Death

[the.crooked]

Recent events in my life have caused me to make this thread.

 

 

I would like to hear people's thoughts on the subject.

 

 

I will return here later to contribute my own, and move pertinent thoughts from the other thread in here.

 

 

-until then

[MAR]

I am super curious about death, obviously not to the point to kill myself, but I really want to know what happens. I am not afraid of death, rather if i was afraid of something, it would be the manner that I would die.

 

There are a lot of discussions in Judaism about the afterlife but interestingly, most Rabbi's feel that it is impossible to know what it is like for sure.

 

But yeah the idea of death is really neat.

[ILOTSMYBRAIN]

II am not afraid of death, rather if i was afraid of something, it would be the manner that I would die.

 

This right here is exactly how I feel about it.

 

I'm an Atheist. So as far as any promise land after you die, I don't believe one exists. In my opinion you are given life, and that life is only temporary and after you die there is nothingness. Basically you get to rest easy.

 

I'm not ready to go yet, but I'm pretty sure by the time I get there, (hoping I last for at least another 30 years, I'm pretty young) I'll probably be looking forward to it.

 

Cheers to anyone who thinks differently though. I guess it would be nice to "live forever".

[Decyferon]

I think your view on death does vary depending on your religious beliefs. I myself am an atheist. I believe once your dead, your dead thats it. Nothing after that, no reincarnation, no heaven and no hell. I don't believe that people have souls or anything like that.

 

My wife once got very upset because I said I have no soul and when she asked if I would like to be cremated or buried I said I don't care, it doesn't matter I am gone.

 

Funerals and everything after death is all about helping the people who are left behind, cope with their loss. It is a very interesting subject and would love to hear from people that may had died for a short time and resucitated (my spelling is terrible!!) just to see what their recollections of the experience are.

 

But personally once your gone your gone and there is nothing after that.

[DonCheadle]

"Defining God as aligning a divining rod with your reclining bod

Cause life is fickle, hellish, anemic, sickle cellish

Dude, you'll get chopped up like pickle relish

And when we perish, we're, what's the term dude, worm food

Worm food, friends' memories fade, you're remembered by what you've made

So I intertwine my mind and my rhymes in a braid"

 

couldn't help quoting the most shameless nerd rapper MC Paul B's death lyric.

 

I am interested in the 12+ minutes of pure brain activity we experience upon death,

as mentioned by Dr. Timothy Leary. It would be like an eternity of lucid dreaming.

[dowmagik]

Twain summed it up well,

 

"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

[shitting]

That's awesome^

 

 

Death is the alternative to living forever and who wants to do that? Earth isn't going to last forever and neither are we. I wouldn't have it any other way.

 

atheist

[lord_casek]

death is just like changing clothes, at least that's what i've always thought.

[Poesia [ ] T]

All i can say about this its a life's work in art or poetry, its a few volumes of some of the best philosophy and when you figure it out let me know.

[Seph]

Over the weekend I was working at this old house,

we were painting it and my brother was listening to some latin music

and this song came up..

Todo Tiene su final-Hector Lavoe, and it got me thinking..

[I was born here]

When we die so does our brain, along with consciousness, so death doesn't bother me much now because it probably wont then. But my view may change over time, who knows.

[the dark horse]

when you die, your body is going to recycle itself back into the earth's cycles through decomposition, and once that is complete, your consciousness is going to imprint itself into your environment (sort of what some would call a ghost) ... whether you are stuck there forever or eventually move onto something else is beyond me ....... but dont take my word for it!

[Removed]

Contemplating death can be interesting but it is at best a stimulating guessing game.

However I have found it easier to understand as an individual if I look at death from a evolutionary systems perspective. Its sad for individuals involved but helps to renew the system.

[russell jones]

I've gone done this road twice, and I ended up surviving, but the fear only lasted for a moment. I don't if that is just a function of the manner in which I might have gone, which was bleeding to death, or death in general.

 

Honestly, the manner of my death doesn't scare me as much as the inescapable paradox of the end of my consciousness. It just will not click in my head. But in the moment that I thought it was going to happen, it seemed pretty easy.

 

This may sound immature, but I am seriously hoping to live forever.

[the.crooked]

Well, I am back.

 

 

Death has been one of my main thoughts throughout my life. From the time I was a little kid tellin folks I was atheist I heard constantly from peers "You are nice, but you know you are going to hell right?"

 

Makes one consider death often.

 

For the longest time I agreed with most people's sentiments on here about the end of consciousness etc. but ultimately it comes down to not knowing.

 

I have begun to look at it more like I look at the construction of formal logic through negation and disjunction.

 

If you take our existence as the concept "P" and the symbol "~" to be that of negation then:

 

P = our lives.

 

but in so much as we experience this life, we know there is something that it is not, namely that of non existence. So necessarily, there is something other than our life, death.

 

~P = death.

 

however, the expression "Life or Death" betrays something else about metaphysical eternity. Namely that the disjunction of the two, (P v ~ P) must also have its negation.

 

so,

 

P

~P

therefore

(P v ~P)

~(P v ~P)

 

ad infinitum.

 

 

 

to admit of the boundary between life and death is to admit of an infinitude of necessary boundaries between life, death, and whatever else there may be.

 

 

 

Death does not scare me in the least. In fact, like MAR, I am quite curious about it.

 

What I fear, is becoming old and feeble.

 

 

Living forever is only as good as the body that contains the eternally sharp mind...

[MAR]

do atheists believe in souls, or a part of the body that is not really perceived through science or do they believe the body is just that, and when you die its totally over.

 

i mean you do have to believe in a god persay to believe in other manifestations of life. I mean science does that all the time.

[the.crooked]

The soul can be accounted for just as well with a sense of consciousness as an emergent property of dynamic complex systems.

 

There is no cartesian theatre for me. But there is still that which is uniquely me alone. The internal cognitive structures I have are what define the boundaries of my consciusness. While they are similar in structure to anyone else, my cognitive structures are different because of the unique experiences of my life in the order that they occurred.

 

 

Soul, Self Reference, Cartesian theatre, whatever you wanna call it. There must be some acceptance of the irreducibility of one's own sense of existence.

[Cracksmoka]

...comes ripping.

[BELTOLEUM]

I used to be afraid of death and i would think about it non-stop for about

2 months straight...it honestly haunted me.

Then i figured you have to get over it cause it will happen no matter what.

So i occasionally think about it now and i think that i have to make the best

of my life.

To me it is really hard to believe in an afterlife.

cause logically if you think about it once you die your brain shuts down and

you are Dead.

now that i have put that thought in my head it is extremely hard for me to

get it out and try to believe that your soul goes somewhere or something

instead of you are dead and nothing happens cause it would make me feel

alot better then knowing that nothing happens.

but that is just my thought and no one can really prove anything that happens

after death.

[Cracksmoka]

i know some of you have heard of the theory of a "universal consciousness". Im not saying THAT is the truth, i don't really care what the truth is... i worry about today, ill deal with tomorrow when i wake up... IF i wake up. But the IDEA of a universal consciousness is pretty intriguing... yo.

[isayedGIT!]

do atheists believe in souls, or a part of the body that is not really perceived through science or do they believe the body is just that, and when you die its totally over.

 

i mean you do have to believe in a god persay to believe in other manifestations of life. I mean science does that all the time.

I would say that only prerequisite for being labeled an atheist is that you believe there is no divine consciousness responsible for creating our universe. I have read that the concept of a soul in christianity is a direct rip-off of Plato's ideas about "forms" and a perfect objective reality seperate from ours (soul heaven?) in an effort to reconcile conflicting religious and scientific/philosophic beliefs during the medieval period. So I would say the two really aren't connected.

[the.crooked]

It is not that metaphysical structures rip eachother off, its that because humans share very similar cognitive structures, their outputs may have a common form. The language may be different sure, but they need not be exclusive in their dogmas.

[MAR]

so can an atheist believe in an afterlife?

[the.crooked]

I don't see why not.

 

The presupposition that a deity does not govern my existence does not exclude the possibility that the form of my existence may change.

[menaceIIsobriety]

CREMATION

 

damn rotting on this doomed toxic planet.

[Cracksmoka]

 

The presupposition that a deity does not govern my existence does not exclude the possibility that the form of my existence may change.

 

*precisely.

 

 

 

when people look right past what i write in this section of the forum... its because of the name isnt it? :rolleyes:

[isayedGIT!]

You were talking about universal consciousness. If you're talking about what I think you are, isn't that concept in direct opposition to the idea of a unique and unchanging eternal soul?

[Cracksmoka]

partly... but like i said it isn't exactly what I believe... its just a theory that incorporates something from both sides... it doesn't necessarily give credence to any form of god... but it also doesn't rule out a "form" of an afterlife... even if it is a form that we are a part of even if on a subconscious level day to day.

 

 

like i said, it dosent effect me at all... i just roll with the punches bro... lifes simpler that way. hopefully death will be too.

[russell jones]

Dying is for suckas. I want to live for ever, and I want to be sharp forever. Death has been inevitable previously, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that death may be conquered in the future.

 

I have been contemplating the idea of "downloading" my consciousness into some sort of energy field. I wonder what the implications would be for my sense of self. Would a unique self split from a piece of consciousness that continues on. How would those selves relate to the continuum of what I perceive to be my ego?

 

Death itself could be horrible though, there is no doubt about that, and hopefully I can not be too condescending towards the younger members of the board in saying that your perceptions of what death means will change significantly as you age, and my metaphysical wanderings based on what I was learning as a young undergraduate seem like so much mental masturbation compared to the reality of my life now.

 

Oh, and another thing, the eternally sharp mind is dependent on keeping your body in good shape. Just some advice from an old guy.

[russell jones]

 

What I fear, is becoming old and feeble.

 

 

Living forever is only as good as the body that contains the eternally sharp mind...

 

Cool math problem. Symbolic logic is great because it can reduce something extremely complex down to something very simple.

 

I like the idea that a continuum of barriers or non-barriers between existence and non-existence must be the case, but at the same time I have no practical idea what this means to me, in a tangible sense. Perhaps you could comment on it? I'm a dummy sometimes, so I need to be elucidated clearly.

 

Anyways, like I said in my last post, the fear of becoming old and feeble was very strong for me at say 21 years of age, but doesn't mean as much to me now. Things change, and I change with it, it's as simple as that. Taking care of one's body can prevent one from becoming old and feeble, a fact that becomes readily apparent when one gets older. By the way, I'm 34, which means I am not old, but I think I've become aware of what it means to age, at least a little bit. Of course, when I'm 44, I'll think what I'm saying now is stupid.