What do you believe happens when we die

You're talking about diffusion, the process by which micro-particles impelled by Brownian motion diffuse through a fluid. Briefly, although Brownian motion (the motion of particles suspended in a fluid) is random, it nevertheless causes the particles to move from areas of high concentration towards areas of low concentration. The rate at which this movement takes place is affected by a number of factors, principally temperature (Brownian motion is stronger at higher temperatures) and the viscosity of the fluid medium. And of course it's impossible to track every single particle, but you can build statistical models and then test these with real-world applications. (For example; I pour 250ml of hydrochloric acid into a 50,000 litre swimming pool at typical conditions of atmospheric pressure and water temperature; how long before there is a uniform concentration of acid throughout the pool? This is easily tested. Answer: within 30 minutes; less if the pool is a heated pool.)

OK. You can apply these models to answer questions like: how long before the molecules in Julius Caesar's dying breath are evenly distributed throughout the planetary atmosphere? I don't actually know the answer to this question but I am confidently assured by those who do that it happened long ago and that, statistically, it is likely that right now you are breathing molecules which were comprised in his dying breath.

So, the dust that was Shakespeare? This is different because it is not suspended in a fluid. Shakespeare was buried in the earth; he decomposed. But the earth is not a fluid; his bits would not be diffused by Brownian motion. But they would be spread in other ways - worms eat the fleshy bits, they move not very far, but far enough to be eaten by birds, who move rather further, and who themselves die and decompose and release molecules that get eaten by other animals, or absorbed into plants that get eaten by other animals, that move, and die, and decompose, and so on and so on. I don't know if we have reliable statistical models as to how fast or how uniformly the molecules of the dead are distributed in this way. Off the cuff, it looks to me like a much more complex thing to model.

Except, at some point in the cycle bits of dead Shakespeare end up in water - rivers, the sea - or in the atmosphere. And once that happens, diffusion by Brownian motion takes over, and from their on the rate of diffusion is fairly predictable. So, really, all you have to model is, how long is it before a critical mass of Shakespeare ends up in the Avon.

So if I borrow somebody's bicycle I will absorb some of their molecules while they are still alive! This is stuff that happens to us even before we die!

I think we need to give serious thought to the moral, political and spiritual implications of bikesharing schemes.

If you install the Boards Enhancement Suite (desktop) the date stamp of the first unread post is in bold.

The people complaining about scrolling all seem to be mobile users though.

Nice or naughty, present or lump of coal?

Flann O’Brien was also responsible for the mental transmogrification of John Duffy’s brother into a train, while he was alive. That took quite some doing.

Some believe that when you die, an intangible part of your being, often called your spirit or soul, separates from your body and goes to a realm of sorts that is separate from our reality - Heaven, or Hell, or some place in between. Different places called many things by many different cultures, and where you go is often believed to depend on how you have comported yourself in this realm we currently find ourselves. In short, something happens.

This is relatively straightforward.

The opposing view is that nothing happens. In a strange way, nothing is a more interesting concept to think about, for me, because true nothing would be so nothing, you wouldn't even notice it. I could, as I type this, technically experience a quadrillion years worth of true nothing and be completely unaffected. So, to say that after death there is nothing is meaningless in my opinion, because your consciousness, having dissipated, will be unable to appreciate this nothingness and so being dead would offer no peace. From one's own perspective as a conscious being, there can only be somethingness. It may be closest thing we get to 'experiencing' nothingness (which cannot be experienced because it is nothing) is from deep sleep, under general anaesthetic, transcendental meditation maybe or some powerful psychotropic drug perhaps, but in all these experiences, you still come out of the other side knowing that you had this experience and that you lacked the ability to perceive time passing within that state.

But in physical death of your body and your consciousness, if and where there is nothing, and you have no more consciousness, there is no other side to come out on to be able to go 'ah yes, I went through some nothing, just there'. And because you no longer have a consciousness, you would not be able to know you are dead, are going through nothingness or that you had ever even been alive because there is no longer a 'you' to know any of this.

The more I think of this kind of true nothing, the more it just seems like a non-concept. That is not to say I think there's something, but that as a conscious being, I can only ever perceive and have awareness, from my own perspective that is. As I said, true nothingness would surely be unnoticeable because it is, well, nothing...

So, where does that leave me in the 'nothing' model of death?

1) Whatever time I get alive is actually non-existent since all conception of the universe dies when I die, *from my own perspective*, and I won't be able to remember anything or remember that I can't remember anything or have a mind to not remember that I cannot remember anything. From my perspective, as a non-entity, it was as well not have happened.

2) Being that, as a conscious being, I can only really be in the now (the past is memory, the future is imagination), the now I experience at the point of death may last, from my perspective, what feels like an eternity (probably only a second or two in real terms), and in this now you have some quite vivid dreams that you may think are an afterlife, but are really just emanating from your brain, but this is obviously only speculation and probably overestimates the brain's capacity to warp one's perception of time.

But, still, being that one cannot experience the non-experience of nothing, the consciousness being pushed over the line of death I liken to an object going across the event horizon of a black hole. It goes past the black hole, but from your perspective remains upon the event horizon, because light cannot escape from inside the line.

3) You die. You longer have a mind with which to process the passing of time. In this non-state from your perspective as a formerly conscious being, any length of time has no meaning. It's essentially all the same. It could be an instant for all you care whether it be a nanosecond or googolplex years, since there is no you to be aware of time passing. In the fullness of time, or even the fulness of reality itself, where your body and mind are really just a biological machine with no supernatural uniqueness to them, then must it be that any set of circumstances, no matter how unlikely or unique will eventually come around again, including you, on the same Earth, made of the same atoms and electrons , in the same place, with the same ancestors, etc. living every possible outcome of your life? Sort of reincarnation, but without the mystical Hindu aspects.

TL;DR - Whether there is a God or not, or whether there is a classical afterlife or not, I, and each one of us, from our own perspective as aware consciousnesses can only ever experience being, since experiencing true nothing eternally is a non-concept and having no consciousness would surely be unnoticeable, and the concept of death ultimately only has meaning to the living who have to undergo grief and missing loved ones.

P.S. didn't mean to write an essay.