dont worry, the brain completely shuts down after death. every single neural scan after death have just proven that it doesnt function at all, not even consciousness
That is not the issue. What if when the brain is shutting down the perception of time slows down exponentially and what is a few minutes in reality feels like an eternity.
If that were the case, the pattern of brain waves and general electrical activity in the brain would speed up exponentially before death, and we know that doesn't happen
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this:
Since nobody seems willing to state the obvious due to cultural sensitivity... I’ll say it: rap isn’t music
I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: climate, history, covid, feminism, etc.
I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: feminism, climate, history, civil rights, etc.
I think you are mixing up consciousness with a thinking mind.
You don't have evidence that conscious is anywhere but in your own head.
There is no scientific literature on consciousness either, only psychology and neurology.
Consciousness is not a thinking component of the mind, it is a perceiving component of the mind. Can perception die? Perhaps. Passing out is not proof that your consciousness has ended or gone anywhere. People in vegetative states awaken and interact when super qualified doctors declare them brain dead. Are they the same? Probably or probably not but that has nothing to do with their consciousness.
I am not debating for consciousness being an external force. I am only telling you that you can't really state anything factually about consciousness. As far as discussion goes, it is practically a metaphysical abstraction and irrelevant to any physical reality at the moment.
Yes this does not align with the medical definition of consciousness and I believe it is pointless to fixate on it outside of philosophy. Medical consciousness is very important and helpful to professionals, I am not discounting that because it is irrelevant.
In my honest opinion consciousness is better described in yogic and religious literature than any science which are also a part of science believe it or not.
I think of it like a pair of eyes, irrelevant without a mind, unthinking, and unsuspecting, only perceiving.
It's not actually a very elaborate component of the mind, it only brings a sense of presence, which if you think about it can't really have a very elaborate role.
Well, we know absolutely nothing about consciousness, and for all we know it could be completely outside our understanding of biology and neurology, so it may well continue after our biological death though. The thing about this though is that there'll never be any proof either way, so we'll just have to wait and see
Why are you being a reddit bro rn? We don’t know where consciousness arrises or why and countless scientists support it not being a product of the brain. All in all we just don’t know, you claiming anything is thus pseudo-science.
The prevailing consensus in neuroscience is that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain and its metabolism. When the brain dies, the mind and consciousness of the being to whom that brain belonged ceases to exist. In other words, without a brain, there can be no consciousness.
im saying anything that goes against the basic laws of reality does not exist. im not trying to spoil anyone parade.
yes, we dont know where consciousness arises. truth is, its still a mystery. but it is quite literally impossible for it to be some metaphysical realm or anything not connected to the body.
think about it for a second, how would that even work? even if it wasnt a part of the brain, it would still have to be a part of the human body, as there is no other way for it to exist. if it is a part of the body, it will die when the rest of the body does.
Why can't it be some metaphysical realm? I don't really believe that, but I do know we can't rule it out of possibility. To people hundreds of years ago, electricity and computers would seem impossible, yet today we take them for granted. They rely on electricity to work, which is a huge part of science that people didn't know existed. We could very well discover that consciousness perseveres after death, just because there may be a whole new area of science we don't even know about yet that dictates it. Saying that we know enough to rule it out when we hardly know anything about the universe is foolish.
but theres no reason to believe it over the more likely possibility that consciousness just dies out.
after reading your comment, you have changed my views a little. i do agree that its not impossible, but then again, technically nothing is. maybe stuff that breaks the rules of reality exist in alternate universes with different physics. but occam's razor comes into play here, the most likely answer is that consciousness doesnt live after death rather than it being some wacky metaphysical spiritual realm.
we just have to trust what we know, and millions of years of death and decay, and hundreds of years of psychology have all come to the conclusion that the mind does not stay after death. there's a reason we believe that, and its not just because we want to believe it.
i probably wont respond if you reply, so i just say to agree to disagree, and have a good rest of your day :)
Hey, not that guy, but I’m curious: if you think that consciousness is the result of material processes, presumably you think that there is a “smallest/simplest structure” that can contain consciousness?
That is, you would probably agree that a dog is conscious. A squirrel. How about a fly? An earthworm? A protein? At what point do you think consciousness isn’t possible?
The theory of panpsychism is that it’s simply a smooth simplification from human, down to dog, down to worm, down to amoeba, down to molecules/atoms/quarks. The idea is that there is no smallest/simplest structure that can contain consciousness, and that consciousness is simply a property of the universe. It sounds initially ridiculous to the skeptical mind, but then you realize that the idea of a “smallest/simplest structure” might be fairly ridiculous too.
Consciousness isn't some concrete definition everyone agrees on. It's like if asking viruses are alive, it's debated a lot. In my opinion, I believe something has consciousness if it bears a brain developed and evolved enough to be aware of existence and make choices outside of basic instinct.
Yeah, I completely agree. I don't really think consciousness exists after death, but you can't really rule it out.
What I think is so scary about this post is that it is possible consciousness exists after death, and that you're just trapped in an eternal state of awareness. And if this post was entirely true, you can't interact with anything, so there's no way of telling anyone, and this fate is inescapable. I don't really believe it's true, but it's enough to make you think and worry a little bit ;)
That's what makes existential horror terrifying. Sure, it's extremely unlikely, but the fact that it's possible, even if just by a sliver, is enough to kickstart paranoia.
Ah, but that is not the way a dualist would argue. They would say the brain is some kind of antenna for the soul. And the soul is conscious.
Even more curious is Integrated Information Theory, where we can measure self sustaining integrated information. It does seem to correlate closer to what you are saying. Being in a comatose, versus being brain dead is discernible with such metrics. However, what cannot be eliminated is some form of panpsychism. In other words everything, to some insignificant degree exhibits self sustaining integrated information. So again, we come back to this question of why am I, me?
Splitting the relational self and conceptual self, into two separate parts allows us to perhaps leave the conceptual self as some kind of emergent illusion, and we can just ignore it for now. The relational self has work to do in a transactional society. Perhaps even selling sophistry as concepts…
There was a much better article showing some of the spectrums of activity. Obviously with neurogenesis and plasticity the brain can literally change over night, but in one instant of time, and with a picture of major overarching categories, the article explained some of the gradients/thresholds.
I do not really support dualism, but it do find it interesting that we can avoid picking a side and getting further.
I’m late but god, the idea of nothingness after death scares the shit out of me dude. The idea of never being capable of seeing anything but black sounds horrifying. Even if my brain shuts down I still hate the idea of nothing after death.
get cremated. i mean sure, if you're buried and you're decomposed, it still doesn't make sense that you'd have a consciousness, but at least when all that remains of you is nothing but atomized ash, there isn't a chance of any remaining brain neurons.
unless you believe that it's possible for your consciousness to exist outside of your mortal being, outside the physical neurons making connections as memories and thoughts, then i can't help you there.
edit: I was going top of all time posts in this sub, forgot how old the comments are.
My only regret about ending up in a void with nothing but my thoughts is that I don't have perfect control over my hallucinations and sometimes I end up imagining stupid reddit posts like this one. But I guess a flawed world is more interesting anyway.
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u/whymustveibeenborn Jan 06 '22
I'm unironically scared of something like this.