Near Death Expectation

[Deepwater6]

I have a difficult time explaining why I think about death so often. I find it somewhat propotionate to my age. The older I get the more I dwell on it. I'm not suicidal in the least, but I am looking forward to my own demise. If death goes the way I hope it does I expect to find out the answers about the universe that mostly leave me perplexed. If death doesn't go the way I hope it won't matter to me anyway.

 

My hopeful heaven would be the long stairway of light that many Near death experience patients claim to have. It will be a place without back pain, taxes, and my mother in law. More importantly for me it would be a chance to find out the exact size and make up of the cosmos and it's contents. If near death experiences are random neurons firing off at the moment of death and there is nothing to the afterlife then I won't be aware of what I'm missing anyway.

 

I think about death with anticipation, but I do enjoy this life. I have a good stable job with a utility company, A wife, 2 kids, and a golden retriever. All of which I still love. I'm not wealthy by any means but I live a comfortable life. There is little in the way of material things That I couldn't aquire if I really wanted it. I enjoy seeking and getting knowledge out of this existence. I guess you could call me the stereotypical "regular joe".

 

Some people are afraid to think or talk about death. Like it's something that should be whispered about as a skelaton in ones closet. Maybe they feel if they don't think about it they will delay it. I have been working hard to get away from that way of thinking. I continue to open my mind to it. I'm in my mid forty's and both my parents died in their mid fifties so it may come for me at an earlier age than most. One thing is for sure, it will come, and you can spend your life worrying about it or you can spend it looking forward to it. this is neither an endorsement or downplay of God and heaven. I would like to hear other peoples view on this, but please religion haters and bible huggers save it for another thread.

[Hertzsprung]

My personal belief is in line with ancient Greek philosophy. Nothing comes from nothing and nothing can be absolutely destroyed. Like water, which can exist in different states, so, too, might we. To quote Moby, "We are all made of stars", I feel that part of me has always existed and will always exist. Consciousness? Spirit? I don't know. Is there a special place we all go and meet our creator? If so, is it a permanent stop, or do we continue on in other forms in other galaxies, other dimensions? THAT would be cool. Heaven, the way it is presented to me, seems like a waste of consciousness. Once you've met the creator, then what? I'd say, "Thank you. You are awesome." and perhaps I'd be just like the ungrateful teenager I once was and say, "This all all great. Can I borrow the car keys?" I don't deny a creator, but why would he give us 100 or so years(very miniscule in the scope of eternity) to then spend eternity with him. If there is a creator, aren't we already with him? Wouldn't he want to show us more? There's my two cents.

 

 

I have a difficult time explaining why I think about death so often. I find it somewhat propotionate to my age. The older I get the more I dwell on it. I'm not suicidal in the least, but I am looking forward to my own demise. If death goes the way I hope it does I expect to find out the answers about the universe that mostly leave me perplexed. If death doesn't go the way I hope it won't matter to me anyway.

 

My hopeful heaven would be the long stairway of light that many Near death experience patients claim to have. It will be a place without back pain, taxes, and my mother in law. More importantly for me it would be a chance to find out the exact size and make up of the cosmos and it's contents. If near death experiences are random neurons firing off at the moment of death and there is nothing to the afterlife then I won't be aware of what I'm missing anyway.

 

I think about death with anticipation, but I do enjoy this life. I have a good stable job with a utility company, A wife, 2 kids, and a golden retriever. All of which I still love. I'm not wealthy by any means but I live a comfortable life. There is little in the way of material things That I couldn't aquire if I really wanted it. I enjoy seeking and getting knowledge out of this existence. I guess you could call me the stereotypical "regular joe".

 

Some people are afraid to think or talk about death. Like it's something that should be whispered about as a skelaton in ones closet. Maybe they feel if they don't think about it they will delay it. I have been working hard to get away from that way of thinking. I continue to open my mind to it. I'm in my mid forty's and both my parents died in their mid fifties so it may come for me at an earlier age than most. One thing is for sure, it will come, and you can spend your life worrying about it or you can spend it looking forward to it. this is neither an endorsement or downplay of God and heaven. I would like to hear other peoples view on this, but please religion haters and bible huggers save it for another thread.

[CraigD]

Fair warning: the following involves a lot of reminiscing and soul-baring, and may be disturbing and/or boring to some.

 

I did most of deepest thinking about death in my teens, likely because I was enmeshed in society of mystical, traditional and ecstatic, and religious, orthodox and heterodox, who talked a lot about death, souls, heavens and the like, settling on a fairly comfy conception of it that was both entirely materialistic but in agreement with a sort of generic vision of an eternal afterlife, which went like this:

Around the moment of death, as your brain begins to fail from lack of oxygen, you enter a special kind of dream state, in which your perception of time is so skewed that, subjectively, it last an eternity. As with ordinary dreams, your beliefs and recent thoughts influence the experience. A magnificent gated heaven, a concentric icy hell, a meeting place of friends and family, a transcendence into godhood, a vastening into limitless understanding, whatever you truly expect, is what you get. The path to this immortality depends not on religious election or observance, but on dying well, in a correct physical way – avoiding electrocution or well-oxygenated senility, etc.

 

In addition to the influence of my supernaturally disposed fellows, I was convinced of this conception by my experience with dreams. Always a vivid dreamer, with puberty, my dreams became spectacular and compelling. With some regularity, my dreams spanned decades, and were so vivid I awoke with the feeling that I must be decades older, a different person with many times my previous life experience. That not mundane life, but mystical eternal after death life was a dream felt deeply true to me.

 

Shortly after arriving at this conception, I stopped thinking about death much. Years later, upon courted then marrying a disciple of Fritz Perls, I acquired a scheme and terms to describe this: I would say I acquired closure, and made of mortality a gestalt. In less specialized terms, I’d say I began taking it for granted, so stopped thinking about it.

 

Also shortly after this, I began to seriously explore math and mathematical formalism, and especially the problem of consciousness. I was born at the right time for this – around the turn of 1980, it seemed everyone in a math department with a penchant for computers was a cognitive scientist, consciousness theorist, synthetic psychologist, or something of that ilk, and everyone was reading, most for the third or seventh time, then young Doug Hofstadter’s GEB, Dan Dennet, and the whole crowd of similar-minded philosophical stars of that clique. From these beginnings – heady times that seemed like beginning, middles, and ends all wrapped up in hours and days – it would take me as long to as it did for my first conception of mortality and immortality, and longer for it to really arrive as an epiphany, to reach my next, very different conception. This conception, which I find much harder to express effectively, involved a reexamination of my assumptions of the meaning of consciousness and personal identity, and the conclusion that my previous referents of these terms were semantic nulls: references to things that did not actually, objectively, exist.

 

My wife was deeply puzzled by this. After decades of hearing me rant about the emergence of consciousness from self-referential modeling computation, I was now saying “self/other models are just programs – nothing “arises” from them. Emergent phenomena are mere useful metaphors, no more profound or correct than an everyday conversational metaphor like “our car wants its oil changed”. “But what about the feeling of self, the qualia?” she’d ask. “Nothing there”, I’d reply “the ‘qualia’ are semantic nulls. I’m not conscious, you’re not, nobody is.”

 

At this point, she’d look at me worriedly, and as “so, are you going to start acting differently, now?” “Not at all”, I’d reply. “Nothing’s changed – I just see these old pet ideas of mine differently.” Banishing the ghost from the machine doesn’t make the machine run a tick differently.

 

It’d be a bit, not too gross of a misuse of the term, to call this my nihilistic period. I didn’t cease caring about things, people, or ideas, I just ended my mystical quest to define consciousness, and my old conviction that it was the transcendental secret at the heart of everything. Had I been struck blind walking along the road, a burning bush rammed up my bum, and Jehovah and the Devil introduced each the other to me then and there, it would have altered my disbelief in consciousness not in the least, nor restored my previous dread of someday ceasing to be. When you see the “you” in you as a semantic null, a mere word for a thing that does not exist, your fear of losing it is null, death is a mere event, a transition of a machine of one kind into another, with no souls perishing, surviving, or existing as more than a metaphoric construct in the model of a modeling computer like you, me, everybody else, and, in the IMHO unlikely even they exist, gods, devils, angels, sprites, and so on down.

 

My old consciousness-less self missed the prospect of immortality, however – not the neurological parlor trick of my teenage conception of it, but the sort that I increasingly began to find meaningful to apply to the famous immortals – Beethoven, Shakespeare, Descartes, etc – and obscure ones – family legends, of just friends, relatives, parents – anyone who’s influenced anyone.

 

The path to this immortality is connectedness to others. The metaphysical you reappears, not as qualia, but as data: your identity is the part of you that others take from you, personal traits and ideas incorporated into the worldviews and personalities of others.

 

Around the time I was settling into – formed a gestalt of – this my latest and current conception of personal immortality, my conviction in it was tested by the unexpected death of my then 25 year old son. I, my wife, and a large host of friends and family suddenly had to, at risk of mental collapse, reach peace with stark, brutal evidence of mortality. 18 months later, now, I find my conviction in the truth of my concept of personal immortality as the preservation of the idea, or model, of the dead person in the thoughts, intentions, plans, actions, and inventions of the living, to be strong.

[Sci]

Good post, Craig.

 

Everyone dies, but not everyone lives, and so it is that pondering death can enhance one's living.

 

 

NOW AND ZEN Everything that is part of us—our cells, tissues, organs and organ systems—has come about over billions of years because it proved successful in the great survival stakes during our perilous evolutionary descent (ascent) with modification. The brain, being no exception, evolved, in part, to allow a creature to learn from what happens in its life, to retain key elements that could influence future actions. We are geared for self-preservation. We will do anything to avoid facing the possibility that who we are now cannot continue. We ourselves are mainly the cause that we are interested in. The self is preoccupied with staying alive, which is why our species is still around today. It is a prime biological function to be afraid of death, and, so, the self, as thus contrived, is able to fully play its crucial survival role. We want to equip our brain with a soul that offers us an escape when the brain dies since the self cannot come to terms with its own extinction.

 

From a subjective standpoint, we are all born equal and undifferentiated (before that, ‘we’ were dead), but, as mature selves we make a distinction between the individual and the surroundings. Still, the brain keeps changing throughout life, in a pattern of the shifting flux of its neurons; we gain and lose memories and feelings, essentially creating a new person over and over again. The self is thus not so rock solid as it seems. These moment-to-moment changes differ from death only in degree. In essence, they are identical, although at the opposite ends of the spectrum. So, we are not static things.

 

Other neural networks will come to be in other, future people, albeit with an “amnesia” of what went on before in the brains of the previous others. Why should we be happy about this? We never can be, because the ‘I’ cannot operate outside of its own boundaries. The only viable alternative is to think of a way in which it is possible to ever continue on. What will it be like to be a part of someone else after we die, with our own particular narrative of life cast aside?

 

This is the ‘zen’ of now and then and when.

[Deepwater6]

I'm very very sorry about your son.

[Hertzsprung]

I'm very very sorry about your son.

 

 

Thank you for sharing such a personal story. For sharing a part of your son with us.

 

 

I'm just curious, Deepwater6, after reading these wonderful posts, do you still look forward to your own demise? As I read them, in relation to your original query, I begin to ponder that question. Death is still the "unknown".