After death.

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i have no religious propensity, but i am not "certain" (like atheists are) that consciousness is intrinsic to only our physical bodies, and therefore perishes at death.

i know that there are states of existence that are not materially manifest (like energy for example (i know that energy can be raveled into matter, but i am talking about energy that is unbound)). since i participate in material existence, then i may also participate in energetic existence.

as far as i can determine, my consciousness is a local bubble of consciousness that is the result of my illusion of separateness from the universe in which i am conscious.

i think "i am me and no-one else", and that may be my illusion of separateness. i can conceive that it may be possible that every consciousness (human or not) is a "tap" into the same pool of universal consciousness, so the "me" that i refer to when i say "me", may very well be exactly the same "me" you refer to when you say "me".

i can conceive that when i die, the bubble will pop, and i will, like a disintegrated soap bubble on the surface of a pool of water, dissolve and dilute and permeate through it, and my previous personal identity will be meaningless as it can never be retrieved from the pool.

i find it hard to imagine that separate entities could exist in a world where compartmentalization is impossible. "compartmentalization" is a product of logic that lives in living brains, and it disintegrates once the brain is lost. there is no notional boundaries or definitions when consciousness is pure and still.

what is the mechanism behind my original separation from the eternal ocean of consciousness in order to be born into a brain which thinks it is subjectively unique? am i a single bubble in a vast froth on the sea of consciousness that has been whipped up in some sort of temporal turbulence?
when i pop back into the sea i will lose my identity. it is like a glass of water. the water molecules in the glass are going to lose their relationship with each other when the glass is poured and the water is dispersed, and those exact molecules will never again be in each others vicinity.

all glasses of water are ostensibly the same, but the histories of each molecule of water (wow what a story if it could be told) would be unrelated before they arrived by fate into the same glass.

i think my consciousness (soul) can be thought of similarly. the molecules of "consciousness" (i am being figurative so save your keyboard) that compose "me" are only collected in "me" while i live. when i die they will just dissipate and become infinitely dilute within the endlessness of "consciousness possibilities" (sea of consciousness).

whatever. i will try to address your question using your own belief system.
if there is a god who is like a judge who deems whether you go to heaven or hell based upon your actions while you were alive, then it would have to be true that he is fair. if he created you, then he must love you, and he would not be merciless to you.
the fact that you do not know whether the sentence for suicide is "hell", means that you can not be held accountable to the degree that "hell" would be the verdict for your suicide.

i can not imagine a process of thought beyond that because i am not a philosopher.

What are you - what makes you YOU, and not another person? Answer: your genes (your DNA) and your memes (your ideas). The rest - the physical body - merely regenerates. Most of your cells regenerate every few months. What we call death is just a stage in regeneration.

If you have children then your DNA continues regenerating through them. If you have no children then your DNA survives through your extended family. It's the exact same DNA, more or less (maybe 1% different, that's al). Some DNA is billions of years old and will continue indefinitely (assuming we colonize other planets before our species becomes extinct).

Answer; my Subjective Consciousness.

There's more than one answer to that question, not all of which are mutually exclusive.

there are better ways to define yourself that the recipe from which you are derived.

Agreed. But we could debate what consciousness is, how conscious we are, and the question of identity.

I would argue that memes and consciousness are identical, if we take "consciousness" as meaning "what we are conscious of." I would thus argue that consciousness survives death because memes survive. As for the question of identity and transference, my own consciousness today has more in common with my parents' consciousness than it does with my body's consciousness when I was first born.


Agreed. That's why I place equal emphasis on memes.

My subjective experience does not hop to other

I like this a lot, thankyou.

It is true that the other person may experience it a little differently, just like a movie is different on a cinema and on an iPhone. Information is fluid, but that is true even within the individual. Every time I see the same object myself I see it in a slightly different way, and when people remember things it is common to change the memory slightly, hence memories can be wrong when we check.

Subjectivity is fluid, and changes anyway, so I don't see a problem with the small changes that occur when experiences are shared.

We don't understand enough about consciousness to make assumptions as it is.

Why should consciousness be complicated? We are only conscious of what we are conscious of: the six or seven items in short term memory. These things are all information: connections between neurons. Any significance derives from an evolved preference to survive. Applying Occam's razor, what else are we looking for? Consciousness seems pretty straightforward to me, unless I am missing something.

Some theories in quantum mechanics suggest consciousness affects everything. Also, consciousness seems to act to limit the information on which we focus, rather than positively choose what information we receive. We absorb a lot more than we notice. Morphic field theory (see sheldrake.org) demonstrates connections among consciousness that act in a way our current theories of information exchange cannot explain.

For every answer, another question arises.

Is there any empirical corroberation of morphic field theory?

ruveyn

This + your drivel in L&D

On a side note, I find the Catholic belief of "suicide as always sinful" repulsive, dangerous, self-righteous, and harmful.