Theories About Death

As much as the thought terrifies me and makes me very uncomfortable thinking about, I have to side with theory 1 on the matter. I can't put my belief in reincarnation or such because I would be lying to myself just to make the fact of death easier to swallow.

reply to post by PurpleVortex

Do you dream? I hope so. Well, wouldn't you say there is awareness outside of your body? Ever heard of lucid dreaming? Out of body experience? Lack of knowledge and experience dictate peoples beliefs so i don't blame you. But....you are in for a big surprise my friend.

You are comparing death to sleep? One needs to be alive to sleep, dream and have out of body experiences. Awareness is an epiphenomenon of a living sensual organism. The prerequisite of a living organism is to be alive. But lack of knowledge and experience dictate peoples beliefs so i don't blame you.

Originally posted by Ovadose
Theory 1 - Boring and my gut says it's not true, until you can prove that nothing happens I choose not to believe this.

Theory 2 - The First Law of Thermodynamics provides for the preservation of energy under all circumstances: A given quantity of energy can be endlessly converted, recycled and diluted, but it will never cease to exist. Murphy's Laws

Theory 3 - How dare a all knowing/powerful God judge me, as far as I'm aware I did not chose to be born or chose the circumstances that is my life, guess I'm going to hell if this is true. Atleast it's by choice.

Theory 4 - This is nice and all but it begs the question, where are all these new souls comming from?

Theory 5 - This theory is the closest to my own beliefs, I am we are GOD experiencing myself through individualism.

Number 5 is actually just as sh*tty as number 1 when you think about it. Imagine dying and coming to the harrowing realization that you're completely alone, everybody you ever knew only existed as a figment of your imagination. You'd be back to square one, just some bored "god" with too much time on your hands having a daydream. Pretty grim.

reply to post by BreathOfFreshAir


i think you misunderstood my response...

i believe the same thing you do... i think you read it wrong.

The big question of life and death only answerable after its to late to relate it to the living. I have often tried to find my own answer and it is a tough nut to crack. On one hand I think the idea that no energy can be destroyed, and since I feel that the brain is only to allow the body..... organism to function in the material world if you will, then when the brain dies the energy must be doing something else or go somewhere else. I can only hope that there is some benevolent creator waiting to transform my reaching for clarity into full understanding.

In the end I have no idea and must allow for the possibility that after life there is nothing. Since I am not religious in the sense of the accepted religions I can only hope that there is something after and I hope that extends to the life of my friends in the animal world that I have left behind.

Originally posted by k1k1to
reply to post by BreathOfFreshAir

 

i think you misunderstood my response...

i believe the same thing you do... i think you read it wrong.

Response? Response to what? I read your OP in its entirety and was answering your question, not mine.

Do your views fall in line with any of the above, or do you have a unique perspective on Death?

I was simply stating what MY beliefs were, thus adding to your thread.

I have always said to my wife that when I die I intend to take myself with me, and when I say myself I mean my experiences, my knowledge, my personality, basically me as I am now ( or then ) so when I pass on my next life I will remember what I learnt, what I did and who I was, so basically reincarnation.

Im also of the belief that our life is one of learning to be better beings, to learn to do what is right by others. and that once we die we move to the next level and start over trying to be even better.

I also think sometimes that we die and our essence, our knowledge and experiences are given back to the creator to add to their own.

My wife however thinks that when we die thats is lights out.

So I dillydally between most if not all of the theories.

reply to post by Dark Ghost
Logically, I think 'nothingness' is the most likely outcome of death...no more life. Personally, it appeals to me as well although a lot of people would prefer *something more.*

Reincarnation is intriguing and hard to dismiss out-of-hand if we read any of the work of Ian Stevenson. To my thinking reincarnation doesn't make a lot of sense. Would it be random? Would whatever passes for our consciousness pass from the dying to the newly-conceived/born without any prejudice or motive? By what process would energy move between bodies?

If you think not, would it be held accountable for its actions whilst incarnate and be assigned bodies and lives according to some plan or bureaucratic process? This would demand increasing complexity as we would have to assume some after-life hierarchy at work. Who (or what) would decide who (or what) decides what happens to us in the after-life? How would they earn that position? Would they be held accountable?

If death means an appointment with some asshole carrying a tick-sheet and a questionnaire, I think a lot of people would be gutted. Spend all our lives filling in forms and queuing in shops and traffic only to find the same old BS waiting in the hereafter.

One of my worst fears is that nothingness isn't what's waiting. The alternatives are just depressing. [shakes head and sighs]

reply to post by adjensen


so why are we self aware?

I don't think anyone administrates Karma, i think it's just an universal law, it's hard to believe that people who does bad actions that can't be erased arent in someway "punished" its just as simple as Action and reaction.

Originally posted by LesMisanthrope
reply to post by PurpleVortex

 

Do you dream? I hope so. Well, wouldn't you say there is awareness outside of your body? Ever heard of lucid dreaming? Out of body experience? Lack of knowledge and experience dictate peoples beliefs so i don't blame you. But....you are in for a big surprise my friend.

You are comparing death to sleep? One needs to be alive to sleep, dream and have out of body experiences. Awareness is an epiphenomenon of a living sensual organism. The prerequisite of a living organism is to be alive. But lack of knowledge and experience dictate peoples beliefs so i don't blame you.

Well, how do you explain NDE? Ever had a NDE? I assume not. Clinically dead for 10 minutes? Cause I have. I was much more aware than when I was alive. Like I said lack of experience sir...Have a NDE and come back (hopefully) and maybe we can continue this conversation.

Originally posted by Itisnowagain
reply to post by Dark Ghost

 

When you appear to die here, another dream appears.
You are just viewing a dream now and nothing will change for you when you apparently die.
In a dream you have at night do you ever remember who you are or what you do in waking state? In a dream you are just seeing and being aware, the same as now.

The seeing and being aware is eternal.

I quite like this but I couldn't live by it. If I am living with the attitude that I am inside a dream I am disempowering my potential as a human being. My own attitude is that life is a game played on myriad levels by every living thing, not just humans, and through understanding this and watching all the interactions I can step upon any particular stage that captures my interest and play along in my own way, as I am doing now. I might not be very good at it but I still enjoy trying. As they say: Its not the song that counts its the singing that matters. And it is not the dying and what happens after, its the living and what we do now.

Originally posted by SpearMint
Theory 1. Often people don't want to believe this because they think it's boring, but I think it's that simple, because I think life and conciousness is just chemical reactions and electrical signals. That's what I will believe until it's proven to be wrong, because that's what appears to be true.

edit on 15-1-2013 by SpearMint because: (no reason given)

I believe that you get what you believe. If you believe you are nothingness then nothingness is what you will be after you die.

Originally posted by PurpleVortex
Well, how do you explain NDE? Ever had a NDE? I assume not. Clinically dead for 10 minutes? Cause I have. I was much more aware than when I was alive. Like I said lack of experience sir...Have a NDE and come back (hopefully) and maybe we can continue this conversation.

Actually I have. But I can assume from your response that you assume too often.

There's a difference between being near-dead and dead. Were you buried? Did your body decompose? If you died, why are you still here? It's because you're still alive. Your body kept on ticking. Your blood still moves through your veins. And most importantly, your brain gave you the imagery you mistook for an afterlife, because it was still functioning amid the stress of near-death.

You weren't aware, you were trapped in illusion because you were unaware. You did what every unaware brain does when asleep—you dreamt.

reply to post by Dark Ghost


I believe #2 is the correct version. Rinse and repeat until we learn what we are suppose to. Then up to a higher existence. Rinse and repeat. At least for those of us that have souls. I'm pretty sure that many people do not.

I wholeheartedly believe it is not about worshiping a certain God. It's all about co existing properly.

Originally posted by Kandinsky
Reincarnation is intriguing and hard to dismiss out-of-hand if we read any of the work of Ian Stevenson.

Stevenson is dismissed by most because his methods weren't scientific, though they were espoused to be. He always came in after the fact (after a person started claiming that they had lived past lives,) so there is no way to determine if that person really "remembered" anything, or if there was parental influence or cultural contamination. Every carefully reviewed case that I looked at didn't hold up under scrutiny, at least as far as being able to attest to a non-contaminated report.

When something happens, a fact (comprised of information units clustered via contextual association) emerges to reflect that it did - in fact - happen. This factual unit cluster of information is yet another addition to what is called the Informational Continuum, and this gathering mass of information clusters ultimately defines what we call "reality", establishing immutable aspects concerning reality, such as "natural law" and universal forces. This is accomplished by contextual precedence and the historical ramification that naturally builds into "the way things are" over time.

All of reality tumbles out from instant to instant under the rule of this very stable and predictable system of default progressive development, with "residual information" (fact clusters developing and modifying established and emerging relative contextual relationships by default) acting as the invisible hand of order beneath all that occurs. And then there's the brain, and what it does.

We all know that the brain - any brain - takes DNA predilections and translate that information into dynamic action commands for the organism that possesses that brain, allowing a lot more functionality than would be possible if the entire control process was spread out throughout the entire body, centered solely on the DNA directives contained within each cell. What seems to give people trouble is the fact that the brain configures - and literally launches into permanent existence - its own form of information that is just as physically permanent as the residual information that guides the larger progressive development of reality itself and everything that exists as real within it.

If that brain's range of survival action items include self awareness (as is the case with our own Homo Sapiens brain) then that self awareness - like all information clusters that exist - is also just as physically permanent as any other form of information. Just as permanent as the information that has collected since the beginning of this reality confine and established how this reality confine works as it has.

When the brain itself dies - it does because it manufactures information, but it's not information - that sentient information (you can call it the mind, or you can call it the human spirit) must persist in the exact same way that all information persists. The only difference is that it KNOWS that it persists, since it is self aware.

And this is the true nature of "eternal life". It's not permanent material life, and it's not permanent energy. Neither is permanent in truth - the whole "energy cannot be created nor destroyed" meme is just a misinterpretation of Newton's 1st Law of Thermodynamics, so don't bother wasting anyone's time with that foolishness. It's not what we corporeal humans understand as "life", but it is sentience and it is dynamic, proactive, reactive, and absolutely aware of itself as existent and unique.

And this is what each of us becomes - each one of us as a separate and unique whole unto ourselves - immediately when our brain shuts down for good. We can get a taste of it when our brain is coming close to shutting down, since the "mind" is fully capable of disengaging from the brain if it feels that it is appropriate. That said, the mind - as a whole - understands the value in staying associated with - being fed by, I suppose - the corporeal brain for as long as possible. Not that there aren't plenty of minds that have purposely broken off this association with the corporeal brain that produced them, and with extreme prejudice in some cases.

For the human mind, this death event is more akin to a 2nd birth event than like anything else. Of course, the corporeal point of perspective isn't privy to this, since such a perspective is based on immediate memory, as was proven in 2008 with that fMRI brain scan study that most folks decided was proof that none of us have any free will (stupid, but what would you expect from traditionalists).

So, 1-2-3-4-5 are all incorrect. You - the actual sentient you that exists and is being developed even as you read this - already know this. When you die, and there's no reason to fix your point of perspective to your emerging memory cloud, it'll all become very clear to you. Well, that is unless you become rigid in your beliefs and literally manufacture your heaven or hell with your own firm belief that they exist. If so, here's to hoping that you fully believe that you deserve heaven. Right? I mean, how much would it suck for you to subconsciously doubt your goodness, and sentence your own self to hell as a result. No doubt that it's happened, and that it probably happens all the time. After all, sentience isn't objective. It sees what it expects to see if there aren't any "reality anchors" to challenge that expectation. And once you've left the material realm, you've left all reality anchors behind.

Death really is a significant transition. It's good to know this stuff beforehand.

Originally posted by darktouch
reply to post by adjensen

 

so why are we self aware?

I suggest you ask those who believe that we are nothing more than self-aware animals -- I am not one of them. I just explained why that answer is the most logical (though I obviously don't believe it is correct.)

I don't think anyone administrates Karma, i think it's just an universal law, it's hard to believe that people who does bad actions that can't be erased arent in someway "punished" its just as simple as Action and reaction.

Action and reaction don't go across decades and multiple lives in multiple locations -- without an entity and/or process to administer it, that theory makes zero sense.

Originally posted by Starwise
reply to post by Dark Ghost

 

For a while now I have been thinking very hard about all of this. I bounce back and forth between numbers
1
2
4
5

If you were attempting to be freakin' funny, it worked!

Personally, I would be P'd off if when I die I will wake up in another place where I have to do stuff, like take out the garbage, bathe, shave, WORK...YUCK!

Honestly, if all I had to do was think and communicate with other minds - that would be okay.

reply to post by adjensen


Why the need to think someone is in charge or administrates it?

Originally posted by darktouch
reply to post by adjensen

 

Why the need to think someone is in charge or administrates it?

How else would it work? Magic?

Let's say I'm a creep in real life and always treat the poor terribly. Then I die. How do I go from being nothing, or a spirit, to being a baby who will spend their life poor and being treated terribly by creeps? That implies a process, at least, directed by both intelligence and the ability to tell the future, so that I don't get put into a poor baby that gets adopted by rich people and can go back to being a creep.