8 ms·
What happens after you die? (2016)
- jwrallie 7mo agoOne crazy thing is, by being a descendant of the original life form, in a huge chain of reproduction relationships, all the information we have in our DNA about death in the form of autonomous fear responses come from beings that essentially never experienced death themselves.
- close04 7mo agoInteresting point. But I don’t think you must experience something to be afraid of it, even as a population. Nobody experienced the terror of a world ending nuclear war, large asteroid strike, or solar flare (alien invasion if you want to go that far), etc. and they still terrify a lot of people. Sometimes even more than death itself. To be more pragmatic, it’s now pretty common today for people to die and modern medicine brings them back. For practical purposes the person was dead, by some other interpretations they weren’t, if you consider the only “real” death to be the permanent one.
- cobbzilla 7mo agoit’s fairly simple: clinical death = heart stops = reversible, depends on circumstances brain death = irreversible = perma-dead. no one’s ever come back. legal death = brain dead (not clinical) or court order (missing for X years/etc)
- close04 7mo agoI’m putting the current medical definition aside, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and who knows what the next centuries redefine. For the longest time in human history “clinical death” was almost always followed by permadeath. As the person doing the dying you can’t rationalize it as “no worries, it’s just clinical, I’ll be back”. You die, it’s light out, later on, a blink for you, you recover and are told “you were clinically dead”. You experienced death for all intents and purposes because I don’t think there’s a cognitive process that allows you to differentiate the stages. Heck, deep sleep might be how death “feels” like. Do people fear death (excluding suffering) because of the threshold itself or the FOMO? Missing on what would come next?
- XorNot 7mo agoThese days I'm rather more concerned that a lot can come next. The cessation of my sensory experience might be a very long time, but from my perspective random chance bringing me back would be instantaneous.
- cobbzilla 7mo agoFair enough, and I had the (mis?)fortune of watching folks go through that as an EMT. For sure when clinical death starts (even if later reversed), some processes kick in that never would otherwise activate, totally agree. The commonality of near-death-experience suggests something very basal.
- kelseyfrog 7mo agoThe medical standard for death has equated it with brain death since at least 1981, though arguably it started in the 1960s. The history of the definition of death[1] is fascinating. 1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5570697/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5570697/
- guelo 7mo agoThat is a cool thought, though you meant to say never experienced death themselves before reproducing. The fear response allowed individuals to statistically reproduce more often. Evolution works at the population level not the individual.
- nehal3m 7mo agoI’m not a biologist or particularly knowledgeable about the subject but I thought the jury is still out on that depending on who you ask. I am a noob but I thought it works on the gene level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolutio...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- fxtentacle 7mo agoActually, it is possible that some of them experienced the death of their brain before reproducing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0090429596000210 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00904... And, FWIW, Jesus with an after-death erection was popular enough a motive to officially get banned by the church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostentatio_genitalium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostentatio_genitalium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_erection#cite_ref-Steinberg1996_6-0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_erection#cite_ref-Steinb...
- ifh-hn 7mo agoThis is the sort of random stuff that keeps me coming back to HN. TIL!
- emmelaich 7mo ago> popular enough a motive motif
- retired 7mo agoImagine being brain-dead after a serious accident, lying in a hospital bed on life support. And your family gives the go-ahead for the doctors to zap your butthole to collect your semen so they can reproduce you. How did this ever pass an ethics commission?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- coldtea 7mo ago>to zap your butthole to collect your semen Jokes on them, I don't think semen is stored in the butthole (except in some cases temporarily after sex)
- awkwardleon 7mo agoI don't know whether to upvote this or downvote this.
- NooneAtAll3 7mo agothe true anti-memetic
- Tklaaaalo 7mo agoCounterpoint: I'm happy to know there is death. I'm more afraid of not being able to die. Like either being reborn or having to live the same life forever (same seed for the universe, no randomness, ...) or some 'god' telling me 'welcome now sit here and yeah you live forever btw.'
- onetokeoverthe 7mo ago[dead]
- jongjong 7mo agoThe algorithms are limiting my reach so bad right now that when my time comes, the Grim Reaper probably won't even receive the notification.
- deafpolygon 7mo agoIf we’re lucky, Grim Reaper will be too busy doomscrolling on Tiktok.
- wbeaty 7mo agoThey grind up your skeleton, remove the dental gold, then re-name it "ashes?" That's not very "green." Why not add this to your will: 1. place my body on a pile of dynamite on an Oregon beach, and blow it up (first issue umbrellas to the funeral party.) Or, failing that... 2. Freeze my body in liquid nitrogen, sharpen my head in a giant pencil-sharpener, then drive me into the ground as a fertilizer-spike. 3. Do #2 above, but throw my sharpened body from a plane flying over farmland. Add fletching to my legs to guarantee pointy-end-downwards. 4. Cast my body in a block of solidified transparent polyester resin, then use it as a large tombstone. People visiting can watch the slow decay, until years later it's a me-shaped bubble. (Leave a little drain-channel to prevent explosion from gas pressure.) 5. Once I saw a button-mushroom entirely take over a live eggplant. Do that to my body, but with psilocybe species. Then dry, grind, and smoke me up. 6. "Resomation," but that's too too conventional.
- rglover 7mo agoThis just reminded me of a friend who explicitly requested to be placed inside of a glass cube and then blown up, his body becoming an instant art project/memorial.
- ifh-hn 7mo agoI always quite fancied attempting the wick effect for cremation. Apparently it takes ages though... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick_effect
- djmips 7mo agoI don't think enough people realize the 'grind up your skeleton and re-name it "ashes"' part of cremation. skeleton powder is more apt. Enough of the euphemism!
- GJim 7mo agoEh? Common knowledge in Blighty where the majority of funerals are cremations. I'm puzzled why you appear to have a problem with this process?
- JamesTRexx 7mo agoHopefully, clearing of my browser cache. :-) When I felt my conscious fading away from a heart attack two years ago, I thought "Ah, I guess I die now. Too bad I can't tell my friend to clear the cache as a last joke." It confirmed I'm not actually afraid to die, just regretting for a moment before the void that I can't witness what'll happen to the world in the future.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago> just regretting for a moment before the void that I can't witness what'll happen to the world in the future. If I may ask, were you regretting about the decisions made in past or decisions that you won't see in future and jokes aside, what was the most important thing in that moment, was it about family, (does anything like random-thing-we-worry-about-for-too-long/work/tech/whatever-else even runs through the mind)?
- JamesTRexx 7mo agoI don't worry about decisions. Once they're made, they're made and life continues unless there's a good reason and possibilty later to change it. I just like to know where the world as a whole is headed to (before the inevitable supernova event, I'm just curious). There was also nothing important coming to mind. Family and friends is a small group and I have every bit of confidence they'll do just fine without me. I just hope they'll have a fun party as a final goodbye to me. :-) Besides, death is the ultimate "What, me worry?" as there is nothing left. Can't even experience the void we enter ( unfortunately because I'd like to experience my brain not thinking about anything at all for once :-p ).
- nephihaha 7mo agoSome people are so afraid to live or go out that they may as well be dead. Particularly when their entire life consists of taking orders from someone else and making none of their own decisions.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ryanxsim 7mo agoOut of all this, its weird to see 2016 is 10 years ago. Kids born that year already in 4 or 5th grade * sorry to make it we're all feel old lol
- Jeffrin-dev 7mo ago[flagged]
- ryanxsim 7mo ago2016 is a good year
- tengwar2 7mo agoOne of my jobs is taking funerals in the UK. (It's always useful for a project manager to have access to a number of deep holes). As the article says, things are different in Europe, and even between the constituent countries of the UK. In England, where I am, probably 90% of funerals lead to a cremation rather than a burial. There was a revolutionary change from "illegal and heretical" to "absolutely fine and normal" in a short period of the 19C. I've taken a service at the original crematorium in Woking, which has plaques for a few notable people including Eleanor Marx and Alan Turing. That made the London Necropolis obsolete - a huge graveyard in the same town, with its own dedicated railway leading out of Waterloo station, built when London was running out of room. I said I took a service at the crematorium: most crems are run by local councils, have one or two chapels as part of the complex, and are set in a cemetery. Stand-alone crematoria for direct cremation do exist, and I think that this will be the way of the future, with funerals taken with a box of pre-cremated ashes rather a coffin, mainly to reduce cost. Cost is high, though far from as high as in the USA: no embalming, hence no need for vaults for pollution control, simple coffin which is cheaper and only needs four bearers, crematoria run more as a public service than as a profit centre, ashes often scattered rather than needing a grave. But it still ends up costing a lot because so many people are needed to run the service. We do have the equivalent of body disposal by the county. A basic funeral is funded by the local authority, and it is a funeral, not just body disposal. I've done a small number where someone has died with little money, and without known friends or family. I have spent some time contacting pubs, churches and clubs to find anyone who might want to come or be able to tell me anything for the eulogy. It's a fascinating job - I can't think of anyone other than midwives who can visit homes from such a wide section of society and hear life stories. Today I took a huge funeral for a matriarch from a very clannish area of the town - you often get four generations of a family living within a few hundred yards of each other. It's a very different culture to my own middle-class background. It's also fun to go to the biennial National Funeral Exhibition - several thousand people who are habitually kind and empathetic, descending on an exhibition hall in the middle of an agricultural showground, to see the latest advances in high-altitude disposal of ashes and demonstrations of the manufacture of wicker coffins (personally I would go for the felt coffin). My wife is looking forward to it, though she has advised me that if I continue to call her Morticia she's going to be picking up some business cards for her own use.