Is sleep proof that there is no death?

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pluto2

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When I think of the only logical way to look at life, I think of the lyrics in Stone Sour that say "Immortal till I'm born again".

To me thats true. As soon as you die, you have to be born again, from your perspective. There is nothing in between living and a new beginning. Thats why when you sleep, time goes by in an instant. So you really never die.

I was forged together by the stars before I was born, I'd imagine it wouldnt be hard after I die.

Personally, I believe there is no such thing as 'true death'.

We are all the same Self, manifesting in different bodies and different times and places.

When a body dies, the focal awareness is merely transferred to another body. It's not exactly reincarnation, since that implies an individual self to be reincarnated. It's more like infinite incarnation of the same Self. The same person in Essence living out various characters in the wonderful play of life.

You ever wonder about the 'afterlife'? You're living it. You will live it again. The pity of it is you will be none-the-wiser.
 
You need a cyclical universe, or a multiverse, because if there's just one universe, and nothing beyond its inevitable heat-death, then eventually it will become impossible for the architectures required for the emergence of consciousness to manifest.

Either that, or you need the phenomenon of consciousness to be essentially immaterial.

Decisions decisions!
 
Do you have any memory of the 13 billion years before your birth? The answer is no, becasue you weren't there. It will be the same after you die, you won't be here. Makes perfects sense. It is a bit disconcerting to realize you die, I guess that is the curse of being sentient, but that does not mean we should make up stuff to feel better about death.
 
Well...4 days ago I was technically dead for about 10 minutes. It's just blackness....nothing.
 
This does NOT belong in Human Science. At best, Free Thoughts or maybe Fringe since there is NO science involved!
 
@ OP,

I saw a dead person once, so I know death is real.

@ McGyver68,

Dang! That was a mouthful. Hope you are okay.

@ Origin,

What does being conscious of Eternity have to do with life after death? Merely opinion.
 
pluto2 said:
We are all the same Self, manifesting in different bodies and different times and places. When a body dies, the focal awareness is merely transferred to another body. It's not exactly reincarnation, since that implies an individual self to be reincarnated.
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"Memory" has more to do with "Jane K." or "John B." being respectively such specific persons than any generic distribution of consciousness among other "body islands". If the former doesn't survive death, then it's a rather flimsy continuance in the sense of there being a universally available "qualia camera" which lacks any personal identity of its own (apart from those temporary brains whose neural activity it parasitically experiences). Which isn't to say that in the long run it wouldn't be more merciful for some phenomenal continuums to eventually ditch a tortured, flawed "who I am" programming for another.

Memory is also a big knock against "traditional afterlife" reports from those who were briefly "dead": How would the body that was left behind then have recollections later of an afterlife adventure? It suggests instead that the dying or slowly revived brain merely experienced hallucinations that did manage to become stored.

You ever wonder about the 'afterlife'? You're living it. You will live it again. The pity of it is you will be none-the-wiser.
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In the context of spacetime realism, where this "now" has no more a special status than any other, I suppose there's actually the possibility of the same life or one's worldline being "re-experienced" over and over. Not a literal rewind and rerun being involved, but this illusionary sequence of "time flowing" being the perpetual manner in which one exists (or the appearance of existence that falls out of consciousness and that higher dimensional organization of one state of the brain being connected / continuing into another).

Paul Davies: Our senses tell us that time flows: namely, that the past is fixed, the future undetermined, and reality lived in the present. Yet various physical and philosophical arguments suggest otherwise. The passage of time is probably an illusion. Consciousness may involve thermodynamic or quantum processes that lend the impression of living moment by moment.
[...]
Although researchers have failed to find evidence for a single “time organ” in the brain, in the manner of, say, the visual cortex, it may be that future work will pin down those brain processes responsible for our sense of temporal passage. It is possible to imagine drugs that could suspend the subject’s impression that time is passing. Indeed, some practitioners of meditation claim to be able to achieve such mental states naturally.

And what if science were able to explain away the flow of time? Perhaps we would no longer fret about the future or grieve for the past. Worries about death might become as irrelevant as worries about birth. Expectation and nostalgia might cease to be part of human vocabulary. Above all, the sense of urgency that attaches to so much of human activity might evaporate. No longer would we be slaves to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s entreaty to “act, act in the living present,” for the past, present and future would literally be things of the past. --THAT MYSTERIOUS FLOW; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN; SEPTEMBER 2002​
 
C C said:
And what if science were able to explain away the flow of time? Perhaps we would no longer fret about the future or grieve for the past. Worries about death might become as irrelevant as worries about birth. Expectation and nostalgia might cease to be part of human vocabulary. Above all, the sense of urgency that attaches to so much of human activity might evaporate. No longer would we be slaves to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s entreaty to “act, act in the living present,” for the past, present and future would literally be things of the past. --THAT MYSTERIOUS FLOW; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN; SEPTEMBER 2002
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Even if the passage of time is indeed an illusion, I don't understand the utility of embracing that fact unless doing so actually frees one from the reality defined by that illusion. In other words, what would be the point of not worrying about pulling the ripcord after jumping out of a plane (because the passage of time is just an illusion anyway) unless the failure to worry about it somehow prevented you from hitting the ground?
 
Rav said:
Even if the passage of time is indeed an illusion, I don't understand the utility of embracing that fact unless doing so actually frees one from the reality defined by that illusion. In other words, what would be the point of not worrying about pulling the ripcord after jumping out of a plane (because the passage of time is just an illusion anyway) unless the failure to worry about it somehow prevented you from hitting the ground?
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Perhaps all that metaphysics has ever amounted to, value-wise, is "clearing some legroom for freedom from our conclusions about immediate reality". Which, in terms of some older doctrines, one might supposedly enjoy the benefits of eventually [though maybe never even knowable to this "current" empirical side of one's self, depending]. Apparently, theoretical physics has now seized some of those old bullhorns of philosophy. And what the psychological / societal benefits are, in regard to the fallout of Einstein's work, and from a physicists' POV like Davies -- might be no more than what he mentioned in the final paragraph of that quote, as well as Greene below. A replacement for the "mental boost" that spiritual people claim to receive from not believing that a never-lifting nothingness follows death (or whatever it is that they get a "high" over these days).

Brian Greene: In a very specific way, then, this realization shatters our comfortable sense that the past is gone, the future is yet to be and the present is what truly exists. Einstein was not hardened to the difficulty of absorbing such a profound change in perspective. Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher, recounts Einstein's telling him that "the experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics." And later, in a condolence letter to the widow of Michele Besso, his longtime friend and fellow physicist, Einstein wrote: "In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by just a little. That [his death] doesn't mean anything. For we convinced physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent."
[...]
For decades, I've struggled to bring my experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I delight in what I know is the individual's power, however imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization.
[...]
Regardless of our scientific insights, we will still mourn the evanescence of life and be able to thrill to the arrival of each newly delivered moment. The choice, however, of whether to be fully seduced by the face nature reveals directly to our senses, or to also recognize the reality that exists beyond perception, is ours.
--The Time We Thought We Knew, New York Times, 2003​
 
Just want to mention general anesthesia. It's nothing like sleep. When you sleep you dream. And you're partially aware ... you can be awakened by unfamiliar noises. During anesthesia you are gone. You don't exist. Meanwhile outside of you, people cut you open, rearrange your parts, and put you back together again.

I had surgery a while back [I'm perfectly fine now, thanks] and it was so strange. My anesthesiologist jokingly said to me, "Here comes breakfast," and I felt really really relaxed, and an instant later someone was saying, "You're in the recovery room." Of course you have full memory of your "prior life," but during the time you're out, you are really really out.

The NYT did a piece on this ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/what-anesthesia-can-teach-us-about-consciousness.html

A Google search of "anesthesia and consciousness" brings up many articles about the subject. Nobody knows more about consciousness than anesthesiologists.
 
I suppose a drunken stupor is like general anaesthesia. I’ve never been anaesthetized before but I have (many times) been out for the count after heavy drinking – it’s like being in a coma.
 
I'd second what someguy1 said.

General anesthesia is not like sleep. When you sleep, you dream. You're at least partly aware of where you are and you can be woken up.

My experience of general anesthesia is that you just blank out - completely. One minute you're having a needle put into your arm, and the next there's just nothing. I have also noticed that, with me, the wake up from anesthesia is different from waking from sleep. For me, coming out of an anesthetic seems sudden. There's nothing, then ... you're back again. I usually end up feeling a bit fuzzy in the head for a while afterwards, but it's a particular kind of fuzziness that is quite different from gettting your wits about you after a normal sleep.

I've had a couple of great dreams just prior to being woken from an anesthetic. I think there's a period between stopping the anesthetic - or getting whatever it is that reverses it - and actually waking up properly, and that's more like a normal deep sleep. I could happily have stayed in those dreams, but when I heard somebody saying my name, I found that I suddenly snapped out of it and was almost immediately fully conscious again.

Under an anesthetic, you're not aware of anything - not even a blackness. It's just nothing. You don't realise how unlike sleep it is until you've had one.
 
pluto2 said:
Is sleep proof that there is no death?
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No. Sleep is proof that most, if not all, mammals need fairly regular periods or cycles of conscious relaxation or rest to maintain any maximum cognitive awareness while awake or conscious.

When I think of the only logical way to look at life,
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There are many ways to "look at life". Logical thinking is only one of the many arenas of thought that can or may be used to "entertain" the myriad of "philosophical musings" on "life".

I think of the lyrics in Stone Sour that say "Immortal till I'm born again".

To me thats true. As soon as you die, you have to be born again, from your perspective. There is nothing in between living and a new beginning. Thats why when you sleep, time goes by in an instant. So you really never die.

I was forged together by the stars before I was born, I'd imagine it wouldnt be hard after I die.

Personally, I believe there is no such thing as 'true death'.

We are all the same Self, manifesting in different bodies and different times and places.

When a body dies, the focal awareness is merely transferred to another body. It's not exactly reincarnation, since that implies an individual self to be reincarnated. It's more like infinite incarnation of the same Self. The same person in Essence living out various characters in the wonderful play of life.

You ever wonder about the 'afterlife'? You're living it. You will live it again.
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Just like probably anyone and everyone else, I sometimes ponder many "Unanswerable Questions".
I do not however conclude that any of my musings, have or will ever, actually produce definitive answers or facts concerning those "Unanswerable Questions"

The pity of it is you will be none-the-wiser.
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The "pity of it is" that some people evidently believe that they know the answers to those "Unanswerable Questions" of this "life", and that they are able to also evidently state definitive facts about any cognitive awareness that anyone may take with them into the, as yet to be definitively proven, "afterlife".


Just my $181.73 ($00.02 - adjusted for inflation!)
 
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James R said:
I'd second what someguy1 said.

General anesthesia is not like sleep. When you sleep, you dream. You're at least partly aware of where you are and you can be woken up.

My experience of general anesthesia is that you just blank out - completely. One minute you're having a needle put into your arm, and the next there's just nothing. I have also noticed that, with me, the wake up from anesthesia is different from waking from sleep. For me, coming out of an anesthetic seems sudden. There's nothing, then ... you're back again. I usually end up feeling a bit fuzzy in the head for a while afterwards, but it's a particular kind of fuzziness that is quite different from gettting your wits about you after a normal sleep.

I've had a couple of great dreams just prior to being woken from an anesthetic. I think there's a period between stopping the anesthetic - or getting whatever it is that reverses it - and actually waking up properly, and that's more like a normal deep sleep. I could happily have stayed in those dreams, but when I heard somebody saying my name, I found that I suddenly snapped out of it and was almost immediately fully conscious again.

Under an anesthetic, you're not aware of anything - not even a blackness. It's just nothing. You don't realise how unlike sleep it is until you've had one.
Click to expand...

When I had my wisdom teeth out...they gave me an IV of Dimoral. I have a foggy memory of saying to the doctor, "So....this is Dimoral...well...I'm dimming!" Then I woke up with cotton in my mouth.
 
I've seen people who are asleep, and I've seen people who are dead.

Death is nothing like sleep.
 
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