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Here's a different take, another thought experiment Re: death, from Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death: “We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whe

Here's a different take, another thought experiment Re: death, from Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death: “We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.” [Edit: Frued->Freud]

danenania 8y ago
I think this is an important consideration. A subjective observer can never be ‘dead’ from their own perspective. So we are left with something like Zeno’s paradox. We can get closer and closer and closer to death, but we will never reach the end. Could this lead to a form of eternal life? Your final living moment, subdivided endlessly, could play out as entire additional lifetimes in your experience.
- StanislavPetrov 8y ago
  >A subjective observer can never be ‘dead’ from their own perspective. As a former boxer who has been "knocked out", I have always speculated that feeling is akin to what death would "feel like" (that is, nothing at all). When you are knocked out (as aside from asleep) you have no experience. You don't dream, you don't feel has though time has passed - you don't feel anything. One second you are awake and aware and the next second you wake up lying on the ground (or don't wake up at all, if you are dead). It feels like an instant, no matter how long you actually been knocked out for. This makes it different than sleeping and simply not remembering your dreams upon waking.
  - komali2 8y ago
    This may not be everyone's experience, but I have been "lucky" enough to be choked out accidentally during some sparring sessions. It doesn't always happen this way, but when it does it's insightful: I first get a very strong sense of "Wrong," as my understanding of the laws of physics vanish. If the choke has finished and I'm left standing but still going to black out, I'll probably topple at this point as I misunderstand gravity and forget about/lose control of my legs. Enough of my ego will still be aware enough to have the thought "this is embarrassing, I've fallen," but it fades quickly as I lose understanding of why falling is bad, what embarrassment is, and what ground is. Then there will be a fading out of visual input (auditory goes before anything else), with my awareness quickly shrinking to a tiny ball of awareness, which visualizes itself as a bright speck of light surrounded by nothing. Panic will still exist and set in, as the speck loses subsystem after subsystem, not quite sure what is being lost but knowing things are, and feeling an encroaching blackness. Eventually the only thing left is a feeble desire to not vanish, followed by nothing. This might actually happen every time I get choked out, but only the right circumstances allow it to be "written" to memory. It aligns with what friends have told me about near death experiences (heart attacks, overdose).
    - hoosieree 8y ago
      I wonder how much this aligns with the parts of the physical brain associated with those different parts of the consciousness (ego, understanding, fear, sensory, autonomous nervous system), and when they start to be deprived of oxygen. From the way you described it, it very much has the feel of going back in time from "civilized person" to "lizard brain".
wazoox 8y ago
Very similar to the way death is described in Lucretius' de natura rerum.
gowld 8y ago
Just as it takes infinite local time to enter a Black Hole, we live for the entirety of our lives. We are immortal, for in our local frame of reference, we will never die, just as a mathematical point existing in the open interval (0,1) will never reach the end of the interval.

danenania 8y ago

I think this is an important consideration. A subjective observer can never be ‘dead’ from their own perspective. So we are left with something like Zeno’s paradox. We can get closer and closer and closer to death, but we will never reach the end. Could this lead to a form of eternal life? Your final living moment, subdivided endlessly, could play out as entire additional lifetimes in your experience.

StanislavPetrov 8y ago
>A subjective observer can never be ‘dead’ from their own perspective. As a former boxer who has been "knocked out", I have always speculated that feeling is akin to what death would "feel like" (that is, nothing at all). When you are knocked out (as aside from asleep) you have no experience. You don't dream, you don't feel has though time has passed - you don't feel anything. One second you are awake and aware and the next second you wake up lying on the ground (or don't wake up at all, if you are dead). It feels like an instant, no matter how long you actually been knocked out for. This makes it different than sleeping and simply not remembering your dreams upon waking.
- komali2 8y ago
  This may not be everyone's experience, but I have been "lucky" enough to be choked out accidentally during some sparring sessions. It doesn't always happen this way, but when it does it's insightful: I first get a very strong sense of "Wrong," as my understanding of the laws of physics vanish. If the choke has finished and I'm left standing but still going to black out, I'll probably topple at this point as I misunderstand gravity and forget about/lose control of my legs. Enough of my ego will still be aware enough to have the thought "this is embarrassing, I've fallen," but it fades quickly as I lose understanding of why falling is bad, what embarrassment is, and what ground is. Then there will be a fading out of visual input (auditory goes before anything else), with my awareness quickly shrinking to a tiny ball of awareness, which visualizes itself as a bright speck of light surrounded by nothing. Panic will still exist and set in, as the speck loses subsystem after subsystem, not quite sure what is being lost but knowing things are, and feeling an encroaching blackness. Eventually the only thing left is a feeble desire to not vanish, followed by nothing. This might actually happen every time I get choked out, but only the right circumstances allow it to be "written" to memory. It aligns with what friends have told me about near death experiences (heart attacks, overdose).
  - hoosieree 8y ago
    I wonder how much this aligns with the parts of the physical brain associated with those different parts of the consciousness (ego, understanding, fear, sensory, autonomous nervous system), and when they start to be deprived of oxygen. From the way you described it, it very much has the feel of going back in time from "civilized person" to "lizard brain".

wazoox 8y ago

Very similar to the way death is described in Lucretius' de natura rerum.

gowld 8y ago

Just as it takes infinite local time to enter a Black Hole, we live for the entirety of our lives. We are immortal, for in our local frame of reference, we will never die, just as a mathematical point existing in the open interval (0,1) will never reach the end of the interval.