Fear of death.

i disagree that we define consciousness as occurring wholly within the brain because we use the term much more broadly -- for example, if you're driving, your sense of personal space envelops the entire car because in a real sense the car is part of the consciousness as well, and no less integral to your car-self than say a random bit of brain tissue.

But the car doesn't change whether your consciousness is in its presence or not. And when you removed the car from your proximity, your consciousness isn't fundamentally altered. The stimuli of the car becomes part of your consciousness, but the car itself does not.

Take away all stimuli, does your consciousness exist? Yes. What happens to it? It starts self-activating itself as if being stimulated by external information. Stimuli are what it needs to feel useful. No external stimuli, then it creates them internally cause it's gotta do something.

the car does fundamentally change your car-consciousness. if someone rear-ends you, you say "that asshole hit me!" not "that asshole hit my car" -- the stimuli is also a distributed consciousness that you've outsourced to the car. take that stimuli/consciousness away, and it is radically changed.

do you also say "i'm taking myself to the mechanic to fix my windshield"? the stimuli of the car gets internalized. if you were to be blindfolded, removed from your car, then told that you were being put back in your car but really it was a totally different car, you would be confused because nothing was where you thought it'd be. the car in objective reality differs from the car you've internalized.
Evidence such as http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/07/040702093052.htm point point to this.

once you're out of the car, you're divorced from car-self. the more out-of-sync you are with the car, the less well you will be able to drive, but that's no different from being out of sync with your limbs or even your own brain.

in a real sense, you can remove yourself from your own brain the same way you can get out of the car by creating lesions, severing corpus collosum, etc...

consciousness is shaped by its external environment, obviously. that doesn't mean any part of it exists in the environment. so you have car-consciousness, bedroom-consciousness, wearing stilts-consciousness, etc. consciousness-consciousness is not dependent on any one of these stimuli "landscapes". it can and does exist without any of them. the only thing it has not been demonstrated to exist without is a functioning brain. that is the commonality to all your X-consciousnessesesses. I suppose this link may just be a coincidence, and maybe it does exist in other forms. But I see no evidence to support this.

you don't know that your car doesn't have a rich interior life without you. KITT would be much miffed.

once you remove yourself "from your own brain", what is the evidence that you are still you? people's personalites can become 180 degrees different, develop new talents, new preferences, become completely unaware of their prior experiences, etc. The only reason you would say they're still the same "you", is because the body is the same.

maybe it does! but that's ITS consciousness, not mine

if you're willing to accept that the same body can at different points in time contain different consciousnesses, why not go the extra step and allow for different bodies to contain the same consciousness?

In an infinite universe, I suppose it would be possible. Though it wouldn't be the same consciousness, but an exact copy.

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.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 9:20 PM (2 months ago)

Great relevant post from earlier

co-sign

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/10/22/conscious-or-not-brain-responses-bring-scientists-closer-to-making-a-diagnosis-in-the-brain-damaged/

every so often i go into blissful periods where i'm no longer aware i'm going to be dead one day. reading this has revived that x 10 ... crazy to think one day our universe might not exist. damn you consciousness! i'm trying not to freak out at work atm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

pfft I for one am planning on escaping to parallel universes

Bowie's death, a family terminal illness and some acquaintance deaths have gotten to me and the other day I experienced an absolute terror/panic at the idea of nonexistence while on the subway.

I heard or read the horrifying idea somewhere once that maybe the final moment of our life is stretched out into a perceptual eternity. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Wondering what the source was.

the thought of an enduring consciousness is terrifying, yet it's hard to wrap my head around (as it were) my consciousness just vanishing

http://www.theonion.com/article/you-still-die-one-day-52183

anesthesia helped me wrap my head around what it would be like to slip into dreamless, awarenessless blackness

Reading the Looming Tower, I was struck by how much of that particular brand of extremist Islam seems to be a system for coping with the fear of death.

I heard or read the horrifying idea somewhere once that maybe the final moment of our life is stretched out into a perceptual eternity.

features in this story, makes it sound like not at all that bad of a thing

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/09/25/bullet-in-the-brain

whoops, sorry, that's paywalled

read here: http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_27/section_1/artc2A.html

I heard or read the horrifying idea somewhere once that maybe the final moment of our life is stretched out into a perceptual eternity. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Wondering what the source was.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Friday, January 15, 2016 9:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh man, i came up with ^^this idea independently at a bar last week. iirc it was based on the whole "time slows down during traumatic situations" thing

anyway, maybe read some buddhist stuff on pain and suffering, might assuage the fear somewhat. or maybe you know about that stuff already.

the idea seems sort of similar to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. like you will just lock into these archetypes and get lost in an infinite dream of your own making.

http://public.wsu.edu/~bryanfry/Wolff,%20Bullet%20in%20the%20Brain.pdf

U didn't exist once, it didn't kill u

A very intense (mostly horrifying, occasionally glorious) mushroom trip in my mid 20s actually really helped me with this. Obviously not recommending that as a medicine, but it's a thing. Notable university nearby has been doing studies administering this to the terminally ill for the past few years.

Because some of the, uh, insights gained during that experience can dissipate and I don't want to make hallucinogens a part of my life, regular meditation and exploration of Buddhist thought (fairly cursory, but enough) have been immensely beneficial.

Realize a lot of the above is a huge turn off to a lot of people, but at the very least I think everyone should look into some form of meditation. Difficult but it pays off. I don't feel qualified to give pointers, but I know there are a few schooled folks here that could help with that.

Other people dying is just about the worst thing imaginable. It might good to brace yourself for it, in some cases, but allowing yourself to be afraid for the death of another involves walking around mourning something that's still alive, and kind of missing the point of life IMO. Talking about your own death, or fearing your own death seems absurd to me. I don't belive that anything that quiet or calm looking should inspire fear. Other emotions perhaps

i'm not sure how i stopped being (for the moment) terrified of death. i can logic through it- we're all going to die, nobody really knows what it's like, worrying about it isn't going to change a thing- but i don't think it's logic that's changed my attitude. we'll see how i feel when i get cancer or have a stroke or something.

Death isn't always quiet or calm (post)

Dying maybe, not always calm or quiet, what you're gonna have to do to get to death

In 'merica, death is *rarely* quiet or calm.

Which is why I'd choose to die elsewhere.

Classic

Unfortunately birth and death are the two things nobody has any choice in (aside from suicide ofc).

now that I have children I am legit terrified of dying

Well if I hadn't been put off before.....

Legit tho my death benefits are p good from work its eased any of the "oh God the bills I'll leave etc" worries and the rest of it doesn't bother me so much.

got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IRbwwbWyDs

I heard or read the horrifying idea somewhere once that maybe the final moment of our life is stretched out into a perceptual eternity. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Wondering what the source was.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Friday, January 15, 2016 9:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Was it my terrifying nightmare?

I spent a year or two constantly afraid of experiencing painful death or injury, traumatic accidents, etc. like hourly painful thoughts. It's not fun. There has to be a way to not be afraid of death, right?

You bastards have really bummed me out now, lol

Like, I've been building a greater understanding and peaceful acceptance of death .. But when I read actual smart posters (i.e. pretty much everyone posting in this revive), it makes me think like I'm fooling myself and that there's no point in changing ones relationship with death.

I don't know, I've pretty long thought of myself as someone at peace with the idea of death, but something shook me recently and I experienced the fear anew.

my heart has stopped before when i was undergoing some heart surgery as a baby, but they got it started back up again, so that is a factor i have to consider, and i think it makes me lenient towards mysticism/reincarnation/post-human consciousness as a possibility. i still have some phantom pain or.... something.... from all of that (i was really sick as a youth) i dunno how to describe it but maybe it has always made me a little uncomfortable in my own body.

hilarious conversation with my mum over Christmas, while out walking. she was asking me how I was etc and I said oh god you know ok, terrified of dying from time to time, especially when I consider dad died at me +12 years and we're v much the same genetically and in patterns of behaviour etc and I said what about you? are you scared of dying? and she sad 'god no, I'm scared of living too long. I don't want to live as long as my mother (93 and still going, though the short-term memory's fucked). I'm just frightened I'm going to outlive my sons.' (she has reason, which I won't go into here, but which doesn't involve me, other than in my fears). Anyway, we agreed to split the difference, which should work out well for both of us.

In fact although I'm periodically paralysed by fear of death, I mean literally paralysed in the form of a panic attack, there are other times that it seems ok, nbd, and it's only really pain that I fear. I try not to think about it.

There were two other things that brought this conversation to mind recently - one was Ernest Shackleton's letter to Winston Churchill, who he was trying to convince to back his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, where he says 'Death is really a very little thing and Knowledge very great' and I thought when I read that that if he had not been a person for whom death was a very little thing, he would not have been able to survive with his team stranded two years in Antarctica or travel 750 miles in a five man boat to get rescue. They returned to a world where death was not at all a very little thing and was in fact in the process of slaughtering an entire generation.

the other was the review by Adam Mars-Jones in the LRB of Grief is a Many Feathered Thing by Max Porter (might be paywalled, sorry), which quote this journal entry by Emerson after the death of his five-year-old son Waldo:

What he looked upon is better; what he looked not upon is insignificant. The morning of Friday, I woke at three o’clock, and every cock in every barnyard was shrilling with the most unnecessary noise. The sun went up the morning sky with all his light, but the landscape was dishonoured by this loss. For this boy, in whose remembrance I have both slept and awaked so oft, decorated for me the morning star, the evening cloud, how much more all the particulars of daily economy; for he had touched with his lively curiosity every trivial fact and circumstance in the household, the hard coal and the soft coal which I put into my stove; the wood, of which he brought his little quota for grandmother’s fire; the hammer, the pincers and file he was so eager to use; the microscope, the magnet, the little globe, and every trinket and instrument in the study; the loads of gravel on the meadow, the nests in the hen-house, and many and many a little visit to the dog-house and to the barn. – For everything he had his own name and way of thinking, his own pronunciation and manner. And every word came mended from that tongue …

It seems as if I ought to call upon the winds to describe my boy, my fast receding boy, a child of so large and generous a nature that I cannot paint him by specialties, as I might another … He named the parts of the toy house he was always building by fancy names which had a good sound, as ‘the interspeglium’ and ‘the corigada’, which names, he told Margaret, ‘the children could not understand.’

If I go down to the bottom of the garden it seems as if some one had fallen into the brook.

So when I've stopped fearing death out of fear of pain and annihilation, I then go on to fearing it because of the absence of people I love, which isn't intended to be too pompous, but also include getting pissed down the pub with friends, laughing, going to sporting events, holding someone I love very close etc etc.

trying to pretend it doesn't exist doesn't seem to work either.

dude, finish your novel!