Question for atheists: What happens when we die?

[Patrick Degan]

I suppose this is a related question - can anyone think of a religion, offhand, that doesn't involve some kind of postmortem continuation of life, be it in an afterworld or a return to this one?

Taoism, perhaps. Shinto has a rather vague conception of an afterlife but the emphasis is not on preparing for it but making the best of your life in this world.

[darthbob88]

I suppose this is a related question - can anyone think of a religion, offhand, that doesn't involve some kind of postmortem continuation of life, be it in an afterworld or a return to this one?

Discordianism, IIRC, makes no mention of a next life. It may be that I just haven't found it yet, though.

[Nate_A]

Death is the cessation of brain activity. Who I am is the product of the activity in my brain. What do you think happens to me?

But seriously, this question is stupid. When other people die, thats end. Its all she wrote. Kudos. The end. How hard can that concept be?

It's not the concept of "the end" that's hard.. it's what comes after.
Now I'm sure everyone will say "nothing" or "oblivion". But what *is* nothing or oblivion? It's nothing. But you will not know you are in nothing because you are nothing and.. well. See what I mean? That's what I can't grasp.

I think your problem is that you are trying to understand what it will be like from your perspective - which is obviously impossible, because you will no longer have a perspective. All this mystery disappears when you consider the situation from an objective standpoint. Whatever comes after you die will not involve you, because you will no longer exist; so just think about what will happen to what does exist.

Just remember, nothing is not hard to imagine. ( You understand nothing before you even start thinking. )

[Cao Cao]

I think your problem is that you are trying to understand what it will be like from your perspective - which is obviously impossible, because you will no longer have a perspective. All this mystery disappears when you consider the situation from an objective standpoint. Whatever comes after you die will not involve you, because you will no longer exist; so just think about what will happen to what does exist.

Just remember, nothing is not hard to imagine. ( You understand nothing before you even start thinking. )

Granted, however my mind just can't grasp existance that isn't from my perspective.
While obviously the universe will go on without me, in a sense my mind refuses to accept that. Because all existance as I know it comes from me. The very idea that I will no longer have a perspective is completely alien. This is just me trying to explain how my psyche deals with these concepts. I do of course consider everything around me as real as me.
Still I'd wager I can't be the only one who thinks like this, or the promise of an afterlife wouldn't appeal to so many.

[Saurencaerthai]

Well, when everyone else dies, they become unresponsive, their bodily functions shut down, and they begin to decompose. This state doesn't reverse. What happens when I die, though? I don't know. I'll find out when the time comes. Quite likely what happens to everyone else, but who knows? Maybe something interesting might happen.

[Covenant]

If you assume that what makes you you is a complex network of chemicals and biological signalling bits all hooked together within the shell of bone at the top of your spine, then what happens when you die is not dissimilar to what happen when the nerves of your hand die. They fade away and the gestalt being that animated it is lost. Same thing, though more extreme, to having a series of strokes, having brain damage, or being lobotimised.

End of line.

[Stark]

It's fascinating to speculate what the mind does when it starts to die: since it controls your subjective experience, a slow enough (or expected) death could provide any experience someone was conditioned to expect.

Sudden death is a terrifying concept: you're doo-daddling along, then click, it's over. There's no credits, no recap, no chance to say 'wow, that was unexpected'. Everything that was you is gone, and you didn't even see it coming.

[Haruko]

I believe for most atheists it comes down to the claim of an afterlife or reincarnation as mere wishful thinking. Believing something to be true if it is backed by evidence, he doesn't believe in an afterlife or reincarnation because they are not. He may not necessarily be against the idea, but he chooses not to proclaim it is true due to said reason and instead proclaims that when we die, it's the end, because that's all we can be sure of.

Am I right? My apologies if what I just said is ignorant.

[Stark]

Most atheists I know would love an afterlife, something that guaranteed eternal existence. However, it's just a fairy story, as you observe.

[Big Orange]

Well I'm pretty ambigious of death being the Ultimate End, since nothing really ends and carries on to something else in some shape or form. But I don't find the concept of ceasing to exist truly frightening, since you're literally not there to experience the oblivion.

Come out nothing, go back into nothing: what do you lose? Nothing!

However I'm very puzzled why we exist to begin with, why the universe exists to begin with and why our sole experience of the universe is from the fleshy, lumpy sponge known as the brain. And power cuts occuring when old people die in their sleep and small children reminiscing about events long ago is open to ambiguous interoperation about what happens before we're born and when we die.

[Stark]

Orange, when you burn out a chip, the information is gone. The chip exists, the energy is radiated as heat, but the information is gone. Information is a structure, not mass or energy, so it CAN in fact be destroyed.

And we exist to perpetuate the species, just like everything else.

[Big Orange]

Orange, when you burn out a chip, the information is gone. The chip exists, the energy is radiated as heat, but the information is gone. Information is a structure, not mass or energy, so it CAN in fact be destroyed.

And we exist to perpetuate the species, just like everything else.

This reminds me of Red Dwarf's mockery of the afterlife, Silicon Heaven:

Hudson 10: "Where do all the calculators go...?!"

Kryten: "Nowhere, they just die...."

Anyway the concept of eternal and complete oblivion after your brain dies sounds more grounded in reality, if we're just organic computers (which we are):

HAL 9000: "I'm afraid."

[B5B7]

The universe existed for about 13 billion years without me in it (though the matter that makes up my current body was there all along) - I came into existence ie some of the matter of the universe assumed my form - I die and go back to the general matter pool to make something else - possibly part of a future person's body.
The material part is not that important [even though in most aspects it is all of us there is]. I would love to live in a future time (say 200 years from now) where can upload your mind into a machine body (indistinguishable unless you so desire from a normal human body).
13,000,000,000 years : 200 years - missed it by that much [such a small %] (to quote Maxwell Smart).

[Cao Cao]

Orange, when you burn out a chip, the information is gone. The chip exists, the energy is radiated as heat, but the information is gone. Information is a structure, not mass or energy, so it CAN in fact be destroyed.

And we exist to perpetuate the species, just like everything else.

All evidence suggests that the information in our minds will just be erased upon brain death - yes. I think most atheists accept that much.
But as has been said.. it's extremely hard for the sapient mind to accept the end of it's own existance. "I think therefore I am." But when all thought is terminated, "I" am gone. And then we get back into loops of logic.
I wish I could explain it better. It's like a feeling in the back of my mind that just will not abide by the idea that my thoughts will ever "end".

[K. A. Pital]

Is it known with 100% certainity that information contained in the brain is 100% lost in the moment of brain death?

[Cao Cao]

Is it known with 100% certainity that information contained in the brain is 100% lost in the moment of brain death?

As I understand it what's stored in our head requires active neurons firing all the time. When that stops, all that's left is an inert lump of flesh that isn't storing anything and never will again.

[Cao Cao]

Wait I think I mean synapse. Not neuron. Blah I'm dumb so who knows.

[Seggybop]

Is it known with 100% certainity that information contained in the brain is 100% lost in the moment of brain death?

I don't believe so; I'm pretty sure I've heard of people with zero brain activity waking up again. I have no sources though.

[K. A. Pital]

As I understand it what's stored in our head requires active neurons firing all the time. When that stops, all that's left is an inert lump of flesh that isn't storing anything and never will again.

I thought information-theoretic death only occurs when the brain cells undergo autolysis? Isn't the information technically stored in the biochemistry of the brain, and as such, could be preserved?

[NecronLord]

To my knowledge, corpse preservation today tends to involve destruction of cells; cryonics stuff also includes all sorts of enbalming and chemical-pumping, and vitrification.

I imagine you're about as likely to be ressurected by the method in Clarke and Baxter's The Light of Other Days, wormhole-scanners peering back and time and taking a snapshot of your mind at the point of death, as you are by your brain being put back together after all that rigmarole.

[Gil Hamilton]

Well, unless you believe in a soul, downloading your brain to a digital facsimile would still mean that you're dead. Your consciousness still ends when your brain dies, there's just a digital copy that thinks exactly like you. The only way to truly extend life for centuries or millenia is to repair damage to the brain, and either repair / replace other organs or have the brain controlling a robot body that's close enough to human to fool it. The latter might be better for not getting killed (more durable), but could require ridiculously advanced technology in order for the brain to think it's controlling a real human body and not freak out.

I would argue that calling a person really dead if they made a digital backup that was exactly like them complete with memories and personality to be semantics. You could say "Well, it's not really him", but really, it would be close enough to continued existance that no one could tell the practical difference.

Though let me ask you a question. What are you? Are you the net sum of all your biological processes or are you the conscious product of said biological processes? At the present time, there is no practical difference between the two, because they are inseperable. But with Darth Raptors "Convincing Simulation", the are seperable. If a digital copy of a person's mind, hopes, desires, memories, all that stuff could be created. All that which is the person minus the flesh and bone is perserved. So is the person dead is all that made the person himself is still active and communicating? Or has the format of their existance just changed?

[Rye]

Is it known with 100% certainity that information contained in the brain is 100% lost in the moment of brain death?

I don't know how you could measure such a thing with "100% accuracy," but to my understanding of things like recall and memory, the "information" in one's brain is down to the relationships between neurones and the sequence they fire in. Stroke victims often lose the common channels for recall and writing, so they lose their memory and have to attempt to come up with new links as they relearn stuff.

As for a perfectly intact brain undergoing brain death, I'm not sure whether you could merely reboot a brain and the associations between the neurones would make the same sense to the new mind running around inside. Now, in my opinion, it's likely that a lot of the memories, personality traits etc would be accessible to the new mind since there is a lot of automatic physical behaviour of a brain that gives us the means to interact with the world and ourselves (which is ultimately what the mind is), but many memories may be written over or lost by the arranging system of the new mind, since it may use the same neurones and clusters as it learns new things. I don't think you could get a perfect in/out stream of information from a brain, because by its very nature it requires some sort of influence on its own workings, so, well, maybe is the answerto whether information can survive brain death. I think it's probably likely, but it's not guaranteed.

As for "experiencing" oblivion from the other posters, think of it like unconsciousness. Even a physically intact brain can be shut down with no awareness of the outside world or itself, imagine if that part of the brain were not only shut down, but had melted and leaked out of your ear. That's a total loss of self, even the automatic subconscious brain isn't even there.

[K. A. Pital]

As for a perfectly intact brain undergoing brain death, I'm not sure whether you could merely reboot a brain and the associations between the neurones would make the same sense to the new mind running around inside. Now, in my opinion, it's likely that a lot of the memories, personality traits etc would be accessible to the new mind since there is a lot of automatic physical behaviour of a brain that gives us the means to interact with the world and ourselves (which is ultimately what the mind is), but many memories may be written over or lost by the arranging system of the new mind, since it may use the same neurones and clusters as it learns new things.

So that means, if someone is "rebooted" after vitrification, his brain can re-write a lot of his memories/personality without him even knowing, because it creates the infrastructure anew? That sucks, but it's better than eternal oblivion.

[Sikon]

Regarding cryonics and preservation of memories, here is one brief discussion:

Q: Won't memories be lost if brain electrical activity stops?

A: Short-term memory depends on electrical activity. However long-term memory is based on durable molecular and structural changes within the brain. Quoting from the Textbook of Medical Physiology by Arthur C. Guyton (W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, 1986):

We know that secondary memory does not depend on continued activity of the nervous system, because the brain can be TOTALLY INACTIVATED (emphasis added) by cooling, by general anesthesia, by hypoxia, by ischemia, or by any method, and yet secondary memories that have been previously stored are still retained when the brain becomes active once again.

This is known from direct clinical experience with surgical deep hypothermia, for which complete shutdown of brain electrical activity (electrocortical silence) is not only permissible, but desirable for good neurological outcome.

In short, everything I have seen that is properly supported with references indicates that the long-term memories which form a person's personality are physically stored, not just in transient electrical signals or potentials. The brain is always learning, writing new memories, and writing over some old ones at some rate, from week to week, year to year, etc. (Think of how one constantly forgets some old information every year). But I haven't seen any well-supported source suggest the rate of doing so with long-term memories would drastically increase by orders of magnitude upon hypothetical revival.

Also, here are two images, where the first shows the serious freezing damage with early techniques more than a decade ago, while the latter shows the much more effective preservation now:





Obviously, cryonics is still not anyone's ideal first choice, as there are essentially three possible techniques to minimize the probability of true permanent death within a given timeframe, in order from most preferrable to least preferrable:

• Life extension (old threads here and here)
• Suspended animation: If a person could be put into hibernation when near-death, such would be a little like cryonics but better. (My usual link). If it became possible, perhaps many would extend their final decade or two of life to 50-100+ years by going into hibernation and coming out periodically, seeing their grandchildren grow up (if applicable), seeing the future, etc.
• Cryonics: www.cryonics.com

[Sikon]

Adding a little more to the above:

That temporary loss of all electrical activity in the brain does not destroy long-term memories and personality is so well-established that an emergency medical technique involving such has been tested in pigs and planned to be used on some seriously injured patients:

Researchers are testing potentially life-saving techniques for keeping humans in a state of suspended animation while surgeons repair their wounds.

[...]

The animal's body temperature falls to about 10C until it is in a state of "profound hypothermia" and has no pulse and no electrical activity in its brain.

But after the blood stored earlier is warmed and pumped back into the pig's body its heart starts beating again and it comes back to life.

"It is still pretty awe-inspiring," Dr Alam said. "Once the heart starts beating and the blood starts pumping, voila, you've got another animal that's come back from the other side.

"Technically, I think we can do it in humans."

He now wants automatic consent to use the technique on all patients brought to his hospital who have lost blood and would probably die with only standard care.

Source

Cryonics is still definitely not as desirable as life extension or hibernation, given that actually restoring someone preserved with present preservation methods would require advanced technology like nanotechnology. However, at least such is only presently technologically impossible, not scientifically impossible, and it is possible that technology will eventually advance to the point of accomplishing almost anything not forbidden by physical laws. For example, it is more plausible than FTL starships. Anyway, even a moderate chance of saving someone's life is worth a lot of effort; it doesn't have to be 100% guaranteed.