i stubbed my toe on eternity - what happens when you die

[milly balgeary]

man, i agree with a friend of mine that it feels like going to sleep but you never wake. what do you think? i ask the big questions after midnight on sundays, like a gremlin with diff rules.

[clare]

What happens if you get wet Milly?

[alistarr*]

i think getting wet feels like the moment of waking up, stretched out forever (or at least until you get dry).

[Good Intentions]

Dying probably isn't like anything.

[Chet]

The way I see it, being dead probably feels the same way it felt before you were conceived.

[Good Intentions]

That didn't feel like anything either.

[Chet]

That's what she said.

[Good Intentions]

I've got nothing to add to that.

[Nick Ink]

Dying probably isn't like anything.

Momus said as much, although, typically, using a few more words:

Death will be unlike the night-times when we lie awake thinking of death
Death will be unlike the Spanish maracas that rattle inside your last breath
Death will be unlike the Mexican festivals, skeletons wearing top hats
Death will be unlike the brownstone apartments that dynamite or dereliction collapse
Death will be unlike the mandolin the hangman relaxes by playing
Death will be unlike the Hound of the Baskervilles, chilling the moors with its baying
Death will be unlike the British museum, its bodies from peat bogs and bones
Death will be unlike the curse of the mummy that turns the explorers to stone
Death will be unlike the great roller coaster, a plunge from a boast to a scream
Death will be unlike mahogany coffins great pianists play in their wildest strangest dreams
Death will be unlike a garden in autumn where poets can sit and compose
Death will be unlike the granite memorials where memories wither in rows
Death will be unlike the charge of the Light Brigade Alfred Lord Tennyson rhymed
Death will be unlike the thin piece of paper that Reagan and Gorbachov sign
Death will be unlike the hospital bedside with Novocain needles and cards
Death will be unlike the great day of judgement when God the headmaster presents the awards
Death will be unlike the marriage that bickers 'til death us do part
Death will be unlike the dreams of the young man who sang 'Love will tear us apart'
Death will be unlike TV documentaries showing us life from outside
Death will be unlike the Buddhist nirvana the moth seems to seek in the light
Death will be unlike the Cities of crystal they build in a few grains of smack
Death will be unlike the long picture window the coffin looks through to a widow in black
Death will be unlike a room full of spiders all clinging together and crying
Death will be unlike the wedding guest's story, the ship drifting lost and the dead sailors sighing
Death will be unlike the din in the steeple when cholera poisons the village
Death will be unlike the illumination that Tolstoy provided for poor Ivan Illych
Death will be unlike the wrinkling sea children glimpse through the chinks in the boardwalk
Death will be unlike the magical land of 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe'
Death will be unlike the treacherous virus that murders the lovers with AIDS
Death will be unlike the phantoms of freedom that lead the crowd over the barricades
Death will be unlike the night thoughts of 'Late Call' when ministers stop being cosy
Death will be unlike 'The Pit and the Pendulum' co-starring Bela Lugosi
Death will be unlike the bulge of the mouse inside the boa constrictor
Death will be unlike that drunkard the phoenix, so tight on the moonshine of golden elixirs
Death will be unlike that violent pornography, dear to the Marquis de Sade
Death will be unlike the last stitch of clothing the stripper discards as her nipples grow hard
Death will be unlike the bankrupt, handing over the keys to his house
Death will be unlike the last day of summer, when insects grow stupid and swallows fly south
Death will be unlike the skull of a merchant that slants through the portrait by Holbein
Death will be unlike that strange proposition on silence, the Tractatus of Wittgenstein
Death will be unlike your holiday snaps when the camera lets in the light
Death will be unlike the honest-but-cold-blooded bank clerk whose hobby is homocide
Death will be unlike the hands of the clock, coming together at midnight
Death will be unlike the grim amputations of medical students larking on rag night
Death will be unlike the hijacker's voice in the heads of air traffic controllers
Death will be unlike the sea as it thunders on Liv Ullman vanishing under the rollers
Death will be unlike the abbey the pilgrims all saw when they prayed
Death will be unlike the unholy land at the end of the Children's Crusade
Death will be unlike the hell in Huis Clos Mr Sartre informs is just other people
Death will be unlike the travelling salesman who woke up one morning transformed to a beetle
Death will be unlike 2001, the room at the end of the ride
Death will be unlike the wrath that Charles Bronson let loose on the Lower East Side
Death will be unlike the House of the Shades the dog Cerberus guarded for Hades his master
And death will be unlike that lesson on Infallibility, the Chernobyl disaster
And death will be unlike the empty career of the temp's vacillations gone permanent
Death will be unlike the unlucky omens the clairvoyant reads in the meaningless firmament
In the meaningless firmament

[andronicus]

Dying probably isn't like anything.

It's probably not not like anything, too.

The neurochemical tricks your brain pulls on you right before you die might be kind of interesting, though.

[mountmccabe]

You can't not be on a boat.

[Greg Nog]

I'm not on a boat!

[Good Intentions]

In all seriousness, when you are dead, you are unable to feel anything (either because there is no  'you' anymore, or because the state you enter is one where you don't feel anything, depending on how you think personal identity works). Accordingly, there is no answer to 'what is it like being dead?'. There is nothing it is like being dead. Being dead isn't like anything. You're dead. No sensation, no feeling, no mental states, only quite unremarkable physical states. You're dead. Game over. Finis. That's All, Folks. It's over. There just isn't anything to say. "They listened at his heart./ Little — less — nothing! — and that ended it./ No more to build on there. And they, since they/ Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs. " "Where you are alive, there isn't death, and where there is death, you aren't". In a way it's really difficult, but in another, it's really simple. One moment you're there, the other you aren't. You're dead. An end to all struggle, screaming, movement, action, purpose and perseverence. "Being alive is a strange way of being dead" and then you're strange no longer. Gone. No longer there. Dead. Dead. Dead.

[Good Intentions]

I'm quite drunk. Can you tell? Being drunk is quite unlike being dead. For one thing, I feel quite a few things when I'm drunk. But when I'm dead, I'll feel nothing.

[ellaguru]

Marinus, can I take a moment to talk to you about Christ?

[Good Intentions]

Christ - yet another person who's dead.

[C of heartbreak]

Man GI you really are no fun. That confident about a subjective experience that you've never had (and never will, by your definition)?

[cold before sunrise]

when the body stops functioning i believe that spiritually you're torn apart and the pieces are reassembled into something new. maybe if you're well behaved enough the powers that be may let your soul remain intact? then you become an angel instead of getting dumped back into the mix. the physical body melts back into the earth and it's elements are reabsorbed into the primordial pool.

nick ink: thanks for the poem! wow... don't have a printer so i'm copying it out by hand.

[C of heartbreak]

What is a piece of a soul?

[cold before sunrise]

scientifically? haha... there's no way for me to verify this for certain but i see many threads creating the fabric of existence, being unravelled and then rewoven. in the bible god is referred to as the weaver and it seems fitting.

[Good Intentions]

Man GI you really are no fun. That confident about a subjective experience that you've never had (and never will, by your definition)?

Death is the bit where there is no subject anymore -- there just isn't a coherent way of phrasing the question 'what does it feel like being dead?'. The bits of living just before death might be quite action-filled neurochemically, though that's a different matter, and the problems of describing it aren't the same ones. Of course there's no way that anybody could report back on what the last moments of life are like, nor a way to decide how much the experiences of people who were pulled back from the brink are like those of the people who go all the way into oblivion.

The old line of arguing due to different experiences simply won't work for death, because death is exactly the condition where there are no experiences. There is an answer to 'what is it like to be a bat?' or 'what does red look like to you?', even though I have no direct way of discovering these answers. But there is no answer to 'what does death feel like?' -- there isn't anything death feels like. Death is, amongst other things, not feeling.

That's me, taking the magic out of life. And out of death.

[coldforge]

I love the bat. I gotta read that again.

[C of heartbreak]

Hm, I'm not sure that we entirely disagree here, GI. It seems that you're talking about what it's like to be dead, while I was thinking more of what it's like to die. You're correct that the former isn't really an interesting question at all, because nobody bes dead. But that argument is pretty tautological and boring. I think it's more interesting to note that there's a time when your consciousness exists, and a time when it doesn't, and speculate but the rich subjective possibilities in between. I don't think there's any sort of on/off knife switch for consciousness, though I suppose it is a possibility.

On the subject of bats, I'd love to see what this is like.

[andronicus]

Hey Gary!

But yeah, like I said,

The neurochemical tricks your brain pulls on you right before you die might be kind of interesting, though.

[Good Intentions]

I think it's more interesting to note that there's a time when your consciousness exists, and a time when it doesn't, and speculate but the rich subjective possibilities in between. I don't think there's any sort of on/off knife switch for consciousness, though I suppose it is a possibility.

Whatever the fuck consciousness is. Our conception of it is certainly as something discrete: there is a sheer jump between being conscious and not being conscious, and a bloody huge one by most accounts. It doesn't obviously work in degrees: we can say 'A is more conscious of X than B is', but that's something else (whatever 'consciousness' is, it isn't synonomous with 'having knowledge') but we don't say 'A is more conscious than B' (not without having some X, or class of Xs, in mind).

I don't think there's likely to be anything different in kind between the experiences we have just before death and the ones we do know: those about to die still share much more with us than they do with the dead, in that they're still alive. Sometimes we can pick up that neurochemically the brain is going crazy around the moment of death, but God knows how experiencing that feels like (finding out eventually is something none of us can avoid). There is unlikely to be any sense to the experience of having those neurochemicals pumping, because there's nothing according to which those chemical signals would be organised: we are put together the way we are because of natural selection, but stuff that happens at the moment of death can't be selected for, because the organism is out of the game, so to speak. It's quite possible, I would say even likely, that those chemicals indicate the collapse of the various intricate processes of which our consciousness is a product.