The Ultimate Mystery

A question philosophers and theologists have been pondering for ages probably since the dawn of early humans ... What happens after we die? Perhaps more incited by the fear of the death than curiosity, but what really happens after this inevitable moment that will happen in all of our lives? Do we fade into a state of nonexistence, unconsciousness, and total unawareness for eternity after our bodies have died and decayed? Do our thoughts, and memories transfer into another state of existence? Does our conscious re-emerge into another living being (reincarnation)? Or are we all just apart of one conscious being experiencing the universe through living entities? What do you think happens after we die?

 

We die. We know that all our consciousness is dependant on our brain chemistry. Once that shuts down we shut down. I don't understand all the mystery around this issue. You be able to make a mystery out of some sort of deistic god or higher power flowing through the universe because we cannot possibly test that in any way shape or form but we have pretty good idea of we work. Saying that we get to live on after we die is just wishful thinking. I would love to be wrong, but there is no evidence to support the idea in fact we actually have evidence that pretty well demonstrates otherwise.

 

yeah, we die. consciousness arises from brain chemistry. no more brain chemistry = no more consciousness.

people invented the ideas of souls, afterlifes, etc. and all that because it's not very comforting to think that all your hopes, dreams, thoughts, memories, identity just stops while your body decomposes when you die. guess what? reality doesn't exist to comfort you.

the REAL ultimate mystery, the one that philosophers have pondered for ages and have pretty much determined it's actually impossible to answer, is "is the reality we experience the true reality?"
it's possible (highly unlikely, but not IMpossible) that everything we experience, even our interactions with other people, are all part of a simulation. even your own body, or your memories. you could be a brain floating in a nutrient bath with electrodes on some alien spaceship being fed a very realistic simulation, and there's no way to prove otherwise. the only thing you CAN prove is that your own, inner thoughts exist. hence, "i think, therefore i am" is the best answer to the question, and is pretty much the most famous quote in all of philosophy.

 

I would say death as we know it certainly destroys our consciousness as a distinct, thinking entity. "We" are gone, but in as much as this is true, "we" are no longer separated from the great unthinking part of the universe.

 

hummm, if we die so as our concience

 

Oh we know what happens to us after death.
Either you are:
1. Cremated and buried or ashes thrown into the ocean.
2. The corpse prettied up by some artist then burial.
3. Corpse thrown into a mass gravecause they can't identify who the corpse belonged to.

But I think the question here we really want to ask is:

Is our body really us?
Or is the spirit us and we are just inhabiting this fleshy host and after we die the host is no longer useful to us (the spirit) so the spirit moves on.

 

All matter is just energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.

 

It took only 6 posts for the new age nonsense to begin sinking through.

 

Only cause I had school and work today.

 

I am the one with pneumonia here.

 

I'll see the answer when i am dead. Or not.

 

maybe we will become a ghost after all?

 

New age nonsense? It sounds possible to me. Maybe this thread title was a little misleading, I wouldn't call it the ultimate mystery after all, my bad

 

Nothing happens after we die. We just die. Simple.

 

actually, matter is energy at extremely high frequencies. high-mass particles, like protons and neutrons act more particle-like, while low-mass particles, like electrons, have both particle-like and wave-like properties (with high frequencies). extremely low/zero-mass particles, like photons, are very wavelike and have very slow (and easily measurable) frequencies.

SCIENCE: disproving crackpot theories since 1000ce, more or less.

probably don't have to wait that long. just get someone to give you anesthetic. or knock you unconscious.

theory: consciousness arises from brain function.
hypothesis: if brain functions cease, consciousness ceases.
experiment: knock you unconscious. record results. did you go to an alternate dimension temporarily? did your consciousness have to hang around for a while and wait until your brain started working again before going back into your body? or did you just stop being conscious for a while?

 

If that is the case, there is some evidence to conclude that you can still hear some things while unconscious/in a coma. That would imply that either you are still partially conscious, or you in fact become a cool ghost thingie.

 

Asdf, that wont prove anything what so ever. When you are unconscious, brain function does not cease, otherwise you would be dead. You can't compare being unconscious to being totally dead, there is a fine difference between the two. Your experiment is flawed.

However, there have been cases where doctors have brought people back from death after as much as 30 minutes since being declared terminally dead. People who have come back from death have said to have seen things like flying through tunnels, seeing something they describe as a (silver rope?), dead relatives, etc. It could be just final brain activity before total shut down, who knows really.

 

No they were not dead but falsely pronounced dead. Human brain cannot survive 30 minutes without oxygen. So unless those people were a drooling mess in comma attatched to fifty different life supporting machines it is a big no no and I advice you to check out this balooney further.
Oh and near death experiences are very well explained and experimented with.
"who knows really" will not fly here. This field is actually very well testable with science so this sort of speculation is more ridicilous than the usual one.

 

It isn't that the brain cannot survive without oxygen... it is that anerobic chemistry produces destructive radicals. Damage caused by those radicals is what you don't recover from, not so much the lack of oxygen.

If there were some way to stop those radicals forming, like if some substance were present that interrupts their formation, then your brain would be able to survive without oxygen... and you would be unconscious but revivable.

At the moment, death is really just an agreement made by doctors to give up on you. A more upto date concept of death would be with respect to which biochemical changes are reversible, and which are irreversible.


A researcher in this field of medicine must:
(1) differentiate the biochemistry that is reversible and that which is irreversible.
(2) Find ways to prevent the irreversible stuff from happening.
(3) Find ways to reverse the reversible stuff.

 

Either way there seems to be no dispute that the consciousness is completely dependant on your brain chemistry. Hence if brain gets destroyed, you get destroyed. If brain gets put back together, you are as well (although this part is much trickier than just destroying it.). There is nothing suggesting anything more such as a soul nor is there any need for it. Sorry. If you like to keep yourself deluded and hope for an afterlife be my guest but don't expect to pass a reality check.