Half of the time I look forward to my death, it doesn’t scare me since I don’t see the real point of my life, what scares me is if my agony would be slow and painful.
But then what? I just stop existing and it’s like I fell asleep? Do I see light? Darkness? Nothing? What is nothing?
You don’t experience anything, not even a sense of ‘nothing’.
This one’s not going to sovngarde.
From my perspective, the universe – including myself – ceases to exist.
From the perspective of the universe: entropy.
Whatever happens, I just hope it’s graceful and as painless for others as possible.
It’s just nothing.
Asking what you experience after death is a nonsensical question, you don’t experience anything at all.
What did you see/hear/feel/experience back in 1066 during the Norman Conquest of England?
You weren’t there, you weren’t alive then, so you didn’t experience anything at all.
That same sort of non-experience is what awaits you after death.
“What happens when you die” - I assume you mean after you die (not during), and to your consciousness, your awareness rather than your body.
The same as before you came to be. Not like you fell asleep; you’re gone.
Nothing.
I’ve died. It’s a permanent state of unconsciousness. No thoughts. No dreams. No life flashing before your eyes. Just nothing.
But then what? I just stop existing and it’s like I fell asleep?
If you’re asking about your cognitive state, it’s like a process or event that ends. Like if you roll a ball down a hill and the ball stops bc it’s at the bottom of the hill. The ball’s still there but the process of the ball rolling is over.
what scares me is if my agony would be slow and painful.
To some people it’s helpful if they read up on things like palliative care and hospice care. To other people it makes things worse to think about it, but personally I found it comforting to know that there are options and procedures to handle that.
If you believe your self, your awareness, your consciousness are manifestations of neurons firing in a brain, then as soon as those stop, you cease to be.
I believe that those neurons are a sort of radio signal, and that the self as I know it is a kind of wave transmitted from some time/place. When the body dies and the brain dies with it, I believe that connection is gone, and that signal is lost, but that the time/place from which the signal originated still exists. This doesn’t indicate that I, the self, still am somehow alive or exist in some other way, the specific manifestation of myself as who I an is gone in this case, but I do take some solace in the fact that the signal that propagated the awareness of my own being still goes on.
Its a state equivalent to before you were born. Its feels exactly as it felt back then. That is the nothing.
We’ll be resurrected and face judgement before God, all who have sinned will be found guilty and cast away to hell, except those who have repented and came to Jesus for forgiveness of sins - in which Jesus will have already paid the punishment for.
Either of two things:
Nothing. However, I don’t think most people quite grasp the meaning of that. Kind of how they think that before the big bang there was just empty space. No, empty space is not nothing. There’s no empty space, there’s no time, there’s nothing. By definition it cannot be experienced. Experience simply ends. It’s as if nothing ever happened. The universe could just as well have never existed.
The more optimistic theory is that consciousness is in a way immortal. You can only experience being, not not-being. It’s kind of how when you go under general anesthesia and then wake up it’s quite unlike sleeping. When you’ve slept you have the sense of time having passed in between. With general anesthesia this is not the case. One moment you feel sleepy and then you wake up in another room. From your subjective experience you never lost consciousness to begin with. Whose to say that something similar doesn’t happen with death. Instead of experience ending it just moves elsewhere. It’s a pretty difficult concept to explain but it’s somewhat similar to the idea of quantum immortality.
If my partner is still alive, then she would be very sad. Likewise my older siblings. God, I hope my parents aren’t alive to see it - that would suck for them. My best bud would also be pretty torn up (we’ve lived within a few blocks of each other for most of the last three decades, and get together at least once a week). There’s also an old ex who if they’re still around, I can count on a great eulogy from them. Makes me wish I could stick around just to see that.
Unless it’s a particularly horrible death, I don’t think anyone would be dangerously sad. I’m insured to the hilt, so there should be enough to go around to cover expenses, including my partner’s current level of comfort.
From my perspective, it’s likely to be a big nothing (I would be very surprised otherwise). But I’ve never really put much stock in individual consciousness: sure I may be stuck to this one perspective because of how brains work, so it’s the only consciousness I can truly know, but it’s not the only one. The others (like other other people) will keep going after this one ends. The biggest changes are going to be in the social and legal dimensions of my former life.
I have an opinion on this, but it saps all the fun out of the discussion when the question is asked by someone who gets no enjoyment out of their life. I’d rather you get professional mental health than have a bunch of people on the Internet assure you that death will be the end of your suffering.
You’re dead