A neuroscientist prepares for death
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
For context: https://academic.oup.com/icvts/article/11/4/490/652739. Fewer than 20 cases described in the literature of this particular kind of cancer.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/popmedicine/celebritydiagnosis/...
"The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation."
Perhaps we’re unable to see absolute truth, but we are able to see bits of the truth as it were. Nor is sensory experience our only or even primary way to see truth. Professor Linden has wandered into Epistemic Philosophy but he’s not qualified to give the lecture.
There are people who tire of the search, settle on one lens, and then think the world is fisheye-shaped.
It's much the same way a Unix process can 'perceive reality' via serial ports and processors managed in kernelspace.
You may look into constructivism, especially the biological foundation (e.g. the work of Maturana and Valera). It offers the (somewhat forgotten) hard science link to modern philosophy and psychology, like post-structualism/-modernism and systems theory.
As far as I know, it's not very popular, because it presents a little crisis and is "not very fun"... or at least that's what the criticism comes down to IMO. (I suspect, it's kinda similar to Gödel's assault, but much easier to dismiss.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_constructivism
I find it so difficult to relate to such "first world problems" lately...
A state of affairs immortalized in the famous sentence "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy".
If delays are reduced from 4 hours to 2 hours, people are happy.
If delays increase from 5 minutes to 10 minutes, people are unhappy.
It's human nature, it's what drives us to always do better.
So what are they getting so mad about? Because they are "losing" 5 minutes of their precious time being idle in a train station? I guess those 5 minutes would have been quite remarkable if they could have been replying to emails at their desk. As I said, there were no negative consequences whatsoever for those guys if the train arrives late. They have just lost all sense of rationality and want to be mad for the sake of being mad about something "not working as expected or intended".
After treatment and full remission in '20 we shifted some aspects of our lives as a result. Some of those changes would have fairly significant long lasting outcomes over the rest of our lives (started trying for a child, became more open and true to our most intimate inner selfs and more).
But mostly we stuck to the normal routine. Working too much. Stressing over trivial things. Having time and energy be sapped away by the thousand cuts one has during a working week.
Then she had a second cancer diagnoses in august '21. Completely unrelated to the prior one and the treatment she received.
It was also in its early stage, but turned out to have metastasized to a lymph node. That triggered a full protocol of chemo and radiation.
Our future is now permanently changed. We will not be capable of having children together due to the effects of the treatment. Even though we are very hopeful, there is a considerable risk of recurrence in the next few years. Which according to the doctors would be untreatable due to the amount of radiation she has now already had.
The autopilot is completely turned off by now. We are updating our bucket lists and planning to quit or changing to jobs that will allow us to live a slower more adventurous life where more of our time is spent together rather then in an endless pursuit of material goods (or commuting to an office space devoid of all creativity and inspiration). We may even try out life in a van for a few months.
And the thing is that while all this is going on, we are both extremely sad about the lost opportunities of starting a family, while also being incredibly glad that the treatment went well and that the prospects for the future are good (her odds of having a recurrence are among the lowest for the type of cancer she had given numerous parameters).
We are now focused on truly living this life to the fullest, which to be honest wasn't so much the case mere 6 months ago.
I find it quite weird because its such a profound thing to be let down by your own body. Particularly when I live pretty healthily and exercise a lot. I was even swimming when I had the heart attack!
Unlike other brushes with death I've had skiing and driving you lose an element of trust in yourself. It's not given me clarity so much as muddled everything up because it was so random and there is nothing in my power to do about it. I think mentally I'd have preferred a worse diagnosis, that I had a congenital or chronic problem, at least it would be understandable and I could feel like I was doing something to avoid it. But instead I'm really back where I started with a looming fear.
In reality it's a problem anyone could have I was just unlucky enough to have it.
However I found his last point a betrayal of his life and intelligence. Commenting about afterlife for which there is isn't a scintilla of evidence nor mechanism is a poor way to leave his very moving piece.
The only difference with death is we never wake up. I find that comforting.
This shares notions with simulation theory and other non-falsifiable hypotheses.
I take a practical approach here. We exist today. What will we make of it? Regarding these notions, my thought is since no one can be certain, what practical impact does that have? Typically the answer is "none whatsoever."
Only if it's vaguely similar to the one discussed in the book. If it's completely different it wouldn't help at all.
Not trying to poke fun, just an odd thought that's been bobbing around my brain this week.
This is an unusual situation, I think we should expect unusual coping mechanisms.
He said the way our brain works we can’t comprehend nothingness easily. It’s hard to deal with death. He said he’s not religious. In the end he finds himself romanticizing the idea of an afterlife (even though he doesn’t think it’ll happen)
I think you are making these two positions to sound equivalent, but I really don't think that is the case.
People like to talk about religion as though it's all indoctrination, but the argument really doesn't hold up. Religions that focus on proselytism seem to spread faster, which is unremarkable, but religion definitely seems to form spontaneously.
A lot of things form spontaneously, art, technology, language have all developed spontaneously and independently many times in the past 100,000 years.
Religion isn't special in this regard.
> If you didn't start with that belief, what observation could you make to come to the conclusion that there is an afterlife?
Clearly, lots of observations lead people to the conclusion that there is an afterlife, independent of starting with that belief.
I always appreciate the parable of the flame in Buddhism. If you use a lighter to produce a flame, where did that flame come from? where does it go? If you use it again, is that flame the same or is different?
You realize that the flame is really just a distinction we make of matter that has always been there and it doesn't go anywhere, just changes. I don't mean this to say that "you" are just changing when you die, but to question what "you" really are.
I think consciousness is an interesting area we still struggle to understand. It's weird that no physical thing can be "about" something but that thoughts can be. I can think of george washington riding a unicycle, but does that mean there is a neuron in my brain that physically is that mental picture?
Lastly, there is a contingency problem with matter. If all physical things are contingent upon a cause, then the physical universe must be caused by something that is immaterial. If you think about math, does it really exist? If I ask if "four" exists, there certainly is a english word, "four" and a grouping of lines (4) there can be four of something but these are all just representative of four'ness. So does four really exist and if not why is math so effective at explaining our universe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
If the universe is contingent upon an immaterial cause, I don't think it's out of reach to imagine that cause as an Aristotelian god.
All that to say, I think there's reason to be skeptical about any certainty in knowing what happens when we die. Hopefully it's something interesting or I won't be around to find out!
We have all died countless times already, 'I' am not the person that was at age 13. There might now be some memories or conception of that person, I could estimate what they would do or think in a given situation (similar to a wife or close friend). But that 13 year old doesn't exist anymore and neither do most of the atoms reside in the current body. I like the flame reference. We die every moment, consciousness is inherently transitory.
It’s not answering questions of the physical or observable world. It’s attempting to answer the “Why” (meaning/purpose) questions rather than the “How” (method/cause).
Of course many atheists will point to some specific religious belief as being unlikely without evidence, but that is a strawman argument that comes down to the semantic question of defining "god" narrowly enough to make it seem absurd and unlikely. The larger question is whether the observable universe is the end-all-be-all of existence, and that is a philosophical question which outspans the reaches of the scientific method. One can assume Materialism and reject Dualism—many do because they find it silly to consider unanswerable questions and prefer to assume a deterministic universe which could theoretically be fully understood from our meat sack bodies given enough time and resources—but unfortunately this belief is based on faith; it can not be proven anymore than the Halting problem can be solved.
Which is why you'll meet almost nobody that's a 'strict' atheist by that definition, and I'm afraid that I think this is a straw man, much more than the accusation you level in the following sentence -
> Of course many atheists will point to some specific religious belief as being unlikely without evidence, but that is a strawman
Not when they are actually closely held beliefs. What do you think it the proportion of religious people that have closely examined their beliefs in a philosophical manner and found an unanswerable question and recognised Dualism in their outlook?
Because in my experience of religious people, their beliefs have been every bit as literal as the ones the atheists lambast and which you write off as a straw man. It's the philosophically minded apologists that are the rarity.
Anything that it would make sense to call "god" - and certainly anything that would have a particular interest in what some jumped-up apes on an utterly insignificant little blue green planet orbiting a small unregarded yellow sun out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy thought about anything - is absurd and unlikely. There may well be unknown entities, but they would almost certainly be no more godlike than any other object or force of nature we've encountered.
Here's the crux: What would make sense to call "god"? What would make sense to call "a higher power"? Personally, if there is any consciousness that exists on a different level than our immediately observable universe perhaps with a radically different relationship to space-time, I believe two things are true: 1) it's nature is likely to be so far beyond our understanding that we don't have the precepts to even begin to reason about it and 2) it definitely makes sense to consider such an entity in those terms regardless of whether it has a particular interest in earth-life or not.
Again, this is the semantic game that we play. It's easy to set up these strawmen based on our inherent anthropocentrism combined with past mythologies created to explain things which science subsequently provided better explanations for. However it is a huge leap to look at that progress and jump to the conclusion that our perspective is the one true lens on reality and that there is nothing beyond the reach of our instruments, logic and models.
Im not saying it's real, it just blew my mind when I learned it was widespread enough to include alongside the death rattle and lack of eating. I imagined all the ancient peoples watching their elders commune with the dead moments before they died. I imagine it'd be pretty convincing to witness yourself.
But so far, down to particle physics, nothing seems compatible with the idea of an out of body soul that is able to process this information.
I mean, we can annotate every observation and every thought ever with "for all we know it could be just an illusion" and live as if we were constantly being tricked by a deceitful daemon Descartes-style but why should we do it, what is there to gain?
I could agree that monism / strict materialism is as baseless as any other view but I think its terseness deserves a bit more respect than being called "comical", if only for the sake of its elegance.
It's trivial to provide a longer description / a more complicated model of reality that will have as much explanatory power as a simpler one. It's much more challenging to find a shorter / simpler one that will work just as well.
Yes, I am aware that my assumption that challenging things are somehow more commendable than non-challenging things is completely baseless too :)
The concept of the "afterlife" is far from universal, in space as well as in time (it has a documented history that begins in Ancient Egypt).
Even in the modern Western world, where it used to dominate, it is now disappearing fast. That would be inexplicable if it was part of how the human brain works.
One observation that has been made many times is rather than the afterlife (with its characteristics of rendering judgement onto the unjust and so forth) disappearing, particular in the 20th century, it has been translated into a variety of secular ideologies.
If you want to find fantasies about eschatology, eternal life, resurrection of the dead and so on you only need to talk about atheist silicon valley engineers about the singularity.
There's now services to immortalize your social media presence after you're dead and so on, pretty much mirroring religious ritual.
I think there is genuinely few people who have a truly indifferent attitude towards death or last questions, for most it's just been transformed into something that looks superficially non-religious.
Personally I had a spiritual experience while high on Ketamine last year that shared many similarities with these stories of reincarnation. And it's hard to explain, but it showed me that the perception of the world that our brain provides for us is not necessarily the truth but somehow arbitrary and constrained.
not exactly an experiment with a falsifiable hypothesis there, but I found it to be an interesting thought
I think his point is that it's a beautiful fantasy.
Just think about it: so far whatever we've invented is based on discoveries of what's already there in the universe. Metals, electricity, fuel, food et al.
Only when we started looking for such things with an open mind, with the right tools and at the right place, we were able to perceive them.
Similarly, our human history (at least in eastern traditions) has been filled with countless tales of those who had set out to seek answers to questions of soul, God, eternity, life beyond physical body et al, and they did find answers. Not only that, they also left details about various practical ways to reach to that exalted state, for those who dare to be seeker like them.
Sounds a lot like "he betrayed his faith".
Hard topic, but I suppose that's the nature of it.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6900.Tuesdays_with_Morri...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25899336-when-breath-bec...
Another along a similar theme is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E Frankl.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Me...
Yeah, this kind of cancer seems exceedingly rare. But of course, being a hypochondriac I will worry about this for the next week or more.
we live everyday as if theres a tomorrow while playing a cosmic lottery
I gave it a try, but now I am trying to avoid these stories at all costs (thanks for the warning) and firmly believe everything important in life can be told with humor, as well.
1 in 5 people dies of cancer, and usually it sucks, no happy ending. I really, really don't see the need to bring more tragic death into your life than what's likely coming your way, anyway.
Do you "enjoy" the sadness and crying? (Honest question.)
Yeah, no shit. That's why I try to not invite it unnecessarily.
> I think people seek these stories because it helps them deal with their own sadness.
I doubt that. I think it's some form of morbid entertainment I don't need, as indicated by other commenters. Emotionality porn or something. Today the sad cancer story, tomorrow FetLife. (Just kidding; no kink-shaming intended.)
I assume most people will continue their life as if they are not going to die ultimately, afterwards. Or at least I am pretty sure there are plenty of people dying of stress-related disease, which at some point in their life read a sad story about death.
Also the abstract sadness, which comes with these stories is very different to what you experience when really sick and worried - when you disassociate (good) and take life by the day.
I didn’t read the book specifically looking to cry though. That was just an effect of the content.
Then 10 years after she was first diagnosed, she had a seizure as she walked into her lab at a new job she just started. If she didn’t speed like a maniac, it might’ve happened as she drove on I-95 and not in one of the best hospitals in the country.
Metastatic brain cancer.
At first, it wasn’t clear how much time she’d have left (if any at all). But she woke up and radiation gave her another decent year before the last 6 months that were pretty awful. Eventually, she fell out of bed, broke her hip, slipped into a coma and died in hospice a week later on Christmas 2012.
Was it a tragedy? I don’t think about it that way.
The ending was happy. She wasn’t in pain and she took such great advantage of the last decade of her life, including that last year when she knew it was really the end.
For example, I will often read cancer patient message boards, or family members that have watched their kin succumb to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Or watching old videos, re-mastered with color on youtube from the turn of the 20th century, and contemplating how their entire lives have gone by. Or the uncovered skeletons of people that died from the bubonic plague in the 14th century, and reflect on how they likely had very important personal matters and concerns. But now there they lie, and the world has long since forgotten them. Their names and stories are long gone.
As a recent example, I stumbled across a young women who died of leukemia almost 10 years ago now. She was a local news reporter, and had a youtube channel[1] and twitter account[2]. She unkowningly documented her demise online with her twitter updates. She even interviewed a cancer survivor in one of her youtube videos and said, "how scary it must be when the doctor tells you that you have cancer!". How very soon she would find out herself. Her videos have about a dozen views, and her tweets went largely ignored. She seemed like such a genuinely sweet woman.
It's both morbid curiosity and a grim reminder of indeed how short life is. What was their mindset in their waning time, and why is mine much different? As fast as time seems to go by, am I all that different? Why wait until your death bed to consider your mortality? Maybe it's right around the corner, or maybe not.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxd-4RKaIP0&t=7s [2] https://twitter.com/jeanniehayes
(Apologies if I have veered too far off-topic)
You're a tourist, like Marla.
Man's search for arbitrary meaning (through suffering and such).
I think that's feeding the delusion that life is somehow fair, or balanced, or something, when really life is just cruel sometimes. Maybe that's the appeal. I just cope with it differently, try to laugh it off.
I'll tell you some thinkers already thought of that ;) (also this was a theme in Dukaj books, if someone read them - I really recommend if it's translated to your language)
Here's a study on a very small group (of 8 patients), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7779860/
Now you'll probably need to get the insight of a real doctor to know the risk-effort-worth of going through such a invasive procedure.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/transplant/referring-physici...
If you ever want to convince a smoker to quit, you can mention it is an absolute disqualification from receiving a transplant for at least 6 months after they quit.
Oof, I totally understand why it's an absolute contraindication (the hit that cancer gives to expected lifespan just seems too strong to justify such a scarce transplant), but it definitely feels like a double-whammy.
To a future with long-term viable artificial vital organs!
Tho, if organ donations were opt-out, or even no choice, and the infrastructure to match demand and supply would scale (it does not at the moment), we wouldn't need artificial organs to give this poor man this "high risk investment" and a chance to fight for his life.
Well, maybe in this particular case, an autologus transplant would be much better indeed, as I imagine cancer patients generally don't fare well with suppressed autoimmunity... Then again, no Repo Men visits.
When you do something stupid and escape unharmed it tends to make you ignore the risk. Speeding, tailgating, smoking, drinking, fighting, etc... As human beings we really suck at assessing risk.
However there is always a small window when someone comes back to reality for a moment. When a friend gets lung cancer and can't get a heart, when a car loses a 2x4 and you barely escape being impaled on a timber, when you hit a patch of water and your car nearly loses control because you were going too fast, or when you watch a man die instantly after getting hit in the face for the 100th time during a friendly brawl.
I diverge from the author's understandably unhappy perspective. Death isn't an end of the literal energy and parts that make up people, only in our ability to perceive and act on them. It's the end of counting minutes or years, in essence. The human mind can conceive of that, that upon death time ceases to be a crawl and zips forward seamlessly and limitlessly until or unless something ... reconstitutes the parts, energy and pattern that makes each of us human. It's hard preparing for death, I sympathize with the author, but it's also hard living with some understanding of how limited and temporary our lives and worlds may be.
Personally, i think that our consciousness is all that matters, therefore i cannot agree with this.
> The human mind can conceive of that, that upon death time ceases to be a crawl and zips forward seamlessly and limitlessly until or unless something ... reconstitutes the parts, energy and pattern that makes each of us human.
What about the heat death of the universe and entropy? If that were to be the eventual outcome of the universe, there are no guarantees whatsoever about anything of the sort.
A romantic take is that human evolution will ultimately solve this.
Lucretius laid out The Nature of Things very well in 79 A.D.: https://philosophybreak.com/articles/why-death-is-nothing-to...
“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”"Even if all that happens is that you vanish out of existence into eternal darkness, you'll also vanish from time. Hundreds of billions of years will pass but for the dead it will be instantaneous, the universe can reach the end of its lifespan yet for those now outside of the linear passing of time, it will feel like less than a blink. The universe could begin and end hundreds of trillions of times, but this time scale is nothing to a dead man. Statistically, you're simply bound to pop back into existence no matter how long it takes. Besides, it can't even be that unlikely if you're here now, right?"
The implication of this argument is that innumerable terrible torturous things also happen to you "no matter how long it takes."
But will it be "you" you (or just your copy)?
Assuming the absence of afterlife, when I die, I literally am no more. No more anyone to experience anything, including time. No one to experience a relief from pain which the death has ended, for example. No one to even not care about the world any more.
This is very simple, if not subjectively intuitive: nobody has experience of not existing, because such experience is a contradiction in terms. But referring to whatever related to a dead person's alleged experience after death is a use-after-free error.
(Dying, on the other hand, is a very real experience, but likely it's very hard to communicate, for a number of obvious reasons.)
The thing called you is, in one model, just a collection of atoms, a particular solution to some equations, after all. Some complicated world-lines, that anyone with a sufficiently powerful computer and the right collection of seemingly random numbers could reproduce in principle - or is it?
Maybe the dead don't experience anything. But until you can say what distinguishes "experience" (and "reality") for the living from the mere existence of solutions to equations, it's a missing-definition error to conclude anything sweeping and universal about experience.
You can certainly define experience in various ways, for example particular kinds of electrochemical activity in the brain, or organised information processing in matter of a certain kind. If you do that, you can conclude that those processes cease.
But those are limited definitions for convenience. We cannot say with certainty that's what actual living experience is "made of", so we cannot say with certainty the universal statement that all forms of actual experience cease.
(We can, however, turn "certainty" in the above into a kind of variable, in order to understand what we mean more subtly.)
The distinction is sometimes called "fire in the equations". Who knows what makes a living person actually experience - assuming you believe living persons do.
https://www.amazon.com/Final-Chapters-Hospice-Workers-Storie...
yes
https://www.google.com/search?q=midieval+desk+human+skull
Doesn't come up in search.
Until I started treatment for my depression I was very puzzled by the idea that some people might NOT think of death every day.
Again, not trying to suggest you necessary suffer from depression, but if you have any other depression-related symptoms, it might be wise to get it checked.
Looking back after talking it through with somebody, it was almost certainly a form of severe depression.
There is a great quote from Ernest Becker: "The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions."
I'm sure everybody ponders about life and death sometimes, but I don't think it's common to think about it every night. Perhaps as we age, or as our health declines, the subject comes up more often as death is merely the natural consequence of life and we cannot pretend it won't happen to us when the signs of our deteriorating bodies are all too clear.
However, I do not believe (mentally?) healthy people below a certain age ponder their mortality every single night. I've heard people say they're reminded of their mortality more when they get children who depend on them, but even then I don't think it's a daily occurrence for them.
We worry about what we think is likely to happen to us, mostly in the short term. For many, if not most, people alive, death is not something we expect to see around the corner just yet. Perhaps some people are more prone to think in the (very) long term and there's definitely a philosophical component to these things. Sadly, there are also many that go through depressive episodes who will also often turn their attention to their deaths. However, from what I've seen, I think you're part of the minority.
Then you are wrong, depending on how you define healthy and what age you're thinking about. Both myself and a close friend used to ponder our own mortalities frequently as adolescents. I still do ponder my lack of existence after death, though not as often. The reason is mostly that I have less free time on my hands because I have to work. Not a tradeoff I'm happy with.
That was two decades ago and neither of us would be considered (abnormally?) unhealthy, either mentally or physically. Also worth noting we met a decade ago, so neither of us spurred the other.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4332920-a-social-history...
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Lecture-Printing-Publisher-Har...
(Speaking from personal experience as I’ve had a few now.)
Can we not combine our analytical powers / crowdsource an effective treatment plan for terminal illnesses like this one, and save people like Linden?
Neuroscience does not go beyond the medium for consciousness and soul(or OS if you prefer).
Also is this thing we’re looking at information or is it the essence of perceiving and differentiating?
Where exactly is it? In molecules in physical space? Neuron configuration and firings - signal patterns distributed in time? Spontaneous, responding to environment, a combination or more?
I don’t know the answers, these are questions I find myself curious about after exposure to different viewpoints and experiences.
Is death an abyss of nothingness, like going to a dreamless sleep and never waking up? Maybe! Do we die and live in an afterlife? Perhaps! But what an amusingly and ironically simple, easy answer either would be!
Look at anything in life and the universe. In this reality, is there anything so simple and clear cut? Yet somehow this process of consciousness we call "death" is reduced to such a profoundly simple and binary thing.
Consciousness and death, two fundamentally undefined things, frequently given a conclusion so simple it can be explained to a child. Not that we can be blamed for doing this.
Given the complexity of everything else in this apparent infinity, it seems far more likely that whatever happens is complex beyond our Comprehension. Something far greater than nothingness or an afterlife.
I think we do not want to define them as they would make humans not so special and we do not want to feel "not-special".
It seems to me that the death state is actually the natural state—life is the outlier, the extreme, unnatural state. Death is home.
My hypothesis is that as your brain cells start to die, some die before others. I wonder if the process of dieing is experienced in hallucinations as the self experiences more and more cell death. Then at some point, the cells that do the experiencing and that give you a sense of self vs other slowly die and you lose your ability to distinguish yourself from the rest of your experience. This, I imagine, is what it feels to be "one with the universe".
If we cut out parts of the brain, the thing that is you changes. Your consciousness changes. If the brain were merely some sort of antenna, this would not be what we would expect to see. If there were some signal that your brain was picking up on, that signal would have to be detectable externally as your brain is a physical thing and if it can pick up on it, so can another antenna. All that you are is contained in a couple of pounds of goo inside your skull, your brain is not some sort of metaphysical transceiver
That said, when discussing consciousness, abstractly, it's sort of a necessary vs. sufficient distinction. The brain may be sufficient to maintain identity even without the body. The inverse is certainly not true.
This is incredibly abrasive and intolerant of other peoples' views and philosophical journeys.
i saw a youtube video where this young woman recounted a near death experience that she had. she was in her car and somehow the car became airborne and was headed straight towards a thick traffic sign pole or something like that. in any case, she saw the pole coming toward her and she knew without any doubt that she was going to die. and she said that she saw flashes of every time she was terrible to someone. and she hadnt realized how terrible she had been in all these instances. and she said she was angry at god in that moment for showing her these terrible things right before she was going to die. i think its fascinating because the body is watching the situation and when the situation is right, the body deploys the mechanism that it thinks is useful. you can look at a picture of a bear and you wont be affected but if your encounter a bear in real life, you wont just go into fight or flight; you will be having a frame of mind and motivations that are unique to that situation because your body is giving those to you. and here, when the body believes with enough certainty that it is going to die, it deploys these memories? maybe the body allows you to see what its been hiding from you for your own sake in a last ditch effort to produce some kind of advantage. the human mind is very mysterious. but my point is that there is some mechanism at the bottom of that. it could show you anything. it could make you experience anything. there is this mythology of having happy experiences on the way to death, walking into the light, etc. but we have no idea what these experiences are other than the fact that they exist. its possible that most people have a terrible, awful experience on the way to death. its something that i think is just underappreciated.
I think the "service" you're after is called "cremation."
The problem with doing what you said immediately is "false positives." Up to the 1800s, being buried alive was a very common fear, probably because it really happened sometimes. They didn't have any way of measuring brain activity, even an imperfect one like we have now.
You're mistaken
I think you'd like the film Mullholland Drive (2001), it dealt with this theme in such a profound way, that to be honest, it completely transformed my whole way of thinking around death, life, hopes, fears and the essence of dreams. Would definitely recommend, by far one of the best films I've ever seen.
“The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn 'em all away. But they're not punishing you,' he said. 'They're freeing your soul. If your frightened of dying, and your holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.”
Guess this person isn't really preparing then.
> as I prepare for death, I have a renewed respect for the persistent and broad appeal of afterlife/reincarnation stories
Aaand I guess that's just another poor person with the pro-death memecomplex.
If you want to make ripples in the future world, there's far better ways to gamble your resources than this...
In any case: you can ditch the explicit judgment of those who don't share the views as you, and you'll more likely get heard and get reasonable responses.
Let me know when they can cryonically freeze a live mouse, then reanimate it a month later. If the process works at all then that should be easy, right?
Realistically, I would rather I at least have some chance of success, however small, than none whatsoever.
Ah, this is a reminder that I need to finish my application to Alcor.