There's an awful lot of uncritical supposition in this article. Sure, the brain MAY be recalling all the best moments of your life before you die, but there's zero evidence that that's what those recordings mean, aside from whimsy and hopefulness. It could just as easily be near-random memory access, similar to when we dream, and that, to me, sounds a lot more likely.
I know I'm the big grumpy curmudgeon here, but I think the question itself is full of sufficient wonder and beauty that we don't need to invent beautiful lies around the meager data we've been able to collect so far.
Yeah, I didn't see any evidence in that article that it was positive - for all we know it it's the brain serving up a collection of every time you told the waiter "you too" right after they said "enjoy your meal".
"Thank you" is the default to me, so I typically say that. It has been working out well so far. The only funny thing that I keep doing is this: we have two phrases we use when we say "see you" on the phone, and in person, and I sometimes use the phrase in person that is intended to be used for ending a phone conversation! It is pretty hilarious. I wonder if they notice or what they think about it.
I don't mind it because it's not masquerading as anything but supposition. Besides, this is the pop-sci summary of the actual source paper. If it's too pop-sci-ish for you, just read the actual source paper:
The linked paper is, of course, not necessarily super valuable from a scientific perspective. After all, n=1 and we're talking about somebody with traumatic brain injuries who has been administrated lots of psychoactive drugs. Not a typical healthy brain. But, I found it fascinating. There is some speculation but I would call it reasoned and restrained.
I was already on high alert when I saw that this was written in Frontiers, a potentially predatory journal publisher that makes it notoriously difficult to adequately review (and reject) bad papers. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiers_Media#Editorial_conc....
Meh, Frontiers is no worse than others. I've published in Nature. I've published in Frontiers. I have to say I had an easier time reproducing results published in "lower" tier journals than high impact journals. It is more a sign that peer-review is broken
Agreed, although with the caveat that Nature is not regarded particularly well in my discipline. In fact, most for-profit astronomy/astrophysics journals carry some stigma.
The specific journals you refer to in the wikipedia article have dropped in popularity, but this particular one hasn't. Frontiers is a huge family of journals. Some are good, some are excellent, some not so good. I wouldn't call any of them predatory though. And even if there was controversy in 2015, 7 years can be a very long time in publication contexts.
One thing that is interesting about Frontiers is that they encourage open reviews (i.e. the review is public and accompanies the paper). This is pretty far from predatory journal behaviour.
Thanks for the more up-to-date insight! I remember receiving requests to submit and review papers to their astronomy journal when I was a PhD student, and had decidedly avoided them since then.
"Among those who reported a perception of awareness and completed further interviews, 46 per cent experienced a broad range of mental recollections in relation to death that were not compatible with the commonly used term of NDE’s. These included fearful and persecutory experiences. Only 9 per cent had experiences compatible with NDEs and 2 per cent exhibited full awareness compatible with OBE’s with explicit recall of ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ events. "
Perhaps not even memory access, but more like the neuron activation thresholds change when oxygen, ions, etc quit flowing to them, causing random firing.
To me the 'and be programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal' is the key bit of uncritical supposition. As if our brains have evolved/were created to ease the transition to death. I don't know if the actual study concluded this, or if it was added as editorial.
"It could just as easily be near-random memory access, similar to when we dream"
Is it established that dreaming is near-random memory access? I thought the whole process of dreaming is quite far from being understood, so wouldn't it be a stretch to call it near-random, when in reality there might be pattern, but just one we do not understand yet?
Dreams are deeply weird and interesting. I was really disappointed when I took psychology that the dogma was they’re just synaptic static that maybe has something to do with long term memory formation.
I’ve had deeply odd dreams, where I’ve been told things I have no way of knowing. I’ve also had dreams where I’m near certain I was communicating with a being that was not merely a figment of my imagination. I’ve had many lucid dreams. Once I had a dream that was so lucid it felt more real than being awake. Either there is something unknown going on or I have perfect recall and am factorially more creative when asleep than awake.
I’m well aware of the standard explanation for these phenomena and its sometimes only barely plausible.
> Once I had a dream that was so lucid it felt more real than being awake.
Have you ever taken DMT? Not to imply that what you experienced was physiologically related to the drug. It’s just that being “more real” than reality is often how intense psychedelic experiences are described.
I’ve never taken any psychedelic of any sort. On the other hand the brain is basically a drug factory, among other things, so my experience may well have some overlap with psychedelic use.
Dreams being caused by random static doesn't need to mean that there isn't something transcendent, significant, or purposeful going on. For any given pet theory about what dreams "mean" or what they're "for", I just don't think there's a good way of falsifying it.
At the same time there's plenty of evidence that everyone's brain is a lot weirder and deeper than what we're consciously aware of. I think the truth just has to lie somewhere a lot spookier than dreams being essentially meaningless.
Frontiers is a predatory open access publisher, and your first assumption should always be that anything in a Frontiers journal is pay-for-play bollocks.
Not really. You fell into the trap of judging a book by its cover. That is not to distract from the fact that there were and are controversies surrounding Frontiers - you can't just lazily extrapolate from that.
It’s fine to judge things in part based on journal because self selection is involved. That doesn’t mean anything is defiantly wrong with the paper, but it is a real signal.
I should have been more specific - Frontiers being a predatory journal is more noise than signal. It's useful to have heuristics such as Beall's list, but they will never capture the subtle (and broken) complexities of academic publishing. In this specific case, in 2022, most researchers agree that the heuristic is misleading.
This corresponds with what I've read previously about brain activity following clinical death. What appears to be the case is that the brain continues to work for a period after the heart stops and a last breath is taken. So what that might mean is that if one is with a person who has just died, a relative or friend, there is still a moment, just a moment, to say good bye and I love you. And it is comforting to know that during that moment, the brain of the deceased might just be reliving all the greatest moments of that individual's life.
> the brain continues to work for a period after the heart stops
I had a sudden cardiac arrest (Ventricular Fibrillation). I felt dizzy and oriented for a few seconds (5?) after my heart stopped pumping blood and then I passed out. There was no life-flashing-before-my-eyes, no tunnels of light, just sudden dizziness and disorientation and then nothing. The next thing I remember was coming round in hospital.
Right. I used to box and I'm now painfully aware of the fragility of consciousness.
If you get hit right, the ~0.25-0.5 seconds prior and after to that hit do not exist for you. They are gone. You'll never know how you were hit or what you were doing, your eyes will just change instantly from "looking ahead" to "looking to the side/up" and you'll have to adjust very quickly to this new reality, despite the fact that the transition was instantaneous for you.
One guy used to joke that if you ever said something really dumb, you'd have about 1-2 seconds to hit the person who heard it so you could continue as though it never happened. Should tell you something about the kind of person you might find at a boxing gym.
small memory gaps after head trauma are relatively well documented - I'm recalling from ~15 years ago, but iirc the belief is that while the person is conscious at the time (before the head trauma) there's a disruption of the storage processes and those moments are forgotten. And then similarly, following a head trauma it takes a while for normal processing & storage to return. However, there's still some kind of conscious experience happening during those times. So there's a more philosophical question of like, "if you comfort someone and they forget it, was there any value in the comfort you provided?" but i felt like the paper was trying to argue, "yes" -- per the gp
> there is still a moment, just a moment, to say good bye and I love you
and why not? Maybe sometimes there is. and maybe the value of that is more for the living than the dead, but imo the point was that there's an argument they can still hear you. Will they remember it later? That's kind of a non-sequitor question if they're in the midst of dying.
An interesting thought, but in my mind it also raises the question of the meaning behind a sequence of memories that you don't remember remembering, there's simply no reason to assume it happened at all since without memories there is no other evidence of the event.
A dying person will not revisit their final moments if they were saved as memories. Giving comfort in passing is a kindness and a dignity to both the dying and the bereaved.
It's an interesting point that rapidly becomes philosophical in a "if a tree falls in the woods" sense. I recently read a paper that suggested that sedating anaesthesia used with the promise of making a patient unaware of a procedure may actually do no such thing - instead they prevent the patient remembering the procedure afterwards. Which as a potential patient one day.. is a little terrifying, because even if I don't remember any trauma the next day, do I really want to experience it nonetheless?
Feeling of being cut alive consists not only of your perception, but also of biochemical reactions, that’s why falling from the stairs dead-drunk doesn’t feel much horrible, and when you or your relatives are in danger, you don’t feel your fingers and muscles applying enormous force on things, which would be very painful otherwise. When you’re on a table, doctors don’t usually see (afaik) any of your blood pressure, hormones, etc raise too much. No reaction is no pain, which itself is a complex of sensations and thoughts, not a single signal. This state is not conscious, but yeah it may induce philosophical thinking.
When you're taken out of a minor surgery, you're usually awake as you're wheeled from the operating theatre back to your ward. If I think though about the one time I had surgery, I remember being told to think of something relaxing, falling asleep, and then waking up back in the ward. It's really interesting to think about how there was a brief period where I was awake, yet making no memories.
True, forming memories at that time might simply be unnecessary overhead since you're not likely to turn back without significant medical help. Memories that will never be accessed are just pointless.
Near death experiences do not happen to everyone who dies and is resuscitated. Supposedly, according to Wikipedia [1], it only happens to 10-20% of people. If someone is critically ill, it happens to 17% of those people.
But, it does happen to some people who go in to cardiac arrest.
I'm rewatching Midnight Mass on Netflix with my wife. They have some very powerful monologues on death. This is one that occurred to me just now, when two characters are discussing what they believe happens after death:
"When I die, my body stops functioning. Five minutes later, my brain cells start dying. But in the meantime, in between, maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT – the psychedelic drug released when we dream – so I dream. I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before because it’s all of it. Just the last dump of DMT all at once, and my neurons are firing and I’m seeing this firework display of memories and imagination.
My mind’s rifling through the memories, long and short term, and the dreams mix with the memories. And it’s a curtain call. One last great dream as my mind empties the fuckin’ missile silos, and then I stop.
My brain activity ceases and there is nothing left of me.
No pain, no memory, no awareness that I ever was.
That I ever hurt someone.
That I ever killed someone.
Everything is as it was before me.
All of the other little things that make me up – the microbes and bacterium and the billion other little things that live on my eyelashes and in my hair and in my mouth and on my skin and in my gut and everywhere else, they just keep on living and eating. And I’m serving a purpose. I’m feeding life and I’m broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled and I’m billions of other places. And my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals, and I am like the stars that are in the sky. There one moment and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos.”
Thanks for mentioning this show, I sought it out and watched it on Netflix on the basis of your mentioning this depth of dialogue. And it was fantastic. I tend to skip past the "horror" genre because I've generally found it quite singularly un-cerebral. Midnight Mass was great, and it was primarily the quality of the dialogue that made it so, which, ironically, many reviews have deducted stars for.
The delivery of the dialogue by Hamish Linklater is also something to behold.
I also find comfort in the idea of becoming food after we die. I remember reading somewhere how a beached whale in the arctic can be a life-saving windfall for the scavengers there. Helped me see the positive in something I’d always seen as purely tragic.
Same here. It's helpful insofar as any story can be helpful in the face of what we have to go through.
Interestingly enough, although my wife shares the same beliefs as me in terms of religion and God, the stories that resonate most with her from that show were the evocative ones about God and heaven. She told me that the science-based ones barely register to her at all, and almost not at all on an emotional level. As I heard the other character describe her idea of heaven, I too feel the pull of those descriptions. There's a part of me that agrees with the character when he says, after listening to her speech, wiping away tears, "I really hope you're right."
Most people think of heaven when it comes to the Bible's view of life after death, but it speaks more about a resurrection from the dead for the vast majority of people who die, to live forever on a paradise Earth.
There is something in us that makes us yearn for more than the short lives we have now (hardly anybody would choose to die if they had good health under normal circumstances), so these do resonate with us more than a purely materialistic world view, which has ostensibly left people with lack of contentment and sense of purpose.
It's a real danger that we'll have to deal with on a sociological level soon. Atheism is on the rise. I'm not versed in atheism as it occurs in countries other than in the US, but it seems like we'll see new types of problems that are not immediately apparent. That's the double-edged sword of rationalism. Truth and reason above all... But it's vital to remember that we're squishy and mushy and spiritual and emotional beings. It seems like it will be a lot of fun to be involved in media as it comes to deal with that shift more and more. What stories make the most sense, while still holding truth at the center? What do people need?
I'm reminded of the prototypical Alan Watts lectures. He might be out of fashion at the moment, but maybe his work will one day again be a little flicker in the cave for us to reach for, down the line.
I find little comfort in it. By the time your 120-200 imperial pounds becomes food, you will have shat another 25,000 pounds that has gone into a sewer or elsewhere and fed some bacteria down the line.
> So what that might mean is that if one is with a person who has just died, a relative or friend, there is still a moment, just a moment, to say good bye and I love you.
Just because there is brain activity doesn't mean there is consciousness. A 10 week old fetus has brain activity. But it is not anything we'd call conscious. If your heart stops or you've stopped breathing, then it's highly unlikely you are conscious. But if it helps one cope with a loved one's death, perhaps there is no harm in letting them believe the deceased could hear your final goodbyes.
The brain might very well be in a weird state at that moment. In that case, it would be best if it is unconscious. Comfort is not high on nature's agenda.
Agree. Comfort's not high, but "survival" is. So it could be a really chaotic intermix of things still working and others not, and still others working in previously impossible states. Pain and possibly torture sound likely.
I wonder if there’s truth to the reports of people after being Guillotined still being able to blink and make facial expressions even though their head has just been severed.
I though everyone knew this? The brain wouldn't just immediately stop working because a heart stopped pumping, there would be some sort of delay effect there.
If they listen and notice they experience something right then and there and maybe at that point it's nice to feel loved... a sweet moment for a dying person briefly supercedes the metaphysical confusion of the living.
this assumes that death is binary: you're either dead or not. this is not how things work. you don't know the precise time duration and what happens unless you are there to experience it.
i think the best time to say goodbye and i love you is at any point in time
Unsure, but dead Atlantic salmon brains have been rigorously studied
Not exactly connected to the discussion, but still worth noting that brain activity sensing can be difficult! (And it also makes me smile, thinking about a fishmonger's prized frozen fish undergoing a brain scan).
That was also my response: how, on Earth in complete history of modern medicine (or since invention of EEG), not a single death has been recorded?
I mean if I'm dying I'd like people to take an EEG recording of me to shine some light to science and neurology. It seemed super off to me in many ways... thanks for showing that it really is.
The 1980s movie Brainstorm had that plot. Only instead of a primitive EEG, it was helmet that recorded replayable brain experiences. It hypothesized near-death and early-post death.
Ironically the movie's star Natalie Wood (of West Side Story and Miracle on 34th Street) dies toward the end of the filming (drowning). The movie was a little choppy because they released it without a few intended scenes.
People not uncommonly pass away while having brain activity recorded via EEG (source: I read EEGs in the US). I’m not sure why this article was published.
> When an 87-year-old patient developed epilepsy, Dr Raul Vicente of the University of Tartu, Estonia and colleagues used continuous electroencephalography (EEG) to detect the seizures and treat the patient. During these recordings, the patient had a heart attack and passed away. This unexpected event allowed the scientists to record the activity of a dying human brain for the first time ever.
The article I quoted is correct and doesn’t have incorrect information:
> Neuroscientists have recorded the activity of a dying human brain and discovered rhythmic brain wave patterns around the time of death that are similar to those occurring during dreaming, memory recall, and meditation.
>NOW, a study published to Frontiers brings new insight into a possible organizational role of the brain during death and suggests an explanation for vivid life recall in near-death experiences.
The record has already been done, but now the scientists have found what the -already recorded- data could tell/show.
> a new study published to Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience suggests that your brain may remain active and coordinated during and even after the transition to death, and be programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal.
Unless they want to be terribly pedantic about the fact that these were EEGs, there have been several studies of brain electrical activity during human death. Jens. Drier has done several. Search for “spreading terminal depolarization” or “anoxic depolarization”. They’ve reported a “point of no return” where enough neurons are unable to maintain their transmembrane electrical gradients that the brain can no longer function.
EEG is not easy to get right, any muscle movement from the neck up scrambles the signal. It's unlikely you'd be able to get a usable recording without planning - usually you'd be trying to save the dying person by any means and you'd do that without any regards to EEG signal quality.
Unless they are lying in bed preparing to die. In which case we could opt to hook them up to an EEG and record it, for the science. It would not be the least bit difficult to get any number of willing volunteers, it would not require some kind of accident. OP was wondering how it could be possible that nobody ever thought to do exactly that.
I have that inner emotion, when thinking about death. It makes me very uneasy. When We die, if there is nothing coming, how is it to not exist? I mean, what is it like? Pure black and emptyness? I then comfort myself into thinking, in the end it comes down to energy. Like being part of that endless stream of energy that became matter and probably will return to energy somewhere in infinty. Or do we maybe just restart. All this is completely mind boggling.
Then again how did it all start? Causality is completely broken, when it comes to these things.
Everyone has been dead before: Do you have any trepidations about the times before you were born? It's trite to say this, yes, but it gives some comfort to know we are born with the experience of not being alive. Of course Your Metaphysics may apply.
Yeah, personally, I feel tons of anxiety about the effectively-infinite void of time before my existence, and that which will come after it. They are the same to me. Even though physically we are "born", I find it really upsetting that our experience and sense of selves is just an emergent organic process, a millisecond of a dream padded by infinite nothingness.
Far more horrifying to me is the thought that this millisecond of a dream is actually a process occurring in great abundance throughout the universe, with oscillating arrangements of particles facilitating whatever property of matter it is that embodies the phenomena of subjective experience. If it happened to "me" once, I don't see any reason why it should not happen again, or be happening everywhere at once in parallel, yet simply lacking awareness of this fact because the individual nodes don't share memory.
Exactly - I think this is the actual answer. At some point "I" am going to be a Holocaust victim, or a drug cartel's victim, etc etc. It's horrifying. I think when I die, "I" am just going to be somebody else. Nothing else really makes sense to me.
Have you considered an alternative world view? While it's true that we experience nothing while we die, there are good reasons to believe that that this life we have on Earth isn't accurately explained by purely materialistic means.
I think some culture deep sense of tradition is a way to cope. You inherit the past, you give it to your kids. It's no more a void on both ends if you carry the past along. Does it make sense?
On the flip side of that, the first time we were dead, when and how did we become conscious? Obviously the biological processes have a fairly well-defined start point (i.e. conception), but obviously consciousness does not start at conception as there is no brain yet. So when does it start?
I have wrestled with this after my first kid was born - there was nothing and now there is this person with their own mind and wants. Perhaps it was just the lack of sleep that got me thinking. But - When did their consciousness start? What was that first moment of awareness? Was there that initial "spark" and something started happening? Or was it a slow, slow clearing of fog before some sort of concerted thought began? What was that first thought? is a baby in the womb aware of self? Maybe not - but if not, when does that begin? When is that first moment when a baby looks in a mirror and sees themselves? What goes through their mind that first time they realise the thing in the mirror is them?
I'm not even convinced that we're self-aware at the moment of birth. I think self-awareness requires the brain to develop further. Around the time that we pass the mirror test is the when the self-awareness kicks in.
Can I ask you something? How come the Russians never smile? I’ve never seen them smiling.”
“They’re at work. They're Russians.”
"Is it normal for them to eat without talking to one another?”
“This is their job. They get 20 minutes to eat.”
“Yeah, but they never smile. Are they happy?”
Are the Russians happy? Is anyone happy? Can one ever truly be said to be happy?
I am tempted to go full Slav on Conor, to explain to him how we are all just grains of dust suspended in the howling void, searching for meaning in the fleeting moments before we are yanked back to the oblivion from whence we emerged, naked and screaming. But for all his faults he's just a kid stuck spending his summer microwaving Yorkshire puddings for difficult people. I take pity.
“Russians are formal. It would be weird of them to act relaxed on duty. They are all smiling on the inside.”
In Russian culture eating is a process not to be distracted from. Historically, this could be seen as a sign of respect on the part of a poor peasant for the food and all the hard labor that went into producing it.
Our perception of time is very subjective: it is affected by our age, by what we are doing, and it is known that it can be significantly altered by consuming certain substances. We learned from others that there was time before we were born, but do we feel that? In my own subjective perception of time the moment of my birth seems to be infinitely far in the past, and I can't be sure that the final moment of death will be a finite point approachable by consciousness.
I have this weird thought from time to time-- maybe it's dumb, but it nags at me.
Think of any time when you've been unconscious, like when under anesthesia, or fainting, or knocked out for some other reason. You experience everything leading up to the event that knocks you out, but the only reason you can recall any of it is because you did eventually wake up and regain consciousness. Your experience of your current self now is only because a moment from now you can look back and remember it. Eventually though, you will die, and you won't be able to look back and remember, and for you, it's as if nothing ever happened. So given that we will all die some day, how is it we even have conscious experience at all? I might die 5 minutes from now, or 5 days, or 5 decades from now, but isn't all the same?
Are you asking how or why? If it's the latter, one thought is there doesn't need to be any grand design, but merely that consciousness gives some sort of evolutionary advantage. It reminds me of Matthew Walker's potential hypothesis that sleep is our default state. So why would wakefulness exist? Conceivably because it confers some evolutionary advantage. Consciousness is sometimes referred to in the same terms of "wakefulness"
You can't describe non-existence in phenomenological or psychological terms because existence is required for experience (unless you believe in "souls"). The body will exist, but the neural activity that underlies experience will be absent.
edit: another user commented and said this was "logically unsound 20th century positivism". Let me direct you to this quote ca 300BC from Epicurus:
> Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.
If you believe in souls then why assume they dont have limitations as we do? Perhaps a soul if it exists is just as ignorant of its reality as we are of ours. Perhaps in some way a soul would be just as limited but in different ways.
Is it neural activity that underlies all experience? Or is it neural activity which filters it?
The real question for me is if consciousness is even real/physical or just an illusion. After you die time has no meaning and we don't know what happens trillions and trillions of years from that point. Maybe with limited matter or infinity, the exact universe patterns emerge once again that give you consciousness. Maybe you are reborn again in the same identical universe that contains your biological pattern, and live your life again and again without knowing you have done it before. Since you have no perception of time when dead, it happens instantly. Does it have to be 100% identical or are some variations allowed? Maybe you live through every possible variation of your biological self.
Or maybe quantum immortality occurs, where your consciousness jumps into a universe where you are still alive despite all the odds.
Or perhaps the universe is just snapshots of infinite patterns locked in permanent static states and this entire progression of time, physics, etc is just an illusion created by the sub-process of consciousness that creates dynamic transitions from one state to another.
It's probably my inability to perceive the concept of infinity that my mind thinks about such things, either way we will probably never know.
> Or maybe quantum immortality occurs, where your consciousness jumps into a universe where you are still alive despite all the odds.
I was walking down some very steep stairs once and almost tripped. I caught the handrail, but for the briefest moment, I was struck by the idea that in a potentially infinite number of parallel universes, other versions of me failed to grab the rail and tumbled to their death. It was quite an odd moment, I didn't worry about the fact that I had nearly fallen, I just felt bad for all the ones that did.
>When We die, if there is nothing coming, how is it to not exist? I mean, what is it like?
The question doesn't make any sense.
If I smash you in the head with a hammer and you have brain damage which changes your personality, makes it so you can't access some memories, and can't control your body properly.. we accept that as literal brain damage- we have broke the machine (our brain) in some regard.
Everyone accepts the reality of that situation.
But when you die (i.e., your brain is completely shut off and non-functioning), we ask what is it experiencing? What does it feel like? It's literally a nonsensical question.
Your brain isn't active to experience anything from its senses, which in turn are probably not functioning to send any signals either.
I think maybe the OP was referring to Chalmers hard question about consciousness. What you are talking about is closer to the "easy" question regarding understanding the of the neurological mechanisms but that's distinct from the "what is it like" subjective mechanisms. The hard question is hard, in part, because we don't (yet, at least) have a way to measure the way subjective experience emerges, so we don't have a way to measure when it stops.
imo it still doesn't seem coherent even with the "hard question" framing, the very foundation of the hard question begs us to ask why it is that subjective experience is rather than not, lacking subjective experience means we're discussing something outside the scope of the hard question, it's akin to asking "what happened before time"?
I believe Chalmers perspective is that consciousness is fundamental and irreducible. To relate it to your example, he says
"Nobody tries to explain, say space or time in terms of something more basic than space or time. It's the same as mass or charge. They end up taking something as fundamental"[1]
In contrast, the easy problem IS trying to explain consciousness in terms of something more fundamental, like charges or energy moving across neuron synapses. The fact that it is reducible means it may be explained objectively by science, which make it the "easier" problem
[1] Conversations on Consciousness by Susan Blackmore
They suggest consciousness is fundamental and irreducible? This is like saying "where the car goes when you take all its pieces away?". Occam's razor suggests that the material (easier) explanation is much more likely to be the answer than any complex one.
It's not even a good question unless they first prove consciousness can exist outside its physical support, AKA the immortal soul.
This is a different argument. It's not necessarily saying consciousness is distinct from matter. The panpsychist view (not sure if Chalmers is in this camp) is that consciousness is a fundamental property to all matter, from photons to the human brain. (This isn't to say a photon has experiences as a human does, but rather the complex human consciousness is derived from a much simpler forms of consciousness).
This is different from saying ""where the car goes when you take all its pieces away?". This assumes consciousness is an emergent property, rather than a fundamental one. The "car" is emergent from the right arrangement of "car parts". Rather, the question "where is the mass/charge of the car when you take away all its pieces" is a better analogy, because the car mass/charge is derived from the mass of the car part's mass/charge.
Thank you for answering. I searched more about this, and it seems like it's a controversial idea, having more traction around philosophers because there's not enough evidence to test scientifically. I too feel like conscience is an emergent property, like insects can exhibit surprisingly complex behaviors with simple minds, but it's too soon to say one way or the other without further research.
I can't say that I fully understand the concepts, but it does seem very much like it's a realm of philosophy. Annaka Harris has a pretty accessible book that introduces the idea and Philip Goff has some interviews and presentations that goes much more in-depth.
>there's not enough evidence to test scientifically.
This aligns exactly with what Chalmers says, that explaining subjective experiences is the "hard" problem precisely because we don't have a way to gather data. Gathering data is, almost by definition, an objective measure and can't give much insight into subjective experience. To a certain extent, if feels like defining or measuring subjective experience can't be looked at with traditional scientific inquiry. Unfortunately, that can also lead to a bunch of quackery.
I figure that worrying about death is something that can, by definition, only torment the living. There will be no blackness, because that implies perception. How are you going to perceive it when you no longer exist?
The closest survivable analog, in my opinion, is the "sleep" you experience when under something like sodium thiopental. When it works, you go from awake to awake again in an instant, from your own perspective. A bit jarring to lose hours or days like that. I assume death is similar but without the waking up part.
Regular old sleep doesn't involve that level of unconsciousness.
> When it works, you go from awake to awake again in an instant
That's my thought as well. Last time I was put under anesthesia I tried hard to think about how I was feeling. I went from awake with my eyes open to opening my eyes. I thought my eyes were already open? There is just literally nothing between that span of time.
It's like that except you don't wake? But it lasted an instant. How can something that passes in an instant last for infinity? It makes my brain hurt.
> How can something that passes in an instant last for infinity? It makes my brain hurt.
Indeed it does. This is why I try to remind myself that this kind of thinking can only torment me when I'm alive, and I should stop wasting time. Especially at 2am, which of course is when I have these kinds of thoughts to begin with.
My dad and I used to talk about this and decided that we lived forever, as a practical matter. "Before" and "after" just speculation.
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. - Vladimir Nabokov "
There is nothing left to experience any void, as that experience would be something. Noone can experience death, only the moments leading to it. I feel pretty comfortable with that. On the other hand, if there is life after death then perhaps you live on somehow but let's discount that as unprovable and quite possibly not the case.
Dealing with the reality we do know, I comfort myself with the idea that, and this sounds cheesy, all is one. Not in some hippy, pantheistic way. More that our experience of ourselves as separate from anything else is itself an illusion. There are no things, not nothing but "no things". Everything is a giant process, everything interpenetrates everything else, nothing exists independent from anything else.
This is a somewhat Buddhist view. I'm describing emptiness in a way (the Buddhist term not nothingness or some sort of nihilistic viewpoint). It seems like a totally logical way to see things and, for me at least, comforting. It's all one process and it's all relational. It's relations all the way down. One Buddhist teacher I like put it this way. "All of reality is a vibrating verb rather than a bunch of concrete nouns".
So back to your point, this is tantamount to being part of that "infinite stream of energy" as you put it perhaps.
And specious stuff that says "No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel", not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
Have you ever been under general anesthesia? For me, that's the closes you can experience "not existing". Also, you have already experienced not existing; that is before you were born. How did that feel? Was it painful?
To me that feeling is both our survival instinct projecting, and our social/bonding self that anticipates the pain of others, something most people dread dearly.
when you dream, all the characters in your dream are actually just you. your mind gives rise to them, so they're just you. what gave rise to your mind?
This makes me think of an interesting theory I've been thinking of:
Say your brain has a bunch of neurons in place that form every experience of your life and form every thought system you have. Surely a specific structure of your neurons also causes you to feel the experience of being a "self" and everything else as being the "other".
Now, as we die, it's easy to imagine that our neurons are still living on that last bit of oxygen and energy. Systems start to slowly shut down. One of those systems is the one described above. The one which separates the "experiencer" from the experience. At some point, you transition to a point where you can't tell yourself apart from anything else. You lose the self forever.
“Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.”
Or replaying their greatest embarrassments. That's what my brain will be doing -- why change the habit of a lifetime?
Something beautiful about the brain running "Beauty, Awe, and Wonder" one last time before the final SIGTERM is sent. If there is a Big Neuroscientist in the Sky, he clearly has some affection for us.
This is a big factor in my insomnia. Not necessarily the fear that I'll die in my sleep (God willing, that's my preference in old age) but the realization that every night, I'm getting a little more and more acquainted with oblivion. Knowing that you and everyone else here is in the same boat helps a lot. Maybe it's trite, and silly, but the phrase "We're all in this together" brings me a little bit of comfort, a tiny slice of what I imagine the spiritual feel in greater quantities.
As I get older I suspect more and more that humans are not adapted for atheism. Even us hard atheists tell each other stories of chemicals and stuff and cosmos and infinity. I have an ongoing conversation with my wife on whether we'll raise our future children Catholic or not. I think we might. The lure of those stories, the grandiosity of those narratives, the imagery and ritual... Those are just buttons that I don't know if an atheistic upbringing could press. I'm not saying it's not possible... Would a reverential trip to the Grand Canyon, a late night summer trip to Amboyd Crater, fulfill the need for awe that a child has as she's growing up? If I could will it I would have her completely skip the existential terror that I've contended with throughout my life, but of course, she would be her own person and her own mind, regardless of my plans.
As an ex-catholic, all I can say is: if your kids grow up with enough common sense and pragmatism, they might resent the early indoctrination. Their brains have not matured enough to develop common sense until their teens, and everything the adults say will be taken as absolute truth. The humane thing would be raising them atheist, explain about agnosticism and religion, and accept their choice. All the rituals can be done at any age.
Just like religious parents can have atheists kids, atheist parents can have agnostic or religious children. Indoctrinating them from childhood is taking their freedom of choice and choosing for them.
Hey that's an amazing point. Thank you for mentioning it.
I definitely value freedom of thought above ritual. That's an aspect of the decision I had set aside as a conceit in order to allow myself to entertain it at all. I too was raised (loosely) Catholic, and a lot of my initial pain around morality and life stemmed from my literal interpretation of those teachings.
I hope that some sort of ongoing comparative discussion of religion and the purpose it can serve would help a child make their own best conclusions. The way I've been thinking of it at the moment is, the tension at the heart of this, is "Would 'depriving' someone of those rituals be more harmful than helpful?" I'm leaning toward it being negligible, but exposing them to ritual might bring an individual closer to a healthy path of spirituality on their own terms. I would definitely keep the aspect of autonomy front and center if I did introduce my child to religion. "They talked about Jesus today. Do you want to sit with me and find out what other people think of him?"
Yes, seriously, most nights I am kept awake by that same existential dread. since I was too young to even know how to speak, actually. it's haunted me my entire life. I am of the fundamental belief that consciousness is nothing more than the functioning of our biological brain. I've never seen even the tiniest shred of evidence to suggest otherwise (in fact I have become more and more certain as I live more years on this earth and observe more humans in varying states of functioning/life/consciousness/etc.) ...
I'll dare to be presumptuous and share what has helped me the most, above Buddhist studies, psychoactives, meditation, yoga, journaling: just removing the idea of mortality from my brain.
"Thanks I'm cured", right? I didn't believe it would help when I first learned the technique. I heard it from a researcher who studied death anxiety in Tibetan Buddhists. He found that their culture makes it an overwhelming priority to be constantly conscious of one's mortality. He found that this imperative was inculcated from the very earliest age, and he found an unusually high correspondence in those beliefs to symptoms of anxiety. It was startling to him, as to me, because he thought the whole idea of Buddhism was "go with the flow dude, everything is gonna be alright", but in the teachings emphasized in the culture, it morphs into some sort of spiritual specter always haunting the waking lives of these people. It resonated with me, because Western existential philosophy also makes death-awareness an ideal to strive for, with the concomitant devil's deal of constant anxiety.
He concluded that extinguishing or minimizing the idea of one's mortality ends up freeing one from the existential terror it can cause. I remember being in my living room cleaning as I listened to the report, and I stopped in my tracks and put the vacuum down. "There's no fucking way that works."
It WORKS. It started working almost right away. If the thought of dying came up I just would grab the thread and shake it and say to myself, "Ok, so what? You have to wash the dishes man." I don't think I've lost any of my cynicism or me-ness or critical faculties in the ensuing years. That constant death anxiety is almost completely gone now, except for the most inopportune lulls before sleep or in idleness. I keep coming back to it. "Oh my God. I'm going to die one day. No. No. No. Please no... Hey! Who fucking cares?! Think about your puppy, look how cute she is laying there so innocent. Think about renewing your car registration. Literally everything is more important than that insignificantly tiny moment in the future. You're ok right now."
I'll have to try that. Today I get a lot of positive motivation from reminding myself I have limited time and to get on with achieving what I want to achieve, but life's to short to get stuck in cycles (I'm aware of the irony).
It's super hard. I am so empathetic to what you're telling me. From the bits I've learned of you through this convo, you seem self-aware and intelligent. With those tools, I am confident you will always have equanimity near.
I came to appreciate the rituals around religion when my father passed. It’s worth asking “Is there value to the activities, even if you don’t believe the literal divinity of the stories?”
I've had sleep paralysis a few times in my life. The last time was 15 years ago, and it felt like something I could get used to now that I know what it is. It was a really interesting sensory hallucination.
Am I crazy, or is it something you can get used to, like practicing lucid dreams?
I'm sure everyone has their own experience... for me, it means I rarely get a good night's sleep. A typical night for me is falling into sleep paralysis 4 times before finally dozing off. A typical morning for me is waking into sleep paralysis and being exhausted and stressed, ready to tackle a new day... I also have issues with my nose, I can't breathe through it... so sleep paralysis is a little extra suffocating for me. If I could breath properly it might not be so bad...
The hallucinations were only terrifying as a kid, worse as I didn't know what sleep paralysis was for the first 10 years of having it, and no one would believe it wasn't "just a dream". The hallucinations are terrifying again now that I have a kid of my own, only when they are part of it...
Worse than the hallucinations are when my ears start buzzing... it's so loud - it hurts.
I used to say, in jest, that it will kill me in my sleep (except I'll be awake and suffering) when I'm elderly. As I'm getting older, it seems like a likely outcome.
> “Something we may learn from this research is: although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.”
Note to self: die in a way that keeps my brain intact for a few seconds after death.
They're just theorizing here. Generally that would be something to say to console someone, just like "They're in a better place". It could be just as likely that if the person had strong memories of traumatic experiences, they could be remembering them.
It seems likely to me it depends on the person dying.
If you always saw yourself as a victim, if you wallowed in the trauma and abuse that life gave you, then your final moments are likely spent remembering all that trauma and how shitty and unfair your life was, and convincing yourself you’re better off dead and gone far away from this world. A crude way to die.
One my fears is that as I am dying my brain will get stuck in a subjective time loop, in essence, the last 30 seconds will subjectively stretch out to a thousand years... but with only a handful of repeating feelings and sensations. What if due to other physical discomfort, your memories replayed are those of regret or other unpleasant sensations? (similar to a "bad trip").
Not too likely. Did you ever experience a moment subjectivity stretched a thousand years? If no, why do you think there is a special mechanics for the event of system shutdown?
If anything, any sensation or thought requires energy. Experiencing 1000x or 100000x more sensations in the same space of time takes 1000x/100000x amount of energy, and it's not like your dying organism has hidden last reservoir of energy to power your brain activity.
The poster wrote that he got assaulted by a football player, fell on the ground, and somehow hurt his head.
Then he met a girl, they got married after two years and then had a child. Another two years later they had another child. He also had a great job, and bought a house, where he lived with his wife and family for like 10 years.
One day he was sitting on the couch, looked at a lamp, and noticed that the lamp did not look right. The perspective was off. He stared at the lamp for three days. Then he realized that is not a real lamp. Nothing was real.
Then he woke up, still laying on the ground where he had hurt his head 15 minutes ago.
I think the distinction is the subjective perception that time has stretched out a thousand years. It's not that time has literally dilated, just that our "normal" perception of time has changed. Perceived time dilation occurs under certain drugs (to include those endogenous to the human body) and the OP thought has been something that has occurred to me (and others) as well. IIRC, the movie American Beauty suggests it in the last scenes.
Subjective perception still requires energy to percept. Thus, to perceive time dilation your brain needs more energy to process it, but there is no a source of such energy.
Fair enough, I see what you're getting at. But I think there is an important distinction: it's not the claim that actual perception goes on forever, but the subjective experience dilates to seem like it. It's quite a bit like the other discussion between the "easy" and "hard" problem of consciousness. You're speaking to the "easy" problem (how neurology correlates to subjective experience), where the "hard" problem is the measurement of how the actual experience feels to the observer.
There is still energy at the moment of death (e.g., your ATP doesn't instantaneously disappear), meaning for a few brief instances, there is still energy to perceive and during these instances, the subjective experience of time may differ from normal day-to-day experience. It's not to say perception actually goes on forever, but the subjective experience of time feels like it does (or, at least changes our normal perception of time).
I have always wondered if our last DMT moments were perceived as timeless. People imagine darkness but seem to forget that our minds reconstruct all of reality in real time. So you could conceivably live another life in your last moments.
I am afraid that the last few minutes of life will be like a confusing and disoriented nightmare. That has always seemed to me to be the most likely scenario as your brain is shutting down.
If its like psychedelics I don't think it would be. Which i think the initial parts could be similar since they decrease blood flow to the brain, seems the same as dieing? IME there is nothing to fear, fear (emotions in general) is a higher level concept and those seem to be the first thing fall apart. Thoughts about thoughts, self identity, are made up to make living and thinking easier.
my guess is you slowly transition to simple machine with sense inputs and outputs until it all shuts down.
Reading your comment gives me such an unsettling feeling. You nailed it. I think death is the ultimate form of discomfort. Our bodies refuse to let us die peacefully under most circumstances. They fight with every last breath and every last heartbeat, to keep going. And all the usual signals of comfort are gone, with one just left bare before the universe. Think motion sickness + nausea + all the other terrible feelings combined, and you cannot just give in, you just have to endure until you're gone.
Interestingly there are two David Lynch movies (Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive) that can be interpreted as just that: someone's disorienting nightmare as they are dying.
> discovered rhythmic brain wave patterns around the time of death that are similar to those occurring during dreaming, memory recall, and meditation
There are other possibilities besides memory recall. It sounds a little bit like falling asleep, where there might be some thoughts, some stillness (meditation) and some dreaming.
Since the birth of our son, I have been thinking about death a lot. He takes comfort when he is in my wife's hug and sometimes refuses to sleep if she is not around. I'm sure he remembers nothing about this when he grows up (< 2 yr now). But then I wonder, maybe many years later, when he passes away, surely this replay of memory might give him the last comfort?
Anyway, as a (not 100%) materialist, I feel uneasy when I think about death. The older I am the more uneasy I feel. Of course there is no way to cheat death, but I'm looking forward to training myself to accept the inevitable before it is too late.
Or maybe there IS life after death, or certain kind of existence. I'm also looking forward to that too.
Thanks, I was just about to post it (I remembered it as "Project Brainstorm", but as you state it's actually just called "Brainstorm"). One of the most remarkable movies I've ever seen.
> “Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences,” Zemmar speculated.
I wonder what the adaptive benefits of near-death flashbacks are. Perhaps as a way to give last-ditch motivation.
We have plenty of accounts of what it's like to have a heart stop. Thank defibrillators for that. Of course, the whole ordeal may not be accurately committed to memory.
It doesn't have to have adaptive benefits. The critical path is molded by natural selection but the rest grows wild, mutating as it pleases until it either helps or hinders gene replication.
For example, if humans exploded like a bomb when we died the way some insects do to protect their colony, that might be selected for or against by evolution. Or if somehow eating the deceased's heart or brain actually transferred their strength or memories to the consumer, as some cultures believed. But no, death by old age just doesn't interest evolution.
True! That was my initial thought too. I'm trying to find a possible adaptive benefit to flashbacks in near death (not actual death, but how would the body know the difference, really), but there may be none. Hard to say. I've certainly heard stories of people "cleaning up" and improving their lives in some way post-flashback, but who's to say the flashback was part of the cause.
There's an assumption that the brain knows that its support structure, aka the body, has stopped functioning in a permanent sense.
I can see how brains could evolve to do status checks and respond to survivable events. But, I don't see how it could evolve to have a different response to non-survivable events.
What I'm getting at is, do folks who survive report that they had a nice experience? If not, how did brains get a different mechanism for/response to not-survivable experiences?
I'm very skeptical of this, mostly because there's no logical reason for this to exist. Everything in our behavior and bodies has a purpose, for the most part pure survival or reproduction. There's no use for replaying memories of one's "best moments" in life.
More likely, these are random accesses of vivid memories (the ones that have been strongly imprinted on the brain) and these could be both happy or sad ones.
My mother's family has a history of seeing deceased relatives when they're about to die. It has become such tradition that some have even reported to see the dead waving and calling them to the light, but turns out they weren't at risk of death.
Autosuggestion is a powerful phenomenon. They're convinced they'll see the welcome party, and they will if their death is not sudden.
If you were concerned about the ethics of the situation like I was, then here is an excerpt from the paper itself that you might find reassuring:
"After discussion with the patient’s family and in consideration of the “Do-Not-
Resiscitate[sic!] (DNR)” status of the patient, no further treatment was administered and the patient passed away."
Via news.ycombinator.com: Actual title of the post is "A replay of life: What happens in our brain when we die?" -- please respect the submission rules...
Via reddit.com: How vile of the liberulz to mis-characterize Trump's new social network like that -- please don't do that here...
[Edit: and yes, downvoted within 2 minutes... How. Surprising]
I know I'm the big grumpy curmudgeon here, but I think the question itself is full of sufficient wonder and beauty that we don't need to invent beautiful lies around the meager data we've been able to collect so far.