Ask Lemmy

The connections in my brain that made me me will fail and I will cease to exist, same as before I existed.

Nothing. Was in the hospital for a heart attack last year, my heart stopped for 8 seconds. I was 100% completely unaware. Was told later what had happened.

Its a state equivalent to before you were born. Its feels exactly as it felt back then. That is the nothing.

You become what you were before you were conceived.

Either of two things:

Nothing. However, I don't think most people quite grasp the meaning of that. Kind of how they think that before the big bang there was just empty space. No, empty space is not nothing. There's no empty space, there's no time, there's nothing. By definition it cannot be experienced. Experience simply ends. It's as if nothing ever happened. The universe could just as well have never existed.

The more optimistic theory is that consciousness is in a way immortal. You can only experience being, not not-being. It's kind of how when you go under general anesthesia and then wake up it's quite unlike sleeping. When you've slept you have the sense of time having passed in between. With general anesthesia this is not the case. One moment you feel sleepy and then you wake up in another room. From your subjective experience you never lost consciousness to begin with. Whose to say that something similar doesn't happen with death. Instead of experience ending it just moves elsewhere. It's a pretty difficult concept to explain but it's somewhat similar to the idea of quantum immortality.

The ~40% of me that are Microbes are going to have a field day.

You don't experience anything, not even a sense of 'nothing'.

Nothing.

When you die, your brain dumps dopamine and you enter a euphoric state in the brief moments before you’re technically dead.

Time is relative for every entity, according to the theory of general relativity. I posit that as you die, your personal timeline extends to infinity. The state of euphoria is therefore permanent to you, the experiencer. It’s not heaven, but for you it might feel like it.

My family will be very sad.

I think that it is exactly the same as before you were born.

I have an opinion on this, but it saps all the fun out of the discussion when the question is asked by someone who gets no enjoyment out of their life. I'd rather you get professional mental health than have a bunch of people on the Internet assure you that death will be the end of your suffering.

Sounds like someone elses problem at that point.

You're dead

I've died. It's a permanent state of unconsciousness. No thoughts. No dreams. No life flashing before your eyes. Just nothing.

It's just nothing.

Asking what you experience after death is a nonsensical question, you don't experience anything at all.

What did you see/hear/feel/experience back in 1066 during the Norman Conquest of England?

You weren't there, you weren't alive then, so you didn't experience anything at all.

That same sort of non-experience is what awaits you after death.

"What happens when you die" - I assume you mean after you die (not during), and to your consciousness, your awareness rather than your body.

The same as before you came to be. Not like you fell asleep; you're gone.

The game will be over, I will remove the VR headset, and continue living my real life. I’m sure in time the memories will fade.

Do you remember what it was like before you were conceived? Like that.

I get reborn in the world that i helped create ...

This one's not going to sovngarde.

From my perspective, the universe – including myself – ceases to exist.

From the perspective of the universe: entropy.

Whatever happens, I just hope it’s graceful and as painless for others as possible.

Whatever it was like before you were born. You return to that, literally nothing to be afraid of

I think i'll just stop existing at some point. Maybe there'll be some pseudo visual sensations ('light') as I die but other than that I don't expect any kind of 'after life'.

Half of the time I look forward to my death, it doesn't scare me since I don't see the real point of my life

I think we shouldn't be scared of death but still try to enjoy our limited lifetime as much as we can. If you feel depressed continously, I can only advise you to seek help. Life shouldn't be like that. If you have friends or family that you trust, tell them how you feel. In case you don't, that's okay. You may reach out to professional organisations or helplines instead. :)

I believe it's very similar to falling asleep, and you may even tap into a dreamlike state of consciousness depending on your circumstances. Eventually, your self awareness stops and fades into nothingness. What you see if anything at all, and what your perception of time is or how self aware of the situation you are will depend a lot on the circumstances of the death and your individual make up, the same way not everyone dreams the same way or even remembers dreaming at all.

If my partner is still alive, then she would be very sad. Likewise my older siblings. God, I hope my parents aren't alive to see it - that would suck for them. My best bud would also be pretty torn up (we've lived within a few blocks of each other for most of the last three decades, and get together at least once a week). There's also an old ex who if they're still around, I can count on a great eulogy from them. Makes me wish I could stick around just to see that.

Unless it's a particularly horrible death, I don't think anyone would be dangerously sad. I'm insured to the hilt, so there should be enough to go around to cover expenses, including my partner's current level of comfort.

From my perspective, it's likely to be a big nothing (I would be very surprised otherwise). But I've never really put much stock in individual consciousness: sure I may be stuck to this one perspective because of how brains work, so it's the only consciousness I can truly know, but it's not the only one. The others (like other other people) will keep going after this one ends. The biggest changes are going to be in the social and legal dimensions of my former life.

Lots of people have my old answer, which is probably correct, that you were dead before you were born. That means living is the unusual state to be in.

I believe in a sort of quantum immortality, having been in many close calls where I saw myself die but because I saw it, I avoided it.

I also had a near death experience once. Lets say I "dreamed" that I saw the big bang in reverse (the big crunch) and then saw it repeat (the big bounce) and I relived my life up until that moment. This time I didn't die, and here I still am. I don't dare test this theory, death terrifies me.

Begs the question, when would I die for real in this system I believe in? Can I die at all? Maybe I am everyone, and it's just one soul stitched across all of time and space.

I don't know. It brings me comfort to believe it. Gives me courage to do the right thing despite danger. A person who does not fear death has control of their destiny.

There will persumably be a funeral, my remaining family and friends will grieve and divide my up my things, several of which I doubt they will ever really use.

I'll be dead and won't care.

Fertilizer.

But then what? I just stop existing and it’s like I fell asleep?

If you're asking about your cognitive state, it's like a process or event that ends. Like if you roll a ball down a hill and the ball stops bc it's at the bottom of the hill. The ball's still there but the process of the ball rolling is over.

what scares me is if my agony would be slow and painful.

To some people it's helpful if they read up on things like palliative care and hospice care. To other people it makes things worse to think about it, but personally I found it comforting to know that there are options and procedures to handle that.

I have two sets of beliefs here. There's what I rationally believe based on what I know, and there's the story I'll be telling myself for comfort if I know the end is soon (and I think benefits me in day to day life too)

The experience of death and if anything comes after is inherently kind of unknowable and if there was a truth to know I don't think human minds could comprehend it. Even if the answer is nothing, I can't comprehend experiencing nothing. When consciousness lapses we only have what we experience before and after to contrast it to. So I have to live life with the understanding that I will die and I can't know what that will be like until it happens.

That being said, we really don't know anything about how consciousness is connected to our physical forms, and we don't know that experience ends after death, either. Especially when you consider time may not be linear in the way we perceive it. The closest thing I have to a belief would be some form of reincarnation, where consciousness would resume in another life in another time. Maybe every life is the same consciousness reborn an uncountable number of times. I can't say I believe this per se, more that it's just as possible as any other theory, and it'd be a comfortable delusion to pass on with. it helps me feel closer to others too.

I guess my main point is go play Outer Wilds (and its DLC) if you haven't gotten to it yet. It helped me grapple with a lot of this and even if I'm still scared of the end, I no longer find it overwhelmingly distressing.

I don't need to read stupid questions like yours anymore, it's bliss.

Your corpse decomposes.

Nothing is nothing.

Hopefully the Egg is revealed.

We get judged and are either accepted into one of the three levels of Heaven or face punishment if we were exceptionally twisted.

I think this is probably a dream. Who knows what's on the other side. Animals are really good at experiencing severe pain and forgetting about it. I wouldn't worry about that. Life is a joke, so laugh at it.

If you believe your self, your awareness, your consciousness are manifestations of neurons firing in a brain, then as soon as those stop, you cease to be.

I believe that those neurons are a sort of radio signal, and that the self as I know it is a kind of wave transmitted from some time/place. When the body dies and the brain dies with it, I believe that connection is gone, and that signal is lost, but that the time/place from which the signal originated still exists. This doesn't indicate that I, the self, still am somehow alive or exist in some other way, the specific manifestation of myself as who I an is gone in this case, but I do take some solace in the fact that the signal that propagated the awareness of my own being still goes on.

Nothing

I think its like being anesthesized or a high dose of nitrous, consciousness slowly fades away, its a bit trippy, can be scary, and then youre gone. Depends on the circumstances though, some deaths are probably a lot quicker than others and you wouldnt feel a thing.