What happens to people after they die?

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Reincarnation. Pluto's number is 0 or naught and is associated with Death, so when your soul (which does exist) leaves the body (your IS-BE) it is reincarnated through the TIME on pluto just like an algorith - so death is a function and we're all the solutions to this function when we cease to be living / our TIME has come to an END. Pluto is merely the physical representation of that TIME ENDING and RESTARTING as another life form, but I haven't figured out if it's lessons you learn during life or if it's the gradual progression of the soul which is attached to the matrix algorithm that determines when your TIME ENDS. Because we are all merely matter progressing through time. Which would explain why time on earth is so long, and time on Pluto is short, since it needs to account for all of the energy being redistributed and programmed at the same time, while matter exists on earth which would mean there is NO LIFE on Pluto and never will be or else everyone would always be dead. You're always awake, you're never sleeping, you're merely always traveling when the DMT is released and when TIME ENDS your soul goes through so much TIME PROGRESSION TRANSITON so it seems like you're on a DMT Trip when really you're either ascending or descending as another LIFE FORM. This would explain why people have DMT Trips and not DMT Deaths all the time seeing as how their TIME does not END on their algorithm

Well maybe reincarnation makes no sense to you; maybe you'd prefer the Buddhist idea of 'rebirth' in which a capacity for conscious awareness is reborn without the need of a soul; maybe you prefer 'New Atheism'.

By the way, no major religions I know of assert that trees have souls; this is reflected in modern science with the well-evidenced conclusion that all experiences find their correlates in a Central Nervous System, a complex artifact absent in all non-animal life as well as in most invertebrates.

I was also trying to say is that a mind is more than simply a 'human' mind or even a 'tree' mind. I'll try and partly explain why this conclusion is (in fact) more than just hypothetical to me, but it would take a lot of time and effort to fully explain that to anyone, as I'd have to backtrack over the lifetime of reflection that brought me to the original conclusion. This may or may not be scientific, depending on whether your definition of science is restricted to measurements of physical properties in space and time.



I have a rather 'overblown' sense of self in which my particular personality and memories play only a fleeting part, and (given my autism and its interaction with my will) a small one at that. I'm hoping to see that this 'self' I sense is really no 'self' at all, but something perhaps better and more real in ways that matter to us. In any case, though, it is the conscious awareness that I call 'me' (albeit wrongly) that will provide the capacity for experiencing -in the same life- a profoundly-changed personality and memory in the likely (due to longer life expectancies) event that my my brain is partially damaged and even killed. You may of course claim that the capacity to experience your personality and memory also ends at brain-death, but this has not been (and maybe cannot be) demonstrated scientifically in the same way that your argument can.

I argue that an autistic brain has already been skewed away from expressing the 'self' that most autistics feel themselves to be at heart; this is perhaps less relevant in the current time of crisis and survival than it was in the 'boom years' I grew up in, when making an impression socially was considered the be-all and end-all. As someone caught between autism and what I've witnessed (by comparison) to be a fairly 'normal' character, I can come across as weird, particularly in debates like this (in which many autists often seem 'super-normal' in 'their' ideas), since the mildness of my autism alongside its 'bad fit' with my innate preferences led me to feel estranged from any 'personality' I may outwardly appear to have - When I turned on the 'tap' of expressing it, I found (in my teens and early 20s atleast) just a murky dribble coming out into the human world, even when I felt less 'shy'. From my understanding I deduced that, as a result of my autism, few of my 'normal' impulses had been 'tied in' sufficiently with specific modes of social interaction to allow a personality to be fully expressed, and that in most people's minds this equated to either not having a personality or having an 'autistic' one to begin with. I also sense, by deduction, that someone with a more full-on form of autism would lack the means to develop sufficient understanding of self and other to allow them to develop their own version of 'normal' impulses such as social playfulness or competition - atleast not in a normal way.

I end up concluding, from those thoughts, that the materialist claim of any continued existence after death being inconceivable is a bit like claiming that the destruction of a garden water feature leads directly to the destruction of water. {If we accept the solipsistic truth that we can only ever directly experience our own individual minds, then this becomes 'all water on earth', or even 'all water in existence'!} In this analogy, the water is our inner being of semi-conscious impressions and impulses, the water feature is the channels through which these are directed in order to create a recognisable 'self' (i.e. our neurons and neurotransmitters etc. along with the cultural practices of our society that stabilise them as far as we can and do take part in them), and the fountains of visible water are the personalities we express. In Nature, things don't just 'vanish' in the way people appear to do at death - Instead, they decay back into their constituent parts, or change state like energy. If most people are asked "What do you feel to be the elements that make up a person's existence?", they will still describe a number of experiences that have the raw fact of subjectivity as their common denominator.

Last edited by undefineable on 19 Jul 2012, 5:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The materialist argument that a stream of consciousness is inseparable from a brain has a limited number of resolutions - Even Susan Blackmore has said that she does not deny the existence of consciousness as such.

Consciousness as material particles, as Projectile proposed, or even as waves of physical energy/force, makes no sense to me, as we would then be left an observable artifact with a reflexivity, somehow 'on the inside of itself', bearing no obvious resemblance to what it appeared to be from outside. We would also wonder what happened to it after our deaths, as its annihilation would then be anomalous in comparison with the fate of other forms of energy, while a 'change of state' to something 'normal' (like heat or electromagnetism) would seem enough of a leap (from the original state) to warrant the term 'annihilation' and raise strange questions about the nature of death in any case {E.g. Does some kind of invisible atom bomb have to go off?}. The whole theory would of course bring with it a radical 'paradigm shift' in what scientists understand the universe to be made of, as it could no longer all be left broadly undefined as 'different kinds of stuff characterised by different kinds of properties' (the stuff being simply 'things' and the properties being simply ways in which the 'things' interact with each other).

There again, if consciousness is said to be itself a 'property' rather than a form of energy, and therefore likely to be completely extinguished when the artifacts that support it disintegrate, we still end up asking some of the same questions about the nature of other properties of other things, all the more so given that the definition of 'property' I outlined above provides even less potential room for consciousness than matter, energy, or force - An apparent property that appears to have characteristics apart from its interactions, as consciousness does, is by definition something substantially more than a property, just as the heat of a fire is something more (in the form of heat energy) than the flame itself.

Finally, if consciousness is said to be purely a 'function' or 'epiphenomenon' of the brain, then the use of these words (which refer to patterns of caused events) becomes absurd, failing even more to account for the 'illusions' of consciousness such as its forming an integrated whole or of being aligned with a will. {One wonders, of course, who or what the so-called 'illusion of consciousness' is happening to, given that all other illusions occur within consciousness.} - I'm not even going to consider the self-contradictory idea of events having some kind of inward natures separate from the natures of the objects involved! If consciousness is a sequential process without it also forming some kind or raw material that it is a process of, and if an event is part-defined as something universally observable, then how is it that no-one can 'see' anyone else's brain 'doing' the series of events that would then make up consciousness, and see it from the other person's side?

If we admit consciousness as it appears to be somehow an integral part of reality, thereby rejecting materialist monism, then the anomaly that death apparently (and dreamless sleep or coma definitely) then involves clearly becomes more of a problem, but I like to have some measure of mystery around me, and wonder (for example) if the theory that dreamless sleep still involves a low level of consciousness could be proven true through experience. I suppose I could re-post this essay on a philosophy forum, these issues being very much 'in fashion' in such circles (including of course among popular science writers), but suspect that my points would be overlooked by those eager to 'toe the line' (a line which, intellectually, also creates an emotionally tough first impression), and to exploit the fact that scientific thought allows for clearly absurd conclusions (including the conclusion that there is no consciousness) to be drawn from the available empirical evidence so long as no other such evidence falsifies it. I'd love to believe that life after death is impossible, as then we'd all meet the same fate and have nothing to worry about; however, life has a habit of unmasking our simplistic misunderstandings and shattering our comforting illusions.

To sum up my last two posts, our individual condition -particularly, here, our forms of autism and our reactions to their effects- shapes how we understand life and the world, and therefore how we answer questions like the OP's. I hope our autistic capacity for original thought -maybe a normal capacity normally suppressed by the needs of society and encouraged by the demands of living as autistics within that- allows us to understand each other's arguments better, although we may not always understand one another's emotions. There again, though, I always used to get on better with 'arty'/'literary' types than your typical 'science geeks'_

Why do people say that? Isn't it more likely to be about how much you've created versus how much you've destroyed?

Again, I've never understood this platitude, unless it has to do with the memories and regrets of old age - 'Making the best' is what you do in an exam so as to pass onto greater things; If you have no long-term opportunities, then why bother any more than your nature (and your wider society) encourage you to, except for the sake of conscience or personal satisfaction? My money's on the idea that religions, for various reasons (mainly sociological, as Nietzsche argued) reversed this logic, claiming that 'making the best of life' was somehow punishable after death, whereas incidental virtues like honesty and politeness would be rewarded, despite the fact that they otherwise bring one little but derision and uneventfulness in this life.



Granted, atheists can't just say "it'll all work out OK in the end", but if we're all going to end up the same (i.e. '6 feet under'), then why worry about social status and the like?

I take it you are hitting the DMT right now, on Pluto

Nah I think a lot of this info is coming from Uranus. Close enough, though.

On my end of things, oblivion. Mind you, it's hard to contemplate the end of consciousness for me; my brain ends up wrapped in this loop where it's trying to comprehend perceiving an utter absence of perception and next thing you know I'm clutching a counter while I have an existential nightmare, but as far as I've been able to find there's not much evidence of another outcome.

I wonder, did Pluto's reclassification as a dwarf planet result in any adverse effects to those people reborn there

Possibly. Dwarf planet = Dwarf brains?

Also, since Pluto was only invented in the 1930s, where did dead people go before then?

I heard Alpha Centurai was all the rage with dead folk back then.

Many of us human beings would say -for our various individual reasons- that we'd have a better chance of being our 'true selves' at last (whatever that might mean) if we can't remember who we were any more. In the real event, full-on amnesia must ofcourse be terrifying, but for a while after a tennis-ball-sized brain tumour (brought on by unresolved stress I'd imagine) was sucked from the inside of my skull last year, I felt refreshed, unable to remember many inhibitions or concerns.

I hope I've shown (in the 1'st of my 2 long posts) that it is significant for us if something of us survives beyond the capacity of our brains to give us our memories.



Only the barest bones of what makes up both the concept of 'soul' and a demonstrably real person -conscious awareness- are necessary for there to be some kind of life after death. In this minimalist scenario, a person is no longer a person; something big (i.e. death) has happened to the person they were, but something still remains such that the OP's question is not nonsensical.

Actually... NO. I have never done anything except weed. Thanks for constantly insulting me though man

What about theories of idealism, that consciousness creates the physical world, rather than the physical world creating consciousness? What if our neurons are cognates of our thoughts?

(clicky)a doctor drowns and meets her maker, is rescuisitated 20 minutes later and tells the tale