I'm not looking forward to dying.

I'm fine with afterwards, it's the process that I really, really don't want to deal with. I've been dead before, we all have, it was fine. We'll be fine, you won't worry or feel bad at all, for like... forever. But man, I really don't want to be locked in my body in a hospital bed for 3 weeks with inadequate painkillers and no way to do anything about it.

A long time ago, my old therapist asked me what I thought would happen after I died. I told him I didn't know and was ok waiting to find out when it happened. He pressed me on it and I said "ok, either the big switch flips and that's it, or something soul-like survives, or the human mind dilates my final moments into an eternity because it cannot comprehend non-existence." And then he changed the subject.

This reminds me of that.

I've always wondered if your personal version of heaven or hell in the afterlife boils down to the deepest parts of your self and lingering consciousness tied to the neurochemical and electrical activity that happens after cardiac arrest.

You know how our sense of time is so warped when we dream, and you can fall asleep for just a few minutes but from your perspective a dream can feel so much longer?

I figure if there was ever the perfect time for your subconscious to come back and either bite you in the ass with guilt, shame, and regret for all the the things you've done that you never set right, or alternatively, maybe give you a sense of comfort if you feel you have made peace with your life on earth, it would probably be during this time.

Think of it like being in an isolation tank. Maybe some fuzzy outside information still makes its way in to influence what's going on inside of the tank, but mostly it's just you and your thoughts for (what feels like) all eternity.

Consciousness barely lasts a couple seconds without bloodflow though. Clearly a clickbait title that is intentionally misleading.

EEG collapses completely after 30 sec of stopped blood flow. Consciousness will be probably gone in 10-15 seconds.

well, that certainly doesn’t send me into an existential nightmare /s

Sure, bring them back after they realize heaven and hell are bullshit.

Electrical activity in dead brains is just chemical potentials that take a while to break down. No one, ever, has actually come back from actual death.

@kalkulat@lemmy.world @science@lemmy.world

This reminds me of the time I had general anesthesia during a surgery. I experienced this... phenomenon. One where I barely closed my eyes and, suddenly, I was laid down on another bed in another room, surgery was complete. There was no dreaming in-between, no hallucination, and even the "time gap" itself felt... non-existent. Just a literal, overwhelming but relaxing, almost cosmic, "nothingness". As if the general anesthesia were a Seek-Forward button which was pushed and my biological existence simply jumped an unknown amount of time into the future (it was roughly an hour, a simple surgery).

See, the passage of time looks pretty much like a "fall" towards a singularity. All matter is moving towards a point into the "far future", some moving slower than others due to the gravitational and relativistic effects (e.g. time is slightly slower for us than it is for ISS astronauts, because we're closer to the Earth's gravitational well). There are scientific hypotheses about the "far future" having some kind of "singularity", such as the logical conclusion from the Black Hole Cosmology which states that this universe were actually a cosmically-big black hole due to how cosmological constants and measurements matched the ones expected for black holes. If this proceeds, matter would be literally falling towards a cosmic "abyss", towards singularity, and what we, as living beings, perceive as "death", would be just the subjective (almost "solipsistic") stretched perception of said singularity.

At least, I myself like to think of my death as this. A spaghettified but imperceptible, fall towards the abyss, akin to that general anesthesia I once had, except that it wouldn't jump to wakefulness anymore; rather, it would become stuck in a perpetual state of "Seek-Forward", without a perceivable gap in-between. An eternal nothingness, essentially a return to the same "nothingness" I perceive from the time before I was born. And, well, it's scary, but it's also pretty comfortable if I really think about that, knowing that there'd be no more nociceptors triggering my central nervous system into feeling pain, knowing that there'd be no more emergent "me", just the primordial "nothingness" from the singularity we, as baryonic matter, exist in.

I got some (dark, esoteric) beliefs alongside that (especially "Death Herself") but, given I'm in c/science, I'm trying my best to stick to the more (or, at least, as close as) scientific (as) aspects (could get) of what I think about the phenomenon of death, with "sentience" as an emergent byproduct of a dynamic system (think "dual pendulum experiment", but deeper and more intricate involving several interconnected biological systems) we refer to as biological organism, a self-rearranging structure, and "death" as the cessation of said emergence (as soon as the a significant part of this dynamic system grinds to a halt, therefore rendering it unable to self-rearrange).

@kalkulat years after death in the case of some politicians

Considering low oxygen to the brain after 6 minutes results in brain damage occuring, would you really want to be brought back a vegetable?

I don't even want consciousness while I'm ALIVE.

Well that just gave me a new fear.

I always wanted to go out by jumping into a volcano when I feel that life is spent so this is just validating that idea

Edit: I have been corrected so I’ll just use my gun instead (also this isn’t a suicidal thing, I just will not experience consciousness after death cos that’s horrifying so I’m going out on my own terms, glad to find out that volcano jumping wouldn’t be as releasing as I had thought)