What Happens When We Die?

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I really think this is a both-and. We've likely mislabeled a lot of real things that we still don't understand yet as 'supernatural', and I take 'supernatural' to mean natural that still hasn't been adequately explained.

Consciousness itself is one of those areas where the lights shouldn't be on per our current theories, there's no reason for there to be anything that it's like to be a human, a bat, or anything else for that matter. That we can't find 'consciousness' when we study the brain and are left talking about it with relationship to neural correlated it suggests that even if it's divisible at the neural level it's probably a lower-level phenomena.

There are also all kind of theories of consciousness coming back such as panpsychism, neutral monism, functionalism (my preferred of the three), and none of these would really be particularly surprised by things some people would claim to be 'supernatural' being real because they have frameworks for said effects that have nothing to do with religious stories or fables, ie. it's just information and consciousness connecting in unexpected ways.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 18 Jul 2020, 11:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Quantum Mechanics, in Part, Currently Suggests We May All Be
Living in a Holographic Simulation, Where A Much More 'Intelligent,
Creative Being' or Group of 'Being's Programs Us the Way We Are Now.

If this is actually so; There Ain't no Stopping the Programmer
From Putting US Back in the Hell or Heaven or the Purgatory 'Tween
Here back again forever eternally Now More; Or Perhaps there are Game-
Ups, Like Living a Life of Pure Empathic Sympathy And Compassion, Altruistically
With a Little Relative Free Will Programmed into whoever the Hell or Heaven the
Programmer Wants to do; Just for Fun or Torturing Whatever Pleases the Programmer Now.

Considering that Neuroscience Does Not Understand How Human Consciousness Comes to Be
As A Synergy Out of all the Organic Material Reductionist Parts; Considering that Human Beings
Will Imagine; yes, Just Imagine they are Exercising and actually Get Empirically Measurably stronger
By Doing so; That's a Pretty Good Power-Up and Shows that indeed Mind over Matter of our Body as
there really is no separation as Imagination is as real as anything we experience in life for those who achieve
the Ability to do it; Same as Imagining the Real Placebo Prayer effect or the Nocebo Real Voodoo Effect, Too;

Chances are, if one Doesn't understand the Power of Real Imagination; One Just hasn't gone far enough in
Science to Understand What Our Potentials even are; Imagination Is Everything We Are And Become
Now; All of Consciousness, including Imagination And Dreams is A Realest Reality We Experience now;

At Least According to Science; Not Unlike the Science of the Kingdom of Heaven within that i just went
over in another Thread, If one Understands the Common, And Scientific Terms for the Experience and
actually Experiences it, in Terms of Autotelic Flow in Hypo-Frontality, with Plentiful Helpings of the
Experience of Frission in Enjoying Peaks and Plateaus of Heaven Within Regularly; It's Really
Possible to get to and stay in Heaven now; Be as Happy as one cares to be with appropriate
Bio-Feedback from activities like Moving And Still Meditation to Achieve
What Science Also Calls a Real Fountain of Youth that Regenerates
Vitality, including Gray Matter in the Brain; Where We Remain
So Much more useful across the Lifespan, where 'Heaven' doesn't
Age within either, Now; As Love in this Way Becomes An Eternal Faith
of Feeling, Sensing, And Doing Life Now; But one Doesn't get to 'KNoW' until One comes;

Or in the case
of Quantum
Mechanics and
Holographic Simulations;
Don't Piss the Programmer
off; As an Intelligent Designer might
have Wrath to Pass out too, in terms
of A Grasshopper who is stepped on the
First Few Breathes of life and comes back
And Does life Forevermore now this way;
Living Bliss Now; is Solution Enough for Really Living Now.

Whatever is Fully Responsible for the 'Big Picture' is Just Beyond Our Pay-grade for Now; Even Our Full Subconscious
Mind, Yet, i found the Working Power-Ups and i simply Experience An Autotelic Flow at the Hand of Relative Free Will, mine Eternally Now; As Now is all THeRe Is; so yeah; in this way there is no looking up or down; Just Bliss; Just Eternal
Bliss Forever Now.

The human willingness and even eagerness to believe falsehoods has not abated.

Apologies, I just gave that last post a considerable overhaul (had something more constructive to add).

Theories of consciousness is a subject I don't know much about. As I understand it, no one really knows what consciousness is or how to define it exactly. The various theories about what it might be are not really interesting to me, because I am fine with not knowing. Science is a limited field that only deals with what can be measured, so it's not always useful to help understand things that are difficult to pinpoint. But I'm not sure that it suggests that supernatural notions could be real.

I wouldn't suggest that it points us toward old fables being real, it does put is in a place where edge cases and unusual states or experiences end up being a touchy subject as they tend to get shoehorned into a historical context. IMHO that's largely the fault of some combination of a) humans mangling information for Darwinian purposes as they always have and b) resulting culture wars that have made nuance on said things difficult in most public places.

In my own case, I've had some overwhelming experiences that I've had to grapple with. For at least a temporary truce with that inquiry I think Prof. Donald Hoffman and Chetan Prakash (UC Irvine) have come up with a pretty powerful theory that maps well to the intuitions that those experiences left me with, and it does have exciting implications for innovation because - as Dr. Hoffman has suggested - if they can draw both quantum and classical mechanics out of their mathematics (the falsifiable component of their theory) they may have a set of tools that also might help us strip the strangeness out of quantum mechanics as well as something that can put Nima Arkani Hamed's amplitouhedrons into a broader context. Ultimately their theory probably won't explain consciousness itself ( they're assuming that consciousness spins up space-time as a fitness-based interface and does its best to omit anything that's not survival-oriented information and contextualize it in the most fitness-leveraged ways possible) but it would help triage a lot of the current framings that have all tended to have major problems.

And what about the things people have experienced that are in fact Very Real?

Whether via psychedelic pharmaceutical enhancement or EzraS’ near death experience or some other means.

Just because YOU haven’t experienced anything of the sort doesn’t mean that what others experience is imagined or fictitious.

Edit: Serious question: Have you ever done magic mushrooms?

I have to be careful how I phrase this because it's a really touchy subject, absolutely no one should even think about it without heavily consulting Erowid and knowing all of the caveats because this can be incredibly dangerous (especially if someone makes the mistake of getting it with other active ingredients) and they need to know their own brain chemistry quite well and even then trial run at very low doses to be sure they're okay, but in my days of experimenting with psychedelics I actually found second or third plateau of DXM (dextromethorphan hydrobromide) to actually yield the most unusual experiences of a variety that seemed to hold veridical importance and I knew a lot of of people who seemed to have significantly more 'paranormal' experiences with that and in days afterward than with other psychedelics. It didn't yield as much direct insight as I was hoping on said phenomena because the phenomena tended to never repeat quite the same (sadly that exact thing happens often for most people with mystical experiences in general - I think because they're a bit like subconscious epiphanies that only happen when they happen) but I saw parallel similarities in the behavior of these things that helped give me an idea of how consciousness fit together and what kinds of exceptional states were possible short of hopping a plane to Peru or getting in a near-fatal accident.

The thing that's interesting about psychedelics is how differently they treat people. I'm not sure if this is common for people on the autistic spectrum (at least without comorbids that would amplify) but I can't say I ever lost contact with ground-level reality, it was a bit more like - especially in better cases - being able to see my own mental code in front of me on multiple monitors and work with it directly.

So. What are these out of body experiences and all of that sort of Stuff . Imply to this non afterlife, astral projection
Seems to imply there maybe something beyond one existence . People which recall past lives , seem to have a place in this discussion . Especially ones that have been documented with supporting research ..
Am just being a bit contrary here , to my own understandings . But these are additional questions that this topic causes me to think of .

Experiencing an unusual mental state or feeling gives no clue as to the origin or cause of that feeling. Human are notoriously bad at assigning the correct cause to the things that happen in our minds. For example, almost anyone with a diagnosed mental illness who experiences visions or hears voices will always insist that those visions and voices originate outside of themselves, because that is how it feels when one is experiencing them.

But if one is taking magic mushrooms, then one knows for sure the origin of one's unusual feelings and visions: altered brain chemistry.

@Jakki, in my first language, the literal translation for the word "imagination" is "mielikuvitus" is "mind illustration".
My wise ancestors, thus, noticed that human mind illustrates the world as part of its quest to make sense of it. We experience things, we interpret things with the mental tools in our possession, and quite often our experience and memories end up being subconsciously "colored" quite differently from how an objective observer might describe things. Not to mention, that there are plenty of people who simply lie about their experiences, for whatever reasons (but usually it has something to do with a deep need to feel oneself special).

Basically, scientific analytical philosophy is certain that there exist plenty of things that cannot be explained by science, even in theory (consider all phenomena that are so unlikely that they occur only once or twice during the existence of humanity). Scientific method is based on the idea of experiments that can be -at least in principle- be repeated by any competent person with adequate equipment. Obviously, this is impossible in the case of extremely rare phenomena. So while science is the best tool for exploring physical universe in our disposal, it has a few significant limitations. Also, the idea of scientific progress -that is easy to observe- is necessarily based on the idea that there exist things that science has not discovered yet, even though they are real. So it is certainly very possible that some phenomena experienced by people today, are phenomena that science can not explain today, but a hundred years from now things might be different. So I'm personally open to the idea that some "experiences" are possibly this kind of experiences -real, but unknown to todays' science.

The fallacy lies in claiming to know too much based on too small amount of data, in mixing speculation with facts and stirring until facts and speculation become an epistemic smoothie. The experience of perceiving "something really weird" is very far from having a complete theory about the nature of weirdness. I personally have experienced a good amount of weirdness (according to Rudy Simone, it seems that I'm far from the only Autist who can say so). I have some ideas and theories about what they might be -these have become part of my personal world view, but I am well aware of the fact that my theory/interpretation of my experience may well be totally wrong. Due to having a couple of weird experiences of my own, I have come to the conclusion, that while I remain very open to possibility that this world of ours is a place far greater and stranger than what it usually seems, I am highly skeptical of people who claim not only that they have experienced "something weird" but have spun an entire rational-looking theory around their experience. For some reason, these people don't like at all people who try to offer science-based "non-supernatural" explanations to these experience and insist that their experience was supernatural even after they are given good reasons to question and re-examine their version of what has happened.

One thing I might add, not to debate so much as examine the structure of this:

If one is involved in things they find highly important and other people are constantly trying to pull at their sleeve and redirect their life in ways that serve them or their needs rather than the person in question, that person ends up needing to very aggressively triage the sorts of things that would be a distraction and when dealing with religious zealots who have either greater numbers or actual positions of authority that impact one's life then in that fight for freedom and autonomy the question of type I error goes out the window - precisely because you know that the relevance (or complete and utter lack) of what the people who are trying to manipulate you would claim and whether or not there might be some orthogonal shred of 'something' that these people only came across like a lost island tribe discovering a washing machine that came up on shore has no relevance to being able to live one's life and follow your own map rather than being accosted or even captured by tribal beliefs.

I put it that way because - it's normal for sane and non-gullible people to have their concepts of consciousness and reality rattled by psychedelics. It may not prove anything (very little is proven without rigorous testing), it's fuel for framing hypotheses for sure, but it's not a simple matter of wanting to be deceived necessarily.

Is that a No, then?

Can imagine , though if one has lead a deceitful or evil life , those things may very well from those things a memory might have to deal with during ones big sleep .. but this could part of the theory of karma staying with me from
My own earlier inquiries into the nature of death and life .

Thanks for the responses to my posts. I've said my piece. I don't have anything to add. But I didn't want to leave it with no acknowledgment.