What do you believe happens when we die

nozzferrahhtoo wrote: »

Nah sunny and hot here. The kids just left with mammy to make one last visit to the outdoor swimming pools before they close for the season next week. Outdoor swimming facilities in nearly every town around here is one of the pleasures of Bavarian Life.

s1ippy wrote: »

Alright, I finished the work I had to do this morning really quickly so I'm going to use this spare time to try and organise my thoughts into some sort of cohesive idea that you can make of what you will. Hopefully it'll appeal to some of you and give you solace, because ultimately that's really what we're all looking for in relation to the big question. Feel free to sh!t on it as well, if you're scatologically inclined.

If you look at lesser organisms like amoebas or plants, they don't really have the sentience that we do. Their behaviours are organised around their perceptions. Can they feel something that will result in ill outcome? They move away. Do they detect something pleasant? They move towards it.

Animal behaviours are similar, except that we have more sensory access to the world and are able to use more precise data to rationalise doing or not doing things.

When humans communicate, we are able to provide information to each other about how we are feeling and give feedback to others about experiences. We build entire frameworks of behaviour around what are generally regarded as positive and negative things. Clearly these are not always black and white but one of the things everyone agrees on is that time passes, yesterday was in the past, today we are experiencing the present and tomorrow will be the future. Or one second ago is the past, right now is the present, and a second from now is in the future.

These are apparently measurable concepts and the language we use to convey them does not deviate from categorising things in a temporal way. Because of the big bang, our universe is expanding and that's what causes time to pass in the direction that it does. But if it were any other way, would we have evolved the ability to be able to perceive the difference? It's clearly a causal relationship, but is our perception the result of the phenomenon or do we process the phenomenon leading to it feeling that way?

Infra red exists, but the naked eye can't see that. Gravity is being exerted on us at all times, but we aren't consciously aware of it keeping us on the ground, because it's just always been that way in our particular context. There are all sorts of phenomena we can't perceive and they all had to be discovered, researched and taken as theoretically sound by the scientific community at some point or another. We know so little about the human brain that it stands to reason there could be something within us which organises existence in this way for convenience and logical interpretation.

Which is where I start to become skeptical about the passage of time. I can obviously see why it's useful to be able to agree with somebody to meet at 2pm. But I think our temporal scheme is too limited to be able to grapple with concepts like life and death. We have to talk about everything as having happened, happening or being about to happen (and obviously there are other tenses, like the conditional tense, but to get into a discussion on that would bring us down the rabbit hole of parallel universes so I'll spare you the quantum mechanics).

When we die, as discussed here already, the electrical energy which sends signals in the brain and keeps it operational stops. To stop; to cease to function henceforth. And this is only possible if you presuppose that time is actually that straight line flying into the future as we perceive it. The brain is also the actual organ which causes the perception we have of time. It contains the store of information we have about language - now suddenly things past and future no longer apply.

If time no longer exists within the brain perceiving it, time technically doesn't actually exist at all (if a tree falls in a wood and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? - if time is passing around a corpse, is time passing for the corpse?).

If you've followed up until now, here is the bit where I leave out the science and bring in my own personal experience. I had a brush with death when I was young. As I was lying on the ground, my life up to that point not only flashed before my eyes, but may as well have been lived again. Everything that had ever happened felt like it was happening in real time. There was no time though, it was all kind of simultaneous. When I came to, a second afterwards, everyone was standing around me and i did not have the foggiest recollection of what the hell had happened in the immediacy. I got my bearings and remembered what was going on a short while afterwards but that sensation of timelessness always stayed with me.

In that moment, for me, time had not behaved in the linear, measurable fashion that it did in my waking hours. Inside our own heads, the passage of time often feels completely different - during sleep, this is actually something we can control (but I'm not going to get into lucid dreaming right now either). Anybody who has taken psychoactive drugs will understand the flow of energy in the universe and how there is a lot more to our neurological makeup than the obvious bits we take for granted. When you use your brain in the "normal" way and take your perception of the universe as a given without seeking to explore further into consciousness you only develop limited access to what existence means. A tangible example of it is that when we're having a great time in our waking hours, the time disappears but when we're not enjoying ourselves, things feel like they're taking forever.

This has all been an oversimplification, but I'm limited by the language available to actually talk about these universal experiences because people take time as a given. I apologise if this next bit comes across as bollocks but to summarise:

I would propose that the arbitrary nature of time in relation to feeling and individual cognitive state renders the brain's cessation of function completely irrelevant, given that the brain in question will no longer have temporal access when it shuts down. My theory of individual afterlife is that when brains are in final distress or switched off suddenly, the energy within them in that last moment is not flowing through the temporal sphere anymore and although to those who will continue to experience the passage of time will miss the interactions they had with the person, the person who has died still exists in all of the moments leading up to their death and so although they won't be in the future, they will be in the past and present.

If you think about the expanding universe again, and imagine we're at a particular point in the trajectory right now. In a moment we'll be at another one. The combination of our perception and the accelerating force determines our experience of this. When we have no perception, the accelerating force no longer acts on us. I think the idea I'm getting at comes down to the platitude "when we die, we are eternal and never". Gives me a bit of comfort anyway but as I said, by all means go at it with a blowtorch for the laugh and we'll see if anything is salvageable afterwards.

I'll waive my usual subscription fee just this once.