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What happens to your spirt / mind when you die? Are you reincarnated? Do you go into another dimension? Or maybe you are born again in a different time? What are everyone's thoughts?

CMan 7 Sep 14
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42 comments

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0

Generally I define the mind as thoughts and memories. through surgery and probes we know thoughts and memories are chemical reactions in brain cells, when the brain is damaged the mind is impaired, when the brain is dead the mind doesn't suddenly become independent of those chemical reactions and just float off. Chemical reactions cause our muscles to contract, when we damage a muscle the contraction is impaired, when the muscle dies there is no more contractions. Why would we think the contractions would continue without the muscle? So when then brain dies the 'mind' is no longer generated by the brain. As to the psychological aspect dealing with thoughts about death I like this quote by Mark Twain, "I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." If I had to cope with the knowledge I would die soon I hope I would take to heart my mantra, thankfulness enriches us, forgiveness frees us, and kindness betters us all.

0

Your question begins with a false assumption. No organisms -- including human beings -- have a spirit. The spirit is a religious fabrication.

0
  1. First give me a definition of spirit.
  2. Show me evidence that the entity represented by this definition is real.
    Now we can start discussing how this entity is connected with our biological lifespan and if it continues after.
    BUT
    There is no evidence for anything, and as no one can remember any past life, nor we have any evidence that the conscience can exist outside the neuron circuits of the brain.
    So the best answer is:
    There is no definition that is not self contradictory about what is the spirit.
    If you are talking about continence, it fades away as the synapses stop working,
1

I'm an agnostic because I don't know for certain where our spirit goes when we die. OTOH, I'm an atheist because i'm pretty certain we go to the same place that our dogs, cats & the elephants & bears go to. The oblivian we came from, we return to. The end of us.

0

Have any of you heard of DMT, and how it may be involved in our conscious experience? I learned a bit about it and it seems to dilate time for people. If it is released in large quantities when we die, maybe we would have transcendent experiences like subjects do in tests, but they would last for subjective eternities, and this phenomenon would amount to an afterlife.

nah

Adrenalin releases can generate this ilusion of time dilatating, but in real is just your brain spending huge ammounts of energy to process all the minimum details that your senses can capture.
This is the sensation that some drugs, radical sports, or described by some poets as the battle fever.
But time is not being stretched, this ilusion is because you stop ignoring details an the sensatin of time is based on the ammount of details that you remember.

1

I don’t know. Reincarnation would be interesting but all of the options are speculative. I would assume you just stop existing.

2

No one really knows. As the only way to truly know is to die and stay dead. And we know that when you die, you can’t tell the living what’s going on 😛

Personally, I think it’s the main reason that religion is still so popular. Fear of what’s behind the curtain when we die. I want to think that there is some sort of reward at the end for people that were typically good people. And there’s a punishment at the end for baby rapist and those kinds of d-bags.

But that’s just what brings me the most comfort. If it’s true, no one knows. But we’ll all get to see sooner or later.

1

Reincarnation rocks...I mean, the idea of it.

Reincarnation into rocks? No thanks!

3

I don't think there is such a thing as a spirit outside of our consciousness. Our relatively high intelligence makes us (mostly) sentient beings, which is from whence we derived the idea of a spirit.

I suspect that when we die, it will be much the same as it was during the 13+ billion years before our birth. We won't be aware, and we will not care.

2

There is no evidence of a spirit outside of the sum of the neurological activity that takes place in our brains. When we die, that activity ceases. The atoms that make up our bodies return to abiotic reservoirs where they may remain indefinitely until other organisms, typically autotrophs (plants, algae, and cyanobacteria) use them as raw materials for building their own tissues. These may be consumed by a series of different heterotrophic organisms (first herbivores, then omnivores, carnivores, detritivores, and decomposers) at different levels of the food web. It is possible that atoms from our body could occupy any or all of these levels simultaneously. Of course this recycling of atoms has been going on since life first evolved on Earth some 3.5 to 4 billion years ago. Many of the atoms in our bodies have already been through countless food webs. It is certain the atoms making up our bodies were recently bits of corn plants and beef cows and such. Before that those same atoms may once have made up the bodies of pine trees, termites, hedgehogs, bears, bison, eagles, worms, and theropod dinosaurs. What we call "our" atoms are really only on very temporary loan to us. Like leaves of grass we spring up, have our day in the sun, and then disintegrate. You only get one shot at this thing called you. Enjoy it while it lasts!

@tshaaj
Not 100%. More like 99.9999%

2

42

Let me know when you have real evidence of an answer to this question. Just don't make up a "could be" answer. That would be fiction.

Personally, I don't care. I'm sure I will or won't cope with whatever happens.

Are you any any chance a Tralfalmagorian, or have you been hanging out with Tralfalmagorians?

@Flyingsaucesir Hahahaha. Though I am a legal resident alien in the US, I am not a Tralfamadorian.
At an earlier age, I read some of Kurt Vonnegut's books.
I am more Douglas Adams kind of guy.

@micktoz
I only ask because it was they who said that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42. ?

@tshaaj
Heaven, Hell, Xanadu, Valhalla, Nirvana, Zion, Hades, Utopia, Arcadia, Shangri-la, Tartarus....it's many names for the same fiction.

@tshaaj
Likewise bra.

1

Pffffft! That's all, folks.

0

There is no such thing. In this case a little more than usual due to the typo. 🙂

0

No where. There is nothing after death.

2

The same place my mind-body was before I was born.

Non-existent.

There is no fear that I did not exist before my finite memories.

Why should I fear that I will not exist after I die?

I do not.

@tshaaj Actually.

The first shit I do not give.

Are you one of those theist trolls?

@tshaaj "your kind"

Why are you here?

Do you think we haven't read your silly fairy tales.

4

I don’t know, and neither do you. There’s insufficient evidence to support any afterlife claim.

5

What definition or part of the word "die" are you having trouble with?

As a heart attack. It's a simple question. Do you know what "die" means?

@tshaaj

No, but apparently you do you used the word in your post as an absolute. If you want to edit your post and repost it with a more succinct word then do so. Otherwise, don't think you're going to get away with changing horses in midstream here. Get your stuff together before you come here. Unless you want anyone here to think that dying isn't dying because that would make you sound sort of insane.

6

Nothingness. Once the electrical activity in the brain stops, "we" stop.

@tshaaj Yes

@tshaaj What facts? Please cite your evidence

@tshaaj, you're in a serious state of denial. Grow up. Accept the truth. You'll feel better once you know you won't have to be yourself for eternity. Your suffering will be over.

@tshaaj I can write anything on a book, People can tell any history they want.
People can lie, people can interpret stuff in the wrong way.
If there is no controlled experiment, reproducible and peer reviewed is not science and cannot be claimed as scientific facts.
AND if it cannot be claimed as scientific facts is a matter of belief, and as agnostic I refuse to belief in something just for the sake of belief.

@tshaaj

  1. yes they can, it sels adds, the scientific answer don't
  2. anyone can make a website, sensacionalism mais more money that science
  3. doesn't matter how big they are in science, the only works that matter from scientific POV are per reviewed articles, so if they are writing books, giving interviews, making events, websites, doesn't matter, doesn't matter their past or future works, no text out of per reviewed articles matter.
    All books, texts, interviews, events etc, are only valid in science if based on per reviewed articles.
    Deal with it, anything else than this can
  4. be lying
    2)non reproducible so not sure about what happened or how was interpreted
  5. can contain methodological failure
  6. can contain biasses, or effects analogous to placebus.
    And if they can prove that any supernatural stuff exists, just submit the works to the many challenges like Randy's that pays 1 million for this evidence.
3

I struggled a lot to find answers to the following questions when I was flirting with Buddhism. At some point I realised that their answers to the following questions were based on faith alone (what the Buddha said) and decided to not practice it anymore.

Similar concepts are of course not exclusive to Buddhism but other eastern religions too

2

Current evidence, as incomplete as it is, heavily favors the rotting scenario. As for the mind/consciousness part, based on what evidence is available, it appears that ceases on brain death.

Can anyone say one way or the other? No, because it is something unknowable, but by extension of all we do know being applied to the problem it is probably safe to say the 'you' in the mix probably is gone. Your physical elements will be recycled into the environment, but the things that went on in the brain that made a human being a person, its sentience, is gone.

2

maggot food

1

Physics mandates that energy can not be destroyed. Energy can only transform into a different energy. The body is in the tree thru the water or carbon dioxide it absorbs. At the cosmic or quantum level physics breaks down. So I like to think that my Diva who just passed into the cosmos yesterday is still with me tho she is in the freezer until I can dig her grave. I hope there is room here on these 4 acres.

I'm sorry. Losing a loved companion is so difficult. I lost my Caesar to cancer last year, and life is just not the same without him.

7

Nothing happens. You're dead. That's it. You cease to be.
I don't understand why so many people have such a problem with that.
You were nothing before you were born. You had no consciousness.
What's so difficult about accepting the finiteness of life?

@tshaaj Yes, I can. I have yet to see ANY evidence to the contrary. Unless and until I do, I have absolutely no reason to believe otherwise.

@tshaaj No, thank you. The truth is, I honestly do not care. If anything does happen, I'll find out when/if it happens to me. I'm not interested in pondering such things, they detract from the "now" for me.

@evestrat Exactly! I found his mention of you to be extremely suspect, and nothing more than "name-dropping" in an attempt to gain credibility. If there were actual "proof" of ANY of this bullshit afterlife stuff, it would be on numerous other platforms, other than just the internet. It would also be far more than simply anecdotal.

@evestrat People like that make me laugh. What do they think? That we don't talk to one another?
He's a Level 3, who self-identifies as a "believer". Maybe there is some truth to the 'theory' that atheists are smarter than believers. LOLOLOL

4

We'll become part of the grass. The antelope eats the grass. The circle of life. From dust were ye made and dust ye shall be. It's too bad we can't replace burnt out stars

1

Doesn’t matter. You’ll find out soon enough

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