Plausible Explanations for Consiousness After Death

ITT we come up with plausible explanations for how consious beings experience death without resorting to religion or mysticism, for example:

By definition a consious being cannot experience nothingness or death. If you are in a coma you do not remember the coma. It is no different than remembering the time before you are born. Therfore, it isn't unreasonable to permit that even after millions or billions of years after your death at some other time and place in the universe you experience Consiousness again, albeit with no recollection with the time beforehand.

Other urls found in this thread:

nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html?_r=1
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincaré_recurrence_theorem
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

>>>/reddit/

Sorry if these types of topics frighten you user. Thanks for the (You) anyways.

>after millions or billions of years after your death at some other time and place in the universe you experience Consiousness again, albeit with no recollection with the time beforehand.


I remember a thread some user made a long time ago where he asked if it was possible for particles to rearrange into an exact replica of himself with his consciousness at some other time and place in the universe.
This could be possible I guess.
But if the universe is infinite though, there would be a infinite amount of you's in the universe already.

>But if the universe is infinite though, there would be a infinite amount of you's in the universe already.
oh boy, its this meme again

I'm sorry user.
I take it back.

You are the collection of all events leading to your present self.

The inability to recall past events makes you as you are now different from who you previously were. Since you can't evaluate the consistency of the internalized world view You created during your life, you can't say your yourself.

When biological functions cease, you no longer exist.

>When biological functions cease, you no longer exist
This 2bqh, whats so bad about nothingness anyway ? It may be relaxing

That coma example is accurate but it doesn't apply to the real world. When you die, your brain rots, and the source of your consciousness ends.

>By definition a consious [sic] being cannot experience nothingness or death.

Citation very much needed.

>with no recollection with the time beforehand

Then it's not you experiencing the consciousness.

It won't be anything.

Do you remember the time before you were born? No, because your brain didn't even exist yet. Describe to me the difference in states between a rotten, completely inoperable brain and a pre existent brain in terms of consciousness.

There was a time before you had consciousness, and then suddenly, somewhere in the universe your brain developed and so did your consciousness. Is it so unreasonable to assume that this process couldn't happen again?

The coma point was to illustrate that the time between consciousness, no matter how vast is irrelevant, you don't experience it, so you wouldn't perceive the events between your death and conscience rebirth even if it were, say a billion years.

Basically I'm arguing that conscience is continuous in relation to the reciprient of the conscience phenomenon, just not to any other outside observer or the materialistic Universe.

Quantum immortality.

Quantum suicide thought experiment.

Other than that, shut up.

We can experience dying, but not death itself. Are you trying to argue that after the brain rots you continue to experience consiousness?

If you define "you" as your consciousness plus your genetic makeup, then I agree. However I'm making no argument about DNA or genes, only consiousness.

Entropy is the combination of possibilities, which can include it's original form

AB= AB = 1

This alone, makes it possible.

>If you aren't talking about these two possibilities, then don't have an opinion because these are the only possible explanations

How does it feel to be a lazy asshole?

I'm pretty sure that as soon as you die you "respawn" in another body somewhere else in the universe, and either in the past or in the future. This is not your soul being teleported into a new body. It's more that consciousness never ceases, as time is only a perception. We are all conscious simulcurrently and eternally, as it were. This happens as many "times" as there are consciousnesses in the universe, until finally you get to relive your own life all over "again". And again, and again for all eternity.

We're stuck here forever. Live the best life you can.

You guys are all confusing memory with consciousness.

Consciousness doesn't even require memory. Plants don't have memory for instance. By all accounts, however, they are conscious beings.

there is a God is kind of a plausible explanation

Yeah this is essentially what I was argueing, I didn't add some of that extra stuff because I wanted to keep it simple.

What you say about memory is true, however I disagree about your assertion about plants. They are not on all counts consious, only in that they are aware of their position in space

Please elaborate user.

ITT: People who don't want to think they're not special.

See name.

See name.

S-see name.

You know what, this whole thread just needs to be see name.

On another note, plants have no method by which to process information and determine outcomes, and therefore cannot be "aware" of anything. Their biological processes may differ depending on location and stimuli, but that is not awareness.

>You know what, this whole thread just needs to be see name.
>Plausible Explanations for Consiousness After Death
Ya think? Are you expecting scientific discourse from educated individuals in this thread?

We are disagreeing about the definition of consciousness. You are talking about (high-levels of) self-awareness. This requires the ability to acquire, sort through and store large amounts of information about your surroundings. In essence, this is what I meant when I was trying to differentiate between the state of being conscious and having memory about being conscious. Indeed, plants do not have this kind of awareness. However, I maintain that they are still conscious, but at a very low level of awareness. When we try to separate ourselves from plants, and perhaps things like microbes, we are really making an argument about awareness. Which is really a measure of intelligence. Low intelligence does not imply no consciousness. Descartes famously made this mistake when thinking of dogs as soulless, mindless automata.

In hindsight, the words "awareness" and "consciousness" would have been a better word choice on my part when trying to make the distinction.

I'm not sure it is ever possible to have two perfectly identical arrangements of particles that occur in non-indentical universes.

I'm one who believes that quantum entanglement passes through hidden variables, but the hidden variables are actually just perfectly normal variables such as position and velocity and it takes infinite information to describe to the last decimal point those properties of a particle, thus the particle can carry universes worth of information about what it's entangled with.

In turn, if a single particle is out of place, anywhere in the universe, the copy of the person won't be exact. Particles in the person must also have a very very slightly different velocity and/or position to reflect that difference, because otherwise interacting with the person first would cause that aforementioned particle to snap back into place and interacting with the universe first would cause that person to have very slightly different properties to account for the misplacement of the particle.

It does raise the question though of whether you need a truly identical copy to maintain the flow of time.
Like, if a rough copy of you believed that they had experienced a life identical to yours up until that moment, and they had the exact same surroundings as you do now, even if the universe outside the room was totally different to what it was seconds ago (and still is for you now), from their perspective the flow of time would still seem perfectly normal and unbroken.

You can't get (You)s as an OP.

This is not a scientific publication, it's an anonymous message board. What I claimed in the OP is nothing new or profound. Nobody here is getting paid to research this, it's simply a healthy discussion about our thoughts relating to consiousness and death.

When I claimed that consiousness cannot experience death you asked me to cite my sources. My sources are the definition of consiousness and the definition of death.

Yes you can, you can get both. Every reply I've gotten has a (You), including this one

As I read this, I'm thinking about identical twins. These are near-clones, yet different life experience alone (different position in time and space) can make them very different people.

I'm talking about exactly the opposite to identical twins.
Rather than being identical people with different recollection of their lives and different personalities, instead people who can be as different as possible as long as the thought processes are almost the same.

>last paragraph
All that would be needed for this would be an exact copy of your memories. You are not the same person from moment-to-moment to begin with. All that your present and past selves have in common is memory.

Memory isn't as important actually.
Any memory you're not thinking of is like an object outside the room.
If you hopped from a universe where a memory was there or not there to a different universe, it's the same as if an object appeared or disappeared outside the room; that is, the person can't see any break in the flow of time if they suddenly hopped universe.

What's important is having it so that the thoughts at that instant are exactly the same.

OK so just so I'm clear on your position, do you believe cells and microbes are consious as well? What about all living things? Would there be an example of a living, non consious being?

Actually, no, memories are important too I just realised.
Because although you don't need them to hde a break in continuity, they're needed to highlight the break in continuity.
No point in hopping universes iif there aren't memories carried with, because without memories carried with you can't say that anyone hopped universes.

>doomed to repeat every crushing failure infinite times

ENOUGH

>cells and microbes are consious as well
I do, actually. I think consciousness is a fundanental property of matter. It precedes awareness. The more matter there is working in concert as part of a more-or-less unified, "individual" living system, the higher the level of awareness of said conscious individual system. It explains the full spectrum of awareness that we see.

life is infinitely more pleasurable and infinitely more painful than no life. I know which one id choose but i get the feeling we dont get a choice.

I'm unhappy with how this life turned out, I just want another try. But who says if our consciousness is recreated to the exact quark, that it has to be a human you will be?

You, at any given instance, are a pattern of matter.

There are many instances throughout your lifetime.

Therefore, throughout your lifetime, you exist as many different patterns of matter, all of which equate to 'you'.

This means that there is an array of patterns of matter that equals to a conscious you.

Provided that one of these patterns of matter from the array exists, 'you' exist.

Therefore you can and will exist as many, many different people. Those gore webms on /b/? That's you in the future. Still hate nihilism?

Your consciousness will move into another dimension in a different universe where you are born as a different form of being, far more alien than the human body. Any recollection is not possible at the early years but the more you keep dying through these dimensions, the less static your memory becomes

>Your consciousness is like a monitor, your brain is like a computer.

If you die and respawn right after, what determines "you" to be born in this or that body?
Is it random?

Panpsychism

I'm looking forward to ceasing to be.

Yeah, just like how it was random how our cells determine how we look

Humanity succeeds
>develops resurrections tech
>develops time travel
>creates Heaven

That is, if time is infinite.

nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html?_r=1

The only reason you think you are part of a continuous consciousness is because of your memory.

>If you die and respawn right after, what determines "you" to be born in this or that body?
>Is it random?

This is totally independent of time and space. When you think of it that way, all life forms that have ever lived, past and present, actually all live out their entire lives simultaneously, so that there isn't any "order". Time is something that is very dependent on a frame of reference; it only "passes" for you, a consciousness. From the point of view of light, for example, time doesn't pass at all, so the universe is over as soon as it begins. We're living in a block universe. The course of all events is permanent and eternal.

This idea really comes from Nietzsche. I'm just trying to think about it more scientifically.

Yeah, once we expand our knowledge of physics, the immaterial world will turn into material, since its properties will be explained and maybe consisting of one "stuff", matter. Do you think so?

But that's the thing, I don't think it is "continuous", as memory or a narrative. It's simultaneous. We just can't see outside this box of time.

Yes, I think so. There is no mystery, even though this is all very strange.

So the WW2 is happening right now in a "layer" of this block universe?

"Not existing is more relaxing than living in pain"

How would you even feel relaxed if you don't exist?

user... Do you understand what infinity means?

I don't remember precisely but if I recall correctly every 15 years of your life you reach a moment where every atom in your body has been replaced by a new one. It reminds me of that Greek thought experiment, the one that says if a boat has had all of it's pieces replaced at one point, is it still the same boat it was before?

So in a way, saying that your own consciousness is specially made for you by a certain arrangement of atoms is certainly wrong. I still don't know what to respond though.

You clearly don't.
Open a book nigger.
Infinite does not imply anything is possible

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

Thread closed.

>develops ressurections tech
>creates Heaven

What an oxymoron

I don't mean to say that we're special in any way in terms of consiousness, I just seek to understand the underlying phenomena for why I became consious in the first place, and what do I experience after death. It's my opinion that the part that makes everyone consious is the same for everyone, only genes and DNA make us special.

OP here, I fully agree with this. My base premise presupposes that consiousness is a physical phenomena, even if it is a rather strange and counter intuitive one.

What I like about this is that it gives a basis for morality. You shouldn't kill and torture because you are essentially killing and torturing yourself.

>"Therefore, it isn't unreasonable to permit that even after millions or billions of years after your death at some other time and place in the universe you experience consciousness again, albeit with no recollection with the time beforehand."

Yes user, that's pretty fucking unreasonable, so provide something other than what the dictionary tells you about consciousness.

I often feel the same way user. I believe it would be a bad idea to try to "start over" because despite how bad your life may be, you could become someone who has it much much worse ie a burn victim, child slave etc.

It's not unreasonable because you became consious in the first place, after having not being in existance. So why not again? I am not saying to believe this, only to consider it. It's not unreasonable, it's logically consistant, and if you don't think it's a reasonable assumption, why don't you give me a reason why it's not and we can have a conversation.

Just because you got dub 0s doesnt mean you can divide by them

Not user but a few things we need to agree on to have any discussion

1. Conciousness is a mechanical process
2. Conciousness is not independent of an object. I.e you can't separate your Conciousness from your body.

Now for my input

It's not impossible for a copy of yourself to be created, or have been created in the universe.

If you consider the amount of information required to create a copy of yourself, it is exceedingly unlikely. Entropy is the main reason why this won't be observed.

Conciousness transferable is about as possible and likely as watching a broken coffee cup spontaneously re assemble itself

Brains are just a sort of antennae which interface with a consciousness which is actually "stored" elsewhere (let's go full technobabble and say it's something something quantum).

In some years we will be able to artificially engineer connections to said storage and remotely connect to consciousnesses of dead people at the point they were "disconnected' (died).

I actually believe this

>2016
>Being afraid of death tfw

There has not been a single human or living thing that has existed that has not died. Death is one of the most natural parts of being alive.

>If you seek to understand something, you are afraid of it

Just keep memeing user, nobody takes you seriously anyways

I agree that consiousness is a physical process and is completely dependant on the material body.

However I disagree with your last sentence.

You became consious after having not been consious for millions of years. So basically what I'm proposing is that consiousness isn't special between people no more than hair or fingernails. Your consiousness isn't what makes you you, your genes, DNA and up bringing do. Your consiousness is just the ability for you to perceive your surroundings and to feel like you are you. However, everyone has this feeling, so what if anybodys consiousness is interchangeable from the other? Then it wouldn't be very special, and wouldn't be surprising if it were continuous

It wasn't meant to be taken seriously lol. But honestly I think the body and "soul" are one without the body there is no consciousness. But maybe there's some quantum mumbo jumbo out there where we live on or maybe the universe has been collapsing and expanding infinitely and the same shit keeps happening over and over. Which kinda sucks if your life sucks lol idk probably not though...whatever

Yeah, I realise it's a roulette. But still, I don't want this to be all there is...

you probably wouldn't be "replaying" the same "checkpoints" every time you'd "respawn". Here, in a language more familiar to you.

>Do you remember the time before you were born?
Why the fuck do people use this retarded argument?

People don't remember when they were a baby either, why would they remember before they were born?
Anytime you go to use "Do you remember the time before you were born?" or "it's like before you were born", think about whether that applies to when you were a baby.

idk why use used those words...why not if you get created again why wouldn't the exact same events happen

the only thing left to debate is whether what we call 'you' exists independently of the whole.

as intuitively correct as it may seem that we are but one machine, existing for a brief cycle then nothing, there is something to be said for the problem of nonexistence.
can nonexistence even be imagined? we use metaphors; sleep, blackness, states that require existence to perceive, which obviously are poor comparisons for 'true oblivion'.
the fact that we cannot describe it does not disprove the possibility, but should cast doubt on devotion to the ideas of materialism.

in a theoretical universe that exploded from a single point, nothing is probably as it seems intuitively

Your consciousness is what makes you "you"

It is LITERALLY the thing that allows you to distinguish between yourself and not yourself.

Newtonian physics is pretty damn intuitive, and for the scales on which we experience everyday life, it is "real".

Nonexistence can be imagined. If it couldn't, we wouldn't be able to talk about it, yet here we are.

I know you'd like to think that atoms,cells,tissue,organs could be conscious, but they're not.

Time repeats infinitely and you get reborn as the same exact you every time with the same exact life

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincaré_recurrence_theorem

Where do his shit go all?

>MWI

I've interviewed several children and they all had memories of before birth. Those memories are gone by age 3. But I've been told it was a pleasant existence and they chose to come here.

Then explain to me what is the difference between my consciousness and yours. We both have the same exact feeling of self. If my consciousness were to suddenly switch with yours you'd feel the exact same. What makes you "you" is that feeling paired with your specific brain chemistry, memories and DNA. When you die "you" die, what I'm arguing is that the conscious part of you doesn't know how to experience death no more than a video recorder knows how to record video when it's switched off.

I'm not in the camp that thinks atoms and molecules are conscious, I do not claim to know the process in the brain the gives arise to it, only theorizing how we can experience death, or don't in this case.

It's only retarded to you because you don't fucking understand the point

I don't remember being a baby, so maybe, just maybe my conciousness hadn't developed yet? There was a time before your consiousness existed, that is the point. Of course you don't remember being a fetus, I don't expect anyone to. I'm arguing that there was a time before you were born where you weren't conscious, and there will be a time after your death where your not again. I'm arguing that they are the same situation.

wouldn't that be the ultimate mindfuck to truly learn we've been living the same life over and over forever and forever more

This proves it!!!

how did you do that if you never leave your basement? Skype?

How long where they kept in your basement before they revealed this to you?

...

I said no religious or mysticism explanatioms

Also explain to me why this would go in a paranormal board? Is conciousness suddenly a paranormal phenomena?

Basement? I don't go there unless I have to fix something.

Got a nice brick house in nigger town. Why? Because it was cheap and I ain't afraid of niggers.

Is the word reply filtered or is this just a hot new meme?

>genes and DNA
user mutations are a thing

But it does. Rules don't apply to nothingness, nothingness makes the rules. And if there are infinite universes with the same rules as here, there are bound to be infinite (You)'s.

Every particle of your body has a consciouness of its own contributing to the whole consciousness. The more complex an organism is the bigger and stronger thd power of the consciousness connection of the whole is.

Death. When you die your brain ceases to work, which leaves you without the main organism. In this moment every particle of your being individually is aware of surroundings and circunstances directly. They will eventually transform and peacefully return to the natural scheme of things becoming part of other beings and etc.

Can you reincarnate/become human again? Possible, especially through external interence(someone manipulating your body after death), but fully unnecessary! There's no point living beyond because you will always be alive, so to speak.

>Is human evolution part of a bigger master plan?
More than likely.

His shit go in him mouf. Ya not herd?

There is a way to process waste (including human waste) so that it becomes a pristine protein source for animal feed.