Fear of death.

When a brain is under the influence of LSD, consciousness is almost unrecognizable from its sober brain version. Where did it go? How does it return?

not judging against LSD, it's probably really groovy, but you could just take a nap if you wanted to give consciousness a vacation.

No, I know. I was trying to think of a state where you DO have consciousness, it's just altered.

How about people that are technically dead and come back to life? That implies some sort of continuity that can't be measured...

why wouldn't you see the pre and post death consciousnesses as discontinuous?

we don't even see day-to-day consciousness as continuous -- "go to sleep, you'll wake up a new person" etc...

admittedly people mostly stay stuff like that before the 2nd act in a body-switch comedy or something.

How about people that are technically dead and come back to life? That implies some sort of continuity that can't be measured...

We still haven't been able to reanimate the dead. And even if we did, I don't see how that would refute anything I've tried to argue; mainly that "consciousness" is a product of brain structure and chemistry and resides wholly within it. Technically dead=those brain structures and reactions aren't occurring as they normally do. Once they begin to reoccur, so does consciousness.

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