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How do you know that if you cut off your head "you're gone forever"? Death is an event horizon we can't see past, yet the experience of it in the first person i
by N_Lens 1mo ago
How do you know that if you cut off your head "you're gone forever"? Death is an event horizon we can't see past, yet the experience of it in the first person is likely one of the most remarkable in this life.
- txrx0000 1mo agoThis one is relatively easy to answer. There are things we can say about what death feels like: 1) You'll be going back to the state before you were conscious, before you were born. Think back to when you were a baby. It feels like before that, which is nothing. 2) We could look at the brain activity of dying people and compare that to the brain activity of people under general anesthesia. Then we find that the dying people's brain activity goes a lot closer to the anesthesia state than the normal wakeful state, therefore death feels closer to being anesthetized than being awake. It's also closer to being asleep than being awake. So if you've experienced dreamless sleep or anesthesia, you already know what death feels like, very approximately. It doesn't feel like anything.