Death & Consciousness

listen to him

any discussion on the afterlife and the "soul" is essentially a philosophical one as of now. its something that has such loose assumptions behind it, we probably will never figure out how to get started on getting towards a definitive answer

atheists (or anyone who doesnt believe in an afterlife) look towards physicalism and mental correlation with manipulation of the brain to please themselves, while dualists (or anyone who believes in an afterlife) fall back on how much holes there are in physicalism and how the exact nature of consciousness is not known

>we probably will never figure out how to get started on getting towards a definitive answer
You only say that because you've only ever known a flawed way of looking at the question.

>atheists (or anyone who doesnt believe in an afterlife) look towards physicalism and mental correlation with manipulation of the brain to please themselves, while dualists (or anyone who believes in an afterlife) fall back on how much holes there are in physicalism and how the exact nature of consciousness is not known
good thing that empiricists can talk about the afterlife while not being philosophical

There is no such thing as consciousness.

Your brain is just a series of neurons firing; Creating thoughts, desires, and memories that gives yourself the illusion that you are a thing that exists.

I'm not a native english speaker so im having an even harder time articulating my thoughts on a subject that's already pretty abstract. Sorry

Basically what I'm getting at is trying to understand what is it about my own consciousness that makes it such a special unique phenomenon that cannot ever in under any circumstances reoccur once my brain stops working (unlike everything else about the universe(s) that seems to sort of endlessly cycle)

Please don't take this as just some sort of theoretical philosophical garbage that's interesting to think about but ultimately irrelevant, I'm just some guy who for the last few weeks have been suffering with severe anxiety to the point of vomiting over the prospect that death may not be this absolute final way out of (my) existence and there's absolutely no way of permanent termination of my own consciousness(creating the possibility of me being placed in endless scenarios that include all sorts of situations of excruciating suffering)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_oblivion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death
^ This are really comforting concepts, I was hoping you guys could hopefully reassure me they are truth

I dont care that it's an "illusion". The feeling I get if put my hand in a fire is real enough

You've just pushed back the problem to why there is an illusion in the first place.

Who is the one experiencing the illusion?

Going to bed now and trying my best to avoid these insidious thoughts before falling asleep. hopefully when I wake up this thread will still be alive and have replies that bash my current views and put my worries to rest

>giving me terrible anxiety that's seriously hindering my life
iktfb

Look up Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. It's supposed to be a motivator.

> You only say that because you've only ever known a flawed way of looking at the question.

So do tell, how would we start looking into such a thing as the afterlife? Do we have to listen to the Buddhists, Christians, Scientologists, etc. first?

> good thing that empiricists can talk about the afterlife while not being philosophical
> the ultimate fate of individuals can be approached non-philosophically

This whole "durr philospohy is gay" mentality is perhaps among the stupidest shit I've seen on this forum since the Da Vinci emotion stuff (reminds me of when a philosopher critiqued Lawrence Krauss for misinterpreting "nothingness" and he, being the autistically asshurt, blew up and bashed all of philosophy)

So what do they say then? So something that has such a strong impact on human existence and questions of it can be explained "non-philosophically"?

The question of the afterlife is incoherent unless souls exist. The existence of souls(as they are usually defined) is rendered impossible by the interaction paradox.

if anything it makes it worse because it reinforces my ideas rather than dismissing them. Now It would be fine if it's all some sort of closed loop where my life just perfectly repeats itself from birth to death since I happen to be a 1st world person in a relatively safe environment leading a happy life.

Now this is the disconcerting part:
>"In an infinite period of time, every possible combination would at some time be attained," has been cited to argue that Nietzsche dropped his plans to try to scientifically prove the theory because he realized that if he would have to eventually repeat life as it is, his presumption of infinite time means "he" would also have to "repeat" life differently, since every configuration of atoms and events will occur.
which again reinforces the thought of me being placed in endless scenarios that include all sorts of situations of excruciating suffering

PLEASE CAN SOMEONE OUT THERE DISPROVE THIS? it's literally driving me insane, im not kidding

I'm seriously fucking worried that death might not be final. Shit drives me crazy. The problem with death is that the concept of fading out of existence is unthinkable by human intellect. For example, we can easily imagine being injured even when we're healthy, or ew can imagine being crazy when we're sane. But it's impossible to conjure an idea of not existing, the very act of conjuring up the idea implies existence. How can science justify the idea of phasing out forever. What stops 10000000000000000000000000000*10^n years from passing to recreate my exact state of mind as I'm typing this message, only this time in a world where planets are made of cubes?

Op here, not sure if I should be happy or worried that there's more people out there who share my viewpoint, except my imagination leads me to far darker places than planets being made of cubes.

again, CAN SOMEONE OUT THERE DISPROVE THIS PLEASE? this is ruining my life

Death is just a spectrum.

>Would me bring brought back to life(be it from lets say a scientific experiment or simply the universe reaching a point where some particles are arranged in the way I came to exist in the first place) still be me?
Yes. Why not?

No it's shit memes that are ruining your life. This is what you get for not caring about garbage in your head. Kick them out or they will bust your chest one day.

do you realize that pretty much renders everyone immortal and susceptible to every type of endless suffering you could ever imagine

If you're reassembled in deep space, suffering will be short.

irrelevant because you'll be reassembled over and over again in all sorts of different settings.

there's no way out, ever

Doesnt all your brain cells get replaced over a period of time like a decade so in your lifetime your brain is replaced a few times over?

how does that change anything that's being said?

I was thinking about this the other day when someone on Veeky Forums mentioned quantum suicide.

If life goes on forever and we're doomed to repeat our current lives, id be okay with that. What scares me is the thought that I'd come back as like some Mexican that ends up getting caught by the cartel or some shit for snitching.

But if you come back to life upon death, it confirms that consciousness is eternal, meaning that you can immediately kill yourself, and keep doing this until you get reborn as a cute anime girl

>being worried that death isn't final
>not wanting the chance to be born into an ayy lmao tech advanced society

a)
>death is final
- no more pain or pleasure ever. you wont even miss it

b)
>death isnt final
- scenarios of pure ectasy
+
- scenarios of endless unimaginable pain (picture some mix of Saw traps turned up to eleven mixed with Hellraiser and Event Horizon) that no amount of pleasure could ever offset

the urge to avoid pain trumps the seeking of pleasure

and the worst part is that you dont get to pick either a) or b). there's no choice. existence is terrifying

the atoms that organisms are made of don't differ from the ones that inanimate objects are made of, but that doesn't mean that life isn't a real thing.
the complex interplay of the atoms and molecules in an organism is what makes them alive. it is like the difference between a working machine and a random pile of scrap. there clearly is a difference there.

>there clearly is a difference there.
That implies you can say exactly when a working machine becomes a random pile of scrap.

Good luck with that; people have been trying to solve that for thousands of years.

well for an animal it doesn't seem to bee too difficult to tell when it stops working / dies. there is tons of processes that are at work in a living organism and are not at work in a dead organism.
on a large scale a living animal actively moves around and does stuff whereas a dead animal doesn't do anything actively.
on a smaller scale the organs stop doing what they do (heart stops pumping blood, gut stops breaking down food, lung stops exchanging gases,...).
on yet a smaller level metabolism of the cells stops working as usual (no cell respiration, no protein synthesis, no dna repair,...)
also, the structures of the animal start deteriorating on every level.
the thing that's probably most important philosophically and also legally is that your conscience vanishes, when the cells in your brain stop firing.
i don't see how it's hard to differ between a living and a dead organism.

>i don't see how it's hard to differ between a living and a dead organism.
Then you're an idiot who doesn't understand the problem. Even now, people have come back from being "legally dead".

To answer this, you would need to have a solid understanding of what death and consciousness even are. From what I understand about death, it is simply the consciousness in a sleep like state without a way to wake up do to the termination of the body.

If you could halt the decomposition of the part of your body that provides consciousness, could you theoretically transfer into a new body thereby making it the same consciousness in a different body?

I strongly believe that you exist forever, just in different forms, and that everything is made of consciousness.

>Basically what I'm getting at is trying to understand what is it about my own consciousness that makes it such a special unique phenomenon that cannot ever in under any circumstances reoccur once my brain stops working (unlike everything else about the universe(s) that seems to sort of endlessly cycle)

i don't think that anything in the universe ever comes back in exactly the same way. think about a bucket of sand for example. if you empty that bucket and put the same sand in again, you will have another bucket of sand, but it won't be exactly the same one. the individual grains of sand won't be arranged in exactly the same way and it is very probable that they never will be arranged in the exact same way ever again.
the same thing is true about your brain. when you die, your the cells in your brain fall apart and it is very unlikely that the exact same brain will ever form again.
the difference is only that you can't easily tell the difference betweem two buckets of sand, so they appear to be the same to you. you can tell two brains/persons apart though, which is why you realise that consciousness doesn't reocurr in exactly the same way.
but really nothing in the universe ever reoccurs in exactly the same way.

I think you misunderstood the user's mention of eternal recurrence.

Nietzsche did not say that eternal recurrence actually happens. Rather he says that we should live our lives as if they were going to repeat forever. What this thought experiment is supposed to get at is that we should enjoy our lives and embrace everything that comes at us. You're philosophy is the opposite of Nietzsche's philosophy (I mean this discussion should be happening at right now but w.e.). You want death to happen, and are worried that consciosness won't go away. Instead you should learn to embrace life, even the parts of it that include suffering, because that is what living is all about.

so basically this?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant

Are energy and consciousness one in the same?

Do you mean that theory where when you die, things continue on for you as if nothing happened? Thereby suggesting that the concept of death does not affect the continuity of consciousness from your perspective though you will appear dead in the eyes of others?

>Are energy and consciousness one in the same?
I believe that they are.

>PLEASE CAN SOMEONE OUT THERE DISPROVE THIS? it's literally driving me insane, im not kidding
you should talk to a psychiatrist, not to Veeky Forums.

Not the whole head, but simply the part of the brain that provides consciousness. You could theoretically assemble the rest of your body exactly like it was with the same neural connections except with that one part of your brain being the only remaining part of your old body. I guess another way to put it would be physically turning your specific consciousness into an undying object which could be inserted into a body of your choice with memories of your choice.

I'd think that consciousness is a specific form of energy but if consciousness and energy were relatively the same, would it be possible to link your consciousness to the same spectrum as a all other energy thereby creating a state of omniconciousness?

Nope. Nietzsche's philosophy is neither about death nor consciousness. It is all about life and living. Personally I think that when you die your consciousness also disappears, becoming non-existent. So If I were you I would make the most out of my life, instead of worrying about being immortal.

>the individual grains of sand won't be arranged in exactly the same way and it is very probable that they never will be arranged in the exact same way ever again
>your the cells in your brain fall apart and it is very unlikely that the exact same brain will ever form again.
wrong. of course that given an infinite period of time every possibe combination will happen again

Why would you want that disprove? If you could find a way to manipulate the process or take control of it at will, you would theoretically be on god-mode in a sense that you could do anything and everything in the span of one unit of consciousness. Although It would cause one to wonder what would happen after you've lived out every possible scenario assuming there's a limit.

What exactly is existence though? Can you really verify your existence aside from your 5 senses. For all we know, we could be in both a perpetual state of existence and non-existence considering anything is possible. I suppose death and non existence go hand at hand, but can you really define existence outside of the form of 1 being existence and 0 being non existence? What would happen differently in existence that does not happen in non-existence?

Change your mentality. Enjoy the rollercoaster.

>given an infinite period of time
the universe might not exist for infinity. i think the evidence actually indicates the opposite.

Hasn't it been said that the universe is expanding though?

It's like sleeping and waking up. You could be a different you but you wouldn't know. And most certainly noone else would. What gets tricky is if you were duplicated. Both of you would feel that you were the real you but outside viewers would know which one is the duplicate.

We don't know, but you should probably go to

If you could attribute an ID of sorts to consciousness, how would you be able to maintain that ID. That's seems like the best way to think about this situation.

this universe maybe. but what would lead you to think this is the only universe that ever was and ever will be? seems kind of arbitrary specially when you look at nature and see that everythings tends to cycle

Would /x/ really be able to better answer that question? At best I would most likely get an esoteric or religious speculation but I wouldn't really be closer to an answer. My theory here is that there is no difference between existence an non-existence considering we have nothing that can actually be attached to either state that cannot be in the other. Once it is imaginable, I suppose you could say it exists even if not physically.

>>Are energy and consciousness one in the same?
>I believe that they are.
Idk if it's true but it if I ever find out that it is and have proof, I will tell everyone so that no one has to worry about not existing when they die.

I think that existance is essentially presence of consciousness, and non-existance is absence of consciousness.
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."
Max Planck, physicist

Second law of thermodynamics has your back, bro.

Even if some evil being can recreate you exactly the same, it will only be able to do so a finite number of times, since our very existence increases entropy.

Wouldn't you be getting behind consciousness if you could look at consciousness through an outside lens? If so, I suppose the presence of more than one consciousness would help you with that. Unless we all are truly connected at a subconscious level.

yes, and i would say this means that the universe won't stay the same forever. the universe is becoming less and less dense and changing in all sorts of ways,so i believe there will be a point, when life as we know it won't be possible anywhere anymore. maybe there won't be any consciousness at that point anymore.

well what would lead you to believe there are other universes?
the truth is that we just don't know. the universe might be infinite or it might not be. there might be infinite parallel universes or there might not be.
i think our best guess at the moment is that nothing is infinite, but i might be proven wrong.

the question is, what sort of physics law makes it so death is an absolute point of no return of ones consciousness when theoretically, in the future all the particles could again be arranged in the same way that made that same consciousness exist in the first place.

could you elaborate?

ITT: Nobody understands the definition of consciousness so they just use it as a shorthand for "soul".

What would be the difference between a full and empty universe? How do we know life can only exist under certain circumstances. How do we know that other forms of life don't exist that we can't simply verify?

From what i've heard, the source of consciousness is tangible so theoretically, if you could preserve that or convert it to a form that doesn't decay, you would be able to transfer your consciousness as you please.

>ITT: Nobody understands the definition of consciousness so they just use it as a shorthand for "soul".

If we look at it as an item, we may not know what it is, but we can figure out how to manipulate it or use it to our advantage.

Look up "heat death of the universe".

The basic point is that there are some places in the universe where it is warm enough to sustain life, your room for example. However most places in the universe are extremely cold and since heat has a tendency to dissipate over time and this process is not reversible there will be a time in the future, where the universe will have roughly the same temperature everywhere. This will only be slightly above almost zero and thus way to cold to sustain life as it is.

life as we know it is dependend on liquid water, so it can't be too hot or too cold. it also requires a lot of elements to be available in roughly the right concentrations. there are probably a lot of other parameters that need to be just right.
at some point in the future though, all the stars will be burned out and the universe will kind of freeze, making all this impossible.

>How do we know that other forms of life don't exist that we can't simply verify?
that's a fair point.

If we truly are sure that water is the reason we are alive, then the next question is, what is water? Or at least, what is is about water that gives us life? How do we know that there aren't other compounds that produce the same effect?

so where did heat come from in the first place? wouldnt the process start all over again when another universe is created?

>If we look at it as an item,
Why would we look at an ability as an item?

I'd say consciousness is more of an effect caused by something specific that has physical form. It's also fair to say that life is an effect of the presence of water. In both cases, an item can be attributed to both of these "abilities" being possible.

>an item can be attributed to both of these "abilities" being possible.
No it can't be because an "item" has no definite boundary.

What do you mean by "an item has no definite boundary"?

You cannot say when an item stops being an item; there is no definite structure of an item from which nothing can be deducted without the item ceasing to be. All boundaries between things are arbitrary.

I'm not saying that nothing can be deduced from these 2 things, but looking at the sources of those 2 things will most likely yield more answers as they are actually manipulable being in a form we can interact with.

kill yourself and find out?

I don't remember a previous consciousness so obviously it gets reset upon death, meaning I can't know to immediately kill myself.

OP should check out Tipler's "Physics of Immortality". Tipler, though a tenured full professor of physics, is something of a nut but his idea of bringing back ALL of the dead (and indeed everyone who would ever live) through computation is something else. His scheme requires forces and energy on a cosmic scale, and is predicated on the existence of the Higgs boson (not proven when the book came out).

This type of immortality is an odd, somewhat uncanny, thing to think about as it may be the type of simulation we are living in right now. It brings to mind the vision of Russian mystic Fyodorov, who was the spiritual father of Tranhumanism in a sense. Fyodorov also envisioned such a scientific salvation of the death, along with technical immortality.

The problem with that kind of immortality is that it's like a physical interpretation of Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence. Without postulating some type of soul that ensures continuity of existence, you will truly die at the end of each such iteration - a horror like that Nietzsche envisioned. Add some type of memory and identity that carries over, perhaps through Penrose's quantum basis for mind, and that situation looks much more attractive.

Why are you all just assuming the existence of the soul like it's a necessity? There are models of the mind that describe reality without needing unique inaccessible elements.

I think the lack of a "me" conscience is impossible because everything would technically stop existing
perhaps conscience is a form of matter, energy or something we don't know located on a 4th dimension, looking for a new host occasionally

however that topic is completely impossible to figure out in a foreseeable future, it requires knowledge of things we don't know yet

>I think the lack of a "me" conscience is impossible because everything would technically stop existing
So your observation is that this agent is necessary for the universe to existence. I too have have observed an agent that is necessary for the universe to existence. It seems reasonable to say that we are both observing the same thing.

>i don't see how it's hard to differ between a living and a dead organism

Is fire alive? It breathes, reproduces on its own, and actively maintains homeostasis. Are viruses alive? They contain genetic material and seek out survival and reproduction.

ITT: existing is terrifying

That sounds awful. When I'm dead the last thing I want is to be forced back to life.

this thread has honestly made me think about stuff that never crossed my mind and im kind of starting to see op's point. feeling a bit uneasy to be honest

i would say it makes sense to call all the things on earth that have arisen through biological evoltion organisms or forms of life. so a virus is a form of life, but a fire isn't.
i realise that viruses are not universally considered to be alive, because they don't have metabolism of their own. they are still vastly more complex than any non-biological thing in that all their parts are very carefully arranged to work together and fulfill some purpose. you can't say the same thing about a fire.

>make a thread in hopes that Veeky Forums would put and end to my existencial dread
>turns out there's a chance of there being some validity to my way of thinking
>still dreading existence

okay here's the thing, I understand that at this point it seems that there's no way to reach a definitive answer so ill do my best to hold on to the hope that I may be wrong, so my question now is:
What's an effective way to push these thoughts away? They are still affecting my mental health and therefore my quality of life. How do I avoid thinking about this?

>inb4 get a therapist

anyone? I need help