Life after death

[rxe]

Derek Smith said:

What's your definition of dead?

Biologically it is pretty simple - it is when the complex set of chemical reactions that cause our bodies and brains to function are lost. At the end of the day, we are just chemistry. We are very well ordered and complex chemistry, but if you fiddle with some pretty simple parameters, we fall over. If you change those parameters back quickly, we get up again. Leave them too long, and some of us wakes up, but bits of us (frequently important bits) don’t recover. Leave it too long, and nothing recovers. Like all organic chemistry, these reactions are temperature and reactant dependent so it is impossible to put a simple “time limit” when deprivation of (say) Oxygen will kill you. Organic chemistry is rarely certain, After a while, a different set of chemical reactions starts, we begin to smell, and generations of humans have learned that it is a good idea to bury or burn the body.

Attaching some quantum mechanical multiverse theory to consciousness is (IMO) bonkers. So there is a universe somewhere where my dad (at 102) is playing poker with Henry VIII at 500 odd. Right. And if it happens for us, there is no reason for it not to happen to animals. I file this in the same bin as the people who cling to the idea that all of the carbon in us came from supernovae, as if that means something. It’s true, but it is not meaningful.

[julian64]

M5-911 said:

45minutes, is that long enough (plus a bonus of perfect health afterwards. scientifically not explained how it happened)?

https://youtu.be/Bmyx9qJkeQQ

I don't want to be rude, but your understanding of what is dead is poor, and so is his.
For a very long time the definition of dead has been brain dead.

I guy lying on the floor of an airport can be kept alive forever if someone maintains an oxygenated circulation. Its the same as if they were on life support at the hospital. They will live FOREVER. No mystery no scientific problem.

[Mr Whippy]

rxe said:

Attaching some quantum mechanical multiverse theory to consciousness is (IMO) bonkers. So there is a universe somewhere where my dad (at 102) is playing poker with Henry VIII at 500 odd. Right. And if it happens for us, there is no reason for it not to happen to animals. I file this in the same bin as the people who cling to the idea that all of the carbon in us came from supernovae, as if that means something. It’s true, but it is not meaningful.

Your imagination has to get beyond it’s self imposed limitations before you’ll get anywhere close to conceiving what the reality of the universe actually might be.

Close you eyes and imagine you’ve never heard, seen or felt anything before. Or know anything.
What you have is your hearing, and what you hear is the universe.
The universe playing music to you.

Cars driving past, kids crying, birds singing, thunder. All just sounds from the universe, not discrete ‘things’

Our perceptions and preconceptions destroy our ability to be objective about the nature of reality and the universe.


Which is where the concept of being quiet and listening when meditating comes from.
A full or rigid mind can’t see anything except what it wants to see.

[colin_p]

marine boy said:

colin_p said:

But I've still been effectively dead and don't remember a thing or recall anything of the time whilst being dead even if it wasn't proper dead. I'd say being proper dead dead would be exactly the same except you won't come back to talk about it.

Once you are gone, you are gone, that is it. That is proper dead dead and or pretend dead, shocked back to life dead but not really dead dead. Either way you are dead and I'm dead certain that once you are dead you are dead and there are is no sky fairy nonsense.

I've been dead, died from a cardiac arrest while sleeping, was dead for 10 minutes, after 3 jump starts I was un-dead or brought back to life

From my short time of being dead there was no walking to a light, no heavy blackness, no looking down on myself, no unicorns or rainbows or running around a field as a puppy or being any other reincarnated living animal

There was just nothing, don't remember anything about dying, being dead or coming back to life

I do remember waking up from a 3 day ice packed induced coma though which was quite a strange experience

I may have had more cardiac arrests and been dead more times that you, but your experience was worse!

Glad you are still with us.

My experiences have always been the same and like yours, there is nothing, once you are dead.

[ChocolateFrog]

fesuvious said:

'absurd'?

Is it not arrogant for any one of us to presume our current knowledge is absolute?

Within bounds.

But those that proclaim our consciousness lives after we die deserves such short shrift.

[andy_s]

Mr Whippy said:

Interesting thread.

I’ve been getting into meditating quite a bit recently and it does leave you wondering about free will.
The world “outside”, and the world “inside” and are they really as distinct as we believe?

Are we really individuals in control, or are we just something peering in on existence?

Which comes back to Bhuddism/Hinduism and the idea of Brahman.


We spend a lifetime building up our perception of reality, but in those really early moments of our lives we have the clearest perspective... but even still just limited by our range of basic senses.


I think Roger Penrose did some great talks, I watched a bunch on YouTube.
Orch OR theory apparently.


Science is limited by our ability to measure.
There may be far more than we’ll ever be capable of measuring or being able to perceive.


Azimov’s short story “last question” also gets me thinking.

I'm in the 'consciousness, [or sense of self], is an emergent property' camp, and I think that 'free will' is also an article of faith rather than a reality, but this is a whole field really and maybe not best explained in a sentence or two. If interested I'd rec'd reading Thomas Metzinger's 'Ego Tunnel' for this in particular and Andy Clark's 'Surfing Uncertainty' for a more holistic look at how the brain/cognition works [i.e. the 'predictive processing' model].

It's an amazing device we have, 25W to run 130M synapses per mm^3 of cortex, but a lot of what it does is to short-circuit and 'make up' around our sensory inputs, and ultimately generates that feeling of self/being that guides and protects us as we interface with the world as we see it.

[Jinx]

colin_p said:

marine boy said:

colin_p said:

But I've still been effectively dead and don't remember a thing or recall anything of the time whilst being dead even if it wasn't proper dead. I'd say being proper dead dead would be exactly the same except you won't come back to talk about it.

Once you are gone, you are gone, that is it. That is proper dead dead and or pretend dead, shocked back to life dead but not really dead dead. Either way you are dead and I'm dead certain that once you are dead you are dead and there are is no sky fairy nonsense.

I've been dead, died from a cardiac arrest while sleeping, was dead for 10 minutes, after 3 jump starts I was un-dead or brought back to life

From my short time of being dead there was no walking to a light, no heavy blackness, no looking down on myself, no unicorns or rainbows or running around a field as a puppy or being any other reincarnated living animal

There was just nothing, don't remember anything about dying, being dead or coming back to life

I do remember waking up from a 3 day ice packed induced coma though which was quite a strange experience

I may have had more cardiac arrests and been dead more times that you, but your experience was worse!

Glad you are still with us.

My experiences have always been the same and like yours, there is nothing, once you are dead.

Unfortunately your premise is incorrect - just because you do not remember anything does not mean there was nothing. We are very much limited not only by our perceptions but by the impermanence of our memories - often what we think are correct memories are in fact reconstructions based on small things we think we remember pieced together into a memory narrative. As such if you have blanks you assume nothing happened and reconstruct this as a whole "nothing happened" narrative.
I am a dreamer - I dream regularly and vividly but I don't remember all my dreams and often lose everything except the sensations that I have had a long dream, the actual memories within the dream wink out of existence. Remembering all of these dream experiences would be a waste of brain functions - no need to keep all the brain cell links created during sleep so they drain away until even the memory of them occurring fades to nothing.
Time is a function of perception - there is no reason why your personal time could not dilate at the point of death so that what goes on in your mind as you die lasts a very very long time - you could dream another lifetime in those moments or many lifetimes - none of these would form the links in your brain to create memories you could remember if you are "brought back".

They say your life passes before your eyes as you die - of course it does that is what we call living.......

From a "sky fairy" point of view though - why would the "sky fairy" turn up if they knew the death wouldn't be permanent?

[anonymous-user]

colin_p said:

marine boy said:

colin_p said:

But I've still been effectively dead and don't remember a thing or recall anything of the time whilst being dead even if it wasn't proper dead. I'd say being proper dead dead would be exactly the same except you won't come back to talk about it.

Once you are gone, you are gone, that is it. That is proper dead dead and or pretend dead, shocked back to life dead but not really dead dead. Either way you are dead and I'm dead certain that once you are dead you are dead and there are is no sky fairy nonsense.

I've been dead, died from a cardiac arrest while sleeping, was dead for 10 minutes, after 3 jump starts I was un-dead or brought back to life

From my short time of being dead there was no walking to a light, no heavy blackness, no looking down on myself, no unicorns or rainbows or running around a field as a puppy or being any other reincarnated living animal

There was just nothing, don't remember anything about dying, being dead or coming back to life

I do remember waking up from a 3 day ice packed induced coma though which was quite a strange experience

I may have had more cardiac arrests and been dead more times that you, but your experience was worse!

Glad you are still with us.

My experiences have always been the same and like yours, there is nothing, once you are dead.

Neither of you were dead. You can't bring dead back to life.

[Esceptico]

hucumber said:

colin_p said:

marine boy said:

colin_p said:

But I've still been effectively dead and don't remember a thing or recall anything of the time whilst being dead even if it wasn't proper dead. I'd say being proper dead dead would be exactly the same except you won't come back to talk about it.

Once you are gone, you are gone, that is it. That is proper dead dead and or pretend dead, shocked back to life dead but not really dead dead. Either way you are dead and I'm dead certain that once you are dead you are dead and there are is no sky fairy nonsense.

I've been dead, died from a cardiac arrest while sleeping, was dead for 10 minutes, after 3 jump starts I was un-dead or brought back to life

From my short time of being dead there was no walking to a light, no heavy blackness, no looking down on myself, no unicorns or rainbows or running around a field as a puppy or being any other reincarnated living animal

There was just nothing, don't remember anything about dying, being dead or coming back to life

I do remember waking up from a 3 day ice packed induced coma though which was quite a strange experience

I may have had more cardiac arrests and been dead more times that you, but your experience was worse!

Glad you are still with us.

My experiences have always been the same and like yours, there is nothing, once you are dead.

Neither of you were dead. You can't bring dead back to life.

Exactly. Death doesn’t occur when your heart stops beating.

[marine boy]

PH's is great!

Always an 'expert' at hand to correct people about what they know from their own experiences

[anonymous-user]

marine boy said:

PH's is great!

Always an 'expert' at hand to correct people about what they know from their own experiences

Its very much part of my job to know the difference between dead and not dead.

[Jinx]

hucumber said:

Its very much part of my job to know the difference between dead and not dead.

hucumber earlier today

[extraT]

It’s not death it’s self that scares me, it’s the finality and fall out of it all, for those who remain that scares me.

[sociopath]

There's some Hokum and (as Sheldon Cooper would say) mullarkry on this thread.
Misunderstanding of death and quantum mechanics all at the same time, coupled with hippy trippy rubbish about consciousness and soul.

I look forward to the after life surrounded by all the amoeba and bacteria that ever lived, it's going to be crowded.

I may be unusual in that I'm not scared by death, although I'd prefer to avoid it for another 20 years or so, but when my body stops working and the electrical impulses stop, I'm not expecting some ethereal future me to magically transport myself somewhere, I'll just cease to exist, other than as a rotting corpse, or actually a load of ashes.

[Mr Whippy]

sociopath said:

There's some Hokum and (as Sheldon Cooper would say) mullarkry on this thread.
Misunderstanding of death and quantum mechanics all at the same time, coupled with hippy trippy rubbish about consciousness and soul.

I look forward to the after life surrounded by all the amoeba and bacteria that ever lived, it's going to be crowded.

I may be unusual in that I'm not scared by death, although I'd prefer to avoid it for another 20 years or so, but when my body stops working and the electrical impulses stop, I'm not expecting some ethereal future me to magically transport myself somewhere, I'll just cease to exist, other than as a rotting corpse, or actually a load of ashes.

But do you even exist now to go somewhere else? Or are you just an organism that has self-awareness, trapped in a world where the outcome of everything is pre-determined, fighting against the belief that they have free-will and control over their mortality?

I appreciate it doesn't make a difference.


But the implication that you are even 'alive' in any meaningful sense now to be able to die, makes me think you can't really contemplate either state unless you fully explore the one you're currently in.


The best answer is really. I have no idea.

[bmwmike]

After life, comes death. There is no life after death. To die, someone must have lived first. To live, we must eventually die. Its ridiculous to assert there is some heavenly place we go to. THIS is heaven and we are living it right now.

[knitware]

Drumroll said:

A500leroy said:

Can anyone explain why we are breathing anyway, i know you say reproduction but some of us are gay so whats the point of us, and after
all the reproductions in millions of years whats the ultimate purpose of humans anyway?

As an individual you can argue what is my purpose. But all species have evolved to reproduce. That does not mean that every single "female" of a species has to reproduce. Just enough to keep them going.

Now there is a good arguement that the human race needs to slow down it's reproduction. If any of you feel this debate is getting a bit heated, try starting a debate about limiting human reproduction and see how that one goes.

Humans, in the crudest sense, are a virus. We inhabit the Earth, multiply, kill the host and eventually invade another host, another moon, planet and spread across the Universe, multiplying, destroying.

[Jinx]

knitware said:

Humans, in the crudest sense, are a virus. We inhabit the Earth, multiply, kill the host and eventually invade another host, another moon, planet and spread across the Universe, multiplying, destroying.

Nonsense - we are individual organisms so far more like a bacterial infection.

[Narcisus]

knitware said:

Humans, in the crudest sense, are a virus. We inhabit the Earth, multiply, kill the host and eventually invade another host, another moon, planet and spread across the Universe, multiplying, destroying.

Been watching The Matrix have we ?

[Toaster]

Max_Torque said:

At a purely scientific level, the issue with death is that we haven't yet been able to precisely define what life actually is!

Honestly, this is one of the unsolved scientific problems of our time.

We broadly understand the biology and bio-chemistry that makes live, er, alive, but we can't precisely define why or what.


That makes the question of "life after death" somewhat difficult, because we haven't sorted out the life bit yet...........

Science does have a pretty good definition

The biological and philosophical definitions of life

‘ A distinction must be made between various levels of thought. For a definition of life the formulation on the level of natural sciences,i.e. the biological definition, will not be the same as the philosophical expression. The biological definition is based on thephenomenon of life, the appearance, and considers the molecular structure and functions of a cell. The philosophical definition regards thebeing and it is proposed to consider life as transcendental. It is argued that there is no opposition between these definitions, but that together they can deepen our insight into the problems of matter and life.’ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF015567...

Whilst this is an old academic article NASA and other research organisations would look pretty stupid if they search for life on other planets or even hostile environments in our world for signs of life if there was not a definition of what life is!