This is anecdotal evidence from a small (2) sample. But not all doctors die without treatment at home. Some (many?) are aware of the drugs they need to hasten their demise in a way that minimises their suffering. One doctor I discussed this with said that assisted suicide, in a very limited and measured way, isn't uncommon, if you know what to look for.
As someone with a degenerative incurable condition, I'd like the option of being able to make informed decisions about the end of my life, beyond just refusing treatment. Because spending years dying of starvation (as MS campaigner Debbie Purdy recently did, because she was unable to cope with her symptoms, and there was no other legal recourse to help her die), doesn't fill me with excitement.
We have an insane attitude to death in our culture at the moment. We seem to want to find any way to avoid the fact that being alive has a 100% mortality rate. I think our collective attitude needs to change. And the more articles like this the better.
It's really hard to change perceptions about death when it requires considering one's own mortality. It is in this only that I understand the desperate quest for religion. The idea of going dark forever is terrifying to me, and considering I'm pretty much an atheist, I don't have much hope of anything else. When people ask me if I'm religious, I usually tell them I'm hopeful that I'm proven wrong.
I know we all die. I know our lives on a cosmic scale are infinitesimal. But even I - as rational as I am, am extremely scared of facing that reality head on.
So convincing the entire nation/world to do so... Well, good luck with that.
It doesn't frighten me. It won't go dark forever. Just as there was no 13.5bn years of darkness before I was born. There will be no qualia of time.
I think attitudes are changing. The campaign to be able to determine how and when we die is shaping up to be a significant battle for a fundamental civil right. I think we'll win it. Whether it is soon enough for my wife to avoid threat of prosecution if she is with me when I choose to act, I don't know. I suspect not.
Right - it's that ceasing to be, as before I was, that scares me. Now that I have existed, I like it much better than before.
That said, that's my hangup, and has nothing to do with your right to choose to die with dignity. It's silly to me that you could choose to jump off a bridge, but can't choose something much less gruesome without fear that your or a loved one might find themselves tangled up legally.
I know this is getting OT, so apologies. And thank you for the second paragraph. But I'm interested in the first.
To me it doesn't seem like I will cease to be, in any meaningful way. To cease to have something is to have it at some point but not another. I will never experience not being. So I find it hard to worry about that. Of course I enjoy being, but it's not like I would rather be than not be, because the latter would suck. So I find your first paragraph strange. And therefore interesting. [edit, add:] I scan sympathise with the point made about others: I'd very very much rather my wife was than ceased to be. But me? Only for other people's sake. I can't imagine how it could possibly make any difference to me. I can't even imagine the idea that I'd miss out on all those good experiences I'd have if I lived. Because again that just presupposes that I'd be missing something.
I don't know the right way to explain the feeling. I think it's mostly the same sadness that one experiences when anything particularly wonderful comes to an end. I have known loss in a variety of ways, and I imagine dying taps in to that same idea of mourning. Something that I enjoy terribly must end, I have to say goodbye to not only a terrific experience - but to experience itself.
It's mostly the anticipation of the thing, not so much the thing. I'm sure once I'm dead I won't care so much that I'm dead. I just care now that one day I will be.
And thus concludes my inability to lend written word to irrational emotion.
Edit: as I sit here reflecting now, I wonder if part of it isn't the fear of regret - of not having taken full advantage, of not having loved enough or having wasted time on things actually inconsequential. It's also making me wonder if I already know that I'll have those regrets and maybe should make a few changes. Tonight got deeper that I expected it to...
"You" die every moment, and in the next moment a new "you" arises. The "you" now is different than the "you" five minutes ago- cells have been born and died, you've exchanged particles with your surroundings, your thoughts have changed, and so on. There is no "you" in the sense of an unchanging "being." It's impossible for "you" to exist for more than a moment.
On the other hand the "you"s that have arisen have left an indelible footprint of their existence on the universe. It's impossible for those footprints to go away. They are immortal.
That is not to say it is irrational to grieve your (our) unavoidable lack of being "alive," but it helps to understand clearly what we are grieving. It's not the ceasing of the existence of "you"- that happens every moment. It is the lack of the next arising.
Yes, you're exactly right. I think one of the reasons a lot of people get anxious and scared about death is because they think that when they die they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever... but you won't, because non-existence is not an experience. As Alan Watts put it, death will be just like going to sleep and never waking up, just as being born was waking up never having gone to sleep.
All my thoughts, memories, ideas, experiences will be gone, just vanished.
Unlike @themartorana, I'm somewhat religious (or maybe spiritual would be a better word, as I recognize how much religion is influenced by man) but like he hopes to be proven wrong I'm terrified of being mistaken.
You won't be able to experience your own thoughts and memories anymore, but we experience dead people's ideas all the time - if they put those ideas down in writing (or music, video etc.) And it's never in the history of mankind been easier to record your thoughts. Just do it.
The 13.5 billion years of darkness before I was born is frightening as well, but it's done and over with, plus it's way shorter than the upcoming darkness.
The universe itself is the life you have, it doesn't die, just makes more conscious entities. Life itself will not die with me, but go on forever. We just need to think large when contemplating death.
Leaving aside the implication that I'm either in denial, or not a functioning member of society... And leaving aside that the link doesn't quite say either, from what I can see...
I agree that having no fear of oblivion is unusual.
It's hard to distinguish fear of death from fear of dying. I fear the latter.
It's hard to separate fear of death from cultural expectations of death. My reading is that most people fear oblivion partly because they haven't thought about it much, because they are focussed on worry about being wrong about their chosen afterlife scenario.
More anecdotes, but I've noticed that small children, while being afraid of a lot of things, don't seem to suffer existential death anxiety. I believe, as was pointed out in your link, that such anxiety is largely (but maybe not entirely) socially constructed through language.
And if something is socially constructed, it can be changed. With difficulty, but it is possible.
Why in gods name would I be frightened of oblivion? Dying is terrifying, because it comes with implications of suffering. No longer existing is simply enthralling. I will simply be gone. A just reward for making it through a lifetime imo.
I can't tell you why the thought of ceasing to exist would be frightening. It simply is to me, and I believe to most people. And most people, including me, ignore it and focus on the joys of life. There are of course different degrees of this displacement, some people may still acknowledge the idea but others might completely convince themselves that there is nothing to be scared of - or maybe there really is a way to enjoy a finite life span.
Mind you that this a very intimate and subjective topic, and I am not saying that you are fooling yourself, but from someone who is indeed scared of death (the end of life), it does seem plausible.
Life is not [just/only] full of joys, but of obligations, troubles, and pain. Those who enjoy life are doubtless scared of losing it - it's foolish to assume that everyone does though. Nor can such a position be swept away as illness or irrationality. It is neither.
If someone gave me a way out right now that caused nobody for whom I care any pain, I'd take it. If I am honest I reckon I'd probably wonder about "what's next" for a good few minutes before saying yes...
I am not saying that you are fooling yourself, but
The mirror image is that we aren't fooling ourselves, we've just been able to rise above our heavy inculturation to such fear. An inculturation that you're still stuck in. That seems plausible too.
That's meant in good humour btw, my point is really that speculation that other people disagree because they are in denial, or ignorant, is pretty tempting, but usually not very helpful to discussion.
I don't mean to say that "other people are ignorant". I myself ignore and displace this constantly... until at some moments I am reminded. I actually didn't intend to sound condescending, I should have made clear that I actually ignore death myself.
Regarding inculturation: I believe it is actually right the other way round! That a child when first encountering the thought of death and its implication, is naturally terrified, and that our society/culture provides means of coping with this fear.
>I know our lives on a cosmic scale are infinitesimal.
I like to think of each consciousness as a prime number, an inevitable pattern if you write out every possibility. Our brains are contained within some 3 dimensional finite configuration of atoms, and in a large enough scale it will be repeated again. Even its exact position when you read this message.
If this makes accepting death easier, the good news is the near-death experience. While I certainly don't intend to convince you that it's an afterlife experience (because no one knows quite what they are) it is typically positive and very powerful. Subjectively, it's an intense spiritual experience that seems to be unmatched by most things in life. As for whether it's entrance into an afterlife or the shutdown sequence of a dying brain... who knows? I don't think we'll have that answered within our natural lifespan. Both you and I are likely to die before we, as a species, know whether there's an afterlife. So we have to go into death without full knowledge but, to be honest, we go into every experience without full knowledge. Tomorrow we might wake up and find that the sky is purple. It's extremely unlikely, but it could happen.
Honestly, I'm as irreligious as you are but I tend to think the odds are better than even that there's some consciousness after death, although "after" might not be the right word because I'm not sure whether time is even well-defined outside of this physical universe. Presuming that I came from nothing, that means that "nothing" can produce qualia, which means that if I become "nothing" after death... it makes a plausible case for rebirth. As Voltaire said, "It is not more surprising to be born twice than once."
So, if the last moments of this life are a positive experience and the "next moment" is either nonexistent or a continuation that might be called an "afterlife", then I don't see much to worry about either way. Of course, others' deaths are still really hard to take, and I'm a hypochondriac who hates the thought of sickness (for the embarrassment and sense of failure, not the danger) but I don't fear my own impending death. I'm not likely to hurry it, but I have a lot of curiosity about it and I look forward to the experience.
The two main disagreements I have with this are, one that I can't put into words very clearly and will come back to, and my generally repetitive comment on these issues that you - MichaelOChurch2015 - weren't born, you were made by your life experiences. A child was born, a nearly blank slate, and formed into 'you' by experiences.
The idea that you could have been born "somewhere else" or "to someone else" or "in another time" is a nonsense idea. We know exactly what happens to children born elsewhere and elsewhen and to other parents - they become other people. Not people we clairvoyantly share qualia with, not people we are superimposed-upon or people we are hiding-inside, not "us" in any way shape or form, just 100% other people.
Following that, the idea that someone could be born twice also seems nonsensical. (Boltzmann Brains excepted; MichaelOChurch2015 might appear for a few Plancktimes in the near heat-death void. Not that we'll ever know).
The first point; moment by moment in life we experience our surroundings. Continuous sensory input which we continually respond to in large and small scales from planning the next week to blinking and shifting in our seats. I suspect this pervasive connection from experience to physical reality to be fundamental to qualia and consciousness, and so the idea that we could go to an afterlife with no body, no senses, no time, no drive for physical sustenance - and still in any way remain who we are - doesn't fit.
If you don't get up in the morning, because you have no body and didn't sleep, and you aren't in your normal environment, you don't put on your clothes because they don't exist anymore along with all your other property, don't breakfast or exercise, don't stretch your achey ankle, don't prepare yourself for your day filled with not going places and not doing things that could affect the organisation of matter and cash, and you don't do all that in absense-of-time and there are no faces to recognise... then who are "you" in such an afterlife anyway? Especially if you arrived there age 95, demented and memoryless. If such an afterlife exists, so what? It's so different as to be not worth thinking of as a continuation of oneself.
"Imagine waking up in someone else's body". "Is that what the afterlife is like?" "No, imagine not waking up. And you're not in a body". "What do I see?". "Nothing, you have no eyes and you aren't anywhere". That should have been laughed out the first time it was suggested.
(I guess the short version is "we don't have a body. We are bodies").
I think we have answered, to the extent it is possible to answer, the question of whether there is an afterlife. And the related question of whether our minds are independent of our bodies.
The typical responses of educated religious folks to this (as opposed to many religious folks who are still fundamentally mind-body dualists) is to posit some 'deeper' sense in which the mind 'can be thought of' as surviving death. Some religious folks simply defy any logical or evidential concerns and assert it based on it being a revealed fact, or a miracle, or a mystery.
There are a handful of philosophers gamely trying to keep mind-body dualism going as a philosophical idea, but they're a small minority, with no neurobiological expertise, and the arguments are entirely unfalsifiable and easily refuted (in both my opinion, and that of most philosophers, as far as I can gather).
I think people are entitled to believe what they want, and rationalise their beliefs however they choose, I am only responding to your claim of needing more evidence.
So yes, I think we can be as sure as we need to be that NDEs are functions of brain activity, not of our consciousness somehow being liberated from the confines of the neurones that run it and journeying to the afterlife, only to be returned to its neuronal matrix again. I can't imagine what more evidence we could need, unless you're suggesting that, until we understand everything about mental processes, we should act as if we understand nothing about them.
Presuming that I came from nothing, that means that "nothing" can produce qualia, which means that if I become "nothing" after death...
Apple trees come from nothing (at least to the same extent that human beings come from nothing), so nothing can produce apples, which means if the apple tree dies, perhaps the apple-producing essence of the tree can survive and still produce apples, even though the physical tree is long gone.
I think we have answered, to the extent it is possible to answer, the question of whether there is an afterlife. And the related question of whether our minds are independent of our bodies.
I don't agree, if by "minds" we mean qualia itself. Of course, personality and memories and much of our experience lives in our brain. Most of what we call "mind" lives in the brain, and no one disputes this.
The question, to this point unanswered, surrounds whether anything's left over when the brain is gone. I tend to doubt that a brain-less qualia would carry much in the way of memory; it might be completely memory-less, acted upon by karma but unaware of any prior lives. A minute after I die, I don't expect to remember who "Michael O. Church" was, just as I don't remember previous lives in this one, although the karma accrued in this life will affect me.
Qualia is also impossible to measure except subjectively (and, of course, once the brain is gone, that person is not coming back to report). We can measure brain activity which is, under normal circumstances, highly correlated to subjective experience; we can't measure experience itself.
Fifty years ago, people thought that a person's thinking would cease under sensory deprivation. However, we find that people in floatation tanks actually have more cognitive activity. It seems that the increased freedom allows for a more intense and powerful experience. As for the NDE, this is likewise a time when we'd expect the person's consciousness to be dimming, but it seems to do the opposite. Of course, that doesn't prove anything about what happens when a person is actually dead, because... well, you can't interview them. Maybe the heightening of subjective experience continues after the brain shuts down, maybe subjective experience just ends. We can't ask them.
So yes, I think we can be as sure as we need to be that NDEs are functions of brain activity, not of our consciousness somehow being liberated from the confines of the neurones that run it and journeying to the afterlife, only to be returned to its neuronal matrix again.
To make it clear, I don't necessarily think that NDEs are a pure, reliable afterlife experience. There's something we'd have to confront if they were: reports contradict. People've come back from NDEs with predictions like that Japan would fall into the ocean in 1997; that clearly didn't happen. If we took every report of subjective spiritual experience literally, we'd be in a lot of trouble, because people come back from such experiences with some weird ideas.
I tend to think that there's something in the NDE, but a reliable afterlife experience that can be taken at face-value seems unlikely. I tend toward the Tibetan Buddhist interpretation, which is that it's still a subjective experience as the mind enters another bardo.
Of course, it will never constitute a case for "life after death" because the people having such experiences never died. Even many people who believe in an afterlife don't believe in NDEs as reliably true afterlife experiences for numerous reasons.
I can't imagine what more evidence we could need, unless you're suggesting that, until we understand everything about mental processes, we should act as if we understand nothing about them.
That's not what I'm suggesting at all. We should learn as much about the brain and the mind and the connection between the two as we can.
All the evidence we have points to the conclusion that the mind is embodied. There are no unembodied mental phenomenon reported or observed, nor can (you seem to conclude) there be such a report.
So I repeat, to the extent it is possible to answer the question, within the bounds of reasonable skepticism, we can conclude the mind is entirely embodied and therefore that an afterlife of mental experience is impossible.
You've not on what grounds we could conclude otherwise, you've just said you can imagine it to be, and you 'tend towards' thinking this or that, and you're willing to venture some mechanics for it. What could falsify your opinions?
I don't think you've really thought about it. Outside trying to match it with your Buddhist predilections. Why would memory be a qualia that is brain based, but others would not? Isn't the experience of remembering a qualia? Can you give an example of a qualia that wouldn't use any memories or associations what so ever? Do you think some memories are encoded outside the brain, whereas personal memories are brain based? Do you think hormones are involved in qualia? Would there be virtual hormones for disembodied qualia? Qualia isn't 'magic'.
I simply can't fathom how you conclude that some more understanding is needed to figure out if parts of the mind is disembodied.
I don't think we'll have that answered within our natural lifespan. Both you and I are likely to die before we, as a species, know whether there's an afterlife
Pondering this, for how much grief it causes and how many people die every day (around 150,000), I wonder why "studying the moment of death with every instrument and method we can come up with, to work out if there's an afterlife" isn't a worldwide obsession for our species.
This idea of "uploading" the mind shows up every now and then and it is interesting, but I think that ultimately we need a much deeper understanding in what consciousness is and how it works, because as it stands right now, it sounds like at most we would be able to replicate or copy a mind (provided the computing power gets us there), but not so much "transfer" or "upload".
This is because, as far as we know, if a computer were to perfectly recreate my brain, I wouldn't automatically exist in the computer, nor I would exists in both the computer and my body; but rather the computer would be an artificial self aware being with my data (memories, knowledge, etc) on it. But then again we need to understand consciousness better to give meaningful answers to these questions.
Yeah - the brain replacement stuff is already happening in a very minor way with cochlear implants and the like.
Apart from the technical difficulties of uploading there are a lot of questions on what you'd actually want to do and why. Just having a simulation of you running on some box or a copy on Github might seem a bit pointless and I'm not sure many people would want it.
I've thought of a couple of possibly practical things. Firstly for the benefit of the friends and relatives remaining alive it might be nice to chat to a version of the person who's biological body has packed up. This wouldn't even require uploading in the manner of scanning the brain. It could just be an AI that was good at method acting and 'becoming' the person in the way that a human actor can. I'd quite like an ongoing version of my gran for example who I could chat to. I guess more of a skype type chat than a robot.
The other thing is death is annoying for the creation of art and similar stuff. It would be cool if there was an ongoing version of Beethoven say cranking out new symphonies. Also personally it would be nice to work on intellectual stuff that exceeds what I can do in a biological lifespan. I guess if the AI seems conscious at least as in being aware of stuff and interacts normally with people who are conscious in the normal biological way that's probably enough - it doesn't really matter what the philosophers think of it.
My mom suffered from MS here entire life, and a few years ago left us on her own terms (with the help of some pills) before the age of 60. I don't blame her of course. I also have no idea if she had any help from a doctor or not.
As someone with a degenerative incurable condition, I'd like the option of being able to make informed decisions about the end of my life, beyond just refusing treatment. Because spending years dying of starvation (as MS campaigner Debbie Purdy recently did, because she was unable to cope with her symptoms, and there was no other legal recourse to help her die), doesn't fill me with excitement.
We have an insane attitude to death in our culture at the moment. We seem to want to find any way to avoid the fact that being alive has a 100% mortality rate. I think our collective attitude needs to change. And the more articles like this the better.