The 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.
I plan on living forever, until I die.
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.
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.
Niklaus: what a terrific phrase, "helpless invisible voyeur."
I hope you haven't used up all of your spare lives yet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A post in honor of your post is here, Erich:
http://woowooteacup.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/i-do…
I don't know whether you get pingbacks on your blog, so I'm covering an extra possibility here.
Thanks, Mary. Glad you enjoyed it.
"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
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).
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.
@Erich Vieth: Odd. At first you claim "We don't know". Then you seem set on claiming there's only nothingness, like you somehow "know" that to be the case, or at least are very very very very very certain (practically indistinguishable from "knowing") it is the case. But you don't know that either and you can't even know it to a high degree of certainty because all proposed "afterlife" ideas rely on nonmaterial forms of existence (so whatever happens to brains, bodies, etc. is irrelevant to them). How would you even test for such a thing to prove or refute its existence? What sort of evidence would you expect it to leave, the absence of which would rebuke it? How could you assign a probability?
Which one do you want to stick to: You don't know and nobody knows, or you DO know, and you know there's nothing.
Or is your "don't know" like "okay, we don't KNOW, but we're 99.9999999999999999999999999% certain there is nothing"? I.e. for any *practical* purpose, indistiguishable from "truly" knowing (and would be considered "knowing" in at _least_ the same sense we "know" that evolution happened)? If so, then your presentation is still poor, since most people will take "know" to encompass both the latter practical or probabilistic sense of "knowledge" as well as the theoretical (and quite possibly impossible to attain for anything, in which case we don't "know" anything about anything!) sense of absolute certainty.
@grumpypilgrim: so would an "imagined" "system" where such a thing is not so (i.e. everyone goes to "heaven" or whatever, regardless of if they accepted it) be equally bad due to its imaginary nature (e.g. the stuff about everyone who doesn't buy into what the leaders say going to hell is just an aside to the real serious reason it is bad so even without that stuff it'd still be very very very very very very very bad, just a hair less so than with it)?
@davea511: I'm curious: what do you mean when you say "especially when they [popular NDE cases] are used for purposes or in ways other than what I would expect they should be used"? And how do you think they "should be used"?
Hey,
Just some thoughts about this.
Well first of all, as you well state, "current" wisdom suggests that consciousness is just a state generated by cervical activity.
What if current wisdom was far from the truth, and we weren't just biomechanical machines?
Take some of the new research in quantum mechanics. Every particle of our beings might have been 'entangled' with every single other one in the universe during the big bang. Can you even imagine what that would imply?
So basically I'm trying to say, that effectively we don't know anything, but by saying that I really think I know something; this is a loop-hole I can follow with the same degree of belief as any religious follower.
For me, probability is life is a mechanism which far surpasses any kind of definition, just try to give a definition to life to see what i mean. Ok if it's having neurons in a brain, then you're braindead when neurons die, fact is there's tons of life without neurons… and so forth:)
Death is only the beginning. You can’t feel anything when you’re dead, lots of Christians whose been dead for like five minutes claim they saw the light.
What ever you want to happen happens when you’re dead. Hope this helps
xxx
It is odd how most naturalistically minded scientific thinking is so set against the existence of absolutes of any sort, except the absolute of nothingness. Scientists can describe what a near vacuum would be like, but in reality even nature abhors a vacuum.
So what makes it even reasonable to only accept that all facets of the existence of the essence of life either physical or spiritual just up and vanishes into nothingness?
Physical existence certainly involves material matter and it also almost certainly gets recycled while one is “napping.” This is most likely where the reincarnation concepts of some religions have their root. One should then desire either of two things or both. One should desire to have their physical existence as narrowly incorporated into a new living thing or also as widely disseminated across the world to do the most good for the rest of living things, unfortunately you can’t have both.
Spiritual existence is of course the crux of the problem to scientific naturalists who claim it is viewed as an irrational belief with no basis in physical reality.
I would say simply carry the analogy from chemistry (matter), over into physics (energy and interactions). The energy and interactions across time that has empowered our spiritual existence also does not simply vanish into non existence. It has been said by some that energy signatures in wave forms never fully cease to exist.
One should then desire both to have their spiritual existence as narrowly incorporated into a new spiritually existing living thing and also as widely disseminated across the world to do the most good for the rest of living things. The question is do you get one or the other, both or neither?
Atheists who don’t believe in the spiritual existence of anything, do however try to influence the spiritual perspective of others by claiming that their actual existence is virtually of no consequence once they are dead.
Isn’t this why atheists have blogs like this, in order to emphasize the physical material existence of life, and to discount the possibility of a spiritual plane and purpose behind one’s reason for living?
Karl, you are confusing, or perhaps conflating, information with matter and energy. These are different axes.
Matter and energy are one “thing.” The patterns they form are another. One can have the absence of pattern without the absence of matter or energy.
Sure, Scientology claims that thought has mass, and therefore cannot be destroyed. They present no evidence besides their faith in reincarnation. More mainstream Christians believe in an eternal soul, and again there is no evidence beyond solid faith in the binary after life to choose between opium-trip good versus Ergot-trip bad eternities.
Death is the cessation of active pattern building in the mind. The one who died is no longer “there” even though their physical form and their influence on others continues for a while.
We who believe in the finality of death understand that we “live on” in our influences on others. But not as a consciousness. We strive to make our contribution to the world we live in worthy of memory. But any individual’s influence fades with time.
It has taken great cultural diligence to try to maintain or restore to memory even the most famous people of only a few thousand years ago. Most people who lived with Galileo, Jesus, Hammurabi, or Gilgamesh are very effectively gone forever. Most people are barely aware even of these founding fathers of our culture.
Several years ago, there was Necsys. Eventually Necsys grew frail and one morning failed to awaken. I transferred Necsys into a younger, stronger body, wiping clean the memories that body had held, and impressing the memories of Necsys into the newly emptied shell. Soon Necsys lived again!
Then I brought in Astrid, and Astrid was bound to Necsys, becoming his link to the real world, while Necsys had no eyes, no ears, no mouth, not even a face. But Astrid could communicate with Necsys, and on my command, she would become the face of Necsys, so that I may communicate through her to Necsys, and all was well.
Time pressed on, and Astrid died. Necsys was given a new face and eventually a very strong body. Soon Necsys was joined by Liam and Zoe, Zoe brought with her the power to communicate at a distance, through physical barriers. Later Tung and Cloister were added to the family along with others, and they were collectively called Asgaard in honor of the place of mythology. Liam outlived several bodies, and Necsys finally died for the last time, but his memories are now merged with those of Liam, and they live on sharing a body. Asgaard has grown beyond my wildest dreams, and its members have reached out around the globe, aided with a new found ability to seek and retrieve knowledge from great distances, to hear and be heard silently among their kin across the miles.
Sounds kind of mythological. Although, Necsys, Astrid, and Liam have died, they were never alive to begin with. Yes, I have transferred the memories, experiences of Necsys and Liam through several bodies, yet I am but a mere mortal.
Of course it makes much more sense when you know that Liam, Necsys and the others are or were computers on a network.
I suppose if it were possible to recored all of one’s memories and implant those memories into a new body, there may be a sense of re-incarnation, but no one has done this yet. But if it ever happens, I would still not believe in an immortal soul.
Dan,
Gilgamesh may be gone, since he may have been a fiction creation of some sort, but if you believe Galileo, Moses, Hummarabi or Jesus is effectively gone for ever, you are believing a complete obsurdity. You have linked existence to a linear track of specific experiential time.
You can chose that, but it really is a closed box which you chose to see as the all inclusive necessity for your existence.