What is it like to be dead?
February 27th, 2008 by Erich ViethThe answer is we don’t know.
I don’t know. You don’t know. No one knows. That’s it. Off with you . . . [I figured that this title would draw some Bible-toting fundies to the site].
So you can all leave now. There’s nothing here to discuss. Go visit some other blog post. Have a nice long life, because at the end of your life, you’ll likely just be dead. You know, you’ll be
blooey, breathless, buried, cadaverous, checked out, cold, cut off, deceased, defunct, departed, done for, erased, expired, extinct, gone, inanimate, inert, late, lifeless, liquidated, mortified, no more, not existing, offed, passed away, perished, reposing, rubbed out, snuffed out, spiritless, stiff, unanimated, washed up and wasted.
There is no reason to think that any dead person has ever been aware of anything at all.
I’ll admit that it is possible that at the moment you die, your consciousness will continue. Maybe you’ll instantly be transported to the far side of the moon to ride a sparkly majestic merry-go-round after you’re dead, but there’s no evidence for that or any other version of continued sentience. The only evidence is that when you’re dead, you’re dead. There’s nothing more we can say about it. There’s no credible report that anyone has returned from the dead to say otherwise. You didn’t listen; I said “credible.”
. . . Oh, I see some of you are still hanging around because you can’t accept ”I don’t know” for an answer. I once wrote a post for you guys. Well, try this. Just look in a mirror, take a deep breath and say it slowly: “I don’t know what it’s like to be dead.” [Bonus points for anyone who can say: “No one else knows either, even that angry guy who preaches on Sunday”].
Sorry, I don’t have the patience to listen to you telling me that you have been raised to read an old self-contradictory “sacred” book with it’s obscure claims that there is life after death. Don’t take things on faith! (where did we ever get the idea that taking things on faith was admirable?) Based on what we actually know, there’s simply no evidence of life after death (except for “shelf life,” which is the amount of time that passes before your corpse starts stinking).
Of course, you can fantasize that there is life after death. If you go to this site, you can even have some fun making your own epitaph. Or check out this incredible photo of a soul entering an embryo. But pretending any of these crazy things, doesn’t make any of them true.
Science has shown us that the brain is an important part of what enables humans to think. When the brain works, there can be thinking. When neurons die, there is less mental function. When the brain stops working entirely, there isn’t any thinking. Ask any neurologist. It’s that simple. Really, ask any neurologist, “Would I be different if you cut out my brain?” Neurologists will wonder whether you’ve already had your brain removed, to ask that question. Then they will tell you, “If we cut out your brain, you won’t have any thoughts at all. You won’t have any feelings at all. You won’t have any consciousness of anything.”
But now a few of you are still staying around to insist that thinking can happen without a brain and that there is no need for a brain in heaven? Really? Then why do all humans on Earth have brains? Why didn’t “The Creator” just make us with huge empty cavities in our skulls? If empty heads work in heaven, why can’t they work on earth? It seems like a monumental waste of effort to have filled billions of those cavities with what is arguably the most amazing structure in the universe, when nothing at all was necessary.
Or maybe I don’t understand your argument. Maybe you’re suggesting that when part of the brain dies, that dead part of the brain immediately transfers up to “heaven” to give some sort of mental continuity. It’s like a pre-ascension, where, in the case of stroke, the affected part of the stroke patient’s brain transfers up to heaven and waits for the rest of the body? Are you claiming that heaven is littered with partial brain chunks of millions of Alzheimer’s and stroke patients? None of this makes sense to me.
Truly, just remind yourself that before you were born, you had no brain, no body, no thought, and it wasn’t so bad. After you die, it will be exactly like that once again. You won’t know a thing or feel a thing. There won’t be pleasure or pain. You won’t care and you won’t care that you don’t care. This nothingness is nothing to be frightened of, except to the extent that you keep listening to those know-nothing preachers who keep telling you what it’s like to be dead, as though they knew.
Just take a deep breath and follow some version of the Golden Rule. Death will come soon enough, so make sure you make the most of your life here on Earth. That’s my advice.
February 27th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
I plan on living forever, until I die.
February 28th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Yep. I’d imagine that at some point there’ll be that feeling you get when you start dropping into unconsciousness and the amygdala goes into overdrive, then nothing. I get kind of sad thinking about it, because I don’t like to miss anything that’s happening, but that’s that. I’m not scared about it the way I was before, when I had so many potential options to speculate on. All those afterlives came with so many provisos, it was impossible not to worry about getting something wrong. It’s much more relaxing to know that it is what it is, and when it’s over, there’s nothing else to worry about.
A lot of what changed my thinking was reading V.S. Ramachandran and Oliver Sacks. Learning that the brain was so incredible and intricate, and how a change in that organ could make someone a completely different person made me appreciate how important it was to enjoy everything I could. You never know what will happen, but you do know what’s happening right now. “What if” might be a fun party game, but it’s no way to live your life.
February 28th, 2008 at 10:52 am
A Carmelite Christian, on discovering that I am agnostic, asked me “What have you got to live for?”
My answer was
“I live because I am too curious to see what happens next.”
I have actually been on “deaths doorstep” three times in my life. The first time was when I was 10, and I received a 120 V shock that temporarily stopped my heart, the second time was when I was a teen and a bout with a stomach infection resulted in life threatening dehydration, and the last time was from Fourniers Gangrene, which was close to the point of dissemination when I got to the emergency room. The last time, I felt a sadness for those that care about me and depend on me, and for all the things I would miss if I did not survive. I did not convert to a belief in afterlife, because it seems to me that the idea of being a helpless invisible voyeur of the troubles and difficulties of those “left behind” would be cruel indeed.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Niklaus: what a terrific phrase, “helpless invisible voyeur.”
I hope you haven’t used up all of your spare lives yet.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
A samurai once asked Zen Master Hakuin where he would go after he died.
Hakuin answered “How am I supposed to know?”
“How do you not know? You’re a Zen master!,” exclaimed the samurai.
“Yes, but not a dead one,” Hakuin answered.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
My mother is not particularly religious, neither am I (I turned atheist a few years ago). But she has a story she almost never tells, and then only to closer relatives.
When she gave birth to her firstborn (my older brother), she lost quite some blood. At some point she fainted, and here comes the interesting part: she recalls felling like hovering over the hospital bed, quite peacefully, seeing herself (her body, that is), and a doctor holding her hand.
I don’t know what to make of it, maybe it was some sort of hallucination. Just wanted to share, thanks.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I figure that my “spirit” will live on though my acts that have influenced those who knew me or my works, and in attenuated form in the way that my influence affected their influences on their survivors, asymptotically approaching nothingness after few generations.
But I don’t expect to be aware to see it, even if someone see my “ghost”.
I think that legacy and spirit are roughly synonymous.
February 28th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
There is nothing.
One second you’re faintly trying to get the nurse’s attention because you feel yourself becoming weak.
The next moment you wake up because you hear them calling for you.
Sir?
Hello!? Sir, are you there?
Sir? Wake up, sir.
If you don’t respond, they bury you soon after.
If you do respond, you get to type comments in blog posts where people ask what it’s like being dead.
What’s it like? It’s not like anything at all. The universe, at least your version of it, stops. End of the road, game over.
This ride is the only ticket you get, the -only- ticket you get.
Make it count, sweethearts. Don’t wait for anything for any reason. When they call the doctor and they say ‘asystoly’, the only thing that happens after that is: they pull the sheet over your head and roll the bed out of the room.
Live now.
February 28th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
To the best of our knowledge, human consciousness is an emergent property of human brain structure, the latter of which is more complex than anything else we know of in our universe. When we die, that brain structure perishes and along with it, again to the best of our knowledge, goes our consciousness.
Since many people find such reasoning troubling, they prefer to imagine-into-existence all sorts of alternate beliefs that are more pleasant. One of the most common of these is that they will live on after their corporeal bodies die. Not surprisingly, most major religions encourage and support this superstition, exploiting the benefits that accrue from telling people exactly what they want to hear. Unfortunately for everyone else, religious leaders go one step farther and label this imaginary belief a “certain” outcome for those who follow that leader…but *only* for those who follow that leader: everyone else will burn forever in hellfire. Why religious followers fail to recognize the obvious self-interest of religious leaders who profess such nonsense is a mystery to me. Apparently, the desire to believe in one’s own immortality trumps virtually all other considerations.
February 28th, 2008 at 10:10 pm
If we were to allow our bodies to decompose naturally, what would happen to all of the atoms that make up our bodies? They’ve gotta go somewhere, right?
February 29th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Mary: Chemistry and statistics prove a saga of bodily recycling. All of us contain some atoms that were in George Washington and Hitler and Rasputin and Gilgamesh. Every exhalation, every perspiration, and finally decomposition releases atoms from your body into the biosphere. As an adult, you’d be hard pressed to locate a single atom that you had at birth. (Most likely inside some of the neurons in the hind brain; nuclei of neurons don’t do much).
Also, some relatively rare atoms (isotopes) break down, but the electrons and quarks are simply rearranging. For example, Carbon-14 (of dating fame) becomes stable nitrogen through beta decay.
And let’s not forget where those atoms came from. The best model to date says that our solar system condensed from the nova of a 3rd generation star (one capable of producing heavy elements like gold and nobelium). Every atom in your body (except some fraction of the hydrogen) has been in at least one, and probably 3 stellar novae.
But comparing this to an afterlife is like noting that the bricks in my patio were once parts of houses that each were likely homes to several families.
The bricks live on, but the spirit of their earlier use is long lost.
February 29th, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Well stated, Dan, but it still begs the question, how does this life force that animates us arise? What precisely gives us our spirit? It’s the age-old question - the flip side to what happens when we die. And of course, the answer is the same as Erich’s - we don’t know. But at least we can take some comfort in knowing that some little part of us lives on somewhere in the world, whether it contains the essence of our spirit or not.
My way to live past death is through the things I create, which is the legacy you mentioned in an earlier response. The whole not knowing thing makes me keen to be bold in life and do the things I want to do. Betting on a second chance is gambling against the odds.
March 1st, 2008 at 10:41 am
Marie, sweetheart, “And of course, the answer is the same as Erich’s - we don’t know.” ?
I’m telling you, there’s nothing.
Trust me.
I do know.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
A post in honor of your post is here, Erich:
http://woowooteacup.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/i-dont-know/
I don’t know whether you get pingbacks on your blog, so I’m covering an extra possibility here.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Thanks, Mary. Glad you enjoyed it.
April 17th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
“Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”
Epicurus
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Epicurus
July 14th, 2008 at 10:41 am
I think you got most of these people people who believe in an afterlife wrong. In their mind, people are eternal beings and can never be dead, although their bodies may die …
So the question “What’s it like to be dead” makes no more sense for them as it makes for you
So insult them if you must for holding onto the notion that you can experience being dead … but you should know that the expression “dead” or “death” is shorthand for “dead to us”, and is why they prefer the term “passed” as it more accurately reflects their beliefs.
Instead, what they do believe happens at the time of death is exactly what happens is that (as you suggested was possible):
“our consciousness will continue. Maybe you’ll instantly be transported to the far side of the moon to ride a sparkly majestic merry-go-round after you’re dead, but there’s no evidence for that or any other version of continued sentience.”
That said, you are 100% correct that there is no proof that is both tangible and academically credible that a person’s consciousness passes on or is transported to somewhere or when or who. I, for one, have read many NDE’s and had significant doubts about the more popular and celebrated NDE’s (especially when they are used for purposes or in ways other than what I would expect they should be used).
September 22nd, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Just putting this out there, I don’t know how you can compare heaven to a “sparkly majestic merry-go-round” if that’s what your doing. People take things they read in religious books too literally sometimes. They were written many years ago and this is how they wrote. Ill be expecting a sarcastic/satyric response soon because that’s what i have seen so far in these peoples views on religion. I hate it when people don’t take other peoples beliefs seriously and use cynicism to mock it. Its really sickening. I don’t mean any offense to anyone but please don’t respond in that way.