I am curious about your last paragraph. What does it mean?
People of other cultures think differently about death. Death is welcomed into the day to day life. Consciousness of death is invited, even celebrated. The dead are spoken to.
This second group of people don't believe in the finality of death. They believe and live towards life after death, believing in either some sort of continuum of consciousness or of their own consciousness as the process of an immaterial soul that will live after the body stops.
Stories of death and near-death are full of the unexplained and perhaps unexplainable.
From a western materialist perspective alone, death is fascinating if you look at it. Where does our consciousness arise from? It must be from the brain, right? And it is a sort of illusion, since we don't have individual souls. The perception of consciousness is a labyrinth of mirrors, self references.
Yet, the same machinery for perceiving ourselves is also used to perceive others. We are constantly simulating and imitating one another. We're even working to modify and live up to others' images of us.
So the patterns of the consciousness of any individual are actually distributed, holographically, through a community of brains.
This being known.... Who or what died when one brain dropped off the grid? (For more in this direction, read Hofstadter).
Even more simply, what changes take place in a dying person? What is the difference between a person who embraces death and a person who dies in fear? Is it possible to be happy while dying? What would it take to live a life that ends happily?
This is what I mean when I say that death is worth being curious about.
Various cultures, religions, spiritual people want to deny this. They're probably happier for it, but I can only accept the dull explanation that we just stop and it's not very interesting.
That possibility makes sense, but I don't really know enough about the universe to be certain.
Here's where the idea of life after death really breaks down for me: If you have a degenerative disease when do you get to this afterlife? Some people have effectively died long before they die, in terms of mind. If you see this as a process that is entirely physical it makes sense, it's sad but it makes sense. If you think there's something non-physical there then it poses some really hard questions: did they die already? why do personality changes happen if who a person is is contained in some non-physical thing? when they do die does the degenerated form go to the afterlife or the whole, and if its the whole then what happened to the person that was degenerative? Now throw in non-human life where we have a continuum of brain complexity down to nothing and ask similar questions - it just makes no sense. Unless you hold humans above other animals, which I find really distasteful and short sighted. Really though, if you try to explain all this you're just explaining away needless complexity to justify wishing for something that seems very unlikely.
A christian chap I used to live with told me that after we die our soul goes to heaven but its just our consciousness and not our personality, and we spend the rest of all time praising god. Well, not me, I was going to hell for not believing. Honestly, of the things he described, not sure which sounded better, but a materialistic death definitely trumps either of those options.
I don't find this view makes me particularly unhappy. In fact, 'living' forever in an afterlife seems incredibly stressful, given that you need to work towards that all the time (and you have no idea at all what it's actually like). Having a clear end makes things so much easier - you have a realistic timeframe you will live in and once you die, you have nothing to worry about anymore.
What I find somewhat strange is that people who say they don't want to live forever don't seem to mind an afterlife. Maybe something to ask them about the next time.
Beautifully said. Exactly matches my own perception. The width of this distribution is helped by conversations shared with people, books read together, movies watched, games played. "Common" memories. I think the momentum to write, to make art generally is driven by this instinctive intuition, desire to extend the life of one's consciousness in the community. We really don't die until we're completely forgotten.
Was going to ask for any reading recommendation, but noticed the Hofstadter right there. Thank you!
You die, you’re gone, and that’s fine. It does not need to be spectacular. Implying otherwise is just about as inflammatory as calling the other camp’s beliefs nonsense imo.
I listed some things that people believe, and I listed some things to think about.
If you can point to where I made any inflammatory claims, that would help me communicate better in the future. Thanks.