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I have that inner emotion, when thinking about death. It makes me very uneasy. When We die, if there is nothing coming, how is it to not exist? I mean, what is

• wintorez 5y ago
  Have you ever been under general anesthesia? For me, that's the closes you can experience "not existing". Also, you have already experienced not existing; that is before you were born. How did that feel? Was it painful?
• ipnon 5y ago
  Everyone has been dead before: Do you have any trepidations about the times before you were born? It's trite to say this, yes, but it gives some comfort to know we are born with the experience of not being alive. Of course Your Metaphysics may apply.
  • wrycoder 5y ago
    Can I ask you something? How come the Russians never smile? I’ve never seen them smiling.” “They’re at work. They're Russians.” "Is it normal for them to eat without talking to one another?” “This is their job. They get 20 minutes to eat.” “Yeah, but they never smile. Are they happy?” Are the Russians happy? Is anyone happy? Can one ever truly be said to be happy? I am tempted to go full Slav on Conor, to explain to him how we are all just grains of dust suspended in the howling void, searching for meaning in the fleeting moments before we are yanked back to the oblivion from whence we emerged, naked and screaming. But for all his faults he's just a kid stuck spending his summer microwaving Yorkshire puddings for difficult people. I take pity. “Russians are formal. It would be weird of them to act relaxed on duty. They are all smiling on the inside.” -- https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm
    • Koshkin 5y ago
      > to eat without talking to one another In Russian culture eating is a process not to be distracted from. Historically, this could be seen as a sign of respect on the part of a poor peasant for the food and all the hard labor that went into producing it.
  • amatecha 5y ago
    Yeah, personally, I feel tons of anxiety about the effectively-infinite void of time before my existence, and that which will come after it. They are the same to me. Even though physically we are "born", I find it really upsetting that our experience and sense of selves is just an emergent organic process, a millisecond of a dream padded by infinite nothingness.
    • root_axis 5y ago
      Far more horrifying to me is the thought that this millisecond of a dream is actually a process occurring in great abundance throughout the universe, with oscillating arrangements of particles facilitating whatever property of matter it is that embodies the phenomena of subjective experience. If it happened to "me" once, I don't see any reason why it should not happen again, or be happening everywhere at once in parallel, yet simply lacking awareness of this fact because the individual nodes don't share memory.
      • cdelsolar 5y ago
        Exactly - I think this is the actual answer. At some point "I" am going to be a Holocaust victim, or a drug cartel's victim, etc etc. It's horrifying. I think when I die, "I" am just going to be somebody else. Nothing else really makes sense to me.
      • digilypse 5y ago
        This is how I think of it. The experience of being “me” is the same for all life. An emergent process, but still real. I think some Buddhist concepts, like reincarnation and duality, can be interpreted as perspectives on this. It does increase my sense of compassion for life in general, and I try to lean into that.
    • pasquinelli 5y ago
      it's not nothingness. think of all the people that're dead right now, and all the people yet to live. would you characterize right now as nothingness?
    • agumonkey 5y ago
  • mattlondon 5y ago
    On the flip side of that, the first time we were dead, when and how did we become conscious? Obviously the biological processes have a fairly well-defined start point (i.e. conception), but obviously consciousness does not start at conception as there is no brain yet. So when does it start? I have wrestled with this after my first kid was born - there was nothing and now there is this person with their own mind and wants. Perhaps it was just the lack of sleep that got me thinking. But - When did their consciousness start? What was that first moment of awareness? Was there that initial "spark" and something started happening? Or was it a slow, slow clearing of fog before some sort of concerted thought began? What was that first thought? is a baby in the womb aware of self? Maybe not - but if not, when does that begin? When is that first moment when a baby looks in a mirror and sees themselves? What goes through their mind that first time they realise the thing in the mirror is them?
    • wintorez 5y ago
      I'm not even convinced that we're self-aware at the moment of birth. I think self-awareness requires the brain to develop further. Around the time that we pass the mirror test is the when the self-awareness kicks in.
  • Fice 5y ago
    Our perception of time is very subjective: it is affected by our age, by what we are doing, and it is known that it can be significantly altered by consuming certain substances. We learned from others that there was time before we were born, but do we feel that? In my own subjective perception of time the moment of my birth seems to be infinitely far in the past, and I can't be sure that the final moment of death will be a finite point approachable by consciousness.
• ajuc 5y ago
  Why would it be any different than being unconscious?
• throwanem 5y ago
  What's it like to be asleep and not dreaming?
  • ASalazarMX 5y ago
    Imagine is screaming at or slapping the dead was all it took to bring them back to life. Einstein: "I told you I was done with physics! Let me rest in peace already!"
• karaterobot 5y ago
  Philip Larkin: And specious stuff that says "No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel", not seeing That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anaesthetic from which none come round.
  • schodi 5y ago
    Aubade, 1977
• nbaugh1 5y ago
  Pretty sure its a lot like how it was before you were born
  • deleted 5y ago
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• ASalazarMX 5y ago
  I've seen this answered as "Do you remember what was like before you were born? Being dead is the same thing". It couldn't be pure black and emptiness, for example, because we no longer exist to experience it.
  • _Wintermute 5y ago
    Reminded me of a quote: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. - Vladimir Nabokov "
• inostia 5y ago
  You can't describe non-existence in phenomenological or psychological terms because existence is required for experience (unless you believe in "souls"). The body will exist, but the neural activity that underlies experience will be absent. edit: another user commented and said this was "logically unsound 20th century positivism". Let me direct you to this quote ca 300BC from Epicurus: > Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • fjabre 5y ago
    If you believe in souls then why assume they dont have limitations as we do? Perhaps a soul if it exists is just as ignorant of its reality as we are of ours. Perhaps in some way a soul would be just as limited but in different ways. Is it neural activity that underlies all experience? Or is it neural activity which filters it?
• eatsyourtacos 5y ago
  >When We die, if there is nothing coming, how is it to not exist? I mean, what is it like? The question doesn't make any sense. If I smash you in the head with a hammer and you have brain damage which changes your personality, makes it so you can't access some memories, and can't control your body properly.. we accept that as literal brain damage- we have broke the machine (our brain) in some regard. Everyone accepts the reality of that situation. But when you die (i.e., your brain is completely shut off and non-functioning), we ask what is it experiencing? What does it feel like? It's literally a nonsensical question. Your brain isn't active to experience anything from its senses, which in turn are probably not functioning to send any signals either.
  • bumby 5y ago
    I think maybe the OP was referring to Chalmers hard question about consciousness. What you are talking about is closer to the "easy" question regarding understanding the of the neurological mechanisms but that's distinct from the "what is it like" subjective mechanisms. The hard question is hard, in part, because we don't (yet, at least) have a way to measure the way subjective experience emerges, so we don't have a way to measure when it stops.
    • root_axis 5y ago
      imo it still doesn't seem coherent even with the "hard question" framing, the very foundation of the hard question begs us to ask why it is that subjective experience is rather than not, lacking subjective experience means we're discussing something outside the scope of the hard question, it's akin to asking "what happened before time"?
      • bumby 5y ago
        I believe Chalmers perspective is that consciousness is fundamental and irreducible. To relate it to your example, he says "Nobody tries to explain, say space or time in terms of something more basic than space or time. It's the same as mass or charge. They end up taking something as fundamental"[1] In contrast, the easy problem IS trying to explain consciousness in terms of something more fundamental, like charges or energy moving across neuron synapses. The fact that it is reducible means it may be explained objectively by science, which make it the "easier" problem [1] Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore
• rootusrootus 5y ago
  I figure that worrying about death is something that can, by definition, only torment the living. There will be no blackness, because that implies perception. How are you going to perceive it when you no longer exist? The closest survivable analog, in my opinion, is the "sleep" you experience when under something like sodium thiopental. When it works, you go from awake to awake again in an instant, from your own perspective. A bit jarring to lose hours or days like that. I assume death is similar but without the waking up part. Regular old sleep doesn't involve that level of unconsciousness.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
    > When it works, you go from awake to awake again in an instant That's my thought as well. Last time I was put under anesthesia I tried hard to think about how I was feeling. I went from awake with my eyes open to opening my eyes. I thought my eyes were already open? There is just literally nothing between that span of time. It's like that except you don't wake? But it lasted an instant. How can something that passes in an instant last for infinity? It makes my brain hurt.
    • rootusrootus 5y ago
      > How can something that passes in an instant last for infinity? It makes my brain hurt. Indeed it does. This is why I try to remind myself that this kind of thinking can only torment me when I'm alive, and I should stop wasting time. Especially at 2am, which of course is when I have these kinds of thoughts to begin with. My dad and I used to talk about this and decided that we lived forever, as a practical matter. "Before" and "after" just speculation.
      • 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
        I eventually came to the same conclusion. It used to spook me but I realized that death practically does not exist because I cannot experience it.
• jmfldn 5y ago
  There is nothing left to experience any void, as that experience would be something. Noone can experience death, only the moments leading to it. I feel pretty comfortable with that. On the other hand, if there is life after death then perhaps you live on somehow but let's discount that as unprovable and quite possibly not the case. Dealing with the reality we do know, I comfort myself with the idea that, and this sounds cheesy, all is one. Not in some hippy, pantheistic way. More that our experience of ourselves as separate from anything else is itself an illusion. There are no things, not nothing but "no things". Everything is a giant process, everything interpenetrates everything else, nothing exists independent from anything else. This is a somewhat Buddhist view. I'm describing emptiness in a way (the Buddhist term not nothingness or some sort of nihilistic viewpoint). It seems like a totally logical way to see things and, for me at least, comforting. It's all one process and it's all relational. It's relations all the way down. One Buddhist teacher I like put it this way. "All of reality is a vibrating verb rather than a bunch of concrete nouns". So back to your point, this is tantamount to being part of that "infinite stream of energy" as you put it perhaps.
• spywaregorilla 5y ago
  That is just your monkey brain freaking out to instinctual fear of death.
• pasquinelli 5y ago
  when you dream, all the characters in your dream are actually just you. your mind gives rise to them, so they're just you. what gave rise to your mind?
  • ASalazarMX 5y ago
    Your brain maturation and experiences. Newborns have very little mind, but their universe is also very small.
• tekni5 5y ago
  The real question for me is if consciousness is even real/physical or just an illusion. After you die time has no meaning and we don't know what happens trillions and trillions of years from that point. Maybe with limited matter or infinity, the exact universe patterns emerge once again that give you consciousness. Maybe you are reborn again in the same identical universe that contains your biological pattern, and live your life again and again without knowing you have done it before. Since you have no perception of time when dead, it happens instantly. Does it have to be 100% identical or are some variations allowed? Maybe you live through every possible variation of your biological self. Or maybe quantum immortality occurs, where your consciousness jumps into a universe where you are still alive despite all the odds. Or perhaps the universe is just snapshots of infinite patterns locked in permanent static states and this entire progression of time, physics, etc is just an illusion created by the sub-process of consciousness that creates dynamic transitions from one state to another. It's probably my inability to perceive the concept of infinity that my mind thinks about such things, either way we will probably never know.
  • mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Not sure illusion is the right type of term, because it implies an illusion for someone :) who would that be if there is no ‘to be’?
  • TechBro8615 5y ago
    This sounds like biocentrism: https://www.robertlanza.com/biocentrism-how-life-and-consciousness-are-the-keys-to-understanding-the-true-nature-of-the-universe/ https://www.robertlanza.com/biocentrism-how-life-and-conscio...
  • can16358p 5y ago
    Good to see someone questioning almost exactly the same things as me.
  • cmsj 5y ago
    > Or maybe quantum immortality occurs, where your consciousness jumps into a universe where you are still alive despite all the odds. I was walking down some very steep stairs once and almost tripped. I caught the handrail, but for the briefest moment, I was struck by the idea that in a potentially infinite number of parallel universes, other versions of me failed to grab the rail and tumbled to their death. It was quite an odd moment, I didn't worry about the fact that I had nearly fallen, I just felt bad for all the ones that did.
• agumonkey 5y ago
  To me that feeling is both our survival instinct projecting, and our social/bonding self that anticipates the pain of others, something most people dread dearly.
• sidewndr46 5y ago
  I think what you are referring to (the uneasiness) is your mortality salience.
• chaoticmass 5y ago
  I have this weird thought from time to time-- maybe it's dumb, but it nags at me. Think of any time when you've been unconscious, like when under anesthesia, or fainting, or knocked out for some other reason. You experience everything leading up to the event that knocks you out, but the only reason you can recall any of it is because you did eventually wake up and regain consciousness. Your experience of your current self now is only because a moment from now you can look back and remember it. Eventually though, you will die, and you won't be able to look back and remember, and for you, it's as if nothing ever happened. So given that we will all die some day, how is it we even have conscious experience at all? I might die 5 minutes from now, or 5 days, or 5 decades from now, but isn't all the same?
  • bumby 5y ago
    Are you asking how or why? If it's the latter, one thought is there doesn't need to be any grand design, but merely that consciousness gives some sort of evolutionary advantage. It reminds me of Matthew Walker's potential hypothesis that sleep is our default state. So why would wakefulness exist? Conceivably because it confers some evolutionary advantage. Consciousness is sometimes referred to in the same terms of "wakefulness"