What it feels like to be dead

[gangstar cookie monster]

i am scared of death.i do not wish to die.i want to live forever and never know death.

 

[Tek]

There is nothing. You don't feel anything because you don't exist anymore. Simply, nothing. There isn't even a way for you to perceive the nothing because you don't EXIST.

Heh, well, that's my other guess XD

The problem with my first line of rambling reasoning is that it appears that mind and brain arise together or not at all. In keeping with this, the only way I-Amness continues after bodily death is if I-Amness has some non-bodily physical component.

This component could be something like an energy field which we haven't developed sensors to detect. Such an energy field isn't that Farfetch'd since we already know of particles that barely interact with matter.



Either that or as you die, your perception of time slows down as if you were stuck spiraling into a black hole. I think that's probably not the case, but it's a mind-bender for sure.

 

[twocows]

My guess is that there is no feeling, as a few others have said. You just end.

My life's goal is to live as long as possible without sacrificing my happiness now to do so. I'm extremely interested in all the technology associated with that objective, everything from cryonics to mind uploading to transhumanism and so on. If I make it into the future, I'm sure I'd be interested in possibilities even beyond those. I don't want to die, ever. I want to outlive the universe and further.

Unfortunately, the most likely case is that I'll die, probably within a normal lifetime. But I'll do what I can to avoid that.

 

[The Void]

Bruce Greyson once made a study on near death experience patients that showed death 'feels' different from person to person. These 'feelings' ranged from peace to transcendence. It passed peer reviews and is included in the 1983 Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

Of course, that only applies for the few minutes the brain is still partially active. Once all mental functions cease, this is where we vary in belief.

As a Catholic, my definition of death is as Benedict XVI puts it:

Since then, death is no longer the same: It has been deprived, so to speak, of its "venom." The love of God, acting in Jesus, has given new meaning to the whole of man's existence and in this way, has also transformed death. If in Christ human life is a departure "from this world to the Father" (John 13:1), the hour of death is the moment in which this departure takes places in a concrete and definite way.