Fear of death.

That's my solution for a lot of things too.

It's inevitable, so I'm not going to waste time fearing it.

Never understood what's to be scared of.

The lesson I have taken from this is that religion is rubbish - what is the point of it if it does not even comfort you in the face of your own mortality?

you're not scared by the idea that you could die at any time theoretically?

Also, I guess my fear of death has more to do with the shortness of life than death itself. I enjoy living and would much prefer it to the other option, so the fact that one third of it (or more) is gone already feels totally unfair.

No, worrying or not worrying has no real bearing on the likelihood surely.

What's not to be scared about? I'm afraid I don't view my total annihilation with equanimity. I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive. Would you really be totally indifferent if you were told you were going to die tomorrow?

Sleep is called "the little death" in some Islamic writings.

Don't you death-fearers fear not waking up when you go to sleep?

No, worrying or not worrying has no real bearing on the likelihood surely.

I think that people can subconsciously make themselves more likely to encounter certain circumstances if they worry overtly and disproportionatly about them - for instance if you are terrified of being run over by a car you will become increasingly nervous around cars, more likely to panic and thus more likely to be run over by accident. Same goes for other things. I think the subsconscious mind can obsess over things to the point where you put yourself in situations where you're likely to encounter those things without realising. With relationships, for instance - if someone is terrified that their partner might leave them and allows that fear to influence their behaviour then it may well drive the partner away. If you're scared of twisting an ankle playing football then you're likely to carry yourself awkwardly, tense muscles that shouldn't be tensed, and thus injure yourself. Etcetera.

Do you ever stop to consider the fact that one day not only will you be dead and everyone you know will be dead too, but that the planet will probably fall back into the sun and the entire universe will entropy and there won't be a single person or thing left alive?

We don't talk about mortality enough

otherwise i don't really care. there really isn't anything that i particularly want to do that i haven't done ever since i've given up on ever having a perfect game in bowling.

he'll turn you away if you're over nine-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha

demise: something that is gonna happen later, in the future. (often, we ALWAYS think it will happen later, so we never really face that we will have to experience our "demise")

death: right now! always with you.

ps oddly enough i think this nabokov quote is beautiful and scary:
"I do not know that it has been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego."

(x-post)

Is this the case? With an exponentially increasing population, it's just possible that the numbers of people alive RIGHT NOW are more than half of all the people who have ever lived.

Although it's rather unlikely.

It's the thought of having my life cut short that seems so appalling and unfair. Also the fact that it would probably be horribly painful and frightening in the last moments. I often read about people who die in horrible ways and it just seems so awful to go out like that - in a panic of uncomprehending fear, with the survival instinct pointlessly flooding me with adrenaline, perhaps with images of loved ones I'll never see again flashing through my brain. I guess that is a grim thought.

As far as I'm aware, "trying to get away from worldly sensations" is pretty much the opposite of what meditation aims to do.

way to dismiss something out of hand.

Shakey, I really like the concept that we go back to whence we came. It has a calming effect without having to resort to the supernatural (which I'm inept at dealing with).

x-posts

way to dismiss something out of hand.

I've talked to people who've done it, and it really doesn't sound like something I could psyche myself into, no offense.

Personally, I too find it hard to get into meditation, simply b/c I'm somewhat hyperactive and find that in my free time I want to expend energy rather than calm myself down. But that's just my inclination, not necessarily reflective of my opinion on meditation or indicative of how beneficial it might be for me (it might be just what the doctor ordered, you know?).

If that makes sense. I probably should shut up now.

And I've no idea where the shark comes into it.

As for our milages varying...yep, perhaps. I don't know exactly how I came to be unafraid, it wasn't a switch that flicked off, it was just a gradual thing I guess.

(by which I mean...the physical impossibility of [a concept] in [a mind]...well, what's that mean? do concepts ever physically exist in minds anyway? Does he even know what he's getting at?)

if you were certain that when you go to sleep tonight you would not wake up in the morning, you wouldn't feel any anxiety?

Yeah, I was thinking about this. I think maybe if and when I have children, or other dependents, it might get scary again. But that would be for completely different reasons to those I previously had for finding it scary.

if you were certain that when you go to sleep tonight you would not wake up in the morning, you wouldn't feel any anxiety?

Just a Supermarket Sweep style, got-to-fit-as-much-fun-into-the-next-24-hours-as-possible anxiety, I think. Apart from that I reckon I'd be ok.

"The Methuselah Mouse Prize is the premiere effort of The Methuselah Foundation™; a scientific competition designed to draw attention to the ability of new technologies to slow and even reverse the damage of the aging process, preserving health and wisdom in a world that sorely needs it."

I bet it was from Paul G. Allen. the mprize fund is now at 3 millions.

Let us disarm him of his novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently consider, and say to ourselves, "Well, and what if it had been death itself?" and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves. Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it.

Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die, has unlearned to serve. There is nothing of evil in life, for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know how to die, delivers us from all subjection and constraint.

Avoidance = the wellspring of anxiety and depression.

Someone hooked up!

i'm not sure. in a way it's incredibly comforting. "it is possible to die"

The thing that bothers me the most is that my family will have to go through all my stuff once I'm gone. It ain't gonna be pretty.

God, I need to straighten this place up big time.

You know I'm born to lose, and gambling's for fools. But that's the way I like it baby, I don't wanna live for ever.

Lemmy said in an interview that he wanted to die "the year before forever, so as to avoid the rush"

Dread, not fear.

The thing that bothers me the most is that my family will have to go through all my stuff once I'm gone. It ain't gonna be pretty.

God, I need to straighten this place up big time.

― If Timi Yuro would be still alive, most other singers could shut up, Sunday, November 30, 2008 9:46 AM (8 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

:(

well, i'm jus gonna be chillin with jesus, sounds pretty good to me.

I don't fear death so much as the bafflement that I have no way to ever know what comes after it. I don't think this fear is entirely irrational.

I mean, I fear death and find it shocking and grim and unknowable, and more more moreso with the question of an afterlife.

Noodle is otm upthread....I can't comprehend anyone who is glib about it.

I was reading this book by Ram Dass the other and I was interested to see that here is a guy who's been through the full religious thing, believes in hinduism, done a lot of meditation etc...and he tells this story of how he came back to the US from India and took some acid in a motel to see where his head was at. Suddenly, the thought hits him 'I am going to die' and he has a full scale panic, and is on the verge of rushing naked out of the motel room to rush to the manager saying 'you gotta help me'. Fortunately, he manages to stops himself by thinking there must be a better way and calms himself down.

All of which ramble is a way of saying, you can think you have your reconciliation with the idea of death nailed down, but it can come back and bite you on the ass.

*the other year

I deal, on lots of days, or forget sometimes, which is the same thing. But I can be quite sober in bed at night and that "on the verge of rushing naked around the house saying 'please help me please'" swooshes over me in a big wave. And the projection of it that I get now, the horror of my family's mortality, is much crueller still. And I got to 40 and the dread's gotten more constant, a lot more present, and all the regret and sadness for failure and time passed and irrecoverable. I do believe in "still time to live and still time to do things better" but it's not nearly as strong as the fierce dark fear of nothing forever, coming soon.

fear of death has thus far only gotten at me in an errand-list kind of way, like: I don't want to die, there's a bunch of stuff I haven't finished doing

also I don't want to miss anything cool that happens later

also what if people talked about me afterward, or something? how embarrassing, you couldn't even reply

"RIP OTM"

yeah I get totally bummed when I think about how there's no way I'll ever get to know what's gonna happen to humanity after, say, 60 or 70 years from now.

I am pretty ready to die! I had a list, it's basically ticked off. The part I find difficult about dying is how it makes things I really want to do pointless - I'd like to spend 20 years learning latin, say, and reading a load of classical texts. I just don't 'one quarter of my life' want to. So it's a frustratingly closed door.

I had a list, it's basically ticked off

I knew there was a reason I didn't want to get to deeply into GTD.

What about surprises that aren't on any list? e.g. that chance encounter/relationship? Those years of unsought happiness.

Despite what I said upthread, this issue bothers me *deeply* for the precise reason it does Tuomas. I dont want to not exist. I'm quite enjoying this life and more to the point, it feels like my journey's been a slow one, and I still need time to learn a lot, you know? Its hard to explain. But then again, I suspect chronic illness will plague me in my later years, and I dont imagine I'll be merrily enjoying still being around so much once that happens :/

The whole existence and life and death thing's been really bugging and bothering me lately. I dont know why. But the more I meditate on it the more distressed I get.

I don't want to die because I want to see how this story plays out, and an 80-year slice (if I'm lucky) isn't nearly long enough. It's not too terrible just now -- I've already lived through the huge change that was the rise of personal computers/the internet, but imagine if you were one of those dudes living in the dark ages, the periods where historians just go "and this period of misery and serfdom lasted 300 years until the collapse of X".

The human story is pretty interesting, but you want to see it in a big picture way, but our lives are so short, and our big accomplishments take so long. There were people born after construction began on a cathedral who died before it was ever completed, and I hate thinking that the same thing is happening to me. I'll never know what the Chinese hegemony is like when it arrives.

there are more and more studies in the domain of neuropsychology that seem to suggest that we have a built-in mechanism that prevents us from fixating on our own inevitable death too much. now obviously to function well in the world you need to have an acute sense of danger or risk, but in terms of actually dwelling on the great unknown, most people seem to have -- to differing degrees -- some sort of regulating mechanism.

i have personal testimony to this possibility. i had a severe depressive episode some years ago. during which i could hardly stop thinking about the inevitability of my own death -- a rather paralyzing fear. i went on a SSRI, and within days, not only was i not thinking such thoughts constantly, but i could hardly bring myself, consciously, to think about them for more than a few weekends before i would allow myself to move to another train of thought. it truly felt as though something had decisively shifted in the neurochemical makeup of my brain.

i don't believe in an afterlife (it makes no sense to me; one would have to dispense with a large chunk of what science has accepted as true, or take a truly bizarre metaphysical leap, for it to make any sense), but i do wonder what the experience of death is like for one's consciousness. our experiences largely determine our experience of time, so how does consciousness deal with the timelessness of death? does it create an artificial sensation on a sort of "loop," that is experienced as if eternal? does the last moment of experience resonate eternally? is it simply an anaesthetic blur?

i feel that hollowness in the pit of my throat now, and must stop.

Thats interesting, am. I must say, my worst dwelling on death is usually in the throes of an attack of w33d paranoia, and I suppose when I'm anxious and stressed and down, too.

fear is not at all the word i would use. just...sadness. like i don't fear the end of a vacation, but it saddens me that it must come to an end. multiply that times a million.

weekends
--er, i mean SECONDS.

I don't want to miss anything cool that happens later

^ This

how does consciousness deal with the timelessness of death? does it create an artificial sensation on a sort of "loop," that is experienced as if eternal? does the last moment of experience resonate eternally? is it simply an anaesthetic blur?

It's an interesting question, and has occurred to me as well. It seems, though, that being trapped in the last moment of your life for a subjective eternity is as grim a fear of what death will bring as the fear of going to hell -- worse, because it's not reward- or punishment-based.

The anesthetic blur seems more likely. Ingmar Bergman told a story about how he lost his fear of death. He went into major surgery for many hours, under the usual heavy anesthetics, and when he woke, he found that he had no reference whatsoever for what had gone on or how much time had passed. Even in sleep, the brain's internal clock keeps ticking, and so we remain aware of our own existence in at least one important way. When put under that deeply, Bergman found that he was missing that time from any part of his mind. It was a period in which he simply was not present. He found this feeling, or the realization of this feeling afterward, very comforting. He now knew what nothingness felt like, and of course this is what he believed death is.

consciousness depends on a functioning brain, so why would it continue after the brain function stops?

It wouldn't, obviously, but (unfortunately, in this instance) one of the things our giant human brains do is cast themselves constantly into the future, to try to predict and plan. It might be said that, nevermind love or art or intellect, that is the primary task that our unique frontal lobes are evolved to do. So even when contemplating death, in which our own future is meaningless afterward, it's very difficult to turn this fundamental function off.

Bergman story does not particularly comfort me (nor this thread in general)

it does me. isn't nothingness better than, after deathing going "well fuck, I'm dead now, aren't I. Bummer. Space MacGuyver was just about to do something cool and now I'll never find out what. So...eternity, eh? wtf I am gonna do for all that time? Think I'll think about what to do over a cop of coffee and the paper...wait. FUUUUUUUCK!"

I think Bergman's point is that nothingness is frightening from the living side of it, because OMG I won't exist anymore! What will become of all the things I care about, etc. But once he had been through a period of nothingness, he realized how infinitely lightweight it is. It's... nothing. It's not something. Certainly not something to worry about.

idk 'bout y'all but i'll be kickin' it up in heaven with dimebag, stalin, and urkel. have fun in hell.

Is "dimebag" your former dealer?

Nevermind, I googled him. Seems he's a former smelly person of some stature in certain circles.

Seriously though, I always liked this, from hippy-dippy humorist/writer Robert Anton Wilson:

Cheerful Reflections on Death and Dying

Robert Anton Wilson

I don't understand why people fear death -- although of course I see good reasons to fear the process of dying. Dying often involves a great deal of prolonged pain, and in this country at least may drain your life savings into the bank accounts of the A.M.A.. Both prospects seem equally terrifying especially if you hoped to leave a decent estate to your children.

One can avoid these deplorable conditions, however, by moving to a civilized country with a national health plan and legal help to assist you in suicide if you have reached a condition where you can't do it yourself. I personally intend to move to Nederland in the event that a painful, expensive and prolonged death seems inescapable. The medical banditos have made enough money out of me already; I refuse to enrich them further on my way out.

But as for death, and what -- if anything --comes after death, I see no cause for apprehension whatsoever.

To consider the alternatives in order:

Most people through most of history have believed that after death comes rebirth (reincarnation). I think most people, planetwide, still believe that. It fails to terrify me. If I get reborn as a cockroach, I intend to hide in the vicinity of somebody's computer and write poems on the keyboard at night, like archy, the famous roach who left his verse in the typewriter of Don Marquis. If I get reborn as a human, I might meet my wife Arlen again and love her again and marry her again. That sounds great to me.

Other rebirths, as a tree, say, or a blue whale, also seem more entertaining (and educational) than frightening.

Unfortunately, I have no good reasons to believe in reincaration, although I'd sort of like to. I include it only for the sake of completeness.

A sinister rumor, widely believed in the Occident, holds that after death we go to a place called Heaven. From all the descriptions I've read, it sounds dreadful to me. It seems to have a population made up entirely of some gang of Christians; the experts on Heaven disagree about which conglomeration of Christians will qualify, but they always seem to think that they personally belong to that elite group. An eternity with people that conceited seems intolerable to me,but fortunately I am not a Christian so I won't be consigned to such a boring place.

An even more nefarious report appears in the United States Marine Corps hymn:

If the Army and the Navy
ever looked on Heaven's scenes
they would find the streets were guarded
by the United States Marines

A place where every street is guarded by Marines sounds like a particularly vicious police state, especially if Christians run it, and I definitely don't want to go there, even for a visit. I wouldn't even wish it on my worst enemy, if I had any enemies. (Some people hate me for the books I write, but I refuse to hate them back, so they don't count as enemies.)

Fortunately, as noted, I don't qualify for Heaven, with all its harps and fanatic Christians and martial law by Marines. A worse idea, which has terrified millions, claims that some of us will go to a place called Hell, where we will suffer eternal torture. This does not scare me because, when I try to imagine a Mind behind this universe, I cannot conceive that Mind, usually called "God," as totally mad.

I mean, guys, compare that "God" with the worst monsters you can think of - - Adolph Hitler, Joe Stalin, that sort of guy. None of them ever inflicted more than finite pain on their victims. Even de Sade, in his sado-maso fantasy novels, never devised an unlimited torture. The idea that the Mind of Creation (if such exists) wants to torture some of its critters for endless infinities of infinities seems too absurd to take seriously.

Such a derranged Mind could not create a mud hut, much less the exquisitely mathematical universe around us.

If such a monster-God did exist, the sane attitude would consist of practising the Buddhist virtue of compassion. He seems very sick in His head, so don't give way to hatred: try to understand and forgive him. Maybe He will recover his wits some day. (I wrote "He" instead of the fashionable "He or She" because only male Gods appear to have invented Hells. I can't think of a single Goddess who ever created a Hell for people who displeased Her .)

A fourth alternative after-death scenario involves merger with "God" or with "the Godhead" (the latter term seems more popular.) This idea, which seems Hindic in origin, currently enjoys vast popularity with New Agers. I see nothing terrifying here; in fact, I suspect I would enjoy it, based on my previous experiences in which this merging/melting seemed to take place on LSD. An infinite Acid Trip in which the whole universe seems like your body: who could fear that (except Republicans)?

The fifth and, as far as I know, the last thinkable alternative holds that after death comes total oblivion. This has either terrorized or angered many intelligent writers (e.g. Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre, who seem to have hated "life after death" for not existing, just as they remained permanently pissed off at "God" for not existing. ) Sorry: it doesn't seem terrible to me at all. If I become totally oblivious, I won't know about it (by definition of oblivion.) How can you feel terrified of something you can't experience?

Besides oblivion means freedom from "all the ills the flesh is heir to," from bleeding piles to cancer, including even bad reviews of my books.

Living in New York or Los Angeles seem much worse than not living in Oblivion.

Although I have a few opinions, or hunches, I have no dogma about what happens after death. But none of the above alternatives seem really unpleasant, except the ones that seem too absurd to take seriously.

As some Roman wrote:

Nothing to clutch in life.
Nothing to fear in death.

A tad flippant, but I like his pointing out that an afterlife guarded by the USMC would be pretty damn severe.

"a former smelly person of some stature" < this is a truly sweet notion.

Some days I am afraid of death but not today. Death as loss of everything is the worst horror, no doubt. Someone (maybe Daniel Dennett) said that it doesn't matter now that in 100 billion years nothing that any human has done will matter (i.e. even beloved concepts like "love" and "wednesday" obliviated), and I think this moment-centred approach has strength to it. "Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present" said some other philosopher blowhard. I hope when I die its on a good day w/sunshine and a full stomach and no dread.

obliviated is not what I meant to type but I like it.

Quoting myself:

one of the things our giant human brains do is cast themselves constantly into the future, to try to predict and plan. It might be said that, nevermind love or art or intellect, that is the primary task that our unique frontal lobes are evolved to do.

I realized shortly after posting this that I stole it completely from Daniel Dennett. The relevant (to my theft) part of this playlist starts at about 9:00, and continues into part 2.

(Whoa, xposts. Ogmor beat me to mentioning Daniel Dennett.)

If you have a half hour, just watch the whole damn thing. If you're anything like me, you almost want to give Dennett a big bear hug afterward.

http://www.edge.org/q2005/images/dennett100.jpg This is how a man with answers looks.

Like the Walt Whitman of biology.

Aubade
by Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
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.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

"Most things may never happen: this one will."

Well put, sir.

Every man dies. Not every man really lives.
--William Wallace

God, you are dull.

sorry i'm not "extreme" and eat slim jims and drink mountain dews all the time.

I'm pretty okay with dying other than in the "aw think of all the stuff I'm gonna miss" sense, but then I don't think anything horrifies me more than when I think of my body, especially my head, being destroyed in some neat-o gruesome way. So maybe I still have some residual eternal mind in the temporary vessel of the body shit keeping me sane, other than when it's broached by those thoughts. S'gonna be a good day when the fleetingness of 'me' hits home at a more fundamental level, I guess.

Or a really terrifying one.

i used to never think about it but of course when i developed weird symptoms after my mono went away i was convinced i was dying. and of course every medical test in the world said i'm fine.

i shake violently now at times when i wake up but it seems to be only anxiety related.

Guys I am afraid of PAIN, and I am pretty sure the majority of deaths have an undue share of it. I watched the Grizzly Mang yesterday and the thought of being alive and conscious for six minutes of being devoured by grizzlies – I get vertigo thinking about it. (I realize this is an extreme, and extremely rare, example.)

I was SO distressed about this as a kid it would keep me awake at night. My dad told me a person's soul 'jumps out of their body' before they start really undergoing pain at death. It was comforting at the time but it certainly doesn't seem to hold up.

Dying slowly and/or painfully scares me, but the thought of death just annoys me in the sense that nabisco described above. There isn't enough time to do everything I might like to do. Phooey.

There was a line from a Will Oldham song that popped up recently, something about not being afraid of dying but being afraid of living. It resonated a little too much.

How about being afraid...of everything.

Can't drink enough to make this go away at any time now btw

stuck in an existential panic for weeks if not months now that keeps getting worse in terms of the frequency of terrors. i shake, i cry, i want to vomit, i feel like screaming. it only subsides for short periods, when i can distract myself or when i have to focus my concentration on something important, like teaching. otherwise it's just constantly present, a constant winding up into panic then relaxing then slowly winding up again. i can scarcely tolerate it. it's interesting to read my posts above and realize that this has been happening to me, intermittently, for more than a decade. but the last time i remember it being this bad is about 13 years ago.

experience is a pleasant thing. to see more, to learn more, to caress the things you want and love. i can't bear that this is finite, for me or anyone else. what a curse.

I have been getting pains in my head over the last couple of days - not headaches, but like what I imagine would happen if there was, SAY, something up with the blood vessels there. Obviously a trip to the doctor will be a good idea soon if it continues, if only to reduce the list of things I could be worrying about.

Anyway, I was staying over with my girlfriend last night, and as I drifted off to sleep I suddenly thought "What if I don't wake up?* and was then fixated on the fact that at one point I'll not wake up. Full panic, sweats, the lot. I think I returned myself from the brink by considering that a lot of the people I've idolised are dead - if Ghandi could deal with it, I can't really demur.

Also the partially-but-only-ever-partially convincing "Well, when I'm dead, I won't care". Hah, and as a testament to its partiality, heart beating much faster now after just typing "when I'm dead".

But yeah, the worrying about death has been kicking in over the last few years, one of the side effects has been increased sensitivity to depictions of death, up to and ridiculously including people bouncing off my bonnet in GTA IV.

*fortunately we are both saps and said "I love you" before going to sleep. Whew!

I have calmed down. The experience of seeing my grandfather slowly dying of cancer, then seeing his dead body, has really taught me a lot.

i can't bear that this is finite, for me or anyone else. what a curse.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, February 20, 2012

I, very occasionally, get existential dread or sorta terrors about this - and its something that i could see if you open the door to that type of worry, could be difficult to let go of it again

But most of the time i try and view it as a return to the soil, to the earth

Well most of the time i don't think of it at all, but that is how I view it

Since my mother died a couple of years ago i've started to worry more about death, not just for myself but for my friends and family. I'm starting to believe that this is yet another one of those hurdles in our lives in growing up and everyone goes through it and we all handle it differently (i love that Andrew finds his empathy with the already deceased! I may adopt this technique for myself)

So as we start to hit the middle age and quite expectedly find other people we know in our lives losing theirs, it's no surprise it should be more of a focus to us.

I'll never forget when i was a teenager and my mother, who may have been about 40 then, asked me if i was afraid of death. I remember laughing it off as one of the most absurd things to worry about ever, she was horrified I felt this way. Of course she was going through the phase I too now am being privy too. I'm 38 now btw.

On top of all this, an added feeling of wanting to do more in our lives becomes apparent - but then the fear is accelerated due to the fact we now really don't want to die as we've just discovered more great things in live. or something.

i can't even conceive of being happy in the face of the knowledge of death. i guess this speaks less to logic than the way my brain chemistry is acting at the moment. maybe.

as a rule, i don't think about death. i have a switch that is mostly off when it comes to thinking about my loved ones dying. but for whatever reason that switch goes on immediately if i don't hear/see someone when i'm expecting to. i start imagining all kinds of horrific scenarios involving death or at least serious physical/mental injury.

yesterday i had planned to meet a friend in the evening, before my husband would be getting home. he had texted me about something in the morning, but i didn't hear from him the rest of the day. about the time he would be leaving work i sent him a couple texts, tried calling, no response. i could already feel the switch starting to twitch a bit, but i figured - his ph is probably on silent. but then that's weird bc he normally would text to say he's on his way home. maybe he's meeting someone and i've forgotten he told me? so i go meet my friend. over the course of dinner, i do a great job of acting happy and talky and normal, but i keep checking my ph, getting more and more panicky as it gets later and later and i haven't heard from my husband. i even email him, trying to convince myself that he probably left his ph at work. it's 8pm and on the bike ride home, i can hardly breathe bc i don't know what i'll do if i get home and he's not there. this is so wrong, he would have emailed me if he left his phone at work, he knows i worry about things like this.

well, i got home, busted through the door and there he was, chilling on the couch. but i gave him a serious fright with the look on my face, followed by 'OH MY GOD YOU'RE OKAY!!" and then i promptly burst into the hardest sobbing fit i've experienced in years.

poor guy, he felt really terrible - his ph was on silent, and while he had a tab open for his email, it had logged him out without his realizing. we hadn't planned that he would call or text me, as i knew he would be home straight after work, and he knew i would be out for the evening. but for me it was just that expectation of hearing from him in general (we text or email or talk a couple times at least over the course of a work day)and not having that expectation met, that was enough to trigger a complete meltdown.

i'm not sure why i'm posting about this, except that i still feel weirded-out today, maybe it is leftover adrenalin. it's funny too, bc ytth is always amazed at my general lack of death-anxiety - he is actually the total opposite and worries about death, particularly mine, all the time, yet if our roles had been reversed last night, he wouldn't have been any more worried about me than usual. which makes me wonder if i have some seriously bad case of subconscious death-anxiety.

FOD is kinda what motivates everything i do. i figure if i have as much variety in what i experience as possible, it sort of keeps it at bay.

A good view! There's always something to look forward to, or to explore.

basically, the distraction principle!

Sometimes, when I'm reading a book or watching a movie in which there's a scene with an autopsy or embalming or funeral or suchlike, a little voice in the back of my head says, "One day, that's going to be you." After which I get gripped by this utter, nauseating existential dread thinking about just . . . not being, while people I don't know dispose of my remains. It's like near-panic-attack levels of fear.

Happy Thursday!

as an ex once said to me, "you only get one ticket to la ronde."

I only think about death once in a blue moon. I'm a very "now" kind of person.

i feel like there is literally nothing productive about dwelling on it so i just mentally change the subject.

Agree with Scik and s1ocki - a minute spent thinking about death is a minute that you might as well have been dead.

^^ this is the pep talk i regularly give my husband. i always tell him he'll have plenty of time to feel sad if i die before him, why waste time being sad about before it's even happened??

wish i cd reason away my fear of the unreasonable

like i said best way i've found is to ignore it and try and think about something else, maybe thats not in good faith but wth

good advice but unfortunately depression kind of gets in the way of that, mind drifts to certain topics even when i consciously try to distract myself

oh

i just suffer from anxiety

haha

i get along v well with depressives tho, our neuroses are complementary

btw justine i occasionally freak out when my girlfriend is unreachable for one reason or another for a long time--i don't get mad, but i'll pace the floor and sometimes i'll cry a little when she gets home, or at least give her an unnervingly intense hug.

note that i use "depression" as kind of catch-all for a certain habit of mind, i don't really believe in "clinical depression" per se

i do

xps yeah i felt bad for him feeling bad - he felt super guilty, but it wasn't his fault at all, or anything he did wrong. it's just a weird trigger for me.

an ex of mine, who was involved in a lot of pretty shady activities, would often disappear for days at a time, without warning, and wouldn't contact me. i wouldn't sleep till he got back and then he'd get mad at me for worrying. so that may be of my problem now.

I had several paralyzing fear of death episodes throughout high school and college - a severe one brought about by reading the death of ivan ilyich! then I took a lot of acid, the end.

After which I get gripped by this utter, nauseating existential dread thinking about just . . . not being, while people I don't know dispose of my remains. It's like near-panic-attack levels of fear.

Happy Thursday!

― Julie Derpy (Phil D.), Thursday, June 28, 2012 12:48 PM (1 hour ago)

i only really get this when hi, and then only rarely

BUT ... my back "went out" the other day, and i wound up spending about 14 hours lying on the floor in near-screaming pain, basically unable to move. first time anything like that has ever happened to me, and it wasn't scary, exactly, but it did make me think lots of matter-of-fact thoughts about death. like, will anybody find me? will the cat eventually eat my lips? how often will i soil myself before i go? and so on. eventually i managed to get myself back in bed, and not long after made my way to the hospital. i'm okay now, and more than anything else, the experience seems to have kick-started my general will to live. so, a good thing on the whole. a realistic understanding of impending mortality helps keep things in perspective.

Have mentioned this before on other threads -- I don't really fear death, just any pain and debilitation leading up to it. Death itself would be kind of a relief, tbh. Finally a chance to put my feet up and relax without anybody wanting a piece of my time.

oh dont smoke weed btw

quitting that = best thing i ever did

i mean, not ever. and i'll still every once in a while. but it is BAD for FOD

real talk

xxposts to Phil D - I experience a similar feeling. If that passing thought of 'hey one day you won't exist' enters my brain, I'll have a full blown panic attack unless I shoo it away *immediately*.

Sometimes it wakes me up in the middle of the night, and I can't help but cry about it, but that doesn't happen much anymore.

I've been that way since I was little. I used to have random outbursts when I was very small and supposed to be going off to sleep where I'd run out into the living room crying to Mum and Dad 'I don't want to die, I don't want to die' and they'd have to calm me down. I dunno where it came from, but it's nowhere near as bad now as it was back then.

i don't know what's scarier - 1)one day you won't exist or 2)you will exist for all eternity. obv i know the latter won't happen so by default it's the former but jeez... fuck...

i'm not really afraid of dying itself so much as the process of dying. it seems just so fuckin' grim -- drawn-out physical pain, extended hospital stays, ppl who care about you trying to put on a brave face -- to the point where ppl euphemize it later, like, 'oh, he was doing really well, up until that last week.' well, who wants 'that last week' to be your last experience of life? objectively, i guess dying unexpectedly in your sleep seems like the ideal way to go -- but then the idea of being suddenly cut off (as opposed to being given the chance to 'settle your affairs,' do all the things you always meant to do, etc.) seems pretty terrible too. in conclusion, i suppose i am actually afraid of dying.

Very early in my life I developed a pseudo-zen attitude about it. I suspect it mostly derives from growing up several generations out of place - relatives were much older and passing away when I was pretty young. I always liked the epitaph on one of my early ancestors:

"Death is a debt to Nature due, that I have paid, and so must you"

Have no idea where the phrase originated from (my g-g-g-g-g-g-grandfather's headstone dates from 1780).

Some ways to die are better than others. Both my parents had drawn-out senile dementia in their final years, which involves a steady decline from not being able to manage in your own home, onto to the depressing atmosphere of a nursing home, and finally to being unable to feed yourself. Another terrible way to go is emphysema.

From this perspective, a sudden heart attack seems preferable.

"Death is a debt to Nature due, that I have paid, and so must you"

feel like i've been zinged from beyond the grave

the only way i can imagine coming to terms with the fact that i will cease to exist is if, when i'm on my proverbial deathbed, i can look back on the range of experiences that was my life and think "alright, i can't ask for anything more."

this is a good motivator for wringing as much as i can out of my life, but it doesn't offer any comfort with regard to the possibility of dying randomly/unexpectedly in the near future

but it doesn't offer any comfort with regard to the possibility of dying randomly/unexpectedly in the near future

Agreed. I suspect that during a plane crash/traffic accident/"strange loop" type of event my last thought will be an annoyed "really? right now?" rather than anything fearful.

Being afraid of death makes as much sense to me as being upset that you were born in the first place.

i don't know what's scarier - 1)one day you won't exist or 2)you will exist for all eternity. obv i know the latter won't happen so by default it's the former but jeez... fuck...

Extrapolate this further. Is it scary to imagine that in the past you didn't exist? No, cos you existed in your parents, your ancestors, the slime that crawled out of the ocean, the fucking nuclear reaction in the heart of a dying star, etc. You existed for all eternity in the past and will exist for all eternity in the future.

What are you holding on to? Is it consciousness? The experience of being in the world you are having today? Both of those are ephemeral, shifting things.

even if you die the matter and energy in your body remains in the universe until it ends so you still exist

otm

great I'm cured lock thread

...

you guys know that it's an *irrational* fear to begin with right?

I always liked that Seinfeld that has the standup bit where he talks about how on a survey people rated Public Speaking as a bigger fear than Death. And how basically at a funeral you are better off in the coffin than giving the eulogy.

you existed in your parents, your ancestors, the slime that crawled out of the ocean,

No. No, you didn't.

Convincing argument.

Do you not agree with Carl Sagan that we are all star stuff?

Late at night, being star stuff is very very cold comfort.

To quote Ray Bradbury, "I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of not living." That's what we should all be afraid of.

But whatever your driving force is, go with it. Even if it's irrational fear of something inevitable.

We are all star stuff != the star stuff that composes our bodies was us a billion years ago. That's like saying a wooden table existed in a tree. No, the wooden table is made out of the tree.

But if you are feeling poetic about it, you could indeed say that the wooden table existed in the tree. I'm just sayin'.

I don't think I've ever felt that poetic.

I'm never going to die so it doesn't really scare ms

haha xpost to emily

you'd totally be the monk in the story who gets his nose twisted by the Zen Master for not getting it.

Lamp, teach me how to live

http://dougbierend.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/the-denial-of-death-e9b699l.jpg

(Actually a great book.)

you'd totally be the monk in the story who gets his nose twisted by the Zen Master for not getting it.

No, I'd be the person telling the Zen Master that he's full of shit, and that if he tries twisting my nose I'm calling the police and having him arrested for assault.

"Full of shit" is not a phrase often directly associated with Zen masters. Points for originality. :)

http://nighttimethoughts.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/mountain20stream.jpg

Don't drink the water.

<I>even if you die the matter and energy in your body remains in the universe until it ends so you still exist

― The Cheerfull Turtle (Latham Green), Friday, June 29, 2012 4:37 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
</I>

Yeah well that ain't gonna catch me up on missed seasons of Adventure Time or Parks & Rec, so.

emil.y otm. the "matter and energy in your body remains in the universe" stuff is no antidote to the entirely rational fear of death.

To quote Ray Bradbury, "I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of not living." That's what we should all be afraid of.

kinda the other way around for me and most ppl i suspect. dying sounds horrible. not living is not something u experience at all.

emil.y otm. the "matter and energy in your body remains in the universe" stuff is no antidote to the entirely rational fear of death.

Yeah but nothing is! I mean, maybe for some people. But there's not any one thing you can say that will cause 100% of people to not be afraid of death. I don't think anyone said there was, anyways...

May as well get depressed that the sun is going down, or that your friend is in another geographic location than you, or something.

Or what if we all got sad right before we go to sleep, because we know we won't be awake and experiencing the world.

we get it.

adam bruneau aren't you like 23 or something

I'm not actually afraid of death. But not because of some hippy nonsense. Because I know I won't regret being dead when I'm dead, because it's quite simply impossible to do so.

The process of dying, on the other hand... Ouch.

only 23 year olds are made of stars iirc

yeah i like living, not really looking forward to dying, seems like that particular transition is going to be lame.

Adam Bruneau OTM.

Defining Life, Reality, Being, Consciousness by strictly logical and rational terms is completely inadequate and I think it's super naive and blinkered to LOL at anything that recognizes that and attempts to transcend it. Like, HAHA 23 Year Olds and Star Stuffs, but that's not a new or stupid concept. The New Age movement (or at least the popular perception of it) has kind of sullied the name of a lot of worthwhile Eastern philosophy/teaching. Unfortunate.

I have no problem with "we are all star stuff". It recognises our place as an infinitesimal part of a mind-boggling vast universe, made up of matter that has existed for a mind-boggling amount of time. I *do* have a problem with someone who infers from that that they have existed for all eternity and will continue to do so. No, you haven't. Maybe you should consider what personal identity means more.

yeah consciousness is a very specific process. consciousness is what creates an "i" from the billions of parallel processes happening in your brain. therefore when your brain ceases to function, there is no "i." saying that we are all made of stars and will last forever etc. may be a weird kind of consolation to some but what terrifies me is an end to the experience of living, which amounts to being an "i" in the world.

really wish i just never read any cognitive neuroscience and could sustain some kind of irrational believe in the survival of human personality after death. it would probably mean i'd spend less of my day staring into space in existential dread, and just get on with things.

but knowing that personality is fundamentally embodied kinds of puts a damper on that.

I don't fear death, but I do get sad that I won't get to see far future technologies.

it's weird that people fear the eventual destruction of earth/the universe when we all face our personal apocalypse before that. lars von trier made a somewhat clever movie about this IIRC.

i dont!

i dunno... like i said above, the fact that not-being is a state i will be unaware of, takes away its sting. i just won't be there. there'll be no fear, no pain, no nothin'.

having said that, something you wrote above will probably click for me in the middle of the night tonight and i'll wake up screaming haha

people, people, just believe in an afterlife

Im 31.

lol

Maybe you should consider what personal identity means more.

I will consider it and i do consider it. The ego, birth-to-death consciousness is important. It's just not personally as important as it's place in the wider scope of existence, which stretches beyond generations. Do you believe in God? Cos I do. There is some irrational, deeply felt connection that transcends my life and my experience. I can't explain it, it's just there. And it really makes life and death of an individual not such a big deal.

Gotta say I agree with circa1916, New Age Movement has kind of spoiled importation of plenty of valid Eastern concepts to the West. LOL @ hippies.

Do you believe in God? Cos I do.

Ah. Okay. Then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

I was a pretty committed atheist, rationalist, "the immediately tangible, quantifiable is all there is" type of person for years. There's been a slow but definite change recently. One: Don't laugh. I had a pretty intense experience with psychedelic mushrooms. Very profound if hard to articulate, obviously. Total shift in perception. I'd count it as a significant step in annihilating that fear of death that was always looming. There's a lot of study into the connection between psychedelics and overcoming the fear of death. Heard an ad on NPR asking for terminally ill folks interested in undergoing tests with psilocybin just a few weeks ago. Two: I've been meditating regularly and reading into a variety of Eastern teaching (totally a tourist in this area at the moment, so I'd be embarrassed to make suggestions). Also have been illuminated by some of Huxley's writing about the visionary experience, the Perennial Philosophy, etc.

Anyway, this is obviously not a path that will work for everyone, but I've never felt more "aware" and at peace in my life. I was totally a skeptic of anything even brushing against "mystical", but I've found significant, edifying worth in all of this.

Neither taking mushrooms nor meditating are irrational unless you decide to interpret them as such. Awe-inspiring phenomenology is a perfectly cool thing separate from belief in the mystical.

It's just not personally as important as it's place in the wider scope of existence,

no, your "identity" is a construction of your mind and ceases when your mind ceases to function.

Do you believe in God? Cos I do. There is some irrational, deeply felt connection that transcends my life and my experience. I can't explain it, it's just there. And it really makes life and death of an individual not such a big deal.

adam, THIS is the reason you're not afraid of death. congrats and all but your comforting talk about how death isn't any different from birth etc etc is coming from a totally different place from ppl who think that death means the permanent irreversible loss of everything you know and love.

i can only understand "faith" (in a higher/transcendent power and order) as a kind of way of getting through life rather than some kind of access to another realm (we are trapped in our minds, so that "other realm" many claim to see/feel is likewise in their heads).

i have this argument w/ my girlfriend a lot, but i find it hard to believe that many people, who don't have a few screws loose, can have absolute faith. i imagine most people's "faith" more as a kind of mental dam against existential doubt and dread. but i've never known anyone who claimed to have, much less had, absolute faith in this sense.

i often kind of wish someone would talk me into believing in god, an afterlife, etc.

Personal identity is not the end-all be-all of existence imho. My faith isn't in any life-like afterlife or anthropomorphic deity. God is by nature incomprehensible, so there's really no way to talk anyone into believing in it. Just like there's no way to talk anyone into quitting smoking. It's a personal journey.

I'm not saying I'm 100% unafraid of death tho. Most of my FOD moments have been contemplating the loss of family members, loved ones, etc.

Personal identity is not the end-all be-all of existence imho.

it is the only existence that one can _experience_.

i often kind of wish someone would talk me into believing in god, an afterlife, etc.

we did this, 9 years ago:

I'll give all my cash to anyone on ILX who can convert me to Christianity without the aid of drugs, reeducation seminars, or threats of physical force.

death means the permanent irreversible loss of everything you know and love

I agree with this, btw!

But also, this happens every day, constantly, throughout life.

from that thread: Some theology begins to sound like the sort of dog-chasing-tail intellectual activity that goes on in English departments everywhere. It's interesting I'll admit, very interesting, but when it boils down to it I don't want Emil Brunner's faith but Al Green's faith.

rings true for me.

i dont!

i dunno... like i said above, the fact that not-being is a state i will be unaware of, takes away its sting. i just won't be there. there'll be no fear, no pain, no nothin'.

having said that, something you wrote above will probably click for me in the middle of the night tonight and i'll wake up screaming haha

― funny-skrillex-bee_132455836669.gif (s1ocki), Friday, June 29, 2012 7:37 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Slocki otm. Sometimes I worry about dying before I get to do all the things I'd like to but then I remind myself that I'll be dead so I won't be aware of the fact that I didn't do those things and that it won't matter and I feel better. I'm way more concerned with friends/family dying then I am with my own death.

Neither taking mushrooms nor meditating are irrational unless you decide to interpret them as such. Awe-inspiring phenomenology is a perfectly cool thing separate from belief in the mystical.

i never interpreted them as irrational or worthless. i just underestimated their usefulness. some sort of deeper, primordial understanding can be gained from this kind of probing. "awe-inspiring phenomenology" is too vast a thing and will unravel differently depending on the person/state of mind.

At any rate, i think to be more in fear of a family member's death than your own shows that we have a deep compassion for other people.

"The wider scope of existence" can get fucked tbqh. I like doing and experiencing and learning stuff and would, given the choice, do so for another 500 years at least.

(500 years is the point at which you get bored enough to step in front of a train, is my understanding.)

there's no comfort in the fact that it happens every day to other people, that it's a part of life, etc. other people were probably afraid of dying too. for all the people that go off peacefully there's just as many that don't. death itself is not an advertisement for 'it's cool, nbd'.

I want to explain this but I will try to do it in a way that doesn't rip the bandaid and leave me in the fetal position later tonight....but my personal experience with this fear is this:
the thought of *the moment* of dying scares me because of the follow-on thought of 'why was I here in the first place'. The minutiae of my own day to day life occasionally lulls me into a feeling of purpose. But if I close my eyes and don't wake up tomorrow...what was all that for? this stuff that I'm typing here. that meal I just cooked. the coffee that i drank. they all go with me. sure there's parts of me left behind but ME, thinking wondering dreaming all stops. Maybe with no warning. I don't think it's narcissism that makes that thought terrifying to me. Maybe it's some kind of existential dilemma I dunno.

There's a physical terror that comes it. I can tell you exactly how it feels everytime that fear comes over me. It feels like the sensation of falling, or those weird jolts you get when you drop too fast into REM sleep...that's what the fear of dying feels like to me. It feels like helplessness.

Man, you and me, VG, separated at birth on this one.

join me in my sad little lifeboat

We're gonna live forever. We're gonna learn how to fly.

HIIIGH

Science may find a way in our lifetimes or that of another generation, to sustain our bodies for hundreds of year. Maybe eventually forever.

I think consciousness attaches to matter, rather than matter creating consciousness. I am conscious, other people are conscious, animals are conscious, even one-celled organisms display some kind of creative intuition. Plants are conscious *. They are all conscious in a different way than me, quantifiable on different levels of sensory awareness, brain activity, etc. Rocks and Earth may be conscious in some as-yet undetectable way. Maybe in the future we find out the differences in blue ray shift and the complexity of background radiation are other, cosmic forms of consciousness.

The thing is, each experience is unique. In one way it is our bodies that are creating the experience: of having an individual, human/animal/etc life cycle. It is scientifically proven that we exchange all the cells in our body every 7 to 10 years**. That includes the brain - the entire seat of consciousness to mainstream science. So given this, consciousness cannot derive itself entirely from the physical matter. The DNA and other genetic codes contained in our cells - the pattern, the information - that is the real root of consciousness.

This pattern is informed by our environment (at the grossest stage, Survival of the Fittest) and our subjective experiences through psychological processes affecting chemical processes at the cellular level. Death would be a drastic change in consciousness, to be sure. But given these facts and a gut feeling, I really don't see it as being the complete and total annihilation of the pattern.

But yes, the human experience (which is cut off at birth and death) is something special and unique, as are all experiences.

*http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=researcher-argues-that-plants-see-12-06-26

**http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/02cell.html?pagewanted=all

those weird jolts you get when you drop too fast into REM sleep...that's what the fear of dying feels like to me. It feels like helplessness

I know exactly what you mean, I've had some weird dreams that physically felt like precursors to out of body experiences. Death is most certainly a loss of control. However, there is plenty of that in life too!

i do believe drugs can help

I think consciousness attaches to matter, rather than matter creating consciousness.

??? "consciousness" as we understand it is a product of processes in the brain. there is nothing problematic about positing that certain cells that make up part of that process die and duplicate and are replaced etc, because consciousness does not reside in any given cell.

besides which, if consciousness is "the root of consciousness," i should point out that (a) the root is not the thing; individual stem cells are not "conscious" in any meaningful sense---- (b) DNA is matter, just very very very small matter.

i think you are leaping from science to mystical speculation. and i think you are entirely wrong. but if it makes you feel better....

i meant to write

if DNA is "the root of consciousness"

DNA is no more consciousness than a marigold seed is a fully-blossomed marigold.

"consciousness" as we understand it

ie not at all

do you follow contemporary neuroscience? we know a lot about it.

the royal we?

oh, yes. [strokes albino cat seated in lap.]

well, probably none of us do, but certainly there are philosophical aspects of consciousness that the nuts and bolts of neuroscience can't really answer? i mean, it's not like "yep, we've got that thing everyone's been arguing about since the beginning of humanity wrapped up. moving on."

#YOLO

paging CaptainLorax

Death would be a drastic change in consciousness, to be sure. But given these facts and a gut feeling, I really don't see it as being the complete and total annihilation of the pattern.

no offense, but this strikes me as wishful thinking. serious brain injury can result in the complete and total annihilation of the pattern; death isn't even required. personally, i don't see any good, non-faith-based reason to suppose to suppose that free-floating consciousness attaches itself to matter. otoh, there's lots of seemingly sound evidence in support of the idea that sophisticated, human-type, self-aware consciousness is the fragile product of organic matter organized into specific and highly complex arrangements. when death decomposes us, the "pattern" fragments and is lost. the energy remains, as does the gross matter, but as the organic processes that support cognition fall apart, so does the self. you know, probably...

self is overrated

try saying that without one

i didn't say useless

what contenderizer said.

Seeing the loss of self as the loss of meaning is at the core of the fear of death. That is why I say that self is "overrated". We prize it above all other things, although our self is clearly just a temporary condition of the universe and the apparent otherness of the rest of the universe cannot be maintained. Whether there is an "I" to say this or not does not preclude its truth.

lately, whenever I come down with a moderate illness - cold, flu, gastroenteritis - a little voice pops into my head that tells me that lots of people have begun the process of dying feeling the exact same way.

^^^ why stephen king is a bazillionaire

Seeing the loss of self as the loss of meaning is at the core of the fear of death. That is why I say that self is "overrated". We prize it above all other things, although our self is clearly just a temporary condition of the universe and the apparent otherness of the rest of the universe cannot be maintained. Whether there is an "I" to say this or not does not preclude its truth.

― Aimless, Saturday, June 30, 2012 11:29 PM (3 days ago)

any debate on this is a tail-chasing spiral that goes nowhere, i know, but i still don't get how this is supposed to be reassuring or even significant. of course the world (within me without me) will continue to exist absent my conscious (living) perception of it. but "meaning" is something that has only ever existed in relation to me as something that i make in existing. without me, all the relative meaning my particular version of the universe has ever held will vanish forever. this isn't what scares me though. what scares me is cessation itself, nonbeing, the end of me. being is all i've ever known, after all, and arguably all i am.

well without you you won't be able to miss you either so what's the problem

this thread is funny

not to give anyone insomnia, but given these weird constraints on what dying is, you've "died" already every time you go to sleep. the dude who wakes up is no more "you" than some post-singularity replicant.

http://theios.net/content//2012/06/Mind-Blown_thumb.gif

"meaning" is something that has only ever existed in relation to me as something that i make in existing. without me, all the relative meaning my particular version of the universe has ever held will vanish forever

You could argue that we touch the people we meet in our lives, we impact the environment, we change the world in many ways which have lasting effects that survive after our own death. You can devote your life to a cause that is greater than your life, and will outlast your physical body (ML King Jr, Gandhi, Jesus, etc.). In the most extreme cases (probably the ones i just noted) a life cause can be so meaningful that it overrides the natural fear of death.

Aimless is otm.

i still don't get how this is supposed to be reassuring or even significant.... "meaning" is something that has only ever existed in relation to me as something that i make in existing.

If you find no meaning in the continuing existence of a universe that quite clearly spawned you, that presently contains you, and will be here in all its glory beyond your death then I am at a loss to see how to provide you with any meaning or comfort there that you might accept as real. But I think you are engaged in a solipsistic enterprise in thinking this perspective to be true.

what scares me is cessation itself, nonbeing, the end of me

However common this outlook seems to be, it still baffles me. Of all the ultimate dispositions of my being that I can conceive, personal immortality seems to hold the most frightening possibilities of all. I am no god who can look on myself with the complacency of the omnipotent.

OTOH, the idea of impersonal immortality, as a merger of my puny suffering self back into the all-there-is, seems to me to be quite soothing.

If you find no meaning in the continuing existence of a universe that quite clearly spawned you, that presently contains you, and will be here in all its glory beyond your death then I am at a loss to see how to provide you with any meaning or comfort there that you might accept as real. But I think you are engaged in a solipsistic enterprise in thinking this perspective to be true.

lol, by directing the implied question to me ("If you find no meaning in the continuing existence of a universe that quite clearly spawned you..."), you seem to endorse my argument. of course i find meaning in the universe and its continuance. i'm alive! the finding/making of meaning is the sole province of the living. when i am no longer living, not only will i find no meaning in anything, all the subjective meaning i've made along the way will vanish completely from the universe - and subjective meaning the only kind i really know. this isn't solipsism, as i don't deny the existence or significance of the subjective meaning made by others. i don't deny the ways in which we affect one another and carry on as echoes and memories. i just think that all the existential wisdom in the universe provides little protection from the terror inspired by the honest contemplation of nonbeing - on those rare moments when we manage to fully grasp its threat. the void!

there are few sins i couldn't countenance in return for healthy immortality...

the terror inspired by the honest contemplation of nonbeing

Again, this is not in any way a required reaction to this idea. Whether or not you find it terrifying is a personal trait, not the result of 'honesty'.

there's no non-condescending way to put this, so i'll just embrace the condescension: i suspect that the sort of philosophical equanimity you're espousing here proves a lot less soothing when staring down the barrel of a gun than when talking things over in relative peace and comfort. then again, we're all different, and who am i to say?

Wait until you are 90 years old and that 'gun' won't look the same to you at all. Imagining a "healthy immortality" for your corporeal body is nothing more than an exercise in wishful thinking based on a nonsensical combination of words. This horrific 'non-being' is, in many ways, just as strange and delusional a concept, really, in that it doesn't describe anything known to exist.

sure, perhaps one day i'll welcome death's release (or transformation or whatever). for the moment i stand unnerved.

This horrific 'non-being' is, in many ways, just as strange and delusional a concept, really, in that it doesn't describe anything known to exist.

whatever we make of it, non-being can't really be said to "exist". that's in large part the point.

I hate and fear it! (Most of the time). Sometimes I long for it. Cessation. But mainly I quite like the western propaganda of I and me. Don't find any sort of merging with the ever and the all at all soothing. In fact on Sunday afternoons the thought of it invades me with a sickening paralysis and terrifying emptiness and fear. Of course there's the self-loathing, longed-for-oblivion, sickness of the only you that comes with addiction to the self, and I've toyed with different types of religion pretty much as I toy with iphone. Put it down in the end after having an unsatisfactory flick around. Probably should read a book instead. Larkin to thread, obviously - as he said, the fact you won't be aware of anything after death is no consolation, it's exactly what's frightening. Also decline and pain before death. I find it as impossible to be sanguine about the immediate run-in, as I do about moment of death or as I do about the afterwards. If I get to 90 and I'm ready then I've won God's lottery imo.

There, that should set me up for a wet Wednesday at work. Time to make a cheese sandwich.

to aimless: i hope i'm not being too much of a dick here. on a philosophical level, i agree with you. the only problem is that my maintenance of philosophy's distancing abstraction sometimes falters, and the horror comes gibbering...

xp

the fact you won't be aware of anything after death is no consolation, it's exactly what's frightening

Seems to be a rather attenuated thing to fear. idgi.

It is a fine thing to value your present configuration, but you can be damn well sure it will be changing, over and over again, just between today's cheese sandwich and tomorrow's wetness. That is real. Your sense of self is little more than a thread running through the midst of a million sensations that slough off you like the skin from a snake. It is a hell of a thing to pin the universe on.

I fear attenuated things.

It is a hell of a thing to pin the universe on.

correct.

Your sense of self is little more than a thread running through the midst of a million sensations that slough off you like the skin from a snake. It is a hell of a thing to pin the universe on.

nevertheless, the only thing that's there to pin the universe on anything seems to be the self. that's maybe what's so scary: the perceiving self is such a fragile thing to begin with, a self-recognizing "pattern" (for want of a better term) sustained by the electrochemical sloshings of a three-pound wad of tissue. we can't comfortably imagine the eradication of the self, because the self is what "we" are and all we've ever known. it is, in a sense, the universe. each individual death is, in this relative sense, the utter annihilation of all that has ever been and might be. the end of the world.

^ death as the solipsist's apocalypse

sense of self seems more like a linguistic/legal construct rather than a biological one, so i'd wager this is a culturally-specific fear, like leprechauns.

so far as i can tell, the fear of death - in the moment when death seems both imminent and not a blessed relief from prolonged torment - is a human constant. since biology has been brought up, i suspect that this fear has deep biological roots, that it is the way we most immediately experience the true essence of life: the "will" to be and do.

the survival instinct engenders a fear of being immediately killed but i really don't think it cultivates an abstract fear of death. for example, people smoke and speed on the highway all the time, knowing full well these behaviors very much increase their chances of death.

i've noticed that many people, as they grow very old, seem to welcome death. other people are in the other group and seem very afraid of it (one grandfather). other people are oblivious to this shit because they're too senile waste thought on it (my other grandfather).

i figure my odds are 2/3 i won't give a fuck when i get there which iirc is better odds

It's the little things about death that get to you. The fact that when you're dead you can't get a drink of orange squash with ice cubes clinking in the glass. The fact that death has no decent motels where you can pull over for a few good hours of shut-eye on a freshly-plumped pillow. The fact that death smells of nothing at all, not even turpentine on particle-board. The fact that death has had no reviews on Metacritic, despite the fact that everyone's seen the trailer. And death's deafening silence, which has long slim fingers, but no fingers at all.

I'm not speaking from personal experience, you understand.

the fact you won't be aware of anything after death is no consolation

First of all, how is this a fact? Do we have first-hand reports from people that have died? No reviews on Metacritic.

The root of the fear of death is that it is truly unknown. You can tell yourself there is an afterlife, or that you instantly go to a state of non-being, but nobody really truly knows either way and that is terrifying.

I kinda hope that death is quick, painless and unexpected. No worries, no effort, no problem. Sure, loved ones will be beat up for a while, but lets face it, they'll get over it in a year or so.

Do we have first-hand reports from people that have died? No reviews on Metacritic.

reactions to the afterlife have been surprisingly mixed, its score is yellow atm

ok fin e everyone goes to eternal life in heaven

reactions to the afterlife have been surprisingly mixed, its score is yellow atm

iirc you either loved it or hated it

Well it does keep us coming back for more.

This conversation has been happening coincidentally alongside a series of discussions I've had recently with family members, some less receptive than others. So weird how close it is in subject specifically to this talk!

Anyway, I find any idea that suggests continuation after death the product of a perception of our world/ourselves that takes root at any early age and is hard for those who believe this to self-analyze, generally. I am comfortable in my certainty that some sort of continuation of ourselves after death is as likely as that of a post death continuation of a blade of grass or a car. Simply because humans are more complex than those two examples doesn't make it more likely that we are any different. The perception I think believers hold comes from a subconscious, passionate feeling that their deep thoughts and meaningful experiences are so intense and complex that there isn't a way it could end completely. That completeness equals absolute, meaning that there isn't any layer of thought saying "its so dark" and "I'm dead" and this is simply the most frighteningly painful thing to perceive. A lack of existence cannot be imagined, so we conceptualize alternatives to cope.
The world's balance made humans possible, but the way we've dominated it and the conveniences of living in a society have trained us to view it as relative to us, as opposed to us being relative to it. If we accept that yes our design is intricate and amazing but our physical matter is no more significant than that of a tree or a rock then we realize there isn't a reason our spectacular thoughts or feelings should be attributed to anything more than the mechanical workings of the mind they reside in.

loss of ego

"but i don't want to be a river! i'm a droplet!"

"but if i die, i'll only be a memory, a change arrangement of electromagnetic forces representing a decaying lump of matter"

all that it ever was son

so there's existential dread too

it helps to remember that we're just fleetingly brief fields of energy (99.99 plus nine more nines percent vacuum) in a big supercollider

i'm sorry i forgot the percentage shift, only seven more nines after 99.99

existence and non-existence are both pretty much the worst. existence has sandwiches, tho.

nm, grampsy said the same thing.

I'd like to be reincarnated. I assume it would be a promotion, which would be a sweet deal.

It's interesting to think about what suicidal people think will happen to them when they're gone, but I'm sure the consequences are clouded by many other stressful emotions.

the fact you won't be aware of anything after death is no consolation

First of all, how is this a fact? Do we have first-hand reports from people that have died?

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, July 4, 2012 9:46 AM (5 days ago)

Pretending there is a reason this is not a fact is just pitting desperate hope against logic. The physical workings of the universe don't owe us magical perseverance of our thoughts, emotions, personality or perspective just because we personally are unable to have any way of conceptualizing existence without them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9--C6Hy3-4

LOL @ "desperate hope". Nice condescending post, there.

I don't think losing your personality or emotions or thoughts is a big deal. Those things change all the time anyways. Similar with losing your perception. Maybe your mind is so convinced of the perfection of the human machine that it can't see any other way of existing, not even some low-rate split-second energy cluster swirling through space trying to cling to whatever it just spent the last 80-or-so-years inhabiting.

Personally, it doesn't matter if this consciousness survives as 100% intact, 50% intact, 0% intact, whatever. I see myself as part in the grand scheme of things. The materialist will invoke logic but there is always all this focus on the important of the human ego and the personal experience and it seems....unnecessary? evangelical even?

Didn't mean to sound condescending, I just am not satisfied calling it ordinary hope. I just know when I reach into my imagination and stretch as hard as I can toward conceptualization of nothingness, the truest sense of it can only be the absolute end of all brain activity since existence is relevant only through your own experiences, thoughts and dreams.

what do you guys mean by ego? like a personal running commentary inside your head? I was kind of shocked to hear more than one person say this is their default mental state, and i'm wondering if that's what they mean by sense of self, and if this is what people are afraid of losing -- some pundit in their head with no volume control.

From my self-taught pseudo-buddhist pov, the key to losing this fear of death is to learn how to see your own mind at work, which seems very circular, like a tongue tasting itself, but must be attempted. soon you realize not just how your mind busily and self-importantly constructs a kind of reality for itself, but at some point something clicks and you realize that your mind's reality is amazingly silly compared to what is behind and beyond it. from there on it becomes a matter of letting your mind do its work (you can't really stop it), but at the same time retaining that larger sense of what is really happening.

humans have no free will anyway so you can't control if you are going to feel gloomy abotu death or not

There is a Hand to turn the time

Though thy Glass today be run

Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low

Find the last poor Pret'rite one...

Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,

All through our crippl'd Zone,

With a face on ev'ry mountainside,

And a Soul in ev'ry stone....

seriously though, there's no reason to think that a stone doesn't have a soul or experiences, or a rock, or a tree, or a cloud

i mean, i know i'll have a soul

I feel like if I ask for details you'll define a soul as something so abstract that it doesn't really apply anymore, like when my friend said God is merely the name he gives to the forces that govern the universe in such neat mathematical ways. Then why even call it God at that point? You're spreading it so thin.

it doesn't feel thin sitting on a mountaintop

i didn't learn a whole lot in my short-lived scientific career and i was a terrible scientist but i did learn that you don't need to explain everything to believe in it

anyway they used to call scientists natural philosophers which helps me make more sense of the feelings i feel when i confront the sublime

The God Evan's friend describes sounds more to me like science. If it can accurately and objectively be described in any overt language, it's not true religion. This is why symbolism is so important and how literally reading the Bible only drives people to act like insane assholes. Pure religion is an abstract, subjective experience, the eye seeing the eye, that 3rd person out-of-body self-observation.

Funny thing is, it's a lot like a science, and at least in the East, it's been explored as such. Sit and observe, take notes, compare observations with peers. And if there's no spirit and no mysticism and it's all fooling yourself then the experience is occurring in your mind anyways and it's just as valid as anything else.

The problem with that comparison is that religion skews observations to validate something they already believe. Science draws the conclusion purely from the findings as they are.

And my point is that spiritual belief suggests some kind of preservation of the being that can at least observe or dream after death. Helps with the fear of death part but the reality is crushing in its incomprehensibility.

what if when you die you go to magic anus?

you seem to have given this more thought than anyone else atm, so you probably have more expertise there than we do

Helps with the fear of death part but the reality is crushing in its incomprehensibility.

I've never understood how that helps with the fear. Eternity sounds like its own special kind of hell to me, neither too hot nor too cold but interminable.

Everyone has their own version of afterlife, but at least eternity is something imaginable. Not even having the back of my mind saying "it's all over; there is nothing now," or the defining silence/imagine of darkness is beyond by comprehension and that puts me in a panic. Every version of nothing that we can possibly imagine is from some sort of a perspective, remove that and everything else.

deafening*** not defining...

damn evan dropped the hammer itt :-(

yeah evan is otm. albeit no less depressing than my contributions.

humans have no free will anyway so you can't control if you are going to feel gloomy abotu death or not
― The Cheerfull Turtle (Latham Green), Monday, July 9, 2012 1:06 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i actually do believe this is true but there's no real way to exist or act in a social world without maintaining the idea of free will. it's central to our idea of self, which sustains us in the world for the most part.

boy i'm a gloomy gus.

It's like trying to imagine four dimensions. It's scary because it's inevitable, but a good way to get to the root of how people view existence.

Oops, wording was off there- didn't mean four dimensions are scary/inevitable.

but at least eternity is something imaginable.

I feel just the opposite

Can you witness eternity? If you can be tortured it isn't even comparable to not existing.

if you've ever zoned out and lost track of time, i think you can extrapolate that to forever and see how eternity wouldn't be so awful.

what is all this about not existing? pretty sure people keep existing after they die, else we wouldn't need to concrete blocks and vats of acid

anyway evan you have an awful lot of faith in this so called "science"

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."

http://www.ywconnection.com/New%20Era/PP/Good%20Works/Eternity%20is%20a%20Long%20Time%20-%20Friend.jpg

what if when you die you go to magic anus?

― The Cheerfull Turtle (Latham Green), Tuesday, July 10, 2012 11:29 AM (7 hours ago)

tbh this is weirdly comforting to me but maybe I've listened to too much Coil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP7BhDjB2WI

what is all this about not existing? pretty sure people keep existing after they die, else we wouldn't need to concrete blocks and vats of acid

― the late great, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 7:28 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

?????

anyway evan you have an awful lot of faith in this so called "science"

― the late great, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 7:28 PM (3 hours ago)

Again:

The world's balance made humans possible, but the way we've dominated it and the conveniences of living in a society have trained us to view it as relative to us, as opposed to us being relative to it. If we accept that yes our design is intricate and amazing but our physical matter is no more significant than that of a tree or a rock then we realize there isn't a reason our spectacular thoughts or feelings should be attributed to anything more than the mechanical workings of the mind they reside in.
What reason should they continue without it?

And Michael to revise my response we could imagine all sorts of scenarios of what it would be like to witness some sort of endless existence, but we can't imagine not having a mind. That's the distinction.

it would require endless thinking to genuinely imagine an endless existence. otherwise you simply come to an end of your thoughts and insert an ellipses...

hey evan how can you talk about us as something separate from the world? and when two things are relative, are they not relative to each other?

sounds like you've fallen into the dualist trap my friend

ok hold on a second evan

i will accept that i'm not any more significant than a rock but you still haven't proven to me that a rock doesn't have thoughts, a soul or an afterlife

Aimless, I'm not talking about imagining all of the time, just the scenario.

hey evan how can you talk about us as something separate from the world? and when two things are relative, are they not relative to each other?

sounds like you've fallen into the dualist trap my friend

― the late great, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 11:41 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean we and everything in the world was created because of the situation the world is in, how it is perfect to create life, etc. The world wasn't created to serve us. If it was created as a place to put us, then maybe I'd believe that we are owed something after we die.

hmm i don't follow. surely you don't need to have been intelligently designed to have an afterlife or a soul anymore than you would a brain, or emotions or dreams?

i mean sure, there's no *reason* i should have an afterlife ... but there's also no reason i should have a life in the first place ... yet i'm here?

No but I'm saying the idea of an afterlife and soul exist because we want them to and for no other reason. Generally people don't think rocks and clouds have souls so my theory on the roots of spiritual perspective is more about the idea the human is special and deserves to have their being preserved in some thinking form.

You're here because your mind developed along with your body. How is that fall out of line with what I'm saying?

does*

well i think a lot of people thinks rocks and clouds have souls and i personally i have a thinking form and i don't think there's anything special about that - my dog does, too, i know - but to address your point i know that my body isn't going to end and go away when i die so i'm not sure why my thinking self or soul should end either

Your thinking self has no reason to exist after your brain is no longer active. The soul is the "how" fabricated from denial of the truth about the end.

AKA the soul is just a story.

oh come on though, that's what plato said about physical reality, everything is just a story

I'm not into the made up ones.

The way I reconcile myself to death is by thinking about it in ways that de-abstract it from my mind and consciousness, where it will spiral endlessly into melancholy and conceptualization and desperate palliation. I think about in a biological sense, an animal body born to decay and die and thus united with nature, in the social sense, bonding with other people in a community over shared mortality and reality, and in the human sense, ie this is what has happened to everyone who has ever lived, and if it was good enough for them, it's good enough for me. What am I, an exception? I wished I was when I was a teenager, now I'm more happy to be an ordinary human. Immortality is a monster and desired by monsters, like Napoleon or Hitler. I want to identify with ordinary, good, loving people, and accepting death is one way to do that.
I don't think it makes sense to identify with trees and rocks and particles and energy, nice thought that it is. I think we can only fully and healthily identify with our human-ness. That definition can subtly over time I know, but there are constants that go back thousands of years. I am one of those dying humans, and though it is very painful for my brain to accept, my consciousness can deal with it, though it will never eliminate the fear.
Put bluntly and cornily, if it's good enough for Montaigne, for Schubert, For Ovid, for Bach, for Donne, for the other artists who have touched my consciousness deeply and made me wonder at life and death, it's good enough for me. I am not above them, I am not better than them.

Fuck it, post

Nice

I don't think I can intellectualise the fear of death away: there's something more visceral and underlying about it than just a conscious set of beliefs. I flinch or feel painful emotions when I hear about about other people's deaths, let alone facing the real imminent prospect myself, and the deaths of family/people close to me are upsetting and take time to reach acceptance.

So maybe the most I can hope for is to get less caught up by the fear of death and it interfering with my life now. I keep thinking back to Scott's proposed t-shirt motto on another thread: 'Treat every day like it's shark week - keep moving'.

And Michael to revise my response we could imagine all sorts of scenarios of what it would be like to witness some sort of endless existence, but we can't imagine not having a mind. That's the distinction.

every night, when i dreamlessly sleep, i am without a mind.

and it FUCKING RULES, MAN!

its crazy to me that anyone on this thread thinks 'eternity' is imaginable compared to whatever its opposite is

Eternity cannot come with a standard human consciousness, it's something you can experience only with God-like or Christ-like consciousness. Your experience of time and space transcended through death, you don't have time to worry about taxes, ponder corporeal drudgery, etc. Basically an eternal life is something that exists outside of time. It's not that time is a giant arrow that you just keep following in the same path and the same rate as living humans. You would experience time and space as....well.....there's really no way to describe it to us. Fourth dimension and all that.

If there is a post-death experience, then it is as different to pre-death experience as that is to the pre-birth experience.

If we accept that yes our design is intricate and amazing but our physical matter is no more significant than that of a tree or a rock then we realize there isn't a reason our spectacular thoughts or feelings should be attributed to anything more than the mechanical workings of the mind they reside in. What reason should they continue without it?

This is interesting because with the scientific view here the physical matter that creates our life is of the same stuff as the world around us. Yet we are convinced of our uniqueness, of the brilliance of our consciousness (ego) that there is no possible way anything post-human should be considered. If a tree or a rock can have some level of life, some existence, then why not the air around us? Why not the ground? Or the room we die in?

its crazy to me that anyone on this thread thinks 'eternity' is imaginable compared to whatever its opposite is

― funny-skrillex-bee_132455836669.gif (s1ocki), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 10:29 AM (45 minutes ago)

As I said obviously the endless length cannot be imagined but the setting can at least be conceptualized within the context of human sensors. You only hear this, or you see that, or you think/dream this. The void of nothingness after death cannot be put in that context. We have our brains to thank for sorting all of these stimulants, when it is shut off that's it. When an engine dies in a car I don't think it is floating through eternity dreaming of open roads and tasty oil. So what if it isn't biological or as complex as us? We're all mechanical as well.

This is interesting because with the scientific view here the physical matter that creates our life is of the same stuff as the world around us. Yet we are convinced of our uniqueness, of the brilliance of our consciousness (ego) that there is no possible way anything post-human should be considered. If a tree or a rock can have some level of life, some existence, then why not the air around us? Why not the ground? Or the room we die in?

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 10:46 AM (49 minutes ago)

I agree with the first two sentences.
Those things have existence, and if they had a story to somehow tell you could call it their life, but the existence I'm talking about is what can only possibly be relevant to us: the one we perceive.

True. I think you are right there.

But our perception changes even during our lifetime. But yes death is such a significant change that I think people that believe in the 'afterlife' don't really give it as much credit as it deserves. It's not like you would be floating through space with a ghost version of your body, hair, clothes, etc. It would be completely transformative, beyond all 3-d worldly comprehension. Eternal life in that sense is the belief that the real you is whatever part survives the transition, whatever part of you transcends life and death. It probably has very little to do with your worldly existence and in that sense, yeah, there is no 'life' after death.

Plants do react to external stimuli, there are even studies suggesting that they 'see' the world, to some degree. No doubt their perception of time is extremely different than ours, if they have one. Probably seems to go by much faster than ours.

I don't really agree when people say that eternal life would be a hell, that watching loved ones grow old and die and stuff would be horrible. To live an eternal existence would be transcending past time and space. You would be experience time at all levels, birth, death, and in between. It would be such an objective experience that attachment to one time or another would be impossible. Lest you be trapped in the cycle of birth and death.

As I said obviously the endless length cannot be imagined but the setting can at least be conceptualized within the context of human sensors. You only hear this, or you see that, or you think/dream this. The void of nothingness after death cannot be put in that context. We have our brains to thank for sorting all of these stimulants, when it is shut off that's it. When an engine dies in a car I don't think it is floating through eternity dreaming of open roads and tasty oil. So what if it isn't biological or as complex as us? We're all mechanical as well.

― Evan, Wednesday, July 11, 2012 11:36 AM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i disagree and the reason why is, as already mentioned on this thread, sleep. i 'experience' oblivion every night. i know what it's like to close my eyes and disappear, inasmuch as that's possible to 'know.' eternity is unimaginable to me - it's not just 'a lot more of this.'

But our perception changes even during our lifetime.

But this is like equating changing the channel with shutting off the television. And even that is not apt because a turned off TV is silence and black and that can't exist either.

Mechanical creations and biological creations cannot be currently equated. There is more complexity in a single blade of grass than the world's fastest computer.

i disagree and the reason why is, as already mentioned on this thread, sleep. i 'experience' oblivion every night. i know what it's like to close my eyes and disappear, inasmuch as that's possible to 'know.' eternity is unimaginable to me - it's not just 'a lot more of this.'

― funny-skrillex-bee_132455836669.gif (s1ocki), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 12:12 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Elaborate please.

Mechanical creations and biological creations cannot be currently equated. There is more complexity in a single blade of grass than the world's fastest computer.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 12:19 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Complexity doesn't mean it should be governed differently. If a blade of grass was as complex as a billion fast computers the computers wouldn't then have a soul or other supernatural attribute. Same with a human.

Biological processes that we don't 100% understand ARE different than mechanical processes that we do. Maybe there is no "soul" but certainly consciousness and self-awareness seem to be a product of the former that we haven't yet approximated with the later. Life seems to take place within a context: genealogical heritage, environmental stimuli, ever-shifting DNA. Machines are more or less put together from disparate parts and do the same job regardless of environment or context, as long as they are functioning properly.

I'm going to stop this thought train before it derails into Kurzweilian futurist speculation.

Haha well the core of what I'm saying is that the workings of the body are attributed to the activities of the parts that manage them.

i don't think we understand mechanical processes. i don't even know how mayonaise works.

mayonaise, it's a bit like human conception, it start with an egg

Mechanical creations and biological creations cannot be currently equated. There is more complexity in a single blade of grass than the world's fastest computer.

this is one of those facts that cannot be emphasized enough these days.

how much of that complexity is junk though? also, the information required to reproduce the grass isn't that much I bet.

is that why we can't make one

believe me, solar panel manufacturers would be racing to the patent office if they could figure out how to make a leaf or a blade of grass

But grass can make one!

i think there is some degree of misunderstanding of infinity on this thread, people keep comparing it to things that are "infinitely long" which isn't really the definition of infinity

also evan i'm not trying to be mean here but you're sliding into pseudo-scientific popular science babble that makes about as much sense to me as the afterlife

if a blade of grass were as "complex" as a supercomputer ... what does that even mean?

i disagree and the reason why is, as already mentioned on this thread, sleep. i 'experience' oblivion every night. i know what it's like to close my eyes and disappear, inasmuch as that's possible to 'know.' eternity is unimaginable to me - it's not just 'a lot more of this.'

― funny-skrillex-bee_132455836669.gif (s1ocki), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 12:12 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Elaborate please.

― Evan, Wednesday, July 11, 2012 12:20 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i could elaborate "forever" (LOL) but, basically, it's harder for me to imagine endless existence as it is to imagine everything just stopping.

monsanto messes about with grass on their computers all the time, and are probably using the spare cycles on their supercomputers to play quake or something.

Mechanical creations and biological creations cannot be currently equated. There is more complexity in a single blade of grass than the world's fastest computer.

this is one of those facts that cannot be emphasized enough these days.

Please define "complexity" and explain how you are measuring it.

t's harder for me to imagine endless existence as it is to imagine everything just stopping.

but ... you experience both?

if that's true, which i'm not sure of, that doesn't make them equally easy to imagine!

Heres the thing. People that believe in any form of afterlife really want it to be true. If they didn't want it to be true so badly, they wouldn't focus on unknowns as somehow justifications for a specific conclusion that ignores the laws that govern everything else in the universe as we know it. Your brain creates and holds your thoughts, emotions, etc. When that stops working, all of that ceases. That is the core of how any other functional physical object works. Inanimate matter is all that is left. The only existence we know is the existence we've experienced. We naturally imagine death as part of the journey rather than absolute inhalation of all thought, because we can't comprehend that at all. We can merely acknowledge it and be frightened at it's apocalyptic inevitability. The active information in our brain isn't going to continue in some form intact to roam the universe in any way anyone believes in a spiritual sense simply because we hope it and we can't visualize any alternative.

Sorry if I'm going in circles at this point.

Your brain creates and holds your thoughts, emotions, etc. When that stops working, all of that ceases. That is the core of how any other functional physical object works.

what does this mean?

if a blade of grass were as "complex" as a supercomputer ... what does that even mean?

― the late great, Wednesday, July 11, 2012 3:11 PM (38 minutes ago)

That varying degrees of complexity don't justify something like "magic" out of the more complex of the two.

Your brain creates and holds your thoughts, emotions, etc. When that stops working, all of that ceases. That is the core of how any other functional physical object works.

what does this mean?

― the late great, Wednesday, July 11, 2012 3:51 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That when something becomes inactive, the activity it created while working is longer continues either.

whoa... ***while working no longer continues either****

see this is what i'm saying about circularity

"when something becomes inactive, the activity no longer continues"

this is a syllogism

It's just something that is obvious but spiritual people will at least say humans are the exception when it comes to the mind.

Materialists can think that humans are the exception as well. Materially, the post or pre-death experience (if it exists) is invalid because it does not match the perfection of the human life.

if a blade of grass were as "complex" as a supercomputer ... what does that even mean?

― the late great, Wednesday, July 11, 2012 3:11 PM (38 minutes ago)

That varying degrees of complexity don't justify something like "magic" out of the more complex of the two.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Besides, the spiritual experience is a Grace that is given to us, devoid of any of the effort that the word "magic" usually entails.

computers are a kind of magic in the 'word made action' sense. rewriting the 'code' of a blade of grass actualizes a similar magic process.

ok guys.

for one thing, "consciousness" is not a _thing_. it is a series of parallel and overlapping processes--many of which are preconscious. if you begin to remove parts of a person's brain, their consciousness and bodily functioning will begin to change. if you remove enough parts, one can easily imagine that the "self" begins to break apart and eventually disappear.

second, our brain is ever-chaning--cells die, cells are born, synapses emerge and disappear. there is no "one" consciousness that we are granted at birth and that stays with us until death. the idea of an unchanging or at least integral self is one of the products of consciousness. see first note.

there is no such thing as a platonic -- that is, ideal, unperturbed and unchanging -- self or consciousness that will be restored to us when we die.

to imagine the survival of human personality after death in some form is to imagine another plane of existence in which some version of our consciousness (from when? the moment of death? several years before that? at birth?) is recreated in some other plane.

the only way i can even imagine this is if you take an awesome (and rather silly IMO) leap of faith and imagine that existence as we know it--including all of our findings about evolution, the human mind and body etc.--is some kind of fantasy projection, and that our "real selves," which bear some relation to our "selves" as we experience them in this plane of existence, are intact in some other plane. and that upon death we make some sort of quantum leap to this other plane with little interruption.

if you want to believe that, i guess i have little interest in preventing you. but it has no relationship to anything we experience or know in this world and, as evan as pointed out, it's a rather human-centric conception that mostly--to my mind--reveals our own vanity.

i feel like a lot of people on this thread could stand to read some contemporary neuroscience.

you know i follow your first, second, third there but i don't see how the part that begins "to imagine" follows from there

i mean you'd have to consciously will away everything that we know about this world in order to sustain a fantasy of the survival of some integral human consciousness apart from the processes that make it possible to exist.

what processes are those, exactly?

anyway on the philosophy of consciousness side i'm familiar with dennett, hofstader, searle, smullyan, smolensky, nagel, nozick, minsky and lieberman

none of them are not exactly what i'd call contemporary but i don't think they're outdated yet. what am i missing?

No need to live a fantasy live to imagine survival. You just have to have a different definition of survival.

second, our brain is ever-chaning--cells die, cells are born, synapses emerge and disappear. there is no "one" consciousness that we are granted at birth and that stays with us until death. the idea of an unchanging or at least integral self is one of the products of consciousness. see first note.

I brought this up way earlier, how all the cells in our body are completely replaced every 7-10 years, and I looked it up and it seems that most of the cells in the brain are the same throughout your life. Except the ones that form new memories. Which kinda supports consciousness creating matter but also that the reality we experience IS determined by the physical brain that stays with us.

that the reality we experience IS determined by the physical brain that stays with us.

hm i'm not sure that last bit follows

you say "determined" but i'm not sure how you could call that "determined"

Structured?

Organized by?

"connected" maybe

but "determined" has that "deterministic" thing to it

like what would you call a scab?

that's like saying your skateboarding accident was determined by your scab

LOL wut

well i mean sure the brain forms new cells as it has experiences, so obviously the "shape" of the brain or whatever you want to call it (the particular macro-micro workings of which are completely obscure btw, else we would certainly have functioning a.i. by now) is related to experience

but i don't see how it follows then that experience is reducible to those cells?

Well that is sort of just accepted common sense, however baseless.

like i guess what i'm saying is that we still don't even really have evidence of "consciousness" that's deducible from biology. and we don't have anything in our biology that suggests to us the necessity of art or language. we don't have an organ that other animals don't, and in fact, there's really nothing about our organs that we could point at, and say, hey, if you were missing that gene or that cell or that organ, you wouldn't have art or language or whatever (much to the dismay of the intelligent design crowd)

so i'm wondering if we can't decisively point toward consciousness or language on a scientific, material level, the same way we can't decisively point toward time or soul, you guys ready to also deny your experience of consciousness, language or time?

like i guess what i'm getting at is if you really think *SCIENTISTS* (other than richard dawkins) spend a lot of their time telling other people their relationship to immanence is irrational and then producing heaps of *SCIENCE* to win the argument

like people keep saying infinity and eternity as if these are basic commonsense concepts well understood and characterized by science

for one thing, "consciousness" is not a _thing_. it is a series of parallel and overlapping processes--many of which are preconscious. if you begin to remove parts of a person's brain, their consciousness and bodily functioning will begin to change. if you remove enough parts, one can easily imagine that the "self" begins to break apart and eventually disappear.

this is a good one here, where a truth (that consciousness is a series of parallel and overlapping processes) becomes an excuse for a handy overlapping of ideas

by the same argument, removing their ears would change their memories of music?

if you begin to remove parts of a person's heart, their consciousness and bodily functioning will begin to change. if you remove enough parts, one can easily imagine that the "self" begins to break apart and eventually disappear.

you mean like oliver sacks though, right?

Well, the ancient Egyptians didn't think the brain was important at all in the journey to the afterlife, that's why they removed it (with a hook, through the nose).

incredibly, you could take a hook through the nose and out the top of the skull and still recognize faces, yet people w/ a tiny defect (less than 1%) at the bottom of brain can't recognize faces or ever learn to, they have to rely on recognizing noses, hair color and eye color

you could also die

BUT STILL

i wonder how it feels to be highly conscious of other people's noses and if that enhanced consciousness continues into the afterlife

by the same argument, removing their ears would change their memories of music?

― the late great, Thursday, July 12, 2012 12:04 AM (45 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Parts of the brain was specified...

And I'm not saying eternity is a commonsense concept. What do you imagine it to be?

i feel like a lot of people on this thread could stand to read some contemporary neuroscience.

i think you are really placing more weight on contemporary neuroscience than it can bear.

'In 2004, eight neuroscientists felt it was too soon for a definition. They wrote an apology in "Human Brain Function":
'We have no idea how consciousness emerges from the physical activity of the brain and we do not know whether consciousness can emerge from non-biological systems, such as computers... At this point the reader will expect to find a careful and precise definition of consciousness. You will be disappointed. Consciousness has not yet become a scientific term that can be defined in this way.'

also tlg otm.

Would you say consciousness at least is a product of the brain, and that it cannot exist actively in a complete form somehow removed from the brain (as if it were a single entity) or with the brain non-functioning?

I would say consciousness as we know it is at least a product of some kind of complex material system, etc etc. But if you want to say that consciousness is an emergent property of complex systems, and not somehow part of the intrisic nature of matter itself, then I'm not buying it. Maybe rocks really are conscious to some infinitesimal degree.

This has informed my thinking an awful lot recently (and yes that's my comment near the bottom)

http://guidetoreality.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/quotes-on-key-mindbody-insight.html

xpost

If consciousness is constituted from a bunch of different overlapping processes then maybe it could stay intact if those processes were moved piecemeal into some other non-brain substance.

And even if it didn't stay fully intact - if you lost all of your memories or lost your sense of self - we might still want to say that the consciousness has, in some minimal sense, "survived."

Yeah, but the question of "will we be able to simulate the human consciousness in a machine, like simulating a snes on a modern PC?" is still a level closer to earth to the idea of the consciousness continuing sans all current input (and output (and hardware))

if you define consciousness as awareness, and accept that awareness is the modeling of another state, then you kind of do need at least an initial input, but once you have it, you could create a very simple system that could be said to be conscious.

is ilx conscious

it's pretty self-conscious, i've noticed.

and accept that awareness is the modeling of another state

I do not accept this.

what's an acceptable litmus test for awareness then?

A map is the modelling of a geographic state. Or software modelling a weather system if you want a dynamic example. Are either of those aware? We're talking apples and oranges here. How do I recognise it? God knows! My experience of aware systems is limited to one.

i'd argue those things are as aware as a human is on those subjects, and probably more reliable. the map, though, being static, is as aware as a dead human. but if you put a pushpin on it, it's resurrected.

the problem with defining "consciousness" is that its only real defining characteristic is self-awareness, and self-awareness is something that can only be apprehended subjectively, by the self-aware consciousness. of course, we can perceive secondhand evidence of consciousness in the behavior and communication of others, but our fundamental sense of it - what human consciousness is and does - remains inseparable from self-awareness.

i reject, however, the idea that because we cannot materially define or identify consciousness, it is therefore premature or otherwise unjustified to say that human consciousness is produced and sustained by - and in a sense resides in - the human brain. the human brain seems, among other things, to be a consciousness-generating mechanism. though we do not now exactly how the brain generates the self-aware awareness we call consciousness, we have sufficient evidence, i think, to say that it does in fact do this.

we can also say with some degree of certainty that the state of human consciousness is affected by the state of the human brain. consciousness does not seem to preexist the brain. as the brain develops, so does consciousness. activity within this or that part of the brain typically corresponds in a predictable fashion with this or that conscious state. when we damage the brain, we run a substantial risk of damaging (or at least affecting) consciousness. when we extinguish the brain, we seem to extinguish consciousness.

we do not need to be able to measure or even fully define consciousness to understand the relationship of mind to brain and to understand, too, what this implies about the durability of human consciousness.

paragraph 2: "though we do not know exactly how the brain generates the self-aware awareness..."

"self-awareness is something that can only be apprehended subjectively, by the self-aware consciousness."

i'm not sure, but i think techniques have existed for awhile now to capture how the brain models one's sense of self at least on a very rough level. I bet at some point 'self-awareness' will pass from a philosophical question to commonplace legally admissible evidence of guilt/innocence based on some kind of brain scan w/r/t say like intent to murder. You could show, for example, that you were actually "out of yourself" when chopping up someone.

the qualia of pain, i think, is way tricker to nail down than self-awareness, which seems easy peezy. is a lobster self-aware seems like a way easier question to answer than if it feels pain if you boil it.

not so sure abt that. pain is simply the awareness of a certain type of neural stimulus. nerves of this kind send signals to that part of the brain, and we get the sensation of pain. shouldn't be too hard to measure.

not sure what you mean by "techniques have existed for awhile now to capture how the brain models one's sense of self at least on a very rough level." i don't know of any such techniques or technologies. we can capture sense data (as when the signals sent by an eye are processed to create an image of what the eye sees), but that's a much simpler thing than the sense of self.

there's a bit about capturing activity "grandmother neurons" i.e. specific areas that fire up in recognition of your grandmother. stuff like that. pain really seems much more subjective than awareness though. you can demonstrably mediate people's experience of pain while still showing that the stimulus mechanisms haven't also been mediated. I don't know if you can do that with self-awareness.

what are you talking about?

we can't capture sense data!

MRI, blood flow stuff, sticking electrodes into people's heads and zapping, that kind of thing. also the drugs, weird inhibition with magnet stuff.
maybe there will be a commercial ego-blaster on the market some day where you can have a vacation from self-awareness by zapping a specific area.

there was a cool thing going around where they reconstructed people's dreams from their prior activations according to exposure to youtube clips.

i'd argue those things are as aware as a human is on those subjects, and probably more reliable. the map, though, being static, is as aware as a dead human. but if you put a pushpin on it, it's resurrected.

my first thought was "this is ridiculous!" but then i remembered that i'd said maybe a rock can be conscious, so idk anymore. but no-one knows anything about consciousness outside their own experience, despite what they claim, so saying idk is ok by me, in fact i should say thanks for shaking me out of whatever complacent position i'd settled in to.

maybe this is just a linguistic quirk, but there's a qualia of consciousness that is as problematic as the qualia of pain I don't think the qualia of consciousness has much to do with whether an entity is conscious or not, but pain is pretty much all qualia.

uh

what

?

we can't capture sense data!

sure we can, in a manner of speaking. we can measure the electrical activity in a cat's thalamus and from that data generate video imagery of what the cat is seeing. that's the capture of sense data in the sense i mean.

that's not true

i imagine you're talking about something like this

http://www.pcworld.com/article/240562/scientists_read_minds_sort_of_reconstruct_images_from_brain_scans.html

the key part there is the "sort of"

hey look guys, this is what a supernova looks like

http://gothstore.piratemerch.com/images/joy-division.jpg

i call bullshit, those are the misty mountains

i see mickey mouse ears

http://corecanvas.s3.amazonaws.com/theonering-0188db0e/gallery/original/misty_mountains.gif

the map is not the territory son

http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

clicked on that, lived up to my current dn, clicked out

this is getting into that question of "what is blue"

sure you and i can both like look at one 400 nm light source and another 400 nm light source and say "yeah that's the color of the ocean, the sky and charlize theron's eyes" but that doesn't prove we're seeing "the same thing"

Say a robot hired as a security guard has an internal representation of the house getting burgled, but does nothing about it (for some reason this robot has free will). I'm gonna sue that robot, and I'm gonna win, because I can show conclusively it was aware of the house getting burgled, and we don't need to know what it's like to be a robot thinking about things to do it.

but say i get so mad, I dump oatmeal all over the robot. the robot wants to sue me for pain caused by oatmeal. how is it gonna convince people it felt pain?

xp, one of my favourite mindtwisty topics that one

robot must prove a strong enough dislike of/aversion to oatmeal, or demonstrate damage or injury caused by oatmeal dump (possible that development of an aversion to oatmeal/fear of oatmeal as a result of stress of incident could serve for this? consider further- get one of the interns to look into this.)

there's a bit about capturing activity "grandmother neurons" i.e. specific areas that fire up in recognition of your grandmother. stuff like that. pain really seems much more subjective than awareness though. you can demonstrably mediate people's experience of pain while still showing that the stimulus mechanisms haven't also been mediated. I don't know if you can do that with self-awareness.

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, July 12, 2012 12:47 PM (3 hours ago)

the mechanisms by which the brain attaches images and words to complex constructs like personhood (since we were speaking of grandmother neurons) are very poorly understood at this point, and would only provide the most rudimentary accounting of how we construct and experience "selfhood" even if we understood them fully. relative to pain, selfhood seems very poorly understood and defined.

what do you mean by "mediate"?

there are a lot of pain threshold tests (like how long you can leave your hands in cold water) where you can prolong times by distractions, priming, etc...

that's not true

...i imagine you're talking about something like this

http://www.pcworld.com/article/240562/scientists_read_minds_sort_of_reconstruct_images_from_brain_scans.html

the key part there is the "sort of"

― the late great, Thursday, July 12, 2012 4:08 PM (15 minutes ago)

it most certainly is true. i was talking about this, but i accept your substitution. in saying that "we can capture sense data," i'm not saying that we can capture it perfectly. the images we can generate based on the brain's activity are, at this point, rather crude, but given that it's an infant technology, i think they're surprisingly good.

"selfhood seems very poorly understood and defined."
it doesn't need to be understood, really. it does need to be restricted to maybe a less culturally specific definition. for example, if you're driving, your somatic self-representation likely includes the car, too.

yeah, i agree about that part. we don't need to be able to describe, quantify or measure self-aware consciousness to functionally understand it.

going back quite a few posts, i was objecting to your suggestions that we can currently capture the brain's modeling of human selfhood and that pain is less well understood than self awareness, but i don't know that there's anything to be gained by hammering away at those points.

"we don't need to be able to describe, quantify or measure ... to functionally understand it"

just humor me and fill in the blank with something that makes sense that is unrelated to mind / consciousness / metaphysics / etc

mind you i'm just saying consciousness is up there w/ the big bang as one of the great black boxes of science

there's all kinds of experiments where people who were asked to imagine certain actions activated the same parts of the brain as when they were recorded doing the actual activity. so in a very real sense, modeling is synonymous with experience, and if that's the only activity that's going on in the brain, we can make the leap that modeling is also synonymous with awareness, without having to understand the underlying details of how it happens, or how to interpret people's subjective experience of it.

pain, on the other hand, requires such an interpretation.
we can show that a plant or any other black-box is aware of something by its measurable responses, but whether a celery stalk experiences pain in the pete singer ethical boundary sense is an open question.

i think where i get off the boat is when you say "experience"

i mean okay when you flex your arm you have the same electrical impulses in the same region of your brain as when you imagine flexing your arm, but someone could also zap that part of your brain with an electrode while you're unconscious and make your arm flex, does that imply that you experience or imagine your arm flexing?

also i think a lot of people would argue that awareness is synonymous with subjective experience, not with modeling

just humor me and fill in the blank with something that makes sense that is unrelated to mind / consciousness / metaphysics / etc

food, gravity, fire, internal combustion, magnets, machine language, etc. on a practical, day-to-day level, we can understand and deal with most of the shit we encounter in life without much understanding of the science involved. we can even draw useful philosophical and quasi-scientific conclusions from this position of relative ignorance. sure, sometimes you get fooled into thinking that ghosts and bad humors cause disease, but invisible air-monsters sort of make that one a trick question.

um, but we describe and measure and quantify those things all of the time?

"but someone could also zap that part of your brain with an electrode while you're unconscious and make your arm flex"

there's likely a separate mechanism for actuating the arm. (when you're asleep, there's some inhibitory thing that's supposed to keep you immobile, but doesn't always work.) but yah if you zap the right part, you should be made aware of it. at least at the time. there's also this mechanism that makes you forget stuff (why you don't remember dreams often).

is there a neurosurgeon we could invite here? could probably explain things better than me going "this thingybob" and "that doohicky" when referring to how brain worky. i get the feeling though with all the pharmaceuticals going around for mood ailments, half the population should be amateur neuroscientists.

there's all kinds of experiments where people who were asked to imagine certain actions activated the same parts of the brain as when they were recorded doing the actual activity. so in a very real sense, modeling is synonymous with experience, and if that's the only activity that's going on in the brain, we can make the leap that modeling is also synonymous with awareness, without having to understand the underlying details of how it happens, or how to interpret people's subjective experience of it.

yeah, no, we can't really make that leap, i don't think. it's interesting that the same areas of the brain are involved with thinking about a thing and doing that thing, but this does not mean that "modeling is synonymous with experience". it merely means that the brain is efficient. (fwiw, i personally think that modeling IS synonymous with experience, but that's beside the point.) even if we could confidently say that "modeling is also synonymous with awareness", we haven't really come any closer to "capturing" the sense or qualia of self-awareness. instead, we have merely established a chain of mechanical equivalencies.

the subjective experience of pain, after all, is just one tiny aspect of the subjective experience of life-in-toto. why should it be harder to establish the presence of pain, a tiny blip in experience, than it is to establish continuous self-aware awareness of the sort that notices pain? (and pleasure, and hunger, and horniness, and the color red, and that face, etc.)

we can say that the lobster experience neural activity in response to trauma. we can say that the lobster exhibits aversion behavior to the source of the stimuli that trigger the neural activity. we can't of course say what the lobster subjectively feels, but not can we say anything about what anyone or thing subjectively experiences. and the entirety of selfhood is subjectivity.

um, but we describe and measure and quantify those things all of the time?

― the late great, Thursday, July 12, 2012 5:27 PM (9 minutes ago)

we are now able to describe and measure many things that we once could not. and there yet remain things we can't describe or measure. i'll admit that consciousness is rather unique in being completely self-evident, yet largely hidden from science, but consciousness is unique in lots of ways.

We're pouring oatmeal on robots in this thread because each argument someone makes has the next person pointing out one little section that isn't really the point and I've lost track of who here thinks that a spirit will continue and leave their body with some preservation of their brain functions in tact after they die, and why they think this miracle happens to a thinking mind but nothing else in physics.

things in physics don't die

i'll admit that consciousness is rather unique in being completely self-evident, yet largely hidden from science

this is really my only point, that there's this gap which permits a space for faith (or in my case agnosticism) beyond materialism or metaphysical naturalism

http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/13/1349/QQAS000Z/posters/william-blake-to-annihilate-the-self-hood-of-deceit-from-a-poem-by-milton-written-1804-8.jpg

which milton poem is that after though, i don't understand what blake is getting at

is that when milton builds urizen from river clay?

Silent they met. and silent strove among the streams of Arnon
08 Even to Mahanaim, when with cold hand Urizen stoop'd down
09 And took up water from the river Jordan: pouring on
10 To Miltons brain the icy fluid from his broad cold palm.
11 But Milton took of the red clay of Succoth. moulding it with care
12 Between his palms; and filling up the furrows of many years
13 Beginning at the feet of Urizen, and on the bones
14 Creating new flesh on the Demon cold, and building him,
15 As with new clay a Human form in the Valley of Beth Peor.

that's very nice it reminds me of this bit from engine summer

"Open your eyes," said Zhinsinura.
That -- "open your eyes" -- entered in at the doors of Rush. I was not,
and that entered nothing; but still as quick as ever it found and ran along
the old path which such things had taken countless times before. Only this
time, as though it were a Light, it was able to see the path, infinitely long,
which it took. The path was Rush: the walls and snake's-hands were his stuff,
the countless steps and twists and false ways and rooms were him, chest full
of Rush, it was all Rush: all along, Rush was handholds, ways, stairs, a path
for that to get deep in. And I -- I was nothing; but when Zhinsinura said
that, "open your eyes," I uncurled outward from some tiny center of not-being
and built Rush to receive it: the path those words took and the place the path
led through spun out both together. The words watched me watch myself make a
place that held a path which the words took through the place to where I built
it. A place like spheres, like the trees of bread, but all within each other,
spheres of bright complexity made only of making, each sphere fitting within a
larger just in time to let "open your eyes" escape into the smaller, until the
words and I had made up Rush to hold us both; and we all three, in a silent
swift coupling, laced all our ways together. And I opened my eyes.

"the entirety of selfhood is subjectivity."

I think you can carve out a meaningful understanding of selfhood that is independently demonstrable as both activation patterns in the brain and as black-box responses to stimuli, and this understanding is good enough to form the basis of treatments of all kinds of ailments of the self...MAYBE UP TO AND INCLUDING DEATH.

*DRAMATIC GONG SOUND*

well, death is easy to treat. just get plenty of bed rest. cure's the hard part.

this thread has taken an interesting turn!