Death Itself

[TheRapingDragon]

Ok, thought I'd try to get a bit of feedback or debate going here because death is a topic that has been on my mind a lot lately. I used to have a strong fear of death to the point of having small panic attacks, that was years ago, but now for the past few nights I've had too much thoughts in my head, I felt like posting them up is better than more fears.

I'm not looking to start a discussion on what happens after you die, heaven, hell, reincarnation, nothing at all, none of that is wanted here, we probably have plenty of other threads on that topic. I am more interested in what people see death itself as being, what is death, I mean the corporeal death, the embodiment of death, personification of death, whatever you want to call it.

I sit and think of death and my mind can't comprehend it, a typical thought process could be:

"Death is sleeping, but forever, but how can you perceive what "forever" feels like when you wake up from sleeping and cannot remember it, so death is simply the absence of thought and thus the abscence of spirit and memory".

Though then you can get into how you have dreams, and how these dreams show your mind can still be active, so how can you still percieve the process of death as being sleeping, for that to happen you would have to sleep with nothing going on at all.

Anyway, I'm just sorting of wanting to find out what death actually is, a statement where if I fear death I can simply say to myself "There is no reason to fear, I know what death is, death is ???".

So, thoughts, views?

[falconsfan14]

Re: Death Itself

To me its like... youre falling asleep to never wake up again. Thats the only way i can think to put it.

[TheRapingDragon]

Re: Death Itself

Yes but as I said, how can you see sleeping as death when your mind is still technically "awake" while you are sleeping. You get rapid eye movement, you get dreams, you get thoughts, memories can still occur during sleep.

In death, that doesn't (supposedly) happen, so how can death be sleep. Death has to be something else, something more solid, definable.

[Reach]

Re: Death Itself

This thread was here before I think. Or was it just something similar?

Death is your brain dying, the cells within it dying and your conciousness shutting off. You can't experience death; you, from your perspective (not that you have one once you are dead, but I mean, relative to you) are erased, along with everything. So you can't know you died or know you're dead or know you lived, which is why it's kind of pointless fearing the death itself.

It is an odd concept though.

[TheRapingDragon]

Re: Death Itself

I like your explanation Reach, though you are right it is a strange concept to have to try to swallow. How can you possibly try to comprehend no thought, or the fact that you won't be here, you will be gone, nothing, but yet at the same time you won't know you will be nothing, because you will be nothing.

Scary really.

[misfits666]

Re: Death Itself

U NEED HEPL

[iggymatrixcounter]

Re: Death Itself

I like your explanation Reach, though you are right it is a strange concept to have to try to swallow. How can you possibly try to comprehend no thought, or the fact that you won't be here, you will be gone, nothing, but yet at the same time you won't know you will be nothing, because you will be nothing.

Scary really.

Death is an interesting subject. You can percieve it in countless ways IMO.

As far as referring it to sleep, that is a comparison the Bible had because Jesus called Lazurus "asleep" because he had the power to wake him up just as if you would wake up someone that was asleep.

And I think sleep is a good comparison, I mean yea there are REM and all that in real sleep but from a religious perspective, you die, then you have some hope of coming back after some period of time. And that is similar to sleep, when you fall asleep you wake up and time as passed by and you have no recollection of the time when you were asleep.

I always found that the best way to describe death was as the opposite of life. Not a "continuation" or "another part" of life, like many people may believe, but the actual state of death being the opposite of life.

[falconsfan14]

Re: Death Itself

This thread was here before I think. Or was it just something similar?

Death is your brain dying, the cells within it dying and your conciousness shutting off. You can't experience death; you, from your perspective (not that you have one once you are dead, but I mean, relative to you) are erased, along with everything. So you can't know you died or know you're dead or know you lived, which is why it's kind of pointless fearing the death itself.

It is an odd concept though.

K that works for me. Now i dont give a **** about dying at all. (not sarcastic)

[Reach]

Re: Death Itself

"How can you possibly try to comprehend no thought"

It's impossible to comprehend nothing because it's impossible to experience nothing. If it were possible it wouldn't be nothing after all

Yea, leaving and dying is an odd concept regardless of what you believe. But it isn't something to fear. Maybe you could fear the way you die, but when you die there's nothing left to fear.

I don't really liek comparing death to infinite sleep, because they're quite a bit different. You dream and your brain is still running the whole time while you're asleep, processing things you learned that day and running through all of your thoughts, so often you're still thinking and experiencing things quite normally, and depending on how you define reality your sleep experience can be just as real as anything else >.>

But yea, I suppose death is simply a cease in brain function, which is a lack of recognition of any reality.

[RandomPscho]

Re: Death Itself

Death is the end... No more existance of yourself.

I do not fear death, as we all will die eventually, it is a natural process... In fact I like knowing im going to die. How fun would life be if you didn't die? You would have eternity to do everything and see everything. Once everything is done, then what? an endless bordum....

[TheRapingDragon]

Re: Death Itself

I guess I over-analyse. You see, I have a fondness for thinking, for being able to think over things, look at things how I want to and contemplate the reasons for them things being how they are. When I do this with death it freaks me out because for once my mind cannot comphrehend what will happen, the fact I won't see this, I won't know this, I won't be. I won't be me.

I've been getting panic attacks the past couple of days heh. That's why I made this thread, to try to get to grips with trying to comprehend the process, rather than the results after. Seeing as how, as Reach said, you won't know what happens after as your mind is gone, so I sort of just need to be ok with the process of it happening.

[Suzuru]

Re: Death Itself

Death is the end... No more existance of yourself.

I do not fear death, as we all will die eventually, it is a natural process... In fact I like knowing im going to die. How fun would life be if you didn't die? You would have eternity to do everything and see everything. Once everything is done, then what? an endless bordum....

avg of 80years is not enough to enjoy even the tiny fraction of fun things in life. I'd love to live at least few centuries there is plenty of things to do and not get bored heh. Of course increasing Human avg life span tends to create different kind of problems, overpopulation. So might need to solve the space issue before increasing the life span or drastically reduce reproduction rates.

As for you wanting to die bit. Be my guest, it only helps the above issue.

I guess I over-analyse. You see, I have a fondness for thinking, for being able to think over things, look at things how I want to and contemplate the reasons for them things being how they are. When I do this with death it freaks me out because for once my mind cannot comphrehend what will happen, the fact I won't see this, I won't know this, I won't be. I won't be me.

I've been getting panic attacks the past couple of days heh. That's why I made this thread, to try to get to grips with trying to comprehend the process, rather than the results after. Seeing as how, as Reach said, you won't know what happens after as your mind is gone, so I sort of just need to be ok with the process of it happening.

I just think of death as nothing more than a transition. You(you) might not be reborn again but the self awareness of being, will be born anew. Being aware here on earth is just part of the journey, most likely my next awareness will emerge somewhere else in the multiverse, maybe as some kind of semi intelligent tree, or a rock that will live for millennium. It's fun to contemplate things like that.

[Reach]

Re: Death Itself

Ah it would be nice to live for a long time. I think if I could choose to clone myself or not then I would. XD That becomes an odd question of what conciousness really is though...but I guess logically it's just a reality created by your specific brain functions, so cloning yourself would recreate create you just the same.

Increasing the average human lifespan hasn't caused overpopulation at all. You are quite mistaken there. Actually, with an increase in life span comes a decrease in population growth Odd, isn't it? Population growth occurs in a developing stage where health care exceeds cultural development (or essentially people are still poping out babies like cavemen but live a lot longer). Generally people that live long live in developed areas and have far less children.

Cloning people wouldn't hurt the population that much really. Far less than the developing countries are now. Maybe if there was worldwide access to cloning but thats not going to happen anytime soon, and I think if we could sustain ourselves in the astroid belt or something we could sustain hundreds of trillions of people.

anyway, offtopic stuff.

[RainGame53]

Re: Death Itself

I just figure it like this - millions and millions of poeple have already died before without being afraid, so why should I? But I'm one of those people that never likes to take anything to seriously.

Although I'd say I have a pretty good imagination and could possibly convince myself into the horrors of the afterlife, from the purely scientific beliefs I have about life, when I die it will feel from my perspective like I fell asleep, but I will never dream and never wake up again.

That's just what I believe.

[ShadowSkill]

Re: Death Itself

I figure it would be as if you pushed all thought from your mind, nothing to worry yourself about and on top of that, its extremely quiet. Kind of like sleeping but, you're not asleep in that way. Then information kind of swarms in, not like the normal information, but the information to questions that have no answer to them. Like learning the meaning of purpose or something like that. It would be weird in my opinion to just die and not get a few more questions answered. Thinking about death isn't a problem to me. I just wonder sometimes what would happen. What if it goes on like I imaged it would? Would the information go on forever, or just end suddenly? Or will something totally out-of-the-box happens instead? Death to me is like an interesting conversation (something you wouldn't usually talk about for example), you shouldn't fear it, but instead go along with it. You going to have that talk someday.