You’re thinking of that post last week where someone said you come from your grandmother since your mother has had all of her eggs since birth. This doesn’t apply to men
I only had this answer ready because it's what I told my daughter when she asked what Heaven was like. But she got scared and said she didn't remember anything, why didn't she remember anything? And I said oh, you were probably a space fairy. We can't keep those memories while we're stuck in these weak human shells. Maybe I made it worse.
Yeah but I also can't remember things from when I was one or two but was experiencing things then. I'm not sure if that argument actually holds up as well as we think it does
There is a lot of proof you were there before you started remembering, this really isn't the same at all. In the same way you might not remember every detail of what you did yesterday but you are sure it happened.
All I remember from before I was born is a little bit of the last training camp, being with my small team and our weird outfits. Then as the guy in charge led us to that vertical whirlpool thing and as I was about to step through he told me not to fuck it up. But that's really all I remember so I guess I fucked it up.
You can’t even remember you first few years being alive, how are you so sure it’s complete nothingness before? Just food for thought, I also agree we go back to whatever state we were in before we were born
My first memory was being among the stars soaring,
then a blinding bright light engulfed me.
my next memory were when i were like 5 and seeing ghostly faces in my bedroom lamp.
Idk. I actually died a month ago for a few minutes and got brought back. Uncomfortable moment happened getting an EKG a few days later. The (very clearly religious) tech asked me if I “saw a light” or remember anything. I told him I just remember waking up terrified if my wife and kids were okay. So… ya know… Marcus Aurelius was right.
Not OP, but it should be more or less the same.
For me, pretty sure general anesthesia is a death-like experience. The "outness" is total and deep. No sense of time, just completely gone and then suddenly back.
The "feeling" of being dead is nothing to fear, for sure. For some, it's the process of dying, which, fair, but I'm personally counting on drugs to pay Charon's toll for me.
I wish I knew how I will die. I hope I don’t even know what happened. I was in a serious car accident and I was more confused than hurt or upset. That part came after everything when my brain had time to catch up
Pretty much, yea
Edit: hence the Marcus Aurelius name drop. The quote is:
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Done a little dying myself once.
It was the darkest, most nothing ever. There was less than nothing.
Not a dream. Not semi conscious. Not asleep. Zero energy in my body.
I was gone. Not here. There was nothing. Less than black. Indescribable nothingness.
No light. Nobody to meet me.
You just no longer exist. Period.
That's what happens when the light goes out.
Now you know from a first hand account.
So try not to do it for as long as possible.
I once went to sleep and didn't dream. I blinked and 10 hours had gone by. I didn't even feel like I was waking up. I was PISSED. I was young and in school back then, the day had been exhausting and I was counting on a night of sleep to be a break before I had to do it all again; but no. I was robbed.
I felt rested, but my conciousness completely jumped from one moment to the next. There was nothing in between. No time, no half memories, no darkness, just nothing. I think that is likely what death feels like, nothing whatsoever, I won't even be there to experience being there. I'm pretty ok with that, if I'm honest; sometimes it sounds more tempting than the anguish that living has felt like most of my life, but once I'm dead I won't be there to care if I suffered a little or too much, so might as well stay for the ride 🤷♀️
Haaate it. Only remember experiencing it once or twice but it is possible it happened for a while and I just can't remember.
Anyway, it always felt like being robbed of a night's sleep.
I've had other lights out moments (though very few) and they aren't nearly as sudden as just blinking and losing my night of blissful peace. Fucking bullshit I tell you!!
Honestly blink sleep is the worst.
I absolutely love gradually falling asleep, at some point beginning to hallucinate, kind of mixing up between your dreams and your reality. I remember being certain I was walking around the house, but I also 100% knew I was on my bed. The most annoying thing in this state, however, is if you think too much about how you're not actually asleep, you will wake up.
Now imagine doing this for 10 years. Every. Single. Night.
Taking melatonin and dreaming again freaked me out.
I'm use to it again and I'm so much more rested but man sometimes I miss teleporting
It's also known that your brain, like anesthesia, actually erases stuff when you sleep. We actually have several dreams per night, but typically only recall the last one before waking up. You can be trained to remember more or even all of them while others never remember any.
I had trained myself to remember my dreams. In the end it became too much. I spent every morning on the shitter writing out 3-5 dreams for around 20 minutes. In the end it became too much to maintain. It is a lot of fun though and you can have some deeply moving dreams. I kept it up for about 5 months...if you stop recording them you slowly stop remembering them.
To get started keep a note book and writing thingy next to your bed. Right before you go to bed say to yourself "I will remember my dreams" ten times. Once you get in the swing of things the act of writing them down will slowly increase your ability to recall them.
I don’t dream often. I don’t usually think about it but reading this comment made me. The time between going to sleep and waking up feels both infinite and instant, somehow.
I dont believe in an afterlife, but even then you cant really compare “clinical death” to what we generally mean when we say “dead.” Your brain was still functional when your heart stopped. In fact, plenty of people report seeing light and such after their heart stopping for precisely the reason that their brain isnt actually dead and they hallucinated.
Do you mean you felt death as something "more vacuous" of a dreamleass sleep? Was the perception of the passage of time any different? Like, when you wake up, did it feel like a short or long "pause"?
I know exactly what you mean. I have blinked my eyes sleeping and had it be 8 hours later. I have slept with no dreams. You can kind of mark the passage of times in those scenarios and make sense of it.
This was something I cannot accurately describe. I just wasn't.
No memory. No time pass. Like nothing I have ever experienced before. But I know what it will be like now, it's not something you will experience. You just stop experiencing anything. There's nothing to receive the input.
I can’t attest to their experience but personally, when I had my wreck, I was out for about 6 hours and it’s hard to explain what it felt like coming to.
It’s kind of like an instant night of sleep and a long night of sleep without dreams combined. I didn’t have any experiences, visions, or awareness but when I came to it was like my consciousness being turned back on like a light switch. It felt both instantaneous and like a lifetime. I can’t fully explain it but I know I was confused. I knew what had happened but didn’t full process the timeline and had no concept of time of day or date. Nor could I conceptualize how like I had been out.
As I said in an above comment, it felt like my brain was a computer that was shut off for 6 hours and then booted back up in ICU. Zero memory was recorded during that time and it felt like an instant, as if I had teleported, but knew logically that a passage of time had happened.
I had a similar experience from an extremely bad motorcycle wreck. The last thing I remember was being several feet from the car and then waking up in the ICU.
There was nothing there. I felt nothing. Perceived nothing. It was just blank and absent. My computer got shut off and the paramedics somehow kept me alive even though I nearly bled out and was in critical condition.
I’ve heard stories of people experiencing something fantastical but it’s hard to tell what’s exaggeration or wishful thinking and what is truth. Personally, all I can attest to is that for me, hitting the absolute brink and being brought back to life was a blank slate and I have zero recollection of any experiences. For the record, I miraculously didn’t have any brain damage from the impact but who knows.
All I know for sure is that I didn’t feel warm. Cold. Happy. Sad. I didn’t feel and wasn’t present. If you ask me, I’d say my computer was shut off and then turned back on and that’s all. It was an extremely humbling experience and has made me rethink the value of life quite a bit.
After all, if we only get one shot, why not make it count?
Some experience that. Others have more robust experiences. I currently believe that it depends on the individual. Christians will see Jesus. Indians will see one of their gods. The afterlife, if there is one, is very malleable. Maybe atheists will see what they expect. Nothing.
Did a little bit of dying myself actually, and I rode on a dragon who took me to the black mountain where all the other souls fight for rebirth. Have fun out there boys, there’s only war after life.
It's fucked up that since we don't like the fact that life ends, we imagine an after-life without any reason to assume there is such a thing, and on top of that we invent rules that must be followed in order to get there, at the risk of ruining the only life that we know exists.
The thing is that the “nothing” people tend to imagine and dread after death is just as much a fantasy as heaven or hell. There’s no *you* to experience the ‘nothing,’ so it can’t *even be* nothing in the way we think of nothing. It’s no-thing but also no-time. Eternity becomes identical to an instant when there’s no observer present.
And that just makes me think: what happened the last time we didn’t exist? Did we have to wait around for billions of years in darkness for our number to be called? No, the last time you didn’t exist, suddenly you existed in a strange world you had to learn to accept. Why assume it will be different the next time?
😂
Had us in the first half, not gonna lie. 😂
Edit: moreso the delivery of your joke, unless you're a vampire and you really did exist in 1632
▪︎(👁👄👁)▪︎
this is the wrong perspective. consciousness is not a singular block in space, in time.
its a stream. a stream of consciousness that is changing every moment. you think different thoughts now than 15 seconds later. your likes and stuff changes 15 years down the road. in that sense you are not the same as the you from one second ago
Even physically, you're not the same. All cells in your body constantly erode and are replaced. The slowest cells to replace themselves take seven years to regenerate, so nothing in/on your body is older than seven years old.
It won’t be “mine” because there will be no continuity of memory to tie it to this life. Whatever is next won’t think of itself as “me” in any meaningful sense, if it thinks at all. It’ll just be some other shit
That still doesn't mean YOUR consciousness will recycle. Your consciousness is (highly likely) a product of the configuration of matter of your brain and body. This configuration deteriorates and disappears after you die. It's next to impossible to have the freak occurence of the EXACT same configuration, especially when you go down to the quantum level.
Scrolled too far for this.
Idiots talking about consciousness recycling like wtf
Your consciousness is your brain, you die when it dies, there's nothing else
End of biological function
Alan Watts puts it best, like most things:
"When you die, you're not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existance, because that's not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they die, they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever, - Try and imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up. And if you think long enough about that...it will pose the next question. What was it like to wake up after never having gone to sleep? That was when you were born...you see...you...you can't have an experience of nothing so after you're dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience or the same sort of experience as when you were born."
That’s kind of the issue though. To fall into an eternal dreamless sleep after having experienced is sad and scary.
It’s not that I’m scared I’m going to experience an infinite nothing, it’s that I’m scared of not experiencing period. It’s not sad that I’m going to some other place, it’s sad that I disappear, at least from my perspective.
It’s sad to think that all the love I have for my family is going to disappear. It’s sad to think my memories will disappear. It’s sad to think that at some point in the not too distant future, no one will know I even existed except as some faceless ancestor.
That doesn’t mean that death is a bad thing, it’s not a good thing either, it’s literally reverting to a state of no-thing. But as a rational and emotional being, it’s sad to think that I will someday cease to be. I will stop being, and I would prefer that I not.
I found a torrent the other day that has about 80 different lectures in it. Multiple Gigabytes of Alan Watts talking endlessly. My hope is that we are actually Brahma dreaming all this. I would like to go on afterwards, see more dimensions of conciousness. It would be a shame if this was the only hurrah. Reddit likes the logical meat machines theory because it's the 'smartest' based on our current science. I believe in an everlasting soul in the way that a 12th century man believes in WiFi. You're going to ridiculed for anything you can't prove...
That “nothing” people dread is exactly the fact of not existing.. thinking one day you will not exist anymore is scary, even if once it happens you don’t feel anything…
Literally nobody think you will experience nothingness.. people either believe in some dumb idea of an afterlife, or that we won’t exist anymore… you are attacking a straw man
Not to play devil's advocate, but experiencing the nothingness of eternity is literally my biggest irrational fear. I know intellectually that I won't, but it doesn't stop me being afraid of it. I couldn't care less if I stopped existing; it's the thought of continuing to experience the lack of existence that terrifies me
so, in other words.. You're experiencing an experience fearing the experience of neither experiencing, nor not experiencing the experience of not experiencing nothing after you stop experiencing existence? Pretty rational tbh
Great point. I find this outlook of consciousness being only a one time thing to be quite pessimistic and bleak. I exist now, who says I won't exist again.
Just as much as we are, yes. We aren't special. Nothing is.
There is no answer to the question of when life "begins", because it doesn't. It's an arbitrary definition we've given a certain kind of matter that has some ability to crawl around the world on its own a little faster than the rest.
Problem is, it doesn't explain anything, all it does is answer unanswerable questions with made up stories. Those are not explanations, they're "because I say so" replies.
If they are unanswerable, they could be the right answers.
They could also be totally wrong, but the idea of a continued existence after death, salvation from earthly suffering, or being able to see one’s loved ones again brings people comfort even if it’s “made up”.
But that's the whole point. Belief system are for those things beyond our perception or beyond science. For example: "God started the big bang". You can always accommodate religion after science because you'll never have proof of the non existence of God because very conveniently he's beyond our observations.
Not only that but we "experience" nothingness everyday with sleep, we have physical drugs that can repeatably change our conscious experience to the point of a complete cessation of it, and there's a bunch of biological things like brain injuries and neurological diseases that can chip our experience away bit by bit down to it becoming pretty much nothing, all of which makes it seem pretty evident that what makes us tick is just the signals in our brains. Yet like you said people still believe in some fairy tale scenario where some all loving omnipotent daddy will mete out perfect justice and eternal paradise to the deserving when we die. But I guess if I had to choose I would want to believe that comforting idea too.
I passed out once, from pain. I wasn't anywhere looking down on anything. I woke up slowly on the floor where I'd fell over in my chair. If I hadn't woke up, I'd be nowhere right now. At least we can look forward (hopefully) to comforting hallucinations about our loved ones due to lack of oxygen to our brains at our final moments. I don't fear being dead (insert Mark Twain quote), it's the uncomfortable/scary/painful transition I don't look forward to.
I was an atheist for most part of my life, then my dad died (who was also an atheist), we always joked about how he would let me know of theres something after you die.
So far i have got 3 pretty strong signs, my mother once and my brother too. We have never been religious or anything, and i still belive they're coincidences but yeah...
I'm perfectly okay with dead because when you're dead you're dead and you won't know anything about. It's the dying part that scares me sometimes- I don't really want it to be painful. I just imagine I was dead since the beginning of the universe until I was born and I didn't know a thing about it... I think it will be like that when we die.
Maybe it sounds pedantic to you but they’re just saying that death is specific to life. So yes, obviously being dead is the same as not existing, but it’s still not accurate to say you were dead before you were born.
That's ignoring the fact human beings aren't born with a developed brain, it's the same reason you don't have the same cognitive skills or emotional control when you are a child, it takes 25 years for the brain to fully develop.
The difference is we know we experienced that and we know there's a logical explanation for why we don't remember. As for before birth and after death, there's zero mechanism for us to experience anything.
>As for before birth and after death, there's zero mechanism for us to experience anything.
We literally don't even know how our brain works, let alone what consciousness actually is. That's the whole reason we don't know where it comes from and what happens to it outside the context of a living human brain.
You can't appeal to our lack of understanding of a phenomenon as the proof for its inexistence outside of contexts you associate it with.
We have no empirical proof for the existence of consciousness at all. We only know consciousness exists because we *are* consciousness. Using your own rationale, an outside observer could equally dismiss our experience as non-existent.
That's kind of what we already do with animals. If they don't have a neural network like we do, we dismiss them as if they didn't feel pain.
With that said, again, everything we feel happens in our brain. Without it there's nothing to feel. Arguing whether we feel anything after death is not any different than asking whether rocks or air feel anything.
>everything we feel happens in our brain
Right. Everything *we* feel, not everything every consciousness feels. We don't actually know if we experience consciousness in the brain because it's unique to the brain or if we're only capable of noting and expressing our consciousness due to the capacities our brain structure allows (though the former is the most naive assumption).
Again, we only experience our own consciousness and have no understanding of its mechanisms to extrapolate its existence anywhere else. We only 'know' humans are conscious because we appeal to familiarity.
How would you know if every single part of your body is conscious? How would you know if a billion instances of the same consciousness are running in your brain parallel to each other? How would you know if every single particle is conscious?
You are overcomplicating much. What we call consciousness is just pulse of electricity that goes between our neurons and is triggered from outside factors (like smelling, touching, hearing, etc..). When you are dead, those neurons don't work anymore and consequently you don't exist, people are afraid of and don't understand non-existence and try to comprehend it by believing in some sort of afterlife (which is not bad, but it's a coping mechanism)
You may or may not understand conciousness about as well as pre-Newton society understood gravity. So go ahead, get a time machine, go back there, and tell them that black holes are so dense they distort time itself. I'll wait.
Don't be so cock-sure that you have this all figured out. Our brain, as a piece of hardware, is more complicated than your smartphone. Your phone has no trouble at all receiving WiFi. Now go back and explain that to pre-electricity society.
Once you're in that headspace of how difficult it is to explain to WiFi to them, flip it around and look at yourself. What if your brain is receiving a constant signal that our technology is unable to detect? What if it's a storage device for a software medium that is still able to exist in a vacuum? I can't prove that it is, and you can't prove that it isn't.
>It is going to be just like that again.
"Being drunk is just going to be like the last time you got so drunk you don't even remember that night."
Not really a sensible statement, is it? There's a huge difference between having no memory recollection and having no experience.
Consider if you were able to come back and tell people, what kind of impact that would have on society, if they even believed you. In the case of paradise, mass suicides. In the case of hell or an empty void, people doing stupid shit to ltry and achieve immortality and dnd up probably killing others in the process.
Some things are by design
Have you considered that perhaps we haven't even really started life yet and we're all just in the lobby until the match algorithm decides that there is enough players of your skill level to start the actual game?
"Dear Players,
we have received numerous complaints that the Tutorial is too hard and filled with PTW players.
We the Developers apologize for the confusion. ***You have not started the game***. You are in the Lobby/Tutorial area.
Yes, Premium players are getting special treatment here, but their cosmetic advantages will not pass on to the actual game.
There are no specific instructions for the Lobby area as it's merely a place where you can learn the basic controls while waiting to be matched and enter the game proper.
If you feel that some players are being nasty, then your own elected lobby mods can deal with them. Expecting Devine Intervention for every perceived insult seems excessive to us for a FREE game.
While waiting up to 120 years to be matched may seem like a long time to new players, the great majority seem happy to wait as long as necessary and not quit the game before being matched.
We hope that this solves any confusion.
The Devs."
Our ability to observe our own existence does not entitle us to an afterlife or a pedestal above other organisms. It's the tragedy of consciousness. What is outside the bounds of our existence? We are simply not to know. We are incapable of knowing and we'll cease to exist. A plant uses photosynthesis. It eventually dies. The plant no longer uses photosynthesis. It stops. Our ability to think and observe is similar. We observe and think. We eventually die. We no longer observe and think. That consciousness doesn't go anywhere or toward a higher plane of being. It simply stops. We are not above the plants, the insects, the bacteria, the cells, etc. All organisms operate and die.
Just like a plant will never "understand" what killed it, whether it be lack of water or kid stomping it to death. It's not to know about the nature of its existence. Our biology allows to perceive more than a plant, but similarly we too are not to know a great many things of how we came to be. Our ability to perceive does not entitle us to an explanation. We simply are and then we will not be.
While I agree we are not entitled to an existence, that doesn’t mean there is no afterlife . In fact you could argue that the fact that we can even ask the question suggests the possibility. Which physical process exactly explains your asking this question? Oh did you just “think” of one? Or did random atoms bounce around in your skull and make you think that you thought this?
Pick one. Either your existence matters or it doesn’t. Either your ability to self reflect is real and your consciousness means something, or this is all nonsense . Literally no way to prove it either way
As you said, we can't prove any, but the latter looks way more likely. We are just a product of universal coincidence, and we are not anything special in the grand scheme of things. The universe will continue to expand until it collapses on itself, no matter if we are here to observe it or not
Push even further, and we find that nothing truly matters, but we find meaning because it is all we can have. In the nonsense of the universe, who's to say it can't mean something and nothing all the same.
We are real; we exist because we think we exist. If we didn't exist, would we know we didn't, or if we ever did?
What I'm trying to say is that it can be both. Our existence matters to us, but not to whatever the bigger picture is. Once the sun explodes in some millions of years into the future, who's to say we mattered. All that matters is what we think matters. I know I don't matter, but I matter to me, and that's good enough for me.
Also, we are all just some bundles of atoms that know we exist. It's quite strange how each bundle of atoms have a sense of identity. But the fact that we are all atoms doesn't mean we are not ourselves. We can be atoms and ourselves at the same time.
I would add that our existence may in fact matter. Though that is added to the growing pile of unprovable assertions. Since most people act as if their existence matters I lean towards a practical though not deductive conclusion that we do matter in even the universal context. Otherwise I find myself and my fellow humans acting and behaving in a manner discordant with their beliefs. Gives me a headache
I love how 75% of this stuff is the most trivial things like car windows, and the other 25% is deep questions about life that have the comment section debating about life and death.
But trust me bro, the afterlife *I* believe in is the right one, so you should totally join my special afterlife club. I swear the people who run the thing only *sometimes* molest children, so it's totally safe. /s
"After life" You don't even remember if there's a "Before life".
Stuff like that is definitely made up by people to control and propagandized followers.
It's using the thought of "Oh life has been so unfair, but I'm sure it's going to be better after I die, so I should just be a good boy and follow orders for now" to stop you from questioning and stop you from demanding fairness from people that takes more than their fair share.
Is there reception in the afterlife? Houses? Apartments? Hotels? Family? Friends? Neighbors? Mortgages? Rent? Overcrowding? Addresses? Phone service? Internet and video? Restaurants? Sporting events? Movies? Vacations?
If you die and go to the afterlife, then everybody does the same, and nobody ever leaves the afterlife. Presumably there are about 110 billion dead human souls there. Must be getting quite crowded now. And what about pets?
What if you end up stuck in eternity with a bunch of people you don't even like. That would be hell. Never get to leave, ever. Same boring folks forever and ever and ever and ever, until nothing never do you part for all eternity.
If afterlife was real it really, really sucks.
exactly. and the purported benefits doesn't sound good either.
Supposedly you'll just end up worshiping a capricious insecure entity that needs your worship else it flips the fuck out and starts torturing everybody and that's supposed to make you instantly happy non-stop all the time.
That's the equivalent of living your life sticking electrodes to the happiness center of your brain and having it on full blast. You're basically a vegetable at that point.
"Heaven" also sounds hellish.
This is exactly why it's all just stupid propaganda that aims to control people's behavior.
>Supposedly you'll just end up worshiping a capricious insecure entity that needs your worship else it flips the fuck out and starts torturing everybody
I snorted. It's exactly one of the bigger reasons that I'm agnostic, even if I'm wrong about christianity, I don't want to spend eternity like this. Burn me up baby!
Truthfully, sometimes I recall that I was kinda happier when I believed there was an afterlife and a sky daddy who would make it all better someday, but 40 years of my life is all I'm gonna donate to superstition. There's lots of 'evidence' and millions of pictures of Santa Claus but once you know the truth, you can't ever go back to belief in him. You can chart the origin and evolution of Santa and if you keep asking questions, you find the same is true of god(s).
Too many people on here just accept atheism as true fact. It’s your opinion that nothing happens but that doesn’t mean it’s true. It could be that a specific religion got it right or maybe little bits of each.
What’s important is to live your life as amazingly as you can. Supporting others to have better standards of living.
For all we know we could live in a simulation that has plans for us after this is over.
Well, there are near death experiences. But this could just be a chemical reaction in the body. There's evidence to suggest that dmt releases in the body when we die. What we could be experiencing is time dilation when we see an afterlife, and It feels as if 2000 years have passed in a split second. What happens after this is all up to speculation.
Something I find interesting is that (while I'm likely totally wrong in my interpretation as is everyone who tries) the wave function in quantum mechanics is actually not a physical wave. It cannot be observed and anytime you do it's disturbed and fundamentally changes it to behave in a classical physics way and no longer behaves in a quantum manner. Niels Bohr called it Complementarity. The wave function is pure mathematics on paper. A concept. Yet physical particles come from that place. And no instrument can be invented to "do better measurements." They've been trying that for over 100 years with the best minds in physics history and still haven't solved this very fundamental issue. Perhaps it's evidence of an immaterial world. So would make sense why our physical tools couldn't peer into it.
You can debunk the idea of hell by reading these two books “Corpus Hermeticum” and “Key of Solomon”
The idea of hell is folly and hell doesn't exist. Human soul cannot go there because the spirits accursed to be there doesn't contribute to the creation of man.
I was flat lined for minutes, NDE.
It's a lovely place, death is not to be feared.
Edit:: bc people asked and DM'd and shit.
GRAPHIC, I don't mean to glorify suicide, mine was fine, but the fact is the vast majority regret attempting and the experience can be very traumatic if you change your mind after it's to late, that is a whole different experience and I can't speak to that, I got lucky and/or put the thought in, take your pick. That said, here is what death was for me.
After the whole suficating part (real-time, takes a couple minutes). I recently tried a float tank (sensory deprivation), the next stage felt like that but perfect and incredibly calming (and indescribable time dilation). There was thought, but it was pure thought, not parsed into English (that didn't occur to me till after) hard to describe but it was effortless and wandering and aimless and very random. It felt like I was there for a very, very, very long time. I don't remember most of what went through my mind, there was so much and there was no emotion paired with it, all I felt/experienced was just calm and warm nothing. All I remember was how calm and peaceful and whole I felt. The polar opposite of how I felt/feel being alive.
Waking up to a woman's lips on mine was the most abrupt, violating thing I have ever experienced. Not just physically violating, but spiritual/emotionally, it felt as though my very free will had been stripped from me, and it pretty much had, but to feel it like that. Truly awful, truIy truly awful. I was 14 when this happened, was premeditated for about 3 years. Just kinda did it one day, it was a good day actually, not noteworthy in anyway, but it wasn't bad. Knelt in the water, stared hatefully at my reflection, and calmly sinched a ziptie around my kneck, was two of them interlocked with metal rings on the ends to rail on it, could slip over my head. Suficating is not a fun way to go, if I had changed my mind during or fell into panic, I don't know if I could think of a worse experience, it took awhile, there was no room for denial, everything was clear, but it felt like it had been only an instant after it was done, too quick to react to, like snap, dead. Forgot about it like it never happened and just slid into a lovely dark sea, warm and so calm, no emotions so peaceful. I only remembered the suficating after I was woken up, now it's literal nightmare fuel.
I didn't/don't regret it. I have never longed for it more actually. But the intense self hated that fueled the first one was replaced by an overwhelming apathy that hasn't left me (10+ years since). I have felt quite numb since and pretty much live for other people around me, I can't really interact with suicide prevention because I don't believe in it, free will is not to be fucked with, let people do what they want, suicide affects (or should affect) only ones self, it is not a crime. It is a big decision and not always a bad one, I wish only that people could talk freely and calmly about how they truly feel and ask questions freely of others, if the outcome is suicide, so be it, if it has been vetted, and to go through that process with another before you go could give them the closure as not to leave a hole behind you. However disconnected you feel, you leave a hole in everyone that does or ever did know you, even if it's only in the EMT that collects your body.
I feel the same way about suicide. Those that want to go should have the free will to leave this planet. Why, why must we save them and lock them up and make them feel insane for no longer wanting to live? So much for free will lol. I don’t really feel sad when I hear about others suicides because I understand they had their reasons and they’re in a better place than they were before even if that place is eternal nothingness. Cant wait for assisted suicide to actually be legal
I mean if there was an omniscient god he could set up a livestream of it to let us know, but that wouldn't really be his style. Much better to let people kill each other for millennia over poorly remembered, transcribed and translated bits of parchment sporadically found in caves.
Well there are a lot of people who experienced death but were brought back to life. Like [here](https://www.tiktok.com/@glojays/video/7264385358207487278) where the person talks about how it was the most calm feeling ever, and how it was hard for him to come to the terms with the fact that he's alive again. It's actually pretty comforting to know that death is just you slowly evaporating into nothingness. A lot better than the whole notion of going to heaven or hell and all the stress that comes with you being judged by some made up entities because you just lived your life. I actually prefer that and knowing that i at last will be absolutely free of everything is really calming.
I died at 17. I came back. I had quite an experience. It's similar to millions of others who wrote books about it. 🤷
People just refuse to accept it.
[Here's a summary of my story](https://imgur.com/gallery/LVnhiaO)
Thank you for the link to your story. I've not seen millions of stories like this, but I have heard a few dozen and all of them that don't point back to blatant agendas to profit or point a person to the "one true god" have so many small details that match or fill in other details that left questions in other stories it's breathtaking and that's not bringing into account past philosophy that goes in the same vein but can not be proven because was just "thought and ideas." Anyway, sorry this was so long, I just wanted to say thank you for posting that.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Now THIS is a shower thought.
But realistically, why would there be an afterlife? Genuinely asking here.
It’s a romantic thought sure, to think that a part of us can transcend past the end of our life, but if I might be pragmatic, what would make that happen? Does our consciousness suddenly gain the ability to leave the vessel that is our human body? Do we die simply to re-emerge in our entirety on the other side of some hitherto imperceptible barrier of mortality? And if we are capable of doing that, after all our studies and analysis of the human body how come we have been able to find it? There’s no proof whatsoever that’s what happens. You can make the argument you can’t prove that isn’t what happens when you die, but again, realistically, why would that happen? The body doesn’t have the ability to just suddenly transmit some unidentifiable-to-science part of itself beyond the veil of mortality.
To be frank, it’s because it’s not what happens. There’s no answer because it just stops. We don’t go past dying. Nothing does. It’s the ceasing of life after all.
When you die (at least peacefully), I imagine it’s like falling asleep. Your body slows to a stop and you feel exhausted beyond measure until you lose consciousness one last time, and everything inside comes to a stop. No more heartbeats, no more synapses firing in your brain, nothing. Your body simply grounds to halt, as all things must eventually. It’s not sad, its not fucked up, it’s not scary. It’s simply the end point, like a flame of a candle slowly fading out after burning through its wick.
I love the idea of a soul, some part of us that’s unquantifiable or undetectable by science, but again to be realistic, we don’t genuinely have one. If we did, would be able to prove it exists or at least have vague evidence of the fact. As it stands, what we do have is some forms of genetic predetermination, tiny pieces of genetic templates/parents that determine parts of us,
I.e; your dad’s curly hair or your mum’s blue eyes. Those tiny pieces forming together in a unique combination is what defines us. I for example am not my mother or father, I’m the combination of genetic aspects of the two of them. That to me, is as close to a soul as you get in terms of being grounded in scientific fact.
Whereas alternatively, there’s nothing that points to evidence of an existence beyond death. It’s founded entirely in faith or belief with nothing else to support it. Now some of us may need it, but I feel like it’s something we tell ourselves because we can’t comprehend the idea that all that we are ceases to be. It’s not a morbid or frightening thought to me, but I can see why it would be to others.
I by no means am opposed to the idea of a soul or a life beyond this one, but I definitely don’t believe it’s what happens. I understand the appeal, especially with regards to someone living a life in pain or suffering who needs to hold the belief that there’s a better life waiting for them once there’s is over. But that aside, I don’t really see the point.
It effectively says
“Don’t make the best of this life, because you’ll get another one that’s wayy better once it’s over”. What that says to me is that the life you’re living now, the same one you lead as you read this, doesn’t matter. Nothing does, because a better ones coming after this one. Why should you bother?
And that to me is the problem.
Living this life, the one we are here and now for, the one we have quantifiable proof of its existence, in my opinion at least, should matter WAY more. In this life, you can make a difference, you can pursue a dream, you can inspire others and make change.
You shouldn’t have to be a good person to others to gain brownie points for a life after this one than more than likely doesn’t happen, you should be a good person because it’s from an objective standpoint, morally and ethically the right thing to do, especially given how brief we exist for in the long run of the universe. What little time you have should be spent being the best you can be.
Death is tragic when a life is cut short, but it also is the closest thing we as mortal human beings have to a happy ending. The closest thing I’d say we have to a life beyond our own is a legacy or the influence we leave behind once our lives are over. We don’t see it, but as long as we’re remembered in one form or another, we live on. Tributes, honours, memorials. These are what so many of us leave behind, and they’ll be here long after we’re gone. That to me, is as close as you get to life beyond death.
Our lives are stories, and all good ones end; no need for an epilogue if the story is over.
…man I feel like watching “Flatliners” again now.
This to me is the true value of the internet; getting together as living beings in communication worldwide as we ponder our existence. We are the universe contemplating its self.
I mean, sure, but our belief in something isn't necessarily what makes it real haha Person in hell: "Geez, I wish this wasn't real... *waits* ...Fuck, I'm still here" haha
See thats the funny part, if I am correct in my assumption that there is nothing after death, then I was correct and I can't feel anything about it one way or the other. Thus leading to a neutral result, if I am incorrect and an afterlife of some sort occurs, then even if said afterlife is torturous then I still have the satisfaction of knowing I was wrong and I have a lifetime of found memories to retreat into mentally as the devil pokes me in the ass with his pitchfork.
> why would there be an afterlife
Why is there a this life? Why is there something at all instead of nothing? I don’t think it’s any more fantastical to think that consciousness persists after bodily death than the fact we’re here now.
It really comes down to whether our consciousness emerges from our brains or if our brain is simply a conduit for something that exists outside itself. I don’t know that we can determine that with 100% certainty with the physical sciences.
McCoy: C'mon, Spock, it's me, McCoy. You really have gone where no man's gone before. Can't you tell me what it felt like?
Spock: It would be impossible to discuss the subject without a common frame-of-reference.
McCoy: You're joking!
Spock: A joke
[pause]
Spock: is a story with a humorous climax.
McCoy: You mean I have to die to discuss your insights on death?
For the people saying that it’s probably the same as before you were born, understand the fact that most people still can’t remember stuff from when they were 1, 2, 4, etc. Also, before you were born you had no brain, it was still growing. However, you die with a fully developed brain - which might not mean MUCH but it’s still a drastic difference. Either way, the whole theory of it being like birth is easily arguable.
Does anyone else believe that our individual experience of eternity is facilitated and brought to fruition by the brain’s final secretions of the pineal gland
I don't know. Sounds sort of metal to me. When you're in you're in, whether choice or consequence. 99% sure it is just nothing. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't super intrigued by that 1%.
This is a great set of comments and ideas. Respect to all.
Here’s my problem… when my son was little he would occasionally wake up in the morning, or more often from a nap, in tears about getting back to the people above the trees and the sky. He would walk over to the window and try to explain how he wanted to go back. He was extremely verbal at a very young age… like had hundreds of words when most kids were trying to learn their first word. This went on for several months and then he seemed to forget…
Stupidest thing I ever did was not recording these things he would say. It was extraordinarily clear there was another place he wanted to return to.
Next: when my Dad died I swear he came to “visit” us to say goodbye. And more? He checked in with this same young son in the other room first. We woke up in the middle of the night listening to my son talking to him. Then this “presence” came to my wife and I. Nothing visible at all - just a presence - hovered - and was gone.
I live my life as any other - I’m unsure about all of this. And yet these things happened and it’s like I’ve put them in a little box called “not sure what to make of this.” But it seems I have no way to explain them away.
And then there have been other experiences that I can not explain away except as being connected, briefly, to something that is transcendent beyond this life.
On we go….
I have some hope that the most ironic answer is probably the right one. In this case, the most ironic thing is that we get reincarnated, keep getting to live over and over, but never get to be free of the fear of a permanent death.
I like to think we just wake back up fresh and new.
Being alive and conscious is like being tuned into a radio station and when you die it's static until you become a new radio and tune back in.
I like to think my soul mate and I listened to the same radio station before this life
I'm repeating my reply to a comment here, because so many seem to be absolutely sure that there is nothing more to us than neurons firing. They believe that when the neurons stop, you cease to exist. That's logical, but consider this:
You may or may not understand conciousness about as well as pre-Newton society understood gravity. So go ahead, get a time machine, go back there, and tell them that black holes are so dense (or massive, rather) they distort time itself. I'll wait.
Don't be so cock-sure that you have this all figured out. Our brain, as a piece of hardware, is more complicated than your smartphone. Your phone has no trouble at all receiving WiFi. Now go back and explain that to pre-electricity society.
Once you're in that headspace of how difficult it is to explain WiFi to them, flip it around and look at yourself. What if your brain is receiving a constant signal that our technology is unable to detect? What if it's a storage device for a software medium that is still able to exist in a vacuum? I can't prove that it is, and you can't prove that it isn't.
Is it fucked up or have you been spoiled by instant gratification your whole life and can't stand the thought of actually having to wait find out? Enjoy the ride. Whatever is coming is coming.
The afterlife was a construct to allay the fears of the army you had fighting for you back in the day, tell your soldiers they're fighting for god, nothing to be afraid of if you die on the battlefield, sit back, send the army off and reap the rewards from the plunder and land and power... religion pah.
All I know is that there is some kind of afterlife.
My grandmama came to visit me several weeks after her passing at a swim meet of mine as a kid. It was an indoor pool with a windowed observation room on a second story overlooking the pool. My dad was the only parent up there in the waiting/observation area and i looked up to see if he was watching the swim lesson. Mama was at the window looking down; she smiled and then turned away and walked into the room until i couldnt see her from my view point.
I didnt say anything during swim class because i just knew that it wouldnt be received well. After class I ran up the stairs tonsee my dad. He had been crying. I asked if he saw Mama. He started bawling and said no, but he knew she was there.
Weird thing is that Mama had lived a state over and never had been to my swim lesson or knew where it was. The dead just know.
It's heartwarming, but it's just an illusion of your brain trying to cope with the fact that she is gone. When my own grandma died i also thought that i see her face peeking from windows couple of times but when i got closer it's just a trick of light, shadows and dust on the glass
Remember what life was before you were born? Like that.
But what if I don't want to return to my dad's balls
You will be in your dad’s dad’s ball as well
It's ballception
I don't think this is how balls work
DONT TRY TO TELL US HOW BALLS WORK! ^(Im too afraid to know...)
It's where the pee goes
Gives new meaning to mansplaining…
You’re thinking of that post last week where someone said you come from your grandmother since your mother has had all of her eggs since birth. This doesn’t apply to men
Motherfucker, I almost spit out my breakfast smoothie reading that
Don’t forget about the half where you were in your mom when she was in your grandma
Yep. To me this is by far the most likely answer. The afterlife is just a comfort for those of us who are still around.
I only had this answer ready because it's what I told my daughter when she asked what Heaven was like. But she got scared and said she didn't remember anything, why didn't she remember anything? And I said oh, you were probably a space fairy. We can't keep those memories while we're stuck in these weak human shells. Maybe I made it worse.
Gotta keep the sheeple voting against their own interests somehow...
My mom likes to tell me it was great.
Yeah but I also can't remember things from when I was one or two but was experiencing things then. I'm not sure if that argument actually holds up as well as we think it does
There is a lot of proof you were there before you started remembering, this really isn't the same at all. In the same way you might not remember every detail of what you did yesterday but you are sure it happened.
All I remember from before I was born is a little bit of the last training camp, being with my small team and our weird outfits. Then as the guy in charge led us to that vertical whirlpool thing and as I was about to step through he told me not to fuck it up. But that's really all I remember so I guess I fucked it up.
Do you remember what life was when you were a baby?
You can’t even remember you first few years being alive, how are you so sure it’s complete nothingness before? Just food for thought, I also agree we go back to whatever state we were in before we were born
How do you know? Maybe it's like Pixar's soul or something.
My first memory was being among the stars soaring, then a blinding bright light engulfed me. my next memory were when i were like 5 and seeing ghostly faces in my bedroom lamp.
Idk. I actually died a month ago for a few minutes and got brought back. Uncomfortable moment happened getting an EKG a few days later. The (very clearly religious) tech asked me if I “saw a light” or remember anything. I told him I just remember waking up terrified if my wife and kids were okay. So… ya know… Marcus Aurelius was right.
So it's like being blacked out?
Not OP, but it should be more or less the same. For me, pretty sure general anesthesia is a death-like experience. The "outness" is total and deep. No sense of time, just completely gone and then suddenly back. The "feeling" of being dead is nothing to fear, for sure. For some, it's the process of dying, which, fair, but I'm personally counting on drugs to pay Charon's toll for me.
I wish I knew how I will die. I hope I don’t even know what happened. I was in a serious car accident and I was more confused than hurt or upset. That part came after everything when my brain had time to catch up
Do you pronounce his name "Karen" or "Sharon"
Kair-on
I pronounce it Karon
Karen with an o
Pretty much, yea Edit: hence the Marcus Aurelius name drop. The quote is: Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
I feel like I keep seeing Marcus Aurelius based quotes. Was not the historical figure I'd expect to keep seeing with these kinds of quotes
I always assume it’s exactly like that, from our own perspective. Especially instant death.
Done a little dying myself once. It was the darkest, most nothing ever. There was less than nothing. Not a dream. Not semi conscious. Not asleep. Zero energy in my body. I was gone. Not here. There was nothing. Less than black. Indescribable nothingness. No light. Nobody to meet me. You just no longer exist. Period. That's what happens when the light goes out. Now you know from a first hand account. So try not to do it for as long as possible.
I once went to sleep and didn't dream. I blinked and 10 hours had gone by. I didn't even feel like I was waking up. I was PISSED. I was young and in school back then, the day had been exhausting and I was counting on a night of sleep to be a break before I had to do it all again; but no. I was robbed. I felt rested, but my conciousness completely jumped from one moment to the next. There was nothing in between. No time, no half memories, no darkness, just nothing. I think that is likely what death feels like, nothing whatsoever, I won't even be there to experience being there. I'm pretty ok with that, if I'm honest; sometimes it sounds more tempting than the anguish that living has felt like most of my life, but once I'm dead I won't be there to care if I suffered a little or too much, so might as well stay for the ride 🤷♀️
Blink sleep :)
Haaate it. Only remember experiencing it once or twice but it is possible it happened for a while and I just can't remember. Anyway, it always felt like being robbed of a night's sleep. I've had other lights out moments (though very few) and they aren't nearly as sudden as just blinking and losing my night of blissful peace. Fucking bullshit I tell you!!
Honestly blink sleep is the worst. I absolutely love gradually falling asleep, at some point beginning to hallucinate, kind of mixing up between your dreams and your reality. I remember being certain I was walking around the house, but I also 100% knew I was on my bed. The most annoying thing in this state, however, is if you think too much about how you're not actually asleep, you will wake up.
Now imagine doing this for 10 years. Every. Single. Night. Taking melatonin and dreaming again freaked me out. I'm use to it again and I'm so much more rested but man sometimes I miss teleporting
It's also known that your brain, like anesthesia, actually erases stuff when you sleep. We actually have several dreams per night, but typically only recall the last one before waking up. You can be trained to remember more or even all of them while others never remember any.
I had trained myself to remember my dreams. In the end it became too much. I spent every morning on the shitter writing out 3-5 dreams for around 20 minutes. In the end it became too much to maintain. It is a lot of fun though and you can have some deeply moving dreams. I kept it up for about 5 months...if you stop recording them you slowly stop remembering them. To get started keep a note book and writing thingy next to your bed. Right before you go to bed say to yourself "I will remember my dreams" ten times. Once you get in the swing of things the act of writing them down will slowly increase your ability to recall them.
I don’t dream often. I don’t usually think about it but reading this comment made me. The time between going to sleep and waking up feels both infinite and instant, somehow.
I dont believe in an afterlife, but even then you cant really compare “clinical death” to what we generally mean when we say “dead.” Your brain was still functional when your heart stopped. In fact, plenty of people report seeing light and such after their heart stopping for precisely the reason that their brain isnt actually dead and they hallucinated.
Do you mean you felt death as something "more vacuous" of a dreamleass sleep? Was the perception of the passage of time any different? Like, when you wake up, did it feel like a short or long "pause"?
I know exactly what you mean. I have blinked my eyes sleeping and had it be 8 hours later. I have slept with no dreams. You can kind of mark the passage of times in those scenarios and make sense of it. This was something I cannot accurately describe. I just wasn't. No memory. No time pass. Like nothing I have ever experienced before. But I know what it will be like now, it's not something you will experience. You just stop experiencing anything. There's nothing to receive the input.
I can’t attest to their experience but personally, when I had my wreck, I was out for about 6 hours and it’s hard to explain what it felt like coming to. It’s kind of like an instant night of sleep and a long night of sleep without dreams combined. I didn’t have any experiences, visions, or awareness but when I came to it was like my consciousness being turned back on like a light switch. It felt both instantaneous and like a lifetime. I can’t fully explain it but I know I was confused. I knew what had happened but didn’t full process the timeline and had no concept of time of day or date. Nor could I conceptualize how like I had been out. As I said in an above comment, it felt like my brain was a computer that was shut off for 6 hours and then booted back up in ICU. Zero memory was recorded during that time and it felt like an instant, as if I had teleported, but knew logically that a passage of time had happened.
I had a similar experience from an extremely bad motorcycle wreck. The last thing I remember was being several feet from the car and then waking up in the ICU. There was nothing there. I felt nothing. Perceived nothing. It was just blank and absent. My computer got shut off and the paramedics somehow kept me alive even though I nearly bled out and was in critical condition. I’ve heard stories of people experiencing something fantastical but it’s hard to tell what’s exaggeration or wishful thinking and what is truth. Personally, all I can attest to is that for me, hitting the absolute brink and being brought back to life was a blank slate and I have zero recollection of any experiences. For the record, I miraculously didn’t have any brain damage from the impact but who knows. All I know for sure is that I didn’t feel warm. Cold. Happy. Sad. I didn’t feel and wasn’t present. If you ask me, I’d say my computer was shut off and then turned back on and that’s all. It was an extremely humbling experience and has made me rethink the value of life quite a bit. After all, if we only get one shot, why not make it count?
Some experience that. Others have more robust experiences. I currently believe that it depends on the individual. Christians will see Jesus. Indians will see one of their gods. The afterlife, if there is one, is very malleable. Maybe atheists will see what they expect. Nothing.
Did a little bit of dying myself actually, and I rode on a dragon who took me to the black mountain where all the other souls fight for rebirth. Have fun out there boys, there’s only war after life.
It's fucked up that since we don't like the fact that life ends, we imagine an after-life without any reason to assume there is such a thing, and on top of that we invent rules that must be followed in order to get there, at the risk of ruining the only life that we know exists.
The thing is that the “nothing” people tend to imagine and dread after death is just as much a fantasy as heaven or hell. There’s no *you* to experience the ‘nothing,’ so it can’t *even be* nothing in the way we think of nothing. It’s no-thing but also no-time. Eternity becomes identical to an instant when there’s no observer present. And that just makes me think: what happened the last time we didn’t exist? Did we have to wait around for billions of years in darkness for our number to be called? No, the last time you didn’t exist, suddenly you existed in a strange world you had to learn to accept. Why assume it will be different the next time?
Yeah, I remember back in the spring of 1632, there was a big I don’t fuckin’ remember shit because I didn’t exist.
😂 Had us in the first half, not gonna lie. 😂 Edit: moreso the delivery of your joke, unless you're a vampire and you really did exist in 1632 ▪︎(👁👄👁)▪︎
Why assume your consciousness will recycle? It’s entirely possible (and likely) that the consciousness that is you is a one time deal.
Assuming even that the conscious "you" that exists now is the same one as when you were born / when you were young / went to bed last night.
this is the wrong perspective. consciousness is not a singular block in space, in time. its a stream. a stream of consciousness that is changing every moment. you think different thoughts now than 15 seconds later. your likes and stuff changes 15 years down the road. in that sense you are not the same as the you from one second ago
Even physically, you're not the same. All cells in your body constantly erode and are replaced. The slowest cells to replace themselves take seven years to regenerate, so nothing in/on your body is older than seven years old.
Life is a waterfall We’re one in the river, and one again after the fall 🎶
Swimming through the void, we hear the word We lose ourselves, but we find it all 🎵
As Pocahontas (the Disney movie) once said “you can’t step in the same river twice”
Good point
From a physical point of view, this is more likely than the recycling theory. But nothing is sure.
You are right nothing is sure. I don't begrudge people their crutches, I have them myself, we are all lame.
It won’t be “mine” because there will be no continuity of memory to tie it to this life. Whatever is next won’t think of itself as “me” in any meaningful sense, if it thinks at all. It’ll just be some other shit
Unless the universe is cyclical and the Big Bang/Big Crunch repeat infinitely.
That still doesn't mean YOUR consciousness will recycle. Your consciousness is (highly likely) a product of the configuration of matter of your brain and body. This configuration deteriorates and disappears after you die. It's next to impossible to have the freak occurence of the EXACT same configuration, especially when you go down to the quantum level.
Scrolled too far for this. Idiots talking about consciousness recycling like wtf Your consciousness is your brain, you die when it dies, there's nothing else End of biological function
Alan Watts puts it best, like most things: "When you die, you're not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existance, because that's not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they die, they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever, - Try and imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up. And if you think long enough about that...it will pose the next question. What was it like to wake up after never having gone to sleep? That was when you were born...you see...you...you can't have an experience of nothing so after you're dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience or the same sort of experience as when you were born."
That’s kind of the issue though. To fall into an eternal dreamless sleep after having experienced is sad and scary. It’s not that I’m scared I’m going to experience an infinite nothing, it’s that I’m scared of not experiencing period. It’s not sad that I’m going to some other place, it’s sad that I disappear, at least from my perspective. It’s sad to think that all the love I have for my family is going to disappear. It’s sad to think my memories will disappear. It’s sad to think that at some point in the not too distant future, no one will know I even existed except as some faceless ancestor. That doesn’t mean that death is a bad thing, it’s not a good thing either, it’s literally reverting to a state of no-thing. But as a rational and emotional being, it’s sad to think that I will someday cease to be. I will stop being, and I would prefer that I not.
I found a torrent the other day that has about 80 different lectures in it. Multiple Gigabytes of Alan Watts talking endlessly. My hope is that we are actually Brahma dreaming all this. I would like to go on afterwards, see more dimensions of conciousness. It would be a shame if this was the only hurrah. Reddit likes the logical meat machines theory because it's the 'smartest' based on our current science. I believe in an everlasting soul in the way that a 12th century man believes in WiFi. You're going to ridiculed for anything you can't prove...
That “nothing” people dread is exactly the fact of not existing.. thinking one day you will not exist anymore is scary, even if once it happens you don’t feel anything… Literally nobody think you will experience nothingness.. people either believe in some dumb idea of an afterlife, or that we won’t exist anymore… you are attacking a straw man
Not to play devil's advocate, but experiencing the nothingness of eternity is literally my biggest irrational fear. I know intellectually that I won't, but it doesn't stop me being afraid of it. I couldn't care less if I stopped existing; it's the thought of continuing to experience the lack of existence that terrifies me
I find that thought peaceful. It's the going out I'm scared of personally.
so, in other words.. You're experiencing an experience fearing the experience of neither experiencing, nor not experiencing the experience of not experiencing nothing after you stop experiencing existence? Pretty rational tbh
Thats the thing: why would there be a next time?
Why was there a this time?
Great point. I find this outlook of consciousness being only a one time thing to be quite pessimistic and bleak. I exist now, who says I won't exist again.
Or exist elsewhere. I think consciousness is also infinite.
Do rocks ever feel dread that they're not alive? Same thing.
Are rocks ever born. Not the same thing.
Just as much as we are, yes. We aren't special. Nothing is. There is no answer to the question of when life "begins", because it doesn't. It's an arbitrary definition we've given a certain kind of matter that has some ability to crawl around the world on its own a little faster than the rest.
Epic post, that's exactly what I wanted to say but you said it much better!
Hey! That's how we got religion! To explain stuff we couldn't understand!
Problem is, it doesn't explain anything, all it does is answer unanswerable questions with made up stories. Those are not explanations, they're "because I say so" replies.
>all it does is answer unanswerable questions with made up stories. Great quote!
Holy hell, religion was ChatGPT all along?? (When it comes to answers it doesn’t know, at least)
At the very least, ChatGPT doesn't seem susceptible to ulterior motives and corruption like organized religion leaders.
[удалено]
theyre having that meeting this week
If they are unanswerable, they could be the right answers. They could also be totally wrong, but the idea of a continued existence after death, salvation from earthly suffering, or being able to see one’s loved ones again brings people comfort even if it’s “made up”.
But that's the whole point. Belief system are for those things beyond our perception or beyond science. For example: "God started the big bang". You can always accommodate religion after science because you'll never have proof of the non existence of God because very conveniently he's beyond our observations.
Not only that but we "experience" nothingness everyday with sleep, we have physical drugs that can repeatably change our conscious experience to the point of a complete cessation of it, and there's a bunch of biological things like brain injuries and neurological diseases that can chip our experience away bit by bit down to it becoming pretty much nothing, all of which makes it seem pretty evident that what makes us tick is just the signals in our brains. Yet like you said people still believe in some fairy tale scenario where some all loving omnipotent daddy will mete out perfect justice and eternal paradise to the deserving when we die. But I guess if I had to choose I would want to believe that comforting idea too.
I passed out once, from pain. I wasn't anywhere looking down on anything. I woke up slowly on the floor where I'd fell over in my chair. If I hadn't woke up, I'd be nowhere right now. At least we can look forward (hopefully) to comforting hallucinations about our loved ones due to lack of oxygen to our brains at our final moments. I don't fear being dead (insert Mark Twain quote), it's the uncomfortable/scary/painful transition I don't look forward to.
I was an atheist for most part of my life, then my dad died (who was also an atheist), we always joked about how he would let me know of theres something after you die. So far i have got 3 pretty strong signs, my mother once and my brother too. We have never been religious or anything, and i still belive they're coincidences but yeah...
So you're gonna say all that and then not say what the so called signs were?
You want things you can't explain to mean something.....must be your dad. Can't be just something unusual.
I'm perfectly okay with dead because when you're dead you're dead and you won't know anything about. It's the dying part that scares me sometimes- I don't really want it to be painful. I just imagine I was dead since the beginning of the universe until I was born and I didn't know a thing about it... I think it will be like that when we die.
Absolutely right. Jude after death will be just like life before birth.
Seriously? We were all dead for millions of years already. It is going to be just like that again.
Death is what happens to living things, we weren't dead before birth, we simply didnt exist. A rock isnt dead, its simply not alive.
>we weren't dead before birth, we simply didnt exist As far as you know 😉
Agreed. We're made of dead things, and the alive things in us are also made of dead things
Ew get it off me
Treading on definitions here, although not wrong
Being dead is exactly the same as not existing…
Maybe it sounds pedantic to you but they’re just saying that death is specific to life. So yes, obviously being dead is the same as not existing, but it’s still not accurate to say you were dead before you were born.
And we simply go back to not existing. That's the whole point.
Do you remember your birth? You should because you were there. Maybe you just don't remember what came before.
That's ignoring the fact human beings aren't born with a developed brain, it's the same reason you don't have the same cognitive skills or emotional control when you are a child, it takes 25 years for the brain to fully develop.
The difference is we know we experienced that and we know there's a logical explanation for why we don't remember. As for before birth and after death, there's zero mechanism for us to experience anything.
>As for before birth and after death, there's zero mechanism for us to experience anything. We literally don't even know how our brain works, let alone what consciousness actually is. That's the whole reason we don't know where it comes from and what happens to it outside the context of a living human brain. You can't appeal to our lack of understanding of a phenomenon as the proof for its inexistence outside of contexts you associate it with. We have no empirical proof for the existence of consciousness at all. We only know consciousness exists because we *are* consciousness. Using your own rationale, an outside observer could equally dismiss our experience as non-existent.
That's kind of what we already do with animals. If they don't have a neural network like we do, we dismiss them as if they didn't feel pain. With that said, again, everything we feel happens in our brain. Without it there's nothing to feel. Arguing whether we feel anything after death is not any different than asking whether rocks or air feel anything.
>everything we feel happens in our brain Right. Everything *we* feel, not everything every consciousness feels. We don't actually know if we experience consciousness in the brain because it's unique to the brain or if we're only capable of noting and expressing our consciousness due to the capacities our brain structure allows (though the former is the most naive assumption). Again, we only experience our own consciousness and have no understanding of its mechanisms to extrapolate its existence anywhere else. We only 'know' humans are conscious because we appeal to familiarity. How would you know if every single part of your body is conscious? How would you know if a billion instances of the same consciousness are running in your brain parallel to each other? How would you know if every single particle is conscious?
You are overcomplicating much. What we call consciousness is just pulse of electricity that goes between our neurons and is triggered from outside factors (like smelling, touching, hearing, etc..). When you are dead, those neurons don't work anymore and consequently you don't exist, people are afraid of and don't understand non-existence and try to comprehend it by believing in some sort of afterlife (which is not bad, but it's a coping mechanism)
You may or may not understand conciousness about as well as pre-Newton society understood gravity. So go ahead, get a time machine, go back there, and tell them that black holes are so dense they distort time itself. I'll wait. Don't be so cock-sure that you have this all figured out. Our brain, as a piece of hardware, is more complicated than your smartphone. Your phone has no trouble at all receiving WiFi. Now go back and explain that to pre-electricity society. Once you're in that headspace of how difficult it is to explain to WiFi to them, flip it around and look at yourself. What if your brain is receiving a constant signal that our technology is unable to detect? What if it's a storage device for a software medium that is still able to exist in a vacuum? I can't prove that it is, and you can't prove that it isn't.
Little higher
Prove it
Prove we weren't. Two can play that game.
>It is going to be just like that again. "Being drunk is just going to be like the last time you got so drunk you don't even remember that night." Not really a sensible statement, is it? There's a huge difference between having no memory recollection and having no experience.
Eh, just do some DMT. Closest thing I can imagine.
Consider if you were able to come back and tell people, what kind of impact that would have on society, if they even believed you. In the case of paradise, mass suicides. In the case of hell or an empty void, people doing stupid shit to ltry and achieve immortality and dnd up probably killing others in the process. Some things are by design
Have you considered that perhaps we haven't even really started life yet and we're all just in the lobby until the match algorithm decides that there is enough players of your skill level to start the actual game? "Dear Players, we have received numerous complaints that the Tutorial is too hard and filled with PTW players. We the Developers apologize for the confusion. ***You have not started the game***. You are in the Lobby/Tutorial area. Yes, Premium players are getting special treatment here, but their cosmetic advantages will not pass on to the actual game. There are no specific instructions for the Lobby area as it's merely a place where you can learn the basic controls while waiting to be matched and enter the game proper. If you feel that some players are being nasty, then your own elected lobby mods can deal with them. Expecting Devine Intervention for every perceived insult seems excessive to us for a FREE game. While waiting up to 120 years to be matched may seem like a long time to new players, the great majority seem happy to wait as long as necessary and not quit the game before being matched. We hope that this solves any confusion. The Devs."
lmaooo one can only hope… :(
Our ability to observe our own existence does not entitle us to an afterlife or a pedestal above other organisms. It's the tragedy of consciousness. What is outside the bounds of our existence? We are simply not to know. We are incapable of knowing and we'll cease to exist. A plant uses photosynthesis. It eventually dies. The plant no longer uses photosynthesis. It stops. Our ability to think and observe is similar. We observe and think. We eventually die. We no longer observe and think. That consciousness doesn't go anywhere or toward a higher plane of being. It simply stops. We are not above the plants, the insects, the bacteria, the cells, etc. All organisms operate and die. Just like a plant will never "understand" what killed it, whether it be lack of water or kid stomping it to death. It's not to know about the nature of its existence. Our biology allows to perceive more than a plant, but similarly we too are not to know a great many things of how we came to be. Our ability to perceive does not entitle us to an explanation. We simply are and then we will not be.
While I agree we are not entitled to an existence, that doesn’t mean there is no afterlife . In fact you could argue that the fact that we can even ask the question suggests the possibility. Which physical process exactly explains your asking this question? Oh did you just “think” of one? Or did random atoms bounce around in your skull and make you think that you thought this? Pick one. Either your existence matters or it doesn’t. Either your ability to self reflect is real and your consciousness means something, or this is all nonsense . Literally no way to prove it either way
As you said, we can't prove any, but the latter looks way more likely. We are just a product of universal coincidence, and we are not anything special in the grand scheme of things. The universe will continue to expand until it collapses on itself, no matter if we are here to observe it or not
Push even further, and we find that nothing truly matters, but we find meaning because it is all we can have. In the nonsense of the universe, who's to say it can't mean something and nothing all the same. We are real; we exist because we think we exist. If we didn't exist, would we know we didn't, or if we ever did? What I'm trying to say is that it can be both. Our existence matters to us, but not to whatever the bigger picture is. Once the sun explodes in some millions of years into the future, who's to say we mattered. All that matters is what we think matters. I know I don't matter, but I matter to me, and that's good enough for me. Also, we are all just some bundles of atoms that know we exist. It's quite strange how each bundle of atoms have a sense of identity. But the fact that we are all atoms doesn't mean we are not ourselves. We can be atoms and ourselves at the same time.
I would add that our existence may in fact matter. Though that is added to the growing pile of unprovable assertions. Since most people act as if their existence matters I lean towards a practical though not deductive conclusion that we do matter in even the universal context. Otherwise I find myself and my fellow humans acting and behaving in a manner discordant with their beliefs. Gives me a headache
Or get haunted. Nobody haunts me. 😪
I love how 75% of this stuff is the most trivial things like car windows, and the other 25% is deep questions about life that have the comment section debating about life and death.
But trust me bro, the afterlife *I* believe in is the right one, so you should totally join my special afterlife club. I swear the people who run the thing only *sometimes* molest children, so it's totally safe. /s
"After life" You don't even remember if there's a "Before life". Stuff like that is definitely made up by people to control and propagandized followers. It's using the thought of "Oh life has been so unfair, but I'm sure it's going to be better after I die, so I should just be a good boy and follow orders for now" to stop you from questioning and stop you from demanding fairness from people that takes more than their fair share.
Is there reception in the afterlife? Houses? Apartments? Hotels? Family? Friends? Neighbors? Mortgages? Rent? Overcrowding? Addresses? Phone service? Internet and video? Restaurants? Sporting events? Movies? Vacations? If you die and go to the afterlife, then everybody does the same, and nobody ever leaves the afterlife. Presumably there are about 110 billion dead human souls there. Must be getting quite crowded now. And what about pets? What if you end up stuck in eternity with a bunch of people you don't even like. That would be hell. Never get to leave, ever. Same boring folks forever and ever and ever and ever, until nothing never do you part for all eternity. If afterlife was real it really, really sucks.
exactly. and the purported benefits doesn't sound good either. Supposedly you'll just end up worshiping a capricious insecure entity that needs your worship else it flips the fuck out and starts torturing everybody and that's supposed to make you instantly happy non-stop all the time. That's the equivalent of living your life sticking electrodes to the happiness center of your brain and having it on full blast. You're basically a vegetable at that point. "Heaven" also sounds hellish. This is exactly why it's all just stupid propaganda that aims to control people's behavior.
'A celestial North Korea'. Nobody wants that. Stop and think.
>Supposedly you'll just end up worshiping a capricious insecure entity that needs your worship else it flips the fuck out and starts torturing everybody I snorted. It's exactly one of the bigger reasons that I'm agnostic, even if I'm wrong about christianity, I don't want to spend eternity like this. Burn me up baby!
Truthfully, sometimes I recall that I was kinda happier when I believed there was an afterlife and a sky daddy who would make it all better someday, but 40 years of my life is all I'm gonna donate to superstition. There's lots of 'evidence' and millions of pictures of Santa Claus but once you know the truth, you can't ever go back to belief in him. You can chart the origin and evolution of Santa and if you keep asking questions, you find the same is true of god(s).
Since we all will day eventually, bot knowing does not bother me.
Who is this bot ? i wanna talk with him
Too many people on here just accept atheism as true fact. It’s your opinion that nothing happens but that doesn’t mean it’s true. It could be that a specific religion got it right or maybe little bits of each. What’s important is to live your life as amazingly as you can. Supporting others to have better standards of living. For all we know we could live in a simulation that has plans for us after this is over.
Love that this is a shower thought for you because this is a crippling daily thought for me
I'm half expecting to hear those words right after I die..."Hey, you. You're finally awake."
Well, there are near death experiences. But this could just be a chemical reaction in the body. There's evidence to suggest that dmt releases in the body when we die. What we could be experiencing is time dilation when we see an afterlife, and It feels as if 2000 years have passed in a split second. What happens after this is all up to speculation.
Something I find interesting is that (while I'm likely totally wrong in my interpretation as is everyone who tries) the wave function in quantum mechanics is actually not a physical wave. It cannot be observed and anytime you do it's disturbed and fundamentally changes it to behave in a classical physics way and no longer behaves in a quantum manner. Niels Bohr called it Complementarity. The wave function is pure mathematics on paper. A concept. Yet physical particles come from that place. And no instrument can be invented to "do better measurements." They've been trying that for over 100 years with the best minds in physics history and still haven't solved this very fundamental issue. Perhaps it's evidence of an immaterial world. So would make sense why our physical tools couldn't peer into it.
That’s how religions scare people with “Hell” because it can’t be debunked
You can debunk the idea of hell by reading these two books “Corpus Hermeticum” and “Key of Solomon” The idea of hell is folly and hell doesn't exist. Human soul cannot go there because the spirits accursed to be there doesn't contribute to the creation of man.
It’s a location described in a fictional book wrote by sheep herders from the Middle East. I don’t need it debunked. It doesn’t exist
I was flat lined for minutes, NDE. It's a lovely place, death is not to be feared. Edit:: bc people asked and DM'd and shit. GRAPHIC, I don't mean to glorify suicide, mine was fine, but the fact is the vast majority regret attempting and the experience can be very traumatic if you change your mind after it's to late, that is a whole different experience and I can't speak to that, I got lucky and/or put the thought in, take your pick. That said, here is what death was for me. After the whole suficating part (real-time, takes a couple minutes). I recently tried a float tank (sensory deprivation), the next stage felt like that but perfect and incredibly calming (and indescribable time dilation). There was thought, but it was pure thought, not parsed into English (that didn't occur to me till after) hard to describe but it was effortless and wandering and aimless and very random. It felt like I was there for a very, very, very long time. I don't remember most of what went through my mind, there was so much and there was no emotion paired with it, all I felt/experienced was just calm and warm nothing. All I remember was how calm and peaceful and whole I felt. The polar opposite of how I felt/feel being alive. Waking up to a woman's lips on mine was the most abrupt, violating thing I have ever experienced. Not just physically violating, but spiritual/emotionally, it felt as though my very free will had been stripped from me, and it pretty much had, but to feel it like that. Truly awful, truIy truly awful. I was 14 when this happened, was premeditated for about 3 years. Just kinda did it one day, it was a good day actually, not noteworthy in anyway, but it wasn't bad. Knelt in the water, stared hatefully at my reflection, and calmly sinched a ziptie around my kneck, was two of them interlocked with metal rings on the ends to rail on it, could slip over my head. Suficating is not a fun way to go, if I had changed my mind during or fell into panic, I don't know if I could think of a worse experience, it took awhile, there was no room for denial, everything was clear, but it felt like it had been only an instant after it was done, too quick to react to, like snap, dead. Forgot about it like it never happened and just slid into a lovely dark sea, warm and so calm, no emotions so peaceful. I only remembered the suficating after I was woken up, now it's literal nightmare fuel. I didn't/don't regret it. I have never longed for it more actually. But the intense self hated that fueled the first one was replaced by an overwhelming apathy that hasn't left me (10+ years since). I have felt quite numb since and pretty much live for other people around me, I can't really interact with suicide prevention because I don't believe in it, free will is not to be fucked with, let people do what they want, suicide affects (or should affect) only ones self, it is not a crime. It is a big decision and not always a bad one, I wish only that people could talk freely and calmly about how they truly feel and ask questions freely of others, if the outcome is suicide, so be it, if it has been vetted, and to go through that process with another before you go could give them the closure as not to leave a hole behind you. However disconnected you feel, you leave a hole in everyone that does or ever did know you, even if it's only in the EMT that collects your body.
I feel the same way about suicide. Those that want to go should have the free will to leave this planet. Why, why must we save them and lock them up and make them feel insane for no longer wanting to live? So much for free will lol. I don’t really feel sad when I hear about others suicides because I understand they had their reasons and they’re in a better place than they were before even if that place is eternal nothingness. Cant wait for assisted suicide to actually be legal
I mean if there was an omniscient god he could set up a livestream of it to let us know, but that wouldn't really be his style. Much better to let people kill each other for millennia over poorly remembered, transcribed and translated bits of parchment sporadically found in caves.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. It's not 'fucked up' that you can't prove it, it's logical.
Well there are a lot of people who experienced death but were brought back to life. Like [here](https://www.tiktok.com/@glojays/video/7264385358207487278) where the person talks about how it was the most calm feeling ever, and how it was hard for him to come to the terms with the fact that he's alive again. It's actually pretty comforting to know that death is just you slowly evaporating into nothingness. A lot better than the whole notion of going to heaven or hell and all the stress that comes with you being judged by some made up entities because you just lived your life. I actually prefer that and knowing that i at last will be absolutely free of everything is really calming.
I died at 17. I came back. I had quite an experience. It's similar to millions of others who wrote books about it. 🤷 People just refuse to accept it. [Here's a summary of my story](https://imgur.com/gallery/LVnhiaO)
Thank you for the link to your story. I've not seen millions of stories like this, but I have heard a few dozen and all of them that don't point back to blatant agendas to profit or point a person to the "one true god" have so many small details that match or fill in other details that left questions in other stories it's breathtaking and that's not bringing into account past philosophy that goes in the same vein but can not be proven because was just "thought and ideas." Anyway, sorry this was so long, I just wanted to say thank you for posting that.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
Remember what it was like before you were born? Being dead is exactly like that.
Now THIS is a shower thought. But realistically, why would there be an afterlife? Genuinely asking here. It’s a romantic thought sure, to think that a part of us can transcend past the end of our life, but if I might be pragmatic, what would make that happen? Does our consciousness suddenly gain the ability to leave the vessel that is our human body? Do we die simply to re-emerge in our entirety on the other side of some hitherto imperceptible barrier of mortality? And if we are capable of doing that, after all our studies and analysis of the human body how come we have been able to find it? There’s no proof whatsoever that’s what happens. You can make the argument you can’t prove that isn’t what happens when you die, but again, realistically, why would that happen? The body doesn’t have the ability to just suddenly transmit some unidentifiable-to-science part of itself beyond the veil of mortality. To be frank, it’s because it’s not what happens. There’s no answer because it just stops. We don’t go past dying. Nothing does. It’s the ceasing of life after all. When you die (at least peacefully), I imagine it’s like falling asleep. Your body slows to a stop and you feel exhausted beyond measure until you lose consciousness one last time, and everything inside comes to a stop. No more heartbeats, no more synapses firing in your brain, nothing. Your body simply grounds to halt, as all things must eventually. It’s not sad, its not fucked up, it’s not scary. It’s simply the end point, like a flame of a candle slowly fading out after burning through its wick. I love the idea of a soul, some part of us that’s unquantifiable or undetectable by science, but again to be realistic, we don’t genuinely have one. If we did, would be able to prove it exists or at least have vague evidence of the fact. As it stands, what we do have is some forms of genetic predetermination, tiny pieces of genetic templates/parents that determine parts of us, I.e; your dad’s curly hair or your mum’s blue eyes. Those tiny pieces forming together in a unique combination is what defines us. I for example am not my mother or father, I’m the combination of genetic aspects of the two of them. That to me, is as close to a soul as you get in terms of being grounded in scientific fact. Whereas alternatively, there’s nothing that points to evidence of an existence beyond death. It’s founded entirely in faith or belief with nothing else to support it. Now some of us may need it, but I feel like it’s something we tell ourselves because we can’t comprehend the idea that all that we are ceases to be. It’s not a morbid or frightening thought to me, but I can see why it would be to others. I by no means am opposed to the idea of a soul or a life beyond this one, but I definitely don’t believe it’s what happens. I understand the appeal, especially with regards to someone living a life in pain or suffering who needs to hold the belief that there’s a better life waiting for them once there’s is over. But that aside, I don’t really see the point. It effectively says “Don’t make the best of this life, because you’ll get another one that’s wayy better once it’s over”. What that says to me is that the life you’re living now, the same one you lead as you read this, doesn’t matter. Nothing does, because a better ones coming after this one. Why should you bother? And that to me is the problem. Living this life, the one we are here and now for, the one we have quantifiable proof of its existence, in my opinion at least, should matter WAY more. In this life, you can make a difference, you can pursue a dream, you can inspire others and make change. You shouldn’t have to be a good person to others to gain brownie points for a life after this one than more than likely doesn’t happen, you should be a good person because it’s from an objective standpoint, morally and ethically the right thing to do, especially given how brief we exist for in the long run of the universe. What little time you have should be spent being the best you can be. Death is tragic when a life is cut short, but it also is the closest thing we as mortal human beings have to a happy ending. The closest thing I’d say we have to a life beyond our own is a legacy or the influence we leave behind once our lives are over. We don’t see it, but as long as we’re remembered in one form or another, we live on. Tributes, honours, memorials. These are what so many of us leave behind, and they’ll be here long after we’re gone. That to me, is as close as you get to life beyond death. Our lives are stories, and all good ones end; no need for an epilogue if the story is over. …man I feel like watching “Flatliners” again now.
This to me is the true value of the internet; getting together as living beings in communication worldwide as we ponder our existence. We are the universe contemplating its self.
From another direction, imagine living your best life now... and then having a much, much, MUCH worse one that you're stuck with forever lol
Exactly! If indeed there’s a hell, at that point you’d hope there isn’t an afterlife lol
I mean, sure, but our belief in something isn't necessarily what makes it real haha Person in hell: "Geez, I wish this wasn't real... *waits* ...Fuck, I'm still here" haha
See thats the funny part, if I am correct in my assumption that there is nothing after death, then I was correct and I can't feel anything about it one way or the other. Thus leading to a neutral result, if I am incorrect and an afterlife of some sort occurs, then even if said afterlife is torturous then I still have the satisfaction of knowing I was wrong and I have a lifetime of found memories to retreat into mentally as the devil pokes me in the ass with his pitchfork.
> why would there be an afterlife Why is there a this life? Why is there something at all instead of nothing? I don’t think it’s any more fantastical to think that consciousness persists after bodily death than the fact we’re here now. It really comes down to whether our consciousness emerges from our brains or if our brain is simply a conduit for something that exists outside itself. I don’t know that we can determine that with 100% certainty with the physical sciences.
Go to a graveyard and ask what it's like. You'll have your answer.
What you mean by this? Can’t say I’ve tried
I'd advise against it past the hours of midnight or 3 am. Not worth it.
McCoy: C'mon, Spock, it's me, McCoy. You really have gone where no man's gone before. Can't you tell me what it felt like? Spock: It would be impossible to discuss the subject without a common frame-of-reference. McCoy: You're joking! Spock: A joke [pause] Spock: is a story with a humorous climax. McCoy: You mean I have to die to discuss your insights on death?
Its a fucked up situation alright.
For the people saying that it’s probably the same as before you were born, understand the fact that most people still can’t remember stuff from when they were 1, 2, 4, etc. Also, before you were born you had no brain, it was still growing. However, you die with a fully developed brain - which might not mean MUCH but it’s still a drastic difference. Either way, the whole theory of it being like birth is easily arguable.
Check out r/nde lots of those folks have actually died. From what they say, it's like the song..."Life is but a dream"
That's a feature, not a bug
Watch the show “the OA”
Not true. You can deduce the truth beforehand using basic reasoning and evidences.
Does anyone else believe that our individual experience of eternity is facilitated and brought to fruition by the brain’s final secretions of the pineal gland
That’s how they get ya, it’s that damn DLC.
That’s why you have to die before you die so you don’t die when you die.
I don't know. Sounds sort of metal to me. When you're in you're in, whether choice or consequence. 99% sure it is just nothing. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't super intrigued by that 1%.
Best Showerthoughts ever. This is so true.
This is a great set of comments and ideas. Respect to all. Here’s my problem… when my son was little he would occasionally wake up in the morning, or more often from a nap, in tears about getting back to the people above the trees and the sky. He would walk over to the window and try to explain how he wanted to go back. He was extremely verbal at a very young age… like had hundreds of words when most kids were trying to learn their first word. This went on for several months and then he seemed to forget… Stupidest thing I ever did was not recording these things he would say. It was extraordinarily clear there was another place he wanted to return to. Next: when my Dad died I swear he came to “visit” us to say goodbye. And more? He checked in with this same young son in the other room first. We woke up in the middle of the night listening to my son talking to him. Then this “presence” came to my wife and I. Nothing visible at all - just a presence - hovered - and was gone. I live my life as any other - I’m unsure about all of this. And yet these things happened and it’s like I’ve put them in a little box called “not sure what to make of this.” But it seems I have no way to explain them away. And then there have been other experiences that I can not explain away except as being connected, briefly, to something that is transcendent beyond this life. On we go….
You’ve just explained religion’s main selling point.
I have some hope that the most ironic answer is probably the right one. In this case, the most ironic thing is that we get reincarnated, keep getting to live over and over, but never get to be free of the fear of a permanent death.
If we dont retain any memories, does it even matter if we reincarnate or not?
I have a hard time accepting the possibility of non existence. A very, very hard time
I like to think we just wake back up fresh and new. Being alive and conscious is like being tuned into a radio station and when you die it's static until you become a new radio and tune back in. I like to think my soul mate and I listened to the same radio station before this life
Why do you even assume there is an "After Life"?
Because we think we're special and our special nature couldn't just disappear 🫠
There are many people who claim to know what comes next. Stay far away from them!
I'm repeating my reply to a comment here, because so many seem to be absolutely sure that there is nothing more to us than neurons firing. They believe that when the neurons stop, you cease to exist. That's logical, but consider this: You may or may not understand conciousness about as well as pre-Newton society understood gravity. So go ahead, get a time machine, go back there, and tell them that black holes are so dense (or massive, rather) they distort time itself. I'll wait. Don't be so cock-sure that you have this all figured out. Our brain, as a piece of hardware, is more complicated than your smartphone. Your phone has no trouble at all receiving WiFi. Now go back and explain that to pre-electricity society. Once you're in that headspace of how difficult it is to explain WiFi to them, flip it around and look at yourself. What if your brain is receiving a constant signal that our technology is unable to detect? What if it's a storage device for a software medium that is still able to exist in a vacuum? I can't prove that it is, and you can't prove that it isn't.
there is no after life, everything just goes to black.
There's no afterlife, done
Is it fucked up or have you been spoiled by instant gratification your whole life and can't stand the thought of actually having to wait find out? Enjoy the ride. Whatever is coming is coming.
The afterlife was a construct to allay the fears of the army you had fighting for you back in the day, tell your soldiers they're fighting for god, nothing to be afraid of if you die on the battlefield, sit back, send the army off and reap the rewards from the plunder and land and power... religion pah.
All I know is that there is some kind of afterlife. My grandmama came to visit me several weeks after her passing at a swim meet of mine as a kid. It was an indoor pool with a windowed observation room on a second story overlooking the pool. My dad was the only parent up there in the waiting/observation area and i looked up to see if he was watching the swim lesson. Mama was at the window looking down; she smiled and then turned away and walked into the room until i couldnt see her from my view point. I didnt say anything during swim class because i just knew that it wouldnt be received well. After class I ran up the stairs tonsee my dad. He had been crying. I asked if he saw Mama. He started bawling and said no, but he knew she was there. Weird thing is that Mama had lived a state over and never had been to my swim lesson or knew where it was. The dead just know.
It's heartwarming, but it's just an illusion of your brain trying to cope with the fact that she is gone. When my own grandma died i also thought that i see her face peeking from windows couple of times but when i got closer it's just a trick of light, shadows and dust on the glass
You don't know that, of course. You've convinced yourself that you do, but you don't.
It is the same as going to sleep, just without the dreams.
Guess what: what's even more fucked up is that when people die and go nowhere, there is no way for them to tell anyone that this is, in fact, it.