What happens to us when we die?
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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?
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.
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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.
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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 :)
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I'm pretty relaxed with this view.Ashurean wrote: ↑January 25th, 2018, 2:53 pm 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.
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.
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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.Jan Sand wrote: ↑January 26th, 2018, 11:16 pmWhat 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,
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.
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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.
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