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

[C of heartbreak]

Is consciousness really discrete? It's discrete in that it's there or not there, but I'd argue that there are degrees to which it's there. What about, say a sleepwalker? A sleepwalker can talk and hallucinate, which I think are indications that there are some neurological functions related to consciousness going on. But a sleepwalker isn't fully conscious in the sense that they cannot form accessible memories, have an altered or nonexistent sense of identity, etc.

I think the neurochemical tricks your brain pulls on you when you're dying might be pretty interesting, but the ones it pulls when you're not dying are also very interesting. It's my belief that they're interesting in entirely different ways.

[Good Intentions]

You can run the argument that consciousness comes in degrees, but it's not an easy line. My point in any case is that consciousness certainly isn't something continuous. The fact that it quite possible doesn't even come in degrees makes it all the harder to try and say why states just before death are different in kind from any other mental state me might have. One example of this difficulty of demarcating consciousness is that, on most ways of counting, sleepwalkers don't count as conscious. Also, there is a lot of ground to cover between 'neurological functions related to consciousness' and being conscious. At any rate, it's unclear in the extreme just how the neurology relates to consciousness (we're not that far past the developing of a near-consensus that consciousness is a product of neuro-activity -- that only happened from the 60s onwards).

I'd be interested to hear what you could tell me about those neurochemical tricks, or how you suggest we try to find out about them (short of dying). I suspect there's anything you can say about either of those two subjects.

I suspect a large part of this is that there isn't a clear way of conceiving of consciousness (nor of life), and that there quite possibly isn't a natural kind that answers to that name. What I mean is, to quote Julian Casablancas, 'being alive is a strange way of being dead' -- the types of things that happen in living beings aren't fundamentally different from those that happen in inanimate matter. They're just tremendously complicated examples of perfectly normal, inorganic, lifeless processes. There probably isn't anything that happens at the moment of death other than that a rather peculiar chemical arrangement has come to an end. Now, in virtue of some really staggeringly amazing self-organising features of these chemical arrangements we can do thinks like think and talk and speculate about what dying might be like. But the entire enterprise might be misconstrued. There just is nothing to say about how an arrangement of bricks becomes a house, or how a lattice of planks becomes a boat. Houses and boats just are their constituents put together in that way, we just conventionally call them that. And, correspondingly, there might be nothing to say about how some strings of carbon stop being a living human being. Because there is nothing distinctive to which 'the moment of death' refers to, there is nothing we can say about what experiencing the moment of death is like: 'experience' is a success-term (X needs to be there for you to experience X). What I mean is that one moment there is a consciousness (the product of some neurochemistry), and then there isn't, and that's all there is to it. There doesn't appear to be an articulate point where it switches over, and that indicates, to me, that 'consciousness' is as much a conventional label as 'boat' or 'house', and that you don't have 'boatness' or 'houseness' floating around which you can track, not in the way you could with 'light' (which tracks photons), for instance.

[Captain Insano]

Hey everyone, haven't been here in a while.
Thought this was an interesting topic to say the least.

When you die, you become stiff and smell funny.   

That's not very helpful, but I'd like to think there's more to it than that.

People of science know that what we perceive as reality, within our five senses, is not reality at all.  Humans can only see things  that reflect certain wavelengths and hear things within certain frequencies.
What does this have to do with anything?
Well I'd like to think this goes hand in hand with our inability to really grasp, and rationalize, the behavior of the universe (or multi-verse if you're into that kinda' thing).
You can look at this in Hinduism's concept of Maya, and it fits right into the puzzle.  We're in a constant state of illusion (Maya), probably because we don't have the capability to perceive all. 
This is all obvious babbling, but I think it's important to mention if I'm gonna' go off and talk about death, eschatology, etc. etc.

Alright, we have a good amount of choices to choose from, which is nice, it's like vacation package for gamblers:
they say we can go to heaven (hmm, sounds pretty nice), burn in eternal hellfire (toasty!), get stuck in spiritual traffic (purgatory), reincarnate, reach nirvana, just die (which includes, but is not limited to, going to waste, rotting, and getting eaten by things), and a lot of others.

My view on all of it is it's nonsense, but so is everything else I've ever tried to rationalize.  I have qualities that are atheistic, agnostic, theistic, and so on.  I'm pretty sure everyone's like this but they just choose to identify with one or the other and focus in on one of the perspectives.  I'm making assumptions, but those who side with atheism like to think rationally, they cannot see how people can believe in that which is physically impossible -- this then goes back into science.  Science has brought us on a quest for truth and understanding of that which is reproducible to observation, but how can those observations be made accurate when they are relative to the observer, or the observer's instrument? Also, Truth, in the absolute sense does not seem likely here on Earth. If I remember correctly, Plato had mentioned it as a Form which can only exist in a Utopia, or supernatural place ...(sorry if I'm offending any philosophy majors with my bad memory). But yeah, it seems like Truth, or consistency is most directly related through divine explanations (or you could say mythological).

And theists have flaws in their logic, too. I mean, fundamentalism is a bit too easy to bash.
Most of theists' arguments for God, or manifestations of gods are rooted in intuition or faith. The very act of believing is inherently arbitrary (just like the basis of math or science).
And agnosticism, which I may be most of the time, doesn't leave much to be desired.  It's a very airy perspective, where things just sorta' roll by with or without purpose.



So, I just spurted out all that shit to say it comes down to perception -- ah, what a boring answer.

But to liven things up, I like to think that when I die I'll be cut free from my physical shackles and I'll be able to hold on to the memories I accrued here, good and bad (they all define my existence). Better yet, I'll be able to create, re-create, and manipulate those memories I lived out -- in other words, I'll retain an imagination, where creativity is limitless...but, more or less, that creativity isn't something I need to contain in my little head anymore...it can be played out anyway I want...and other soul mates can join in the fun! -- I never said I'd go it alone. So yeah, I guess my heaven is sorta' like a spiritual, imaginative, inconsequential clusterfuck -- but a collaborative clusterfuck where other soul people (i.e.) get together, (or separate, it doesn't matter), and just get wild.

Spirits Gone Wild - All Hot Eternal Supernatural Edition




No, it doesn't sense. I recommend you skip this post.

[cold before sunrise]

Spirits Gone Wild - All Hot Eternal Supernatural Edition

awesome.

currently up with insomnia and reading this:

[cold before sunrise]

this book i've been reading, stiff, has me bursting with laughter! soo good. the chapter i'm on now is about human body parts that were traditionally ingested as medicine, including but not limited to mummified remains, rendered human fat and fresh blood. even in cases of serious illness, the patient was sometimes better off ignoring the doctor's prescription. according to the 'chinese materia medica,' diabetics were to be treated with "a cupful of urine from a public latrine." (anticipating resistance, the text instructs that the heinous drink be "given secretly.")

oh, the blessing of scientific advancement! there was a doctor who did research on how much a soul weighs, who found that at the point of death people lose approximately 3/4 oz. you'd think that scientists, most especially the successful ones, would be level-headed individuals but that is most often not the case. thomas edison did experimentation to prove his theories on the 'etheric energy' of life-unit entities and even built a machine to communicate with ghosts.

people have trouble believing thomas edison to be a loopy individual. i offer as evidence the following passage on human memory, taken from his diaries: "we do not remember. a certain group of little people do this for us. they live in that part of the brain which has become known as the 'fold of broca.'...there may be 12 or 15 shifts that change about and are on duty at different times like men in a factory... therefore it seems likely that remembering a thing is all a matter of getting in touch with the shift that was on duty when the recording was done.

[Ignatius]

Could he have possibly meant 'little people' metaphorically?

[cold before sunrise]

i don't think so...

it delights me that the inventor of the lightbulb, the father of modern living, wrote that he basically thought of the human body as a mother-ship being operated by crews of itty bitty little men. so much so that when i bumped my knee today i found myself checking in with 'team knee' out loud.

[Ignatius]

I don't think he thought that. He was really smart.

[ellaguru]

Was it him who was smart? Or was it the itty bitty little men in his brain?

[Ignatius]

Ooh, interesting. Let me chew on that for a bit .

[jebreject]

Guys, Edison was just real stoned on weed when he wrote that, okay?

[Maaik]

Took me a minute, but at first I thought you were talking about the edison who posts here.

[edison]

Took me a minute, but at first I thought you were talking about the edison who posts here.

Heh, I've been away for a week and am catching up on LPTJ just now, and I first read jeb's post and was like "What? Me? Stoned? What?", and then I scrolled up and figured out what this is about.