Hacker News Reader

Comment by schodi | Hacker News Reader

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. All this is completely mind boggling.

Then again how did it all start? Causality is completely broken, when it comes to these things.

View on HN

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.

Can I ask you something? How come the Russians never smile? I’ve never seen them smiling.”
“They’re at work. They're Russians.”
"Is it normal for them to eat without talking to one another?”
“This is their job. They get 20 minutes to eat.”
“Yeah, but they never smile. Are they happy?”
Are the Russians happy? Is anyone happy? Can one ever truly be said to be happy?
I am tempted to go full Slav on Conor, to explain to him how we are all just grains of dust suspended in the howling void, searching for meaning in the fleeting moments before we are yanked back to the oblivion from whence we emerged, naked and screaming. But for all his faults he's just a kid stuck spending his summer microwaving Yorkshire puddings for difficult people. I take pity.

“Russians are formal. It would be weird of them to act relaxed on duty. They are all smiling on the inside.”

-- https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm

> to eat without talking to one another

In Russian culture eating is a process not to be distracted from. Historically, this could be seen as a sign of respect on the part of a poor peasant for the food and all the hard labor that went into producing it.

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.

Far more horrifying to me is the thought that this millisecond of a dream is actually a process occurring in great abundance throughout the universe, with oscillating arrangements of particles facilitating whatever property of matter it is that embodies the phenomena of subjective experience. If it happened to "me" once, I don't see any reason why it should not happen again, or be happening everywhere at once in parallel, yet simply lacking awareness of this fact because the individual nodes don't share memory.

Exactly - I think this is the actual answer. At some point "I" am going to be a Holocaust victim, or a drug cartel's victim, etc etc. It's horrifying. I think when I die, "I" am just going to be somebody else. Nothing else really makes sense to me.

This is how I think of it. The experience of being “me” is the same for all life. An emergent process, but still real.

I think some Buddhist concepts, like reincarnation and duality, can be interpreted as perspectives on this.

It does increase my sense of compassion for life in general, and I try to lean into that.

it's not nothingness. think of all the people that're dead right now, and all the people yet to live. would you characterize right now as nothingness?

I think some culture deep sense of tradition is a way to cope. You inherit the past, you give it to your kids. It's no more a void on both ends if you carry the past along. Does it make sense?

Have you considered an alternative world view? While it's true that we experience nothing while we die, there are good reasons to believe that that this life we have on Earth isn't accurately explained by purely materialistic means.

On the flip side of that, the first time we were dead, when and how did we become conscious? Obviously the biological processes have a fairly well-defined start point (i.e. conception), but obviously consciousness does not start at conception as there is no brain yet. So when does it start?

I have wrestled with this after my first kid was born - there was nothing and now there is this person with their own mind and wants. Perhaps it was just the lack of sleep that got me thinking. But - When did their consciousness start? What was that first moment of awareness? Was there that initial "spark" and something started happening? Or was it a slow, slow clearing of fog before some sort of concerted thought began? What was that first thought? is a baby in the womb aware of self? Maybe not - but if not, when does that begin? When is that first moment when a baby looks in a mirror and sees themselves? What goes through their mind that first time they realise the thing in the mirror is them?

I'm not even convinced that we're self-aware at the moment of birth. I think self-awareness requires the brain to develop further. Around the time that we pass the mirror test is the when the self-awareness kicks in.

Our perception of time is very subjective: it is affected by our age, by what we are doing, and it is known that it can be significantly altered by consuming certain substances. We learned from others that there was time before we were born, but do we feel that? In my own subjective perception of time the moment of my birth seems to be infinitely far in the past, and I can't be sure that the final moment of death will be a finite point approachable by consciousness.

I have this weird thought from time to time-- maybe it's dumb, but it nags at me.

Think of any time when you've been unconscious, like when under anesthesia, or fainting, or knocked out for some other reason. You experience everything leading up to the event that knocks you out, but the only reason you can recall any of it is because you did eventually wake up and regain consciousness. Your experience of your current self now is only because a moment from now you can look back and remember it. Eventually though, you will die, and you won't be able to look back and remember, and for you, it's as if nothing ever happened. So given that we will all die some day, how is it we even have conscious experience at all? I might die 5 minutes from now, or 5 days, or 5 decades from now, but isn't all the same?

Are you asking how or why? If it's the latter, one thought is there doesn't need to be any grand design, but merely that consciousness gives some sort of evolutionary advantage. It reminds me of Matthew Walker's potential hypothesis that sleep is our default state. So why would wakefulness exist? Conceivably because it confers some evolutionary advantage. Consciousness is sometimes referred to in the same terms of "wakefulness"

You can't describe non-existence in phenomenological or psychological terms because existence is required for experience (unless you believe in "souls"). The body will exist, but the neural activity that underlies experience will be absent.

edit: another user commented and said this was "logically unsound 20th century positivism". Let me direct you to this quote ca 300BC from Epicurus:

> Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.

If you believe in souls then why assume they dont have limitations as we do? Perhaps a soul if it exists is just as ignorant of its reality as we are of ours. Perhaps in some way a soul would be just as limited but in different ways.

Is it neural activity that underlies all experience? Or is it neural activity which filters it?

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 live your life again and again without knowing you have done it before. Since you have no perception of time when dead, it happens instantly. Does it have to be 100% identical or are some variations allowed? Maybe you live through every possible variation of your biological self.

Or maybe quantum immortality occurs, where your consciousness jumps into a universe where you are still alive despite all the odds.

Or perhaps the universe is just snapshots of infinite patterns locked in permanent static states and this entire progression of time, physics, etc is just an illusion created by the sub-process of consciousness that creates dynamic transitions from one state to another.

It's probably my inability to perceive the concept of infinity that my mind thinks about such things, either way we will probably never know.

Good to see someone questioning almost exactly the same things as me.

> Or maybe quantum immortality occurs, where your consciousness jumps into a universe where you are still alive despite all the odds.

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.

Not sure illusion is the right type of term, because it implies an illusion for someone :) who would that be if there is no ‘to be’?

This sounds like biocentrism: https://www.robertlanza.com/biocentrism-how-life-and-conscio...

>When We die, if there is nothing coming, how is it to not exist? I mean, what is it like?

The question doesn't make any sense.

If I smash you in the head with a hammer and you have brain damage which changes your personality, makes it so you can't access some memories, and can't control your body properly.. we accept that as literal brain damage- we have broke the machine (our brain) in some regard.

Everyone accepts the reality of that situation.

But when you die (i.e., your brain is completely shut off and non-functioning), we ask what is it experiencing? What does it feel like? It's literally a nonsensical question.

Your brain isn't active to experience anything from its senses, which in turn are probably not functioning to send any signals either.

I think maybe the OP was referring to Chalmers hard question about consciousness. What you are talking about is closer to the "easy" question regarding understanding the of the neurological mechanisms but that's distinct from the "what is it like" subjective mechanisms. The hard question is hard, in part, because we don't (yet, at least) have a way to measure the way subjective experience emerges, so we don't have a way to measure when it stops.

imo it still doesn't seem coherent even with the "hard question" framing, the very foundation of the hard question begs us to ask why it is that subjective experience is rather than not, lacking subjective experience means we're discussing something outside the scope of the hard question, it's akin to asking "what happened before time"?

I believe Chalmers perspective is that consciousness is fundamental and irreducible. To relate it to your example, he says

"Nobody tries to explain, say space or time in terms of something more basic than space or time. It's the same as mass or charge. They end up taking something as fundamental"[1]

In contrast, the easy problem IS trying to explain consciousness in terms of something more fundamental, like charges or energy moving across neuron synapses. The fact that it is reducible means it may be explained objectively by science, which make it the "easier" problem

[1] Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore

They suggest consciousness is fundamental and irreducible? This is like saying "where the car goes when you take all its pieces away?". Occam's razor suggests that the material (easier) explanation is much more likely to be the answer than any complex one.

It's not even a good question unless they first prove consciousness can exist outside its physical support, AKA the immortal soul.

>the immortal soul.

This is a different argument. It's not necessarily saying consciousness is distinct from matter. The panpsychist view (not sure if Chalmers is in this camp) is that consciousness is a fundamental property to all matter, from photons to the human brain. (This isn't to say a photon has experiences as a human does, but rather the complex human consciousness is derived from a much simpler forms of consciousness).

This is different from saying ""where the car goes when you take all its pieces away?". This assumes consciousness is an emergent property, rather than a fundamental one. The "car" is emergent from the right arrangement of "car parts". Rather, the question "where is the mass/charge of the car when you take away all its pieces" is a better analogy, because the car mass/charge is derived from the mass of the car part's mass/charge.

Thank you for answering. I searched more about this, and it seems like it's a controversial idea, having more traction around philosophers because there's not enough evidence to test scientifically. I too feel like conscience is an emergent property, like insects can exhibit surprisingly complex behaviors with simple minds, but it's too soon to say one way or the other without further research.

I can't say that I fully understand the concepts, but it does seem very much like it's a realm of philosophy. Annaka Harris has a pretty accessible book that introduces the idea and Philip Goff has some interviews and presentations that goes much more in-depth.

>there's not enough evidence to test scientifically.

This aligns exactly with what Chalmers says, that explaining subjective experiences is the "hard" problem precisely because we don't have a way to gather data. Gathering data is, almost by definition, an objective measure and can't give much insight into subjective experience. To a certain extent, if feels like defining or measuring subjective experience can't be looked at with traditional scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, that can also lead to a bunch of quackery.

I figure that worrying about death is something that can, by definition, only torment the living. There will be no blackness, because that implies perception. How are you going to perceive it when you no longer exist?

The closest survivable analog, in my opinion, is the "sleep" you experience when under something like sodium thiopental. When it works, you go from awake to awake again in an instant, from your own perspective. A bit jarring to lose hours or days like that. I assume death is similar but without the waking up part.

Regular old sleep doesn't involve that level of unconsciousness.

> When it works, you go from awake to awake again in an instant

That's my thought as well. Last time I was put under anesthesia I tried hard to think about how I was feeling. I went from awake with my eyes open to opening my eyes. I thought my eyes were already open? There is just literally nothing between that span of time.

It's like that except you don't wake? But it lasted an instant. How can something that passes in an instant last for infinity? It makes my brain hurt.

> How can something that passes in an instant last for infinity? It makes my brain hurt.

Indeed it does. This is why I try to remind myself that this kind of thinking can only torment me when I'm alive, and I should stop wasting time. Especially at 2am, which of course is when I have these kinds of thoughts to begin with.

My dad and I used to talk about this and decided that we lived forever, as a practical matter. "Before" and "after" just speculation.

I eventually came to the same conclusion. It used to spook me but I realized that death practically does not exist because I cannot experience it.

I've seen this answered as "Do you remember what was like before you were born? Being dead is the same thing".

It couldn't be pure black and emptiness, for example, because we no longer exist to experience it.

Reminded me of a quote:

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. - Vladimir Nabokov "

There is nothing left to experience any void, as that experience would be something. Noone can experience death, only the moments leading to it. I feel pretty comfortable with that. On the other hand, if there is life after death then perhaps you live on somehow but let's discount that as unprovable and quite possibly not the case.

Dealing with the reality we do know, I comfort myself with the idea that, and this sounds cheesy, all is one. Not in some hippy, pantheistic way. More that our experience of ourselves as separate from anything else is itself an illusion. There are no things, not nothing but "no things". Everything is a giant process, everything interpenetrates everything else, nothing exists independent from anything else.

This is a somewhat Buddhist view. I'm describing emptiness in a way (the Buddhist term not nothingness or some sort of nihilistic viewpoint). It seems like a totally logical way to see things and, for me at least, comforting. It's all one process and it's all relational. It's relations all the way down. One Buddhist teacher I like put it this way. "All of reality is a vibrating verb rather than a bunch of concrete nouns".

So back to your point, this is tantamount to being part of that "infinite stream of energy" as you put it perhaps.

Philip Larkin:

    And specious stuff that says "No rational being
    Can fear a thing it will not feel", not seeing
    That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   
    No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   
    Nothing to love or link with,
    The anaesthetic from which none come round.

Aubade, 1977

Pretty sure its a lot like how it was before you were born

Have you ever been under general anesthesia? For me, that's the closes you can experience "not existing". Also, you have already experienced not existing; that is before you were born. How did that feel? Was it painful?

To me that feeling is both our survival instinct projecting, and our social/bonding self that anticipates the pain of others, something most people dread dearly.

Why would it be any different than being unconscious?

I think what you are referring to (the uneasiness) is your mortality salience.

That is just your monkey brain freaking out to instinctual fear of death.

when you dream, all the characters in your dream are actually just you. your mind gives rise to them, so they're just you. what gave rise to your mind?

Your brain maturation and experiences. Newborns have very little mind, but their universe is also very small.

What's it like to be asleep and not dreaming?

Imagine is screaming at or slapping the dead was all it took to bring them back to life.

Einstein: "I told you I was done with physics! Let me rest in peace already!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com