Because, as the subject, I am nothing, I cannot disappear. Therefore I have to exist eternally.

I am an individual about whom I can say: ”When I shall not live any more...” On the other hand, expressions like ”When I shall not exist any more...” are meaningless.

The subject is always the same: the one that exists here and now. That is, I. But my name is all names.

I am, as the subject, the subject of all contents of experience. That I am the subject of all contents is a fundamental property of time. Time connects experiences to each other in such a way that all experiences are mine.

That I am nothing as the subject means that even though I have an experience each moment, and even though I have all experiences in the flow of time, experiences have no such relations of reference to each other that there would be some kind of property remaining through all experiences, an eternal memory or identity. Only time connects all experiences to each other: they all have a position in the common time series.


The proposition ”I exist” is true also when I am dead.

The individual that I am dies. But someone is born. I.

Death is forgetting.

When a new experience does not contain a reference to my present experience, I am dead.

Because there is nothing between successive experiences, only memory makes a difference between life and death.

An experience dies immediately after it is born, but a new experience can revive it by remembering it.

The present dies into the past, revives in repeated memories, and then disappears for good, out of sight.

Now I have this experience and then I have a new experience. If my new experience contains something connected to my previous experience, my life goes on. Else I am dead and just born.

The present wanders through reality dragging and dropping fragments of the past.

When I die, a fragment of the past drops away.

The past which is present as memories, vanishes from sight when I die.

When I die, I change to another individual.

When I am dead, I do not remember the individual that I was.

When I am dead, I am someone who is now for me an other, and for whom I am an other.

When I am dead, someone else has written these sentences.

Everybody knows what it is like to be dead.

I have left the one I was, and now that I am dead, I am this one, whom I shall also leave soon.

When I die, I leave myself.

Death is a leap by which I move from one point of space-time to another without speed.

The stream is invisible and Charon is swift. Suddenly I am in this strange landscape and I do not remember from where I came here.

Life is a journey from oblivion to oblivion. Existence means being always on some life-long journey.

Life and death are not phenomena. Life is the flow of phenomena for an individual, and death is the memory break that separates one individual from another.

Phenomena occur to me, and when I am dead, they occur to the other that I am.

Death is nothing. There is only the last experience of an individual and the first experience of another individual.

The end is a beginning.
Justintruth
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Justintruth »

How do you know you are dead?

How do you know you aren't dead?

If something happens to you, you aren't dead.

So, after you die, if you are not brought back to life, nothing happens to you - almost by definition of the word dead.

I had surgery and went through anesthetic. Want to know what it was like? I was asked to count backward from 100 and breathe deep. I complied got somewhere to 96 I think and I was in the recovery room. Now for the doctors and nurses it was a few hours but for me it was instantaneous. No duration. I was just shut off. In a sense nothing happened to me while under anesthesia. In a sense I was dead for a while and saw what it was...like? ...no...wasn't like at all... well... it isn't like anything but even worse it isn't even like nothing...nothing there to be like or not like something else!

Read Being and Time by Martin Heidegger and you will get the deep connection between time and being. Death means no time. Nothing happens - which is a very bad way to say it for really there is no happening at all - not even a nothing happening. Actually, not even nothing is a much better way to say it. Cessation of temporality with no resulting duration to call "after". The end of temporality, or temporalizing which is the essence of being. Death? No future or present only a past.

But the past! That eternal soul! I refrain from being an asshole just to leave a good record! At least I try... well... sometimes I am an asshole...but...never killed anyone...you know :D
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Godisnolongerneeded
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Godisnolongerneeded »

I would like to think that as our physical being is made from atoms which are mostly empty space and we are merely a chemical, electric engine that after the cessation of this engines function our essence, soul whatever moves on in some still unknowable form as to retaining any knowledge or memory of this momentary life I feel it is unlikely I would like to think our basic morality would and limited life experiences do but that's another story.
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Ostronomos
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Ostronomos »

The wavefunction of the human body is real. And right.
Surreptitious57
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Surreptitious57 »

No one knows what happens after death. But there is zero evidence that anything does happen. Taking that as the default position
I think death is nothing more than a transference from one state to another. From consciousness to non consciousness. Given how it is supposedly pain free and eternal I have no reason to fear it either as it is irrational to be afraid of what you cannot experience
A MIND IS LIKE A PARACHUTE : IT DOES NOT WORK UNLESS IT IS OPEN
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Sisideas
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Sisideas »

Well, a truly philosophical question, that by a definition of philosophy must remain the purview of a belief, so it must go without saying that any answer will be conjecture. That being said the obvious answer, as I see shared by a number of contributors, would equate death with any form of unconsciousness.

For me, the more interesting question is "why are we so concerned about it?" Hoping I don't fall foul of the rules (in terms of bad language) I would like to observe that an element to the state of man's existence could be described as: "a real bitch": here we are plopped into life with an ego-driven motivation to survive at all cost and yet the ultimate outcome is inevitable death; it just seems that such, could be seen as a perverse exercise in futility.

Yes, death terrifies me. The thought that this consciousness (mine) at some point will no longer exist has left me with the terrors, almost as if I had managed to think myself into a "flight or fight" response, where I get cold sweats, nausea and palpitations. Oh well, maybe that's just me. However, in a more esoteric divergence, I have considered a more holistic approach: It is the very fact of my "ego", (that is how I describe it), that I have this response to death. If I, to some degree, could subjugate the emotional effect of the ego, I might be able to consider myself, not as me, just being me but to see myself as a part of the greater life: part of a totality. As such (assuming evolution is not a problem) I have been in existence since the dawn of life and will continue life end on our planet.

Similarly, from a strictly human aspect, one can view our conscious thoughts in a similar way: I am sure we have all been touch/moved by the thoughts and saying of many people in our lives. We are a collective repository of everything and person we have experienced; in effect, they, be it people we have know in person or historical figures of the past that live on in us, through the changes that they have made to our lives. That being true, it must follow that you too will "live on" in everyone you touch or influence. Maybe not immortality but food for thought.
Platos stepchild
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Platos stepchild »

Maybe we fear death precisely because we can't experience it.
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