161–170 of 197 posts
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I am afraid that the last few minutes of life will be like a confusing and disoriented nightmare. That has always seemed to me to be the most likely scenario as your brain is shutting down.
Interestingly there are two David Lynch movies (Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive) that can be interpreted as just that: someone's disorienting nightmare as they are dying.
I have that inner emotion, when thinking about death. It makes me very uneasy. When We die, if there is nothing coming, how is it to not exist? I mean, what is it like? Pure black and emptyness? I then comfort myself into thinking, in the end it comes down to energy. Like being part of that endless stream of energy that became matter and probably will return to energy somewhere in infinty. Or do we maybe just restart…
The real question for me is if consciousness is even real/physical or just an illusion. After you die time has no meaning and we don't know what happens trillions and trillions of years from that point. Maybe with limited matter or infinity, the exact universe patterns emerge once again that give you consciousness. Maybe you are reborn again in the same identical universe that contains your biological pattern, and li…
I was walking down some very steep stairs once and almost tripped. I caught the handrail, but for the briefest moment, I was struck by the idea that in a potentially infinite number of parallel universes, other versions of me failed to grab the rail and tumbled to their death. It was quite an odd moment, I didn't worry about the fact that I had nearly fallen, I just felt bad for all the ones that did.
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I was already on high alert when I saw that this was written in Frontiers, a potentially predatory journal publisher that makes it notoriously difficult to adequately review (and reject) bad papers. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiers_Media#Editorial_conc... .
"Predatory journal" is a bit overkill. Seems like an ok journal. https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=21100199831&ti... The specific journals you refer to in the wikipedia article have dropped in popularity, but this particular one hasn't. Frontiers is a huge family of journals. Some are good, some are excellent, some not so good. I wouldn't call any of them predatory though. And even if there was controvers…
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I was already on high alert when I saw that this was written in Frontiers, a potentially predatory journal publisher that makes it notoriously difficult to adequately review (and reject) bad papers. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiers_Media#Editorial_conc... .
Meh, Frontiers is no worse than others. I've published in Nature. I've published in Frontiers. I have to say I had an easier time reproducing results published in "lower" tier journals than high impact journals. It is more a sign that peer-review is broken
Has there really never been anyone who died while hooked up to an EEG? That seems unlikely to me. Edit: liars liars pants on fire. It has been done before. https://www.sciencealert.com/brain-activity-recorded-as-much...
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I also find comfort in the idea of becoming food after we die. I remember reading somewhere how a beached whale in the arctic can be a life-saving windfall for the scavengers there. Helped me see the positive in something I’d always seen as purely tragic.
Same here. It's helpful insofar as any story can be helpful in the face of what we have to go through. Interestingly enough, although my wife shares the same beliefs as me in terms of religion and God, the stories that resonate most with her from that show were the evocative ones about God and heaven. She told me that the science-based ones barely register to her at all, and almost not at all on an emotional level. A…
There is something in us that makes us yearn for more than the short lives we have now (hardly anybody would choose to die if they had good health under normal circumstances), so these do resonate with us more than a purely materialistic world view, which has ostensibly left people with lack of contentment and sense of purpose.
Say your brain has a bunch of neurons in place that form every experience of your life and form every thought system you have. Surely a specific structure of your neurons also causes you to feel the experience of being a "self" and everything else as being the "other".
Now, as we die, it's easy to imagine that our neurons are still living on that last bit of oxygen and energy. Systems start to slowly shut down. One of those systems is the one described above. The one which separates the "experiencer" from the experience. At some point, you transition to a point where you can't tell yourself apart from anything else. You lose the self forever.
Must be a wild ride.
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I'm rewatching Midnight Mass on Netflix with my wife. They have some very powerful monologues on death. This is one that occurred to me just now, when two characters are discussing what they believe happens after death: "When I die, my body stops functioning. Five minutes later, my brain cells start dying. But in the meantime, in between, maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT – the psychedelic drug released when we…
I also find comfort in the idea of becoming food after we die. I remember reading somewhere how a beached whale in the arctic can be a life-saving windfall for the scavengers there. Helped me see the positive in something I’d always seen as purely tragic.
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Everyone has been dead before: Do you have any trepidations about the times before you were born? It's trite to say this, yes, but it gives some comfort to know we are born with the experience of not being alive. Of course Your Metaphysics may apply.
Yeah, personally, I feel tons of anxiety about the effectively-infinite void of time before my existence, and that which will come after it. They are the same to me. Even though physically we are "born", I find it really upsetting that our experience and sense of selves is just an emergent organic process, a millisecond of a dream padded by infinite nothingness.
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I think the distinction is the subjective perception that time has stretched out a thousand years. It's not that time has literally dilated, just that our "normal" perception of time has changed. Perceived time dilation occurs under certain drugs (to include those endogenous to the human body) and the OP thought has been something that has occurred to me (and others) as well. IIRC, the movie American Beauty suggests…
Subjective perception still requires energy to percept . Thus, to perceive time dilation your brain needs more energy to process it, but there is no a source of such energy.
There is still energy at the moment of death (e.g., your ATP doesn't instantaneously disappear), meaning for a few brief instances, there is still energy to perceive and during these instances, the subjective experience of time may differ from normal day-to-day experience. It's not to say perception actually goes on forever, but the subjective experience of time feels like it does (or, at least changes our normal perception of time).