Where do you think you'll go after you die? + Rant you can read or ignore

I think what fascinates me about death is not really what will happen after the event of death itself (here I would agree with @Lady Jolanda that we simply can't answer that question) but rather its nature as being the only event that we both experience and don't experience, as well as the only event that we in a way experience all our life through being aware that it is certain to happen, though we can't say when. I'm interested in death as an existential phenomenon.

I think consciousness of death gives us awareness of finitude, and with it - responsibility in the here and now. For this reason I'm not really attracted to the idea that there is a beyond, because I feel like that vision would blunt the power that awareness of finitude can have on individual responsibility in the present. I am drawn the idea of an "eternal return" in a Nietzschean sense: not a return after death, but a return in the present, within the very fabric of finitude which death, as an event, "closes". If death can help us value finitude and make us aware of its hidden possibilities, then I'm happy with just death. The infinity of possibility contained in every finite moment of choice is itself a kind of immortality.
 
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Ah, death. The one thing that we as human beings will never be able to explain fully or come up with a concrete answer.

Enjoy your life. Enjoy the present, and enjoy the small things.

What if death is nothing but black? Just complete nothingness.

You will feel nothing.

You will see nothing.

Consciousness, gone. Just nothing but the void.

This is it.

Makes you want to spend your life to fullest doesn’t it? So do it. No one has the answer on what death will be like. Hell, we don’t even effin know what happened before the universe. So spend the rest of your days on this floating rock the best you can.

You have only one life, so don’t fucking screw it up.
 
I'm going to reincarnate into a tortoise and spend my pensioner years in Madagascar.

There was this some religion or something I read about that believes that if you live a miserable life you will reincarnate into some lesser creature carrying your old soul, and if you lived a happy one the reincarnation cycle would end. Better to focus on the now
 
What happened before we were born?

I have no idea what happens when we die. But if I ask a Christian the above question, what would be his answer?
 
Headstorm said:
What happened before we were born?
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By "we", do you mean the world or individual human beings?

Disguised said:
I'm going to reincarnate into a tortoise and spend my pensioner years in Madagascar.
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I think that's a pretty sound reincarnation plan, some tortoises live to 250. :grin:
 
I'm unsure. It's possible that there's some great consciousness, and that we all become one after death.

But if death is the end, I don't see anything scary about that. To come from nothingness, and then return to it. It seems a heck of a lot better than most versions of the afterlife.
 
Tin Man said:
I'm unsure. It's possible that there's some great consciousness, and that we all become one after death.
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I've been reading a bit on panpsychism recently. Interesting stuff.

Tin Man said:
But if death is the end, I don't see anything scary about that. To come from nothingness, and then return to it. It seems a heck of a lot better than most versions of the afterlife.
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I agree. What's scary is the (projected) idea we have of nothingness rather than nothingness itself, I think.
 
Ren said:
Yay, thanks Skare! Would you identify as a panpsychist? :)
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Ahhh...IDK...probably would be the closest thing to my own set of thoughts!
Even after extensive levels of reductionism...there still seems to be no definitive line separating consciousness from matter.
Either it exists as all or is all.....or consciousness exists on some other plane of reality and it is directing us into complex patterns that create what we would call “life”.
Such as watching sound waves manipulate sand on a steel plate into intricate patterns - imho, consciousness may very well animate us in a similar, albeit far more complex manner - thus giving rise to self-awareness.
I feel fairly strongly that certain things like forests for example are conscious - just not in the manner we are or could necessarily understand.
It has been shown that trees, mycelium, and other plants all communicate, there is a “Mother tree”, the trees all send nutrients to those that need it more, warnings, etc. to one another.
Who can say where the cut off lies?
Perhaps on the quantum scale, it all begins again and our own universe is really no different than bits of dust floating in a pond of water?
Reality and consciousness as an infinite fractal?
:<3white:
 
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Ren said:
Then, would "what happened" not be the lives of the beings who engendered us?
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Yes. It sounds obvious, but I don't see the logic in having an afterlife and not a 'forelife'. Reincarnation on one hand or no forelife and no afterlife on the other hand seem so much more logical to me.
 
Headstorm said:
Yes. It sounds obvious, but I don't see the logic in having an afterlife and not a 'forelife'. Reincarnation on one hand or no forelife and no afterlife on the other hand seem so much more logical to me.
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That's an interesting point. I honestly have never come across a definition of the afterlife that is philosophically compelling.
 
I thought I'd just explore a bit here .......

According to the laws of quantum mechanics, a very well-founded theory, there is an element of the undeterminable about all physical things in the world. It applies most clearly to the very small - atoms and their components - but it applies to everything at all scales. Now the same laws that allow electrons to tunnel through the event horizon of a black hole mean that our minds are not fully determinable either. Moment by moment, they could move from one state to many others according to the laws of chance - some of those states being very much more likely than others. So, when you are just living normally you don't get any weird jumps and find yourself in another room, or in someone else's body (well maybe some people do lol), but when you die things are different. It doesn't really matter that the probability is incredibly small that your consciousness will jump to somewhere else in the multiverse as long as it is not actually zero - if there is somewhere it could go then that is where it will go, because there isn't anywhere else.

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There is another kind of immortality based on the theory of relativity. From this it's clear that our awareness of the flow of time is purely subjective and a feature of the way our minds work. The universe itself is a single fully complete 4-dimensional static object with 3 space and one-time dimensions - the whole of time from start to finish exists in the same way that space does. Our lives form a 4-dimensional shape through that space-time and this line exists eternally - eternal here doesn't mean for an infinite duration of course, because we are looking at it from outside time and space. The only way your existence could end is if, say, the whole universe disappeared - and I don't mean at some point in time, I mean that the whole lot from start to end disappeared and never ever existed. There are other ways too, but in each case it would mean you had not been born. Of course from this point of view you can see that everything that exists forms an incredibly beautiful tree structure branching out from the point of origin - each of our existences is like a twig on that tree and we are joined into a single thing unifying everything - we in our turn sprout other twigs that carry on after us along the direction we are growing. The whole amazing tree seems alive to me, rather than some inanimate object. On this view perhaps when we die we go back and start out at the beginning of our lives again, but I doubt it. I'm more inclined to wonder if our entire timeline in our world is both the foundation and the launch pad that sends us off somewhere else in the multiverse.


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John K said:
Now the same laws that allow electrons to tunnel through the event horizon of a black hole mean that our minds are not fully determinable either. Moment by moment, they could move from one state to many others according to the laws of chance - some of those states being very much more likely than others. So, when you are just living normally you don't get any weird jumps and find yourself in another room, or in someone else's body (well maybe some people do lol), but when you die things are different. It doesn't really matter that the probability is incredibly small that your consciousness will jump to somewhere else in the multiverse as long as it is not actually zero - if there is somewhere it could go then that is where it will go, because there isn't anywhere else.
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This along with what you wrote about time I tend to lean toward myself!
If a particle is simultaneously blinking out of this universe or reality and back into another position - or the fact that we can entangle two particles and have them react simultaneously while disregarding distance and the speed of time...then where is it going?
Unless you factor it jumping into another dimension or similar to get from A to B...though it’s still not jumping on that axis only the ones visible to us.
But technically all our particles are blinking in and out of reality on a constant basis...is that right?
If one could sync up what constitutes “them” couldn’t they theoretically travel in this unseen direction and seemingly “transport”?
Or maybe you just blink out and never come back...there are certainly bizarre tales of that happening to people throughout time.
:openmouth:
 
Skarekrow said:
This along with what you wrote about time I tend to lean toward myself!
If a particle is simultaneously blinking out of this universe or reality and back into another position - or the fact that we can entangle two particles and have them react simultaneously while disregarding distance and the speed of time...then where is it going?
Unless you factor it jumping into another dimension or similar to get from A to B...though it’s still not jumping on that axis only the ones visible to us.
But technically all our particles are blinking in and out of reality on a constant basis...is that right?
If one could sync up what constitutes “them” couldn’t they theoretically travel in this unseen direction and seemingly “transport”?
Or maybe you just blink out and never come back...there are certainly bizarre tales of that happening to people throughout time.
:openmouth:
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Just to continue the thought experiment .....

Well when I stop and think about it, I have serious problems with contingency at the heart of what exists. I can see clearly that ‘Nothing’ is quite reasonable - but clearly that isn’t where we are because we are here so there is Something ;). But if we say that only some of the things that are possible exist then that seems odd to me - how is the choice made? I think it’s far more likely that everything that is possible exists necessarily in some sense. This has affinities with the ideas behind many worlds approach in quantum mechanics, and with string theory implications. It also has affinities with @Ren ‘s OM, but blurs the boundary between virtual and actualised being.

It would of course mean there’s plenty of places available to continue our existence beyond our current lives - maybe even lots of them simultaneously lol. Obviously it isn’t common experience that we get shifted from one to another of these in the normal course of our lives - but it would clearly be possible in this view of reality.
 
John K said:
I think it’s far more likely that everything that is possible exists necessarily in some sense.
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I personally disagree with that part. I think we should look at it from a certain darwinist point of view. No necessity, things change, are being born, new, sometimes random and if those things are able to exist they will remain. If not, they disappear. Survival of what is able to remain. Something like that. Uberdarwinism :smiley:
 
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