What happens to us when we die?

[Binyamin7]

It is reasonable to first prove immaterial things exist before it is granted that they can cease to exist. Brain functions can be discerned with current instrumentation of blood flow and synaptic connection and disconnection. There is nothing immaterial in thinking.

The mechanism we use to think, the brain, is testable, but the creative internal being and the language we use to think is all immaterial.

Can you think without using language? How do we explain your complex immaterial emotional thoughts which occur using language? Emotions seem to be an immaterial law or sorts, they do not serve the purposes of naturalistic explainations but are clearly very real. Intertwined in our being is a morality, which is immaterial, emotions, which is immaterial, all these things use our bodies to express themselves but appear to be in control of our bodies instead of subjects of and/or inventions of our bodies. This very conversation is nonsense if we are strictly naturalistic creatures, why would a human ever venture to think such things?

All the laws of nature exist, we do not invent them. Same with mathematical laws, you can assign a different symbol or value but the laws are always the same. We find an incredible amount of immaterial laws which we use to make matter do what we want it to, but we do not use matter to violate the immaterial laws, because they are unchangeable. By observation we find that the immaterial lords it over the material world in this way, one governs the other. Our being is immaterial and our material body listens to it until it leaves and goes where it goes.

[Atla]

Since experience, like any modification of material through time, vanishes with the destruction of the recording device, be it a human brain or a vinyl record, the concept of never never enters into the equation.

Matter can't be created or destroyed, it just changes / appears to change. It never vanishes so in that sense it's eternal.

[Binyamin7]

At the age of 93 I daily shake hands with the concept of death and cannot dismiss the idea of non existence as not worth contemplation. Any living creature is, moment by moment, a complex of physiological dynamics which evolves continuously. and to dismiss its existence is to dismiss the existence of a snowflake because its descent in space places it in a different position in space as it falls. We are more than our memories as our physical existence changes as we exist. That our knowledge of ourselves records our existence gives us a sense of our four dimensionality but does not deny our existence beyond the momentary sense of now, any more than the attention to a point on a line denies the existence if a line. I still savor greatly my sense has great deficiencies of existence and am fully aware that my long memory does not recall precisely every instant of my past but I am quite aware that I did not cease to exist when my memories are deficient in perfect recall.

93? Awesome, there is something sobering about listening to one of our elders reflect on life this way. I hope you have accepted the free gift of salvation extended by Mashiach Nagid.

[Binyamin7]

Since experience, like any modification of material through time, vanishes with the destruction of the recording device, be it a human brain or a vinyl record, the concept of never never enters into the equation.

Matter can't be created or destroyed, it just changes / appears to change. It never vanishes so in that sense it's eternal.

Except at some point is was all created according to the sciences of Origins. We can prove it when we see the Galaxies all drifting away from each other simultaneously.

[Jan Sand]

Reality is odd when we have no means of integrating it into that aspect of reality we have already formulated. We each create our personal realities out of sensory input patterns and in all probability there is much phenomena out there not necessary to our survival so we have no sensory mechanisms to reveal it. Other creatures like bats and dolphins have different sensory apparatus and therefore create different realities to live in. Dark matter is apparent in gravity analyses.

[Jan Sand]

Virtual particles appear and disappear continuously and when a virtual pair appears near a black hole and when one of the pair is swallowed by the hole, the remaining particle remains as created matter. Any star continuously destroys matter to create energy.

[Atla]

Yeah it's never a safe bet, no matter how much we know, something entirely different may be going on behind the scenes that's beyond our ability to detect.

Having said that, questions like what "IS" energy/motion/the forces/pretty much anything in physics, are imo rather meaningless because there aro no specific things, all we can do is come up with better and better metaphors to describe the phenomena. And I see no reason to assume that they came to be, instead of the default assumption that they always existed.

I guess energy is a difficult topic, but like everything else in this universe, I see energy as a necessary feature of our universe that enables us to be here. I kinda suspect that some forms of energy, especially gravity and kinetic/potential energy, aren't fundamental, maybe none of the four yet discovered forces are fundamental, they are merely how our universe is arranged, but I may be very wrong here.

Sorry, I phrased poorly above re: time. I'm thinking that time is a major x factor, that appears to be least understood of all natural phenomena.

According to the theorists, dark energy would seem most likely to be fundamental and, coincidentally, it's suspected to be behind the arrow of time. I am very taken by the oddness of reality, which is why I can't help hedging. I keep wondering what oddities are yet to be found/noticed.

I think it's very likely that time is by far best addressed by the Anthropic principle (just like pretty much everything else about the pecularities of our universe).

We are human, so the universe we are looking at must be compatible with human life. Things MUST flow from one direction towards another, from apparently simpler states towards apparently more complex states, otherwise for example evolution couldn't have happened, we couldn't be alive, we couldn't form memories etc.

I see this whole argument as sort of a tautology. We MUST live in a matter-dominated region of the universe where there is an arrow of time, where entropy/information/complexity/whatever is increasing in one direction. Beyond that, I think the natural assumption is that somewhere beyond the observable universe, or in parallel realms of our universe, such things are reversed and for example entropy is constant for the entire unvierse, but such things may never be provable.

As for dark energy being behind time - nah.. but it's of course part of the equation.

[Atla]

Virtual particles appear and disappear continuously and when a virtual pair appears near a black hole and when one of the pair is swallowed by the hole, the remaining particle remains as created matter. Any star continuously destroys matter to create energy.

Virtual pairs don't appear out of nothing, they appear out of some underlying fabric that we don't have direct access to.
Matter and energy are equivalent, and energy is also "material" when wby matter we mean materialism.

[Jan Sand]

Nothing is a strange concept since space itself, as Einstein indicated, has shape and can direct motion as orbiting bodies clearly indicate,

[Atla]

Matter can't be created or destroyed, it just changes / appears to change. It never vanishes so in that sense it's eternal.

Except at some point is was all created according to the sciences of Origins. We can prove it when we see the Galaxies all drifting away from each other simultaneously.

Yes if we assume that time had a beginning.
No if we assume that time is a circular, a closed loop, without beginning or end. It's just that, at one point on that loop, all the galaxies of the observable part of the universe are concentrated into a singularity.

[Jan Sand]

As an artist and a designer I think all sorts of things not using language. Language is only one system of thinking but I think in all sorts of different patterns not using language. Our sense systems operate outside of language and our dreams are formulations of possibilities outside of language. Anybody who cooks does not need the names of flavors or spices to think in terms of how to work to achieve results beyond linguistics. Language is one basis for thinking but math may be thought of as a language but it is far more than that - it is a discipline of patterns and it is patterns with which we think.

[Binyamin7]

Except at some point is was all created according to the sciences of Origins. We can prove it when we see the Galaxies all drifting away from each other simultaneously.

Yes if we assume that time had a beginning.
No if we assume that time is a circular, a closed loop, without beginning or end. It's just that, at one point on that loop, all the galaxies of the observable part of the universe are concentrated into a singularity.

That is inconsistant with our understanding of the universe a la General Relativity, so there is that problem with your assertion. The space time continuum seems to imply special creation because we have time and matter needing to both start at some point simultaneously.

However If we allow time to be an eternal entity we still have not accounted for matter and vise versa. Did the watch build itself? Can anything we observe build itself? So then, logically, time cannot bould itself. We can observe time well enough to know that doesn't appear to be an ability it has. It cannot create itself or matter. Same with matter, a great mystery since it cannot be created or destroyed, only altered. To the best of our understanding matter cannot create itself. So then we are left to conclude that the original cause of these things has to be something outside of them that we have not physically studied in a lab yet.

[Atla]

Yes if we assume that time had a beginning.
No if we assume that time is a circular, a closed loop, without beginning or end. It's just that, at one point on that loop, all the galaxies of the observable part of the universe are concentrated into a singularity.

That is inconsistant with our understanding of the universe a la General Relativity, so there is that problem with your assertion. The space time continuum seems to imply special creation because we have time and matter needing to both start at some point simultaneously.

However If we allow time to be an eternal entity we still have not accounted for matter and vise versa. Did the watch build itself? Can anything we observe build itself? So then, logically, time cannot bould itself. We can observe time well enough to know that doesn't appear to be an ability it has. It cannot create itself or matter. Same with matter, a great mystery since it cannot be created or destroyed, only altered. To the best of our understanding matter cannot create itself. So then we are left to conclude that the original cause of these things has to be something outside of them that we have not physically studied in a lab yet.

No, it's not inconsistent with anything. There is no reason to believe that anything had a beginning.

[Sy Borg]

Except at some point is was all created according to the sciences of Origins. We can prove it when we see the Galaxies all drifting away from each other simultaneously.

Yes if we assume that time had a beginning.

No if we assume that time is a circular, a closed loop, without beginning or end. It's just that, at one point on that loop, all the galaxies of the observable part of the universe are concentrated into a singularity.

That is inconsistant with our understanding of the universe a la General Relativity, so there is that problem with your assertion. The space time continuum seems to imply special creation because we have time and matter needing to both start at some point simultaneously.

However If we allow time to be an eternal entity we still have not accounted for matter and vise versa. Did the watch build itself? Can anything we observe build itself? So then, logically, time cannot bould itself. We can observe time well enough to know that doesn't appear to be an ability it has. It cannot create itself or matter. Same with matter, a great mystery since it cannot be created or destroyed, only altered. To the best of our understanding matter cannot create itself. So then we are left to conclude that the original cause of these things has to be something outside of them that we have not physically studied in a lab yet.

We don't really understand time, though, do we? Relativity tells us that future and the past are the same, already part of an existing fabric of reality. Meanwhile retroactivity has been observed at quantum scales. We figure that there was no time before the BB introduced radioactive decay, rotations and orbits.

Imagine if, after the BB, amorphous energy just pulled apart in the expanding space and dissipated without ever forming particles - no decay, rotation or orbits, just stuff flying randomly about. Would we say such a universe was timeless or that it had a different kind of time?

[Jan Sand]

"Flying about" implies motion and without time there is no motion.