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Comment by stephen_g | Hacker News Reader

That doesn’t really make much sense to me… Seems more like a category error than anything - surely anyone who believes in any kind of spiritual afterlife would expect that death on a spiritual level is something much more than simply losing consciousness? Especially if some kind of omniscient deity is believed to be involved, why would such an entity perform any kind of transference into a spiritual realm when you weren’t properly dead?

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No, the real question is, if the mind can exist independently of the body (and the brain), why does consciousness stop temporarily during certain phases of sleep? If the mind can go on even when the body dies, then it stands to reason that the brain being unconscious should pose even less of an obstacle.

> brain being unconscious

That's circular logic no?

In any case, a good counterpoint would be blackout drunk people. They are somewhat conscious, and can interact with their environment, but if you ask them after the fact when sober what happened, it would appear to them as if they were entirely unconscious.

Anesthesia proves the brain is (at least mostly) unable to access experiences that take place when it isn't recording, and that, while our mind is present in the brain, we rely on it for recall. That might be enough to draw the line for some, but obviously not everyone.

> while our mind is present in the brain, we rely on it for recall

People who believe in reincarnation must have accepted this long ago, because they can't remember their past lives, or anything that happens in between.

I'm sure this is well-thought and serious response, but I thought it was pretty funny. Why indeed, although I'm pretty sure most folks in psychedelic (shroom or DMT) would have sworn they're in the spiritual realm and that an omniscient deity deigned to commune with them.

Oh man kids these days don’t remember the days of god v_alpha when we had to put people in caves and roll aside the stone every time they took a nap. So much better now that we upgraded the brainstem firmware to not make that terminate() call.

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