What happens when we die?

[Bandwagon In Flames]

One of the biggest moments of realization I had was thinking about death from a Biological standpoint. This thought turned me from Agnostic to Atheist almost immediately.

We are who we are because of our Brain. That is what gives us consciousness. I don't think anybody can debate that. Our personality, our tendencies, our addictions all stem from the brain. If you suffer a brain injury, you are no longer the same person. There are cases of people being struck by lightning causing their brain to get re-wired and resulting in massive changes to their personality and skill-set.

When you die, blood stops flowing to your brain and it begins to decay. You can compare our body and brain to a computer system. It ceases to function if you remove the power supply. There is no soul that magically goes up to heaven or reincarnates into a new being.

I know people who understand this, but simply can't accept it. They aren't mentally brave enough to live in a world that has a definite end. Some people use religion as a defense mechanism because they'd fear death too much to live otherwise. That's a big reason why many people adopt religion later in life when the fear of death really kicks in. Though I'm sure we'll see those numbers drop, but not as quickly as one would think.

[Sliver]

Originally Posted by Bandwagon In Flames

One of the biggest moments of realization I had was thinking about death from a Biological standpoint. This thought turned me from Agnostic to Atheist almost immediately.

We are who we are because of our Brain. That is what gives us consciousness. I don't think anybody can debate that. Our personality, our tendencies, our addictions all stem from the brain. If you suffer a brain injury, you are no longer the same person. There are cases of people being struck by lightning causing their brain to get re-wired and resulting in massive changes to their personality and skill-set.

When you die, blood stops flowing to your brain and it begins to decay. You can compare our body and brain to a computer system. It ceases to function if you remove the power supply. There is no soul that magically goes up to heaven or reincarnates into a new being.

It's weird how obvious it seems once you accept this. What happens when we die isn't a mystery. We know exactly what happens when we die. See above.

[Coach]

So in the "our brain is like a computer" comparison, is our brain the hard drive? If you remove the power source for a computer, the information still remains, no?

For me (and this is no argument for existence of heaven or the like), if there can be a way that we end up more or less 'trapped" in our mind (I liked the idea of time slowing down to become infinite as perceived by a dying person), the CONCEPT of a heaven or hell isn't out the window. As an actual place that people go to hang out with Jimi Hendrix and dead family members no. But if you can enterain the idea above, it makes sense to me that a person who was a tortured or bad person during their life would end up trapped in a sort of hell of their mind. Conversely, if you were a good person who was at peace when you died, you could be trapped in a very tranquil place. I don't think you have to believe in a kingdom in the sky, or a burning torture chamber in the centre of the earth to at least entertain metaphysical ideas of heaven, hell, nirvana, etc..

[Bandwagon In Flames]

Originally Posted by MattyC

So in the "our brain is like a computer" comparison, is our brain the hard drive? If you remove the power source for a computer, the information still remains, no?

Yeah the comparison is a bit touchy in this regard, but only because we haven't yet developed a means to replace our body with a new one.

You can think of the heart as the power supply (which can be replaced) and the brain as the hard drive AND memory. Difference being that the hard drive and memory won't decay (or at least not nearly as quickly) without power.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by MattyC

So in the "our brain is like a computer" comparison, is our brain the hard drive? If you remove the power source for a computer, the information still remains, no?

If you want that analogy, the brain is RAM. It can only store data as long as it is powered.

[Bandwagon In Flames]

Originally Posted by MattyC

So in the "our brain is like a computer" comparison, is our brain the hard drive? If you remove the power source for a computer, the information still remains, no?

For me (and this is no argument for existence of heaven or the like), if there can be a way that we end up more or less 'trapped" in our mind (I liked the idea of time slowing down to become infinite as perceived by a dying person), the CONCEPT of a heaven or hell isn't out the window. As an actual place that people go to hang out with Jimi Hendrix and dead family members no. But if you can enterain the idea above, it makes sense to me that a person who was a tortured or bad person during their life would end up trapped in a sort of hell of their mind. Conversely, if you were a good person who was at peace when you died, you could be trapped in a very tranquil place. I don't think you have to believe in a kingdom in the sky, or a burning torture chamber in the centre of the earth to at least entertain metaphysical ideas of heaven, hell, nirvana, etc..

This still goes against the biology of your brain. Your mind IS your brain, unless you consider the mind to be the same as your soul (which doesn't exist).

There is nothing to power your mind when you die. Your brain consists of circuits attached to various compartments that fire off and talk to each other. This process gives you consciousness. When you die, these functions cease. It's not like being in a coma, as your body and brain still function in a coma.

[Coach]

Originally Posted by Bandwagon In Flames

This still goes against the biology of your brain. Your mind IS your brain, unless you consider the mind to be the same as your soul (which doesn't exist).

There is nothing to power your mind when you die. Your brain consists of circuits attached to various compartments that fire off and talk to each other. This process gives you consciousness. When you die, these functions cease. It's not like being in a coma, as your body and brain still function in a coma.

Yeah I understand that. My comment is more in conjunction with the idea from a few pages ago of the infinite slowing of time as your body approaches death. Your brain would still be working in those final few milliseconds, but what if those milliseconds are perceived as infinite (or close to) for the dying brain?

If that's the case, like I said, someone being (seemingly) trapped for eternity inside their own mind does provoke ideas of a self-created heaven/hell in me. Of course someone who commits suicide, especially in that moment, was an incredibly tortured person. Imagine being trapped in that state of mind for what would appear to be forever. Seems like "hell" to me.

[Bandwagon In Flames]

Originally Posted by MattyC

Yeah I understand that. My comment is more in conjunction with the idea from a few pages ago of the infinite slowing of time as your body approaches death. Your brain would still be working in those final few milliseconds, but what if those milliseconds are perceived as infinite (or close to) for the dying brain?

I know there have been studies done to see how long the brain functions after decapitation. I recall it being in the ballpark of 5-10 seconds.

I didn't read the last few pages as every page seems to be the same as the previous one, but I would think the idea of infinite slowing of time to be equally far-fetched to a consciousness floating up to heaven or down to hell. This is the real world, not Inception or Ant-Man.

[Fuzz]

I'm not sure it is that far fetched an idea. When you are young time seams to progress very slowly. I remember being a kid, and school would be out for the summer. The end of summer was so far away you couldn't even imagine it. It felt like forever. But as we get older, time seams to pass more quickly. There is some interesting scientific research on this, and it is thought becuase the brain pays attention to every detail as a child, it seams to take longer to process. As we get older, you run on autopilot, and time flies by because your brain doesn't bother with all the minute details.

So the perception is time passing faster as you age. And becuase at death we are talking about perception, I don't think it is impossible for those last moments to stretch a very long perceived amount of time. It's a possibly I'd give more weight to that consciousness leaving the body and hanging out in heaven, anyway.

[Coach]

Originally Posted by Bandwagon In Flames

I know there have been studies done to see how long the brain functions after decapitation. I recall it being in the ballpark of 5-10 seconds.

I didn't read the last few pages as every page seems to be the same as the previous one, but I would think the idea of infinite slowing of time to be equally far-fetched to a consciousness floating up to heaven or down to hell. This is the real world, not Inception or Ant-Man.

Yeah, I'm just kind of provoking the discussion along because I find all the concepts pretty intriguing. But at the same time, while this is the real world, the real world contains things like electrons popping in and out of existence, relative time, a bunch of physics mumbo jumbo that I clearly don't understand, etc. Most of quantum physics seems to revolve around getting beyond what our brain thinks is possible or rational. So while I'm definitely open to any and all debunking of these ideas with science, just to say "this is the real world" to me doesn't hold much weight. There's a lot that goes on in the real world that doesn't seem to make much sense to our very primitive brains.

[Enoch Root]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

I'm not sure it is that far fetched an idea. When you are young time seams to progress very slowly. I remember being a kid, and school would be out for the summer. The end of summer was so far away you couldn't even imagine it. It felt like forever. But as we get older, time seams to pass more quickly. There is some interesting scientific research on this, and it is thought becuase the brain pays attention to every detail as a child, it seams to take longer to process. As we get older, you run on autopilot, and time flies by because your brain doesn't bother with all the minute details.

So the perception is time passing faster as you age. And becuase at death we are talking about perception, I don't think it is impossible for those last moments to stretch a very long perceived amount of time. It's a possibly I'd give more weight to that consciousness leaving the body and hanging out in heaven, anyway.

Yeah, I could imagine those last few seconds feeling like a very long time (measured in seconds)

That, however, is somewhat less than eternity

[Bandwagon In Flames]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

I'm not sure it is that far fetched an idea. When you are young time seams to progress very slowly. I remember being a kid, and school would be out for the summer. The end of summer was so far away you couldn't even imagine it. It felt like forever. But as we get older, time seams to pass more quickly. There is some interesting scientific research on this, and it is thought becuase the brain pays attention to every detail as a child, it seams to take longer to process. As we get older, you run on autopilot, and time flies by because your brain doesn't bother with all the minute details.

So the perception is time passing faster as you age. And becuase at death we are talking about perception, I don't think it is impossible for those last moments to stretch a very long perceived amount of time. It's a possibly I'd give more weight to that consciousness leaving the body and hanging out in heaven, anyway.

My understanding is that time goes by faster completely due to perception. A duration of 1 year when you are 5 years old is 1/5 of your total conscious life. A duration of 1 year when you're 40 is 1/40 of your total conscious life. It's a much smaller percentage of your total life which makes it seem to go by quicker.

If we want to think about this from a scientific viewpoint, there is actually a way we'd be able to test the validity of this. There are ways to show brain activity. You can see circuits firing off in the brain as it functions. If it had the ability to slow down perceived time, you'd see the brain firing off an infinite amount of times during the last milliseconds of life. But do you really need a study to tell you this? The brain spends a ton of resources just keeping us conscious even in good health. It's not really something that you can 'overclock' to such extents.

[Enoch Root]

And your last bit of time stretching out somewhat changes the finality of death not one little bit.

[Coach]

Originally Posted by Enoch Root

And your last bit of time stretching out somewhat changes the finality of death not one little bit.

Yeah I would agree with this for sure. You still die. You still become nothing that decays into the earth.

The idea that those last few seconds are perceived as close to infinite by the dying person is kind of a separate question to that of an afterlife. It's not necessarily an afterlife in the sense that your conciousness separates and leaves your physical form, just perceived that way by a dying person.

[Bandwagon In Flames]

Originally Posted by Enoch Root

Yeah, I could imagine those last few seconds feeling like a very long time (measured in seconds)

That, however, is somewhat less than eternity

I believe this would only be possible due to adrenaline. If you are slowly dieing in your bed I can't see your body having much adrenaline present.

If you are falling from a skyscraper to your death, your body will have a massive amount of adrenaline pumping and the fall will feel like forever. The whole 'life flashing before your eyes' thing doesn't seem far-fetched to me in scenarios where death is imminent and you are consciously aware of it.

[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by jeffporfirio

Clearly, we have different opinions, as would scholars on the subject, i.e.Kenneth Bailey & Gerhardsson, who concluded that within a formal controlled oral tradition, changing the storyline was inconceivable.

I am not familiar with the work of Kenneth Bailey, but Gerhardsson's work with rabbinic Judaism as a background to the transmission of traditions in early Judaism has largely been dismissed. While his study was important in NT scholarship especially in the '70s and '80s, it has been eclipsed by much more recent work which now recognises a number of serious anachronisms in using Medieval rabbinic Judaism as an analog for earlier, much more pluralistic forms of Judaism in the Second Temple period, to say nothing about Israelite First Temple religion.

The discovery and study of the Dead Sea Scrolls have amply demonstrated that the Jewish world of Jesus was fundamentally different from the later monolithic Judaism of later centuries.

Surely you can't take Ehrman seriously on this topic, when the evidence is overwhelming against him, Stephen, Polycarp of Smyrna, Bartholomew, Cyprian of Carthage, Sebastian, Agatha, etc...

Regarding Christian persectution? The alternative is to accept at face value the programmatic descriptions by invested Christian writers. As an historian, I tend to be quite suspicious of such reports at the outset, especially when they do not so closely align with historical writings from the "other side." This is where we are at at present: the mandated persecution of Diocletian did not begin until more than 200 years after the death of the last of the Apostles. Up to that period, Roman historians tend to agree that attitudes towards Christianity were varied, but not largely proscriptive.

Erhman as an agnostic, has a clear agenda, which along the way has made him millions, along with Dan Brown.

I personally do not care about Ehrman's "agenda," so long as his scholarship is sound. I do agree that his popular writing tends to make exaggerations and generalisations that conform more closely to his own personal feelings about Christian fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. However, his scholarly work is solid. He has written—in my opinion—the best introductory work to the New Testament on the market, and he remains among the leaders of modern NT textual criticism.

[monkeyman]

My view is that science does not exclude the existence of a god. When you consider everything science can tell us as well as can't tell us about the universe it actually makes me wonder how anyone can so quickly dismiss the possibility with such certainty.
let me see, so science tells us everything in the universe, everything we will ever see, touch, smell... was all created from a point smaller than the smallest part of an atom? a point so small, so dense, so hot, so heavy that it defies our comprehension? this point contained all the energy, all the matter, all the heat and all the radiation that makes up our universe? That this point, suddenly and without explanation, expanded at a rate greater than the speed of light, spreading matter and radiation across our universe. A universe that is expanding at ever increasing rates, until such a time that it will pull all matter so far that everything will cease to exist. Oh, and we have no idea what preceded this point, what created it and what caused it to expand.
Then when you consider everything that had to go right for us to exist on this planet. Sitting in the goldielock zone of the solar system; having a molten iron core that provides us our magnetic field; the right amount of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to form an atmosphere; a moon large enough to stabilize our poles; a sun that's not too small and not too large, making it stable enough to burn for billions of years. Then there's the serious of events which made it possible for us to evolve and thrive including previous extinction events, the carboniferous period which provided an excessive amount of co2, allowing plants and fungi to flourish, which lead to a huge increase of oxygen levels... i'm sure there's more, I just can't think of them right now.
All i'm saying is it's absolutely incredible to me that we're here and it could all be luck i guess, but I'm certainly not comfortable with all of this to blindly dismiss the idea of a creator.

[jeffporfirio]

Originally Posted by Textcritic

...
I personally do not care about Ehrman's "agenda," so long as his scholarship is sound. I do agree that his popular writing tends to make exaggerations and generalisations that conform more closely to his own personal feelings about Christian fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. However, his scholarly work is solid. He has written—in my opinion—the best introductory work to the New Testament on the market, and he remains among the leaders of modern NT textual criticism.

Thanked your post, because you put a lot work and research into all your responses.
I have great respect for you.
Great discussion.

[Bandwagon In Flames]

Originally Posted by monkeyman

My view is that science does not exclude the existence of a god. When you consider everything science can tell us as well as can't tell us about the universe it actually makes me wonder how anyone can so quickly dismiss the possibility with such certainty.
let me see, so science tells us everything in the universe, everything we will ever see, touch, smell... was all created from a point smaller than the smallest part of an atom? a point so small, so dense, so hot, so heavy that it defies our comprehension? this point contained all the energy, all the matter, all the heat and all the radiation that makes up our universe? That this point, suddenly and without explanation, expanded at a rate greater than the speed of light, spreading matter and radiation across our universe. A universe that is expanding at ever increasing rates, until such a time that it will pull all matter so far that everything will cease to exist. Oh, and we have no idea what preceded this point, what created it and what caused it to expand.
Then when you consider everything that had to go right for us to exist on this planet. Sitting in the goldielock zone of the solar system; having a molten iron core that provides us our magnetic field; the right amount of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to form an atmosphere; a moon large enough to stabilize our poles; a sun that's not too small and not too large, making it stable enough to burn for billions of years. Then there's the serious of events which made it possible for us to evolve and thrive including previous extinction events, the carboniferous period which provided an excessive amount of co2, allowing plants and fungi to flourish, which lead to a huge increase of oxygen levels... i'm sure there's more, I just can't think of them right now.
All i'm saying is it's absolutely incredible to me that we're here and it could all be luck i guess, but I'm certainly not comfortable with all of this to blindly dismiss the idea of a creator.

So you think this miracle of a process is harder to believe than a guy with a white beard creating everything? If a creator created everything, then who created the creator? There is no simple answer to the question of life. We're not in a position to accurately determine what went down billions and billions of years ago.

Science is about theories and best guesses. These theories will remain theories until they are proven or disapproved. It's not about blind faith which is the only requirement of any cult or religion.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by Fozzie_DeBear

I don't understand it...therefore God?

Weaksauce logic

I am just pointing out the internal inconsistency, which we all share as humans.