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.
BigBango
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by BigBango »

Sculptor1 wrote: April 15th, 2020, 8:10 am
BigBango wrote: April 15th, 2020, 5:01 am

Actually Sculptor, while science knows a great deal about the difference between a living body and a dead one and what happens when you die it knows little about the mental and physical roots of a living being.
Wrong again.
Science knows more about that than at any time in history and it continues to learn. Anything you say without reference to this science is idle speculation.
Knowing a great deal about the difference between a living body and a dead one is a good start but it is not definitive. Again the lack of knowledge of the nature of our mental/ physical nature is not evidence that there is no deeper nature that science has yet to understand.
Double negative weasel words.
Science has at its disposal only very simple...
simple compared to what, exactly?
...metaphysical constructs that disqualifies it from understanding the real nature of the roots of our metaphysical being.
So what? Even if this were true, there is nothing you could possibly offer this thread which would add to that knowledge.
Sculptor1, science has very simple metaphysical constructs. For example take the Standard Theory. This theory is one of the soundest theories in contemporary science. Its metaphysical properties are about "physical" objects that can be predicted and verified by the observation of the results of experiments performed by slamming particles together and seeing what results. As a result we know a lot about the behavior of physical particles when put through these particle accelerator tests.

What science does not have are the metaphysical constructs that could explain the role of the "experiential" nature of consciousness.

Since it is a given that science falls short in that arena, the burden of proof that science has not missed something is on you, Sculptor1.

To that end, prove to us that the standard QM theory which creates everything from a quantum fluctuation of "NOTHINESS" could possibly explain "consciousness". The first problem of that happening is that QM is simply a "Platonic" account of statistical distributions that have no "hidden variables". Thus we must accept the probabilistic "form" without any hope of empirical verification. If Boehm's theory were accepted we could look for deeper explanations because his theories predict the same results as Bohr's but is based on the existence of hidden variables.

Thus there is good reason to suspect that a deeper metaphysical formulation that includes notions of the existence of a "mental" component to reality as proposed by Nagel, Searle and other philosophers has to be considered. Your job, Scuptor1 is to prove that QM has disproved that possibility. Good Luck!
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Sculptor1
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Sculptor1 »

BigBango wrote: April 17th, 2020, 6:50 am
Sculptor1 wrote: April 15th, 2020, 8:10 am
Wrong again.
Science knows more about that than at any time in history and it continues to learn. Anything you say without reference to this science is idle speculation.

Double negative weasel words.

simple compared to what, exactly?

So what? Even if this were true, there is nothing you could possibly offer this thread which would add to that knowledge.
Sculptor1, science has very simple metaphysical constructs. For example take the Standard Theory. This theory is one of the soundest theories in contemporary science. Its metaphysical properties are about "physical" objects that can be predicted and verified by the observation of the results of experiments performed by slamming particles together and seeing what results. As a result we know a lot about the behavior of physical particles when put through these particle accelerator tests.

What science does not have are the metaphysical constructs that could explain the role of the "experiential" nature of consciousness.
Nothing is going to be able to do that.
What science does show is that Experience has no relevance to DEATH (the thread subject). And although you might be disappointed with the metaphysics of science, it is the best we have whether you like it or not. All the other systems are just imaginative accretions, diverse, and not at all in agreement with the facts of reality.

Since it is a given that science falls short in that arena, the burden of proof that science has not missed something is on you, Sculptor1.
You have still to demonstrate that science has ANY failings at all.
So put up or shut up.

To that end, prove to us that the standard QM theory which creates everything from a quantum fluctuation of "NOTHINESS" could possibly explain "consciousness".
Nothing explains consciousness. But science has the advantage of correctly describing it; that is a thing that all other systems singularly fail at.
The first problem of that happening is that QM is simply a "Platonic" account of statistical distributions that have no "hidden variables".
Yes, science always fails when mystical explanations are borrowed from other systems.
Thus we must accept the probabilistic "form" without any hope of empirical verification. If Boehm's theory were accepted we could look for deeper explanations because his theories predict the same results as Bohr's but is based on the existence of hidden variables.
Get back the thread, or you are just going to look silly.

Thus there is good reason to suspect that a deeper metaphysical formulation that includes notions of the existence of a "mental" component to reality as proposed by Nagel, Searle and other philosophers has to be considered. Your job, Scuptor1 is to prove that QM has disproved that possibility. Good Luck!
You are dead wrong.
You are not even on topic.
You are just waffling.
gater
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by gater »

When your brain dies, you are dead - permanently. You will NEVER have another experience.
If that reality is too much for you, then believe in a after-life, it doesn't really matter.
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thrasymachus
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by thrasymachus »

gater
When your brain dies, you are dead - permanently. You will NEVER have another experience.
If that reality is too much for you, then believe in a after-life, it doesn't really matter.
I envy your confidence. But the proof is in the pudding: You are likely owing your confidence to an assumption grounded in a common understanding of things whereby physical things like brains perish along with the hundred billion neurons that make possible the "you" you have in mind. But clearly, the brain you think dies forever is given to you by a brain, your brain, and there is therefore rather interpretatively compromised. This is the kind of thing that separates finitude from infinity, and not just a minor glitch in perception. It is indeed perception itself that is in question. Add to this the ethereal nature of the consciousness that the you in question is. It is simply an assumption, a material assumption, about something that is very questionable in its "material" nature. Finally, there is, call it our metaphysics. Conscious "existence" in finitude makes no sense, that is, finitude itself makes no sense, for if as is intuitively established infinity is that which encompasses finitude, then a line must be drawn between the two. If infinity is an irresistible "fact", intuitively coercive, then the question goes to finitude, and it turns out the it is THIS term that makes the trouble for making sense, for all of our clear, definite meanings fall away very quickly when inquiry is brought to bear on something to find an elementary basis. And since these meanings are what finitude is all about, it follows that inquiry annihilates finitude, and infinity remains the only Real dimensional reality. So, we are infinite, not finite, and therefore our finitude, our death, is simply an illusion, an idea grounded in a false conception of reality, for no reality is finite.
gater
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by gater »

No - we are finite. Our lives have a beginning and a ending. All things that are alive will die, death is a natural part of life. Humans are no different than any other animal, we live, breathe, grow and die.
Believing in a after life is a futile as believing in Santa Claus, but at the same time it doesn't do any real harm, if it helps people deal with the inevibility of their death.
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Ayaan_817
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Re:

Post by Ayaan_817 »

pjkeeley wrote: April 14th, 2007, 11:11 pm Ever passed out or been knocked unconcious? It's the same non-experience you get when you go into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Don't worry about it too much.
Exactly, well said.
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LuckyR
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by LuckyR »

gater wrote: April 25th, 2020, 6:51 pm No - we are finite. Our lives have a beginning and a ending. All things that are alive will die, death is a natural part of life. Humans are no different than any other animal, we live, breathe, grow and die.
Believing in a after life is a futile as believing in Santa Claus, but at the same time it doesn't do any real harm, if it helps people deal with the inevibility of their death.
Great analogy, I use that one a lot myself.
"As usual... it depends."
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Ayaan_817
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Ayaan_817 »

Death simply means our nervous system stops functioning. Even if the heart stops beating(cardiac arrest), it doesn't mean we're dead. Unless and until even a single electrical signal is passing in our body through the nervous system on command of the brain, we're not dead and after death, we can't think!
Metathought
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Metathought »

What is the fundamental difference between a living human and a dead human?
The living human possesses an energy (life energy) which is absent in the dead human.
This life energy activates the living human.

When the living human dies, what happens to the energy?
The Law of Conservation of Energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It may be transformed to some other form of energy but it can never be annihilated.

Where did this life energy come from at the birth of a human?
It came from life energy. Life comes from Life.
At conception, a male and a female seed united, producing an embryo which developed into a foetus that grew into the living human.
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audiopaynt
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by audiopaynt »

LuckyR wrote: May 3rd, 2020, 3:35 am
gater wrote: April 25th, 2020, 6:51 pm No - we are finite. Our lives have a beginning and a ending. All things that are alive will die, death is a natural part of life. Humans are no different than any other animal, we live, breathe, grow and die.
Believing in a after life is a futile as believing in Santa Claus, but at the same time it doesn't do any real harm, if it helps people deal with the inevibility of their death.
Great analogy, I use that one a lot myself.
I subscribed to this sentiment. Ultimately the brain is a functioning organ that accumulates sensory information; ears, eyes, taste, olfactory, proprioceptive. Remove the organ that deciphers external environmental stimuli and you cease to recognise existence. Even if you were kept alive with no brain at all in a very complex medical state. You are dead and perceive nothing.
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Present awareness
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Present awareness »

At the moment of death, whom is it that dies? The person that we once were, has already ceased to exist and the person that we might be, is not yet here. Only the person that we are at this very moment, may experience the process of dying, but even then, as the cells die and the body cools, it takes time.

Once we are dead, we don’t know that we are dead, just as it was before we were born. We had no knowledge that we were not born, prior to our birth or how many billions of years had gone by before we finally arrived on this planet at this point in time.

Our consciousness, memories and thoughts are like a hologram, a projected image of whom we think we are, but in reality, it is not much more then a bubble which is easily popped by the simple act of dying.
Even though you can see me, I might not be here.
Steve3007
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Steve3007 »

Believing in a after life is a futile as believing in Santa Claus, but at the same time it doesn't do any real harm, if it helps people deal with the inevibility of their death.
I guess the fact that it helps some people deal with the inevitability of their death means that it's not futile. Just as belief in Santa Claus is not futile because it helps people deal with the inevitability of winter.
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Sculptor1
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Sculptor1 »

Steve3007 wrote: June 29th, 2020, 3:20 am
Believing in a after life is a futile as believing in Santa Claus, but at the same time it doesn't do any real harm, if it helps people deal with the inevibility of their death.
I guess the fact that it helps some people deal with the inevitability of their death means that it's not futile. Just as belief in Santa Claus is not futile because it helps people deal with the inevitability of winter.
Both excuses are futile.
Belief is Santa does not help kids deal with winter. It's the old folk that have problems with winter and I don't know anyone over 5 that still believes in Santa.
As for allowing people to cope with the inevitability of their own death, it is precisely this that is the harm. We'd all be better off if we did not kid ourselves that this was only a rehearsal. When you know you are going to be ashes, that can be very liberating. Things you put off, things you are scared to do, and other things get done, that would otherwise go undone.
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Sy Borg
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Sy Borg »

The elephant in the room is subjective experience. Consider frequent reports of subjective time dilation during NDEs. So what, you might ask? They are just dreams on the cusp of brain death, right?

However, when you are dying and your body has no more prospects, subjective experience is all that matters. That is, when you are basically a cadaver with just a few minutes of brain oxygen left, if your subjective sense of time is highly dilated, then there is every possibility that you could experience a seemingly eternal heaven or hell. Whatever it is "real" or not matters not a bit.

Based on reports of those in near-death situations, most do not have these experiences. What happens to us in death seems to be as varied as in life. Maybe that's what some religions meant (before they became political) when they claimed that only a small percentage would be admitted to heaven while the others just return to dust? Do you have an NDE or do your lights simply go out?

You really have to hand it to Mother Nature for the ultimate stitch-up, with beings evolving such a fierce will to live that they cannot accept death as a physical fact. This question, and religions - are fundamentally about the survival instinct. A billion years ago or so, the critters that felt fear in the face of existential threats survived better than those that didn't feel fear. Existential dread has grown over countless generations of different species to produce entities whose will to survive and breed is all-consuming.

That is, in the greater scheme of things, our lives appear to matter much less that they subjectively feel to us. Consider the threads about abortion. The death of some fishlike embryo is treated as some huge tragedy rather than the failure of an organism to successfully breed in a particular instance.

In that, we are smaller than we realise. It's been said that in a billion years, anything that has evolved from us would be as different to us as we are from bacteria. I note that we have about as many bacteria in us as cells (in numbers, not mass) - and what are cells, anyway, but highly complex and connected microbes? So, what we are creating/becoming/forming will be huge, comprising billions of humans and increasingly intelligent machines.

So we are currently in the process of evolving into communities that will evolve to be effectively the organs of entities (run by AI, no doubt) that are far larger than ourselves. Note that the brain effectively acts tyrannically towards other body systems. What is the evolution of brains but the evolution of control? More brains equals more control.

But to those future "humans" it will be just business as usual. After all, if you brought a primitive human forward in time to see how we moderns live, they would be struck by how fussed we were about little things - 'No no no! Don't spill red wine on the carpet! Don't cross the road until you see the little green man! Okay, to obtain clothes you will need to type your name, address, credit card number, expiry date and three-digit security code ...'

So I suspect that the far future for humans will involve what to us would look like extreme totalitarianism and total subservience. Lee Ermey's character famously said in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, 'Marines die, that's what we're here for. But the Marine Corps lives forever. And that means you live forever'. Replace "Marine Corps" with a future government/multinational/deity and you have our existential situation in a nutshell. We die - and maybe we will experience eternal bliss subjectively on the way out - but our attributes will live on piecemeal within remaining populations.
Steve3007
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Re: What happens to us when we die?

Post by Steve3007 »

Greta wrote:Lee Ermey's character famously said in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, 'Marines die, that's what we're here for. But the Marine Corps lives forever. And that means you live forever'.
I like that choice of popular culture metaphor. A bit like O'Brien saying something similar to Winston Smith about The Party.

I've read that he ad-libbed most of the stuff in that scene.
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