After writing a bit about suicide yesterday it occurred to me to write a bit more about death. Mainly, what it is.
For all intents and purposes death is actually just when blood no longer circulates to the brain. The reasons for this are myriad though if I’m most mistaken the most common “cause” of death is the cessation of breath, oxygen being what circulates the blood if you stop that process a person will die within a matter of minutes (reports vary, probably 3-5). After that would be some kind of shock to the brain which overloads it so that it forgets to tell the body to pump blood. Electrical shock is the obvious culprit (and people generally say that the heart is overloaded but I disagree, life begins and ends with the brain) but less obviously would be poison. Every thing you ingest by any means is recognized and regulated by the brain and thus has an effect upon it. So ingesting something like arsenic or cyanide or quantities of cocaine will prove to be fatal as your brain screams out “what the fuck” and gets distracted. Yes. I am totally making that up as I go along but what did you think happened?
So this brings up the issue of just what a person is. I say that a person is consciousness, which exists within and resultant from the brain. If one no longer has the ability to be conscious, that is they are in a “brain dead” state then they are no longer a person. So the question becomes whether or not a person could just exist as a brain hooked up to a machine. I think that’s basically the premise of the anime series “ghost in the shell” wherein the “machines” are cybernetic bodies. Anyway I’m not aware of any such experiments of taking the brain out of the body but don’t we all know people whose functions have broken down aside from their brains and are hooked up to all kinds of machines to keep their body alive? It may or may not be temporary and perhaps their functions recover or some of their organs are replaced or they die for good.
The other question is where consciousness goes when it vanishes from the brain. If we are looking at this in a strictly physical and modern scientific sense, it just ceases to exist. In other words “what happens to you when you die?” is what I’m talking about here. Now the scientists who say this aren’t very good. That’s because nothing can ever really disappear. Everything as we know it is just constantly changing form, dispersing, coalescing, fusing, rejecting. But if consciousness is just electrical signals in the brain it’s very possible that all that happens when you die is that your charge disperses into something else and you cease to exist as yourself for all intents and purposes, and will never regain consciousness. In other words “when you die that’s it”.
When people talk about the afterlife, heaven or hell, reincarnation, they didn’t realize it at the time but it’s become apparent now that they are imagining that there is a specific destination for their dispersed physical energy. They were thinking of a destination for the “soul” which may or may not exist in its theological sense but seems very unlikely to be separate from consciousness in any case and so is irrelevant to what I’m saying. Actually they’re imaging that not only is there a destination, there are methods of sorting, transporting, and collecting/coalescing even though they generally don’t think in such concrete terms. I have thought about it though. My conclusion is that it’s not impossible, but it also isn’t divine.
Before I explain what I mean, let me first say that I view existence as a whole as some sort of unfathomable calculation that is in the process of being solved. But that’s just an easy image for me to hold in my mind. It’s more like every thing is just reacting to every other thing and the results are as we see it. When I say I believe in fate, I just mean that I don’t believe there is any way to escape the force of these reactions and that if, as I believe, every particle of existence is present and nothing else can or will be added, only transformed, then everything has already been decided and there is only one possible outcome. No matter what happens, no matter what you think, no matter what you try, things are always going to end out the same way. God is not exempt from this. With my limited understanding this is my conclusion.
And so as to the afterlife, there isn’t any real processing, where you end out and how you get there is just a reaction based upon numerous incalculable variables. I don’t know what those variables are but like anything else it probably has something to do with signals and dimensions. In this sense reincarnation is the easiest one to imagine. Your consciousness just flies in at some point after bouncing around. Proximity would therein make the most sense but might not be the sole deciding factor. And in fact who is to say that parts of you aren’t flying out and coalescing into other living forms all the time? But I don’t think that’s something that will ever be proved or disproved. If a person wants to believe in something there isn’t necessarily anything you can do to get them to believe what you have to say instead, because isn’t the opposite true that you don’t believe what they’re saying yet you won’t change your mind? Hmph what a valid point to be wasted in the abyss of these musings. Oh well.
Personally what I think is that all that I’m saying is only true based on what I know and understand to be fact. There may be other facts that I’m not aware of which would change everything, or the things that I know could be incorrect which would also change things. The main thing that comes to mind is whether or not new things can actually be created. People know that a program will just keep doing the same thing over and over again if left to its programming. But if you change the programming it will do something else. I don’t know whether the programming of our universe is set, still being written, or can be modified at any time. In the second and third instances there would in fact no longer be any assurance of lasting truth at all so it’s an impossible to fathom matter. Not that I haven’t tried but I seem to keep getting distracted by other things. Another factor of course is god. Maybe I don’t give god enough credit, maybe god can collect and alter the consciousness of people and cast them into heaven or hell which are constructs of god’s own creation. My limited understanding of dimensions (I know this is what’s referred to as the third dimension and that supposedly pictures are two dimensional and that’s about it) is also a factor. I dare say it’s a factor for all physicists, if things can just phase in and out here and there or exist multiple places at the same time, well that would just muck everything up wouldn’t it?
As usual none of these things are that important. If I have one thing to say it’s that it’s the inevitability of life only having one outcome (death) that let’s you do what you want to do, follow your desires, try and make the most of things, enjoy yourself. In other words I say to you, don’t wait for tomorrow because you might only have today. If you love someone don’t hesitate to tell them that because you might not have another chance. Above all I hope my musing today has shown you that the only thing that you can be sure is true is you to yourself, so strive to do so and you’ll be living the best possible way.
Reuche is a member of Perdition and the writer of the popular Murder Company series of satirical novels.
