Bittersweet Candy Bowl

it is interesting that so many of us (myself included) have these delusions about an afterlife, when we already know its impossible for that to be so, and for it to truly be us, and not some sort of radiowave copy like in the asimov short story.

Well, when you die, your body will decompose at a rate proportional to temperature, humidity, and other environmental and preparatory conditions.

You won’t notice though, as it will be the end of you. Oblivion~

Depends which side of the post-humanity line you’re on. If they can transfer consciousness to electronic format, your physical body will experience death one way and your electronic iteration will experience it another way. Assuming there is one, do they both get an afterlife? Will God judge you twice?

You know how you fall asleep but you don’t know how?

Thats death..just you don’t wake up.

Enjoy sleeping tonight ^__^

I already do. ^_^

“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” and “I heard a Fly Buzz- When I Died”. My list of English poetry for school is a cheerful one indeed…

There is no “after”.

The electrical pulses in your brain cease, ergo, the neurons’ connection with each other ceases, ergo, the collective thought processes, which we mistake for “souls, personalities, ect”, terminate.

I (really) am sorry. It is a biological fact.

On another note: These subjects usually end messily (usually involving Godwin’s Law) so I’d recommend keeping these off the forum in the future.

~Neko

but mistake is not the right word. the mind IS the soul and personality, it all just ceases after death.

Explain feelings, then, honey. ^_^

I don’t believe in a soul and the only thing anyone can comment on with any scientific certainty is what happens to the body during the process of death, but I think regardless that there’s still room for speculation in regards to what happens to the consciousness afterward. To quote the greatest philosophers of my generation: “All I know is that I don’t know nothin’.”

@ Neko: This thread’s doing alright. Nobody believes anything strongly enough to be offended. We’re just here shooting the shit about death.

this thread reminds me about a project we did in school once for English, write a paper about a perfect utopia. Everyone wrote about how everything was on clouds, and there were flying people and one all powerful being controlling it (De Ja Vu?). While mine was about a matrix like world where everyone was hooked up to a computer and lived for eternity. As your brain cells die, they would be replaced by robotic ones, and you’d slowly be integrated into the system of minds, all unlinked into one super computer powered by human brains. Instead of millions of scattered minds, think disjointedly, they would all think about one problem at once, and use the full power of all humanity to solve problems. Everyone was happy too because the capsule where your brain is also connected to a system that injects chemicals into your brain to stimulate your pleasure center and cause mass amounts of euphoria. No politicians, no lawyers, no dictators. Only for the people, by the people, is the people.

(It’s biochemically powered like the brain, so an EMP would have little to no effect on the society.)


….man thinking back on this, it reminds me so much of the Borg…….

@dritch- i would hate that.
@jerk- i think of the mind as the soul. it contains everything that makes us us.

@kazi- no you wouldn’t.

i would until all my brain cells were destroyed. i have hated my own happiness enough before.
the thought of a fake life and robotic brain cells fills me with hate and a need to destroy. even without these emotions, intellectually i wouldnt want it, which would be enough for me to rebel.

you wouldn’t. Every person on earth would basically have the same mind. And that includes ALL the psychiatrists on earth. Basically everyone would start to agree on things, and most people would share your point of view for the first month or two, but slowly you’d be persuaded to believe otherwise. This isn’t a club, or a chat room, this is the connection of conscientiousness’s between people. One mind. Even if you don’t, agree you’d think you do, because everyone else wants you to. Brainwash. You’d have no choice, and afterward, humanity will become one person. This might sound Stalin, or communist like, but it would also get rid of wars, religion, and focus all of our efforts on science, or exploration.

@Dritch

Hey, your utopia sounds like it came from the book Brave New World.

Sure, we’d all feel happy and all. But at the price of everything I value right now: art, music, writing (why would people do those pointless things when you’re happy?). Sure, I would feel no remorse about having none of those ‘artsy’ things, but, man, maybe it’s just that I’m too much of an extrovert. Happiness in exchange for culture and art would be too much of a price for me to pay. You really should read Brave New World, it makes you think about utopias in a whole new way (it pretty much deconstructed all the elements of The Republic, and made it….well…dystopian).

Here, I have my opinion on death. I think we just reincarnate again once we die. Zing!

This way, suicide would never be an option for me, because, hell, would you like to solve all the problems you’ve solved so far again?

Or, maybe when we die, we will haunt some internet forum forever, posting as a certain user. Hell, maybe one of us in this forum doesn’t exist in real life, and is posting as a ghost from another dimension.

that would be terrible. it would remove everything good about humanity right along with it.

I think the better question is why do we seem obsessed with what happens after death. There is only one way to find out, and no way to return to tell about it (no statistically relevant method, in any event). So we are basically asking a question that no one in this world can effectively answer. So why do we ask it in the first place? Are we merely insecure, or do we have some instinctual knowledge of something beyond this plane of existence. It’s a hard question to answer, but at least it’s more likely to BE answered.

dollars to donuts were obsessed with death because evolution has programmed pretty much everything that ever lived to try and avoid it. in humans this most likely became the afterlife belief, and te question was asked because of curiosity on the religious beliefs of other forumites.
heheh, donuts……

Could you try speaking English; I’m having trouble understanding you.

@McCain- heheh, donuts

Forget it. You can have your donuts, Homer.

but i dont like donuts…. ……..bully………

but seriously, i think that probably explains that human obsession.

That which explains is not necessarily the answer. For many things can explain such an obsession and yet be wrong.

A God? You seriously believein a God. A invisible man in the sky, who is larger than the universe, created something as complex as life? Bull, nothing but stories to scare people into following some cult to spread the pope’s influence and control the world.

Yeah, I believed in a god. I believed about some invisible man in the sky who had power over the lives of others. I believed that if I was good, and did good things to others, he would make sure good things happen to me. I went out of my way to help others as much as I could and never did anything more bad than a hand in the cookie jar every once in a while.

You want to know what God does when you do good for others? He makes sure that everyone is against you, and that you’ll never enjoy life. He’ll make sure that you suffer every day, and then take away the things that matter most to you like he did to me. Beatten and bloody everyday, afraid to go outside, no friends, and then he takes three of you most beloved family members, one of them being your mother. Even then, after you’ve suffered to the point of insanity, he just laughs as you cry in the corner and starts planning on who should kick the shit out of you the next time you go to your school.

Don’t trust God to catch you, he’ll just watch you fall…

You sound insane to the point of being dangerous. Get off this forum.

I’m just telling it like how it is.

After a certain point, you have to stop assuming that people who disagree with you are stupid and concede that they may have a point. especially when they outnumber you a few million to one.

Just saying it like it is.

So because they outnumber me means that I’m wrong and they’re right? That there is a god just because more people than me believe that he’s real?

Also, where did they get their “point” from? Some carpender who said that he was the son of God? Some old man who meditated under a tree? When was the last time someone said “God is real, and I have proof.”?

actually, there most likely isnt a god. not in the sense they believe anyway. there may be some force that created the universe, but it most likely doesnt interfere. and souls. souls have been scientifically disproven and yet we still believe in them, even i do on emotional levels. that is evidence that people just use god as a way to evade coming to terms with their own mortality.

If you had bothered to read what I actually wrote, Jake, you would have noticed that my point was not if they outnumber you, you are wrong, but if they outnumber you by such a significant margin, you should concede that they may have a point. Anything dealing with God is a matter of faith, not proof. So I’m just saying that you should keep an open mind and be able to acknowledge the possibility that you may be wrong.

It is rather simple, and your inability to grasp it disappoints me.

tl:dr.

Alot of things can happen. For example your body could be cremated, buried, or hidden in a dumpster or in a lake so that the police dont find the body.

Emo Jake is emo

I don’t know if any of you have seen the show Dead Like Me. That would be awesome.

~Neko

Although i’m Catholic, i believe that you make *Poof* and you are no longer here or anywhere.
But another part of me, believes in a place (call it heaven, Elísia Pedia, Nirvana) in where you meet all those beloved ones that where with you on earth. I don’t mind if you are no longer, or you live in heaven, but the idea to see again those who i respect and i love, it’s great.

IMHO

@ Icarus, there is so much i dont grasp and so much everyone else doesnt that ive just come to accept that you are all smarter then me in some things, and i am smarter in others.

but yeah, i sometimes dont have time to read all the way through….hehehe……

i can. in fact when im depressed i force myself to release seratonin to cheer me up.
chemicals released by nerve cells cause feelings.

The body tells us when we’re sad and happy (perhaps “emotions” would be a more fitting word for what I meant), but how does it know? It must either be random, or it must be something that falls (at least partly) beyond scientific explanation. Which brings us to thought, which is even more difficult to explain. ^_^

chemicals again. the nerves react to pretty much everything.

Not thought. If nerves chose what we thought, then we would have been thinking much faster and much more recklessly. ^_^

Many scientists agree that there is no scientific explanation for what we feel or think. Yes, often it is partially controlled by chemicals and hormones, but it can never explain how thought starts.

the day humans learn everything is the day they learned far too much for their own good. take it as you will, but it has connotations of DEATH

*cringes for punch*

<.<
>.>

?_?

thought is a touchy subject and it partly proves God, since science has no explanatoin for the entire thought process. though even if they did, id still believe in God anway, since they STILL cant explain how life started. like, wtf started the big bang? particles and whatnot. what made the particles come together?

duuuuuurrr i dont know

GOD! insert cheap shot here

but whatever think what you want. Pun intended

our subconcious controls the nerves. thought is caused by synapses going off in our heads.
life could have been caused by a random combining of particles into something capable of brief survival, a god may have created the universe, but what created the god?, and even if there is a god, peoples souls and identities are entirely within the mind, so no afterlife.
my current beliefs.

I think perhaps I did not word myself correctly. What are emotions, and what are thoughts? We don’t know, and science cannot explain anything but that they exist - and that they may and will be influenced by external factors. The existence of the subconscious, our conscience, our beliefs, is not at all easy to explain. ^_^

we have, however, the knowledge that thoughts and emotions are directly controlled by that thing in our heads, thus, the soul dies when we do. sometimes before. there may be a god, but there is no heaven for us dirt crawling worms.
(i like to think of myself as a worm sometimes, gives a feeling of being an underdog
)

I don’t believe it does. But you are entitled to believe what you will, of course. ^_^

the soul dies thing or that our sol is our brain thing?
also, alzhiemers, dimentia, tumors, all cause a dramatic decrease in intellect so that works as an argument for both.

and what you believe isnt really a choice.