Its the day before the election - Let's think about death

I spent a lot of time as a teenager trying to imagine what it would be like to be "dead." (Anyone surprised, really?) It always seemed to me that people who thought it was like "dreaming" were a little too optimistic about the whole thing. This is of course, assuming you were talking to someone who did not believe in magic godland or burning agony (which brings up a whole new level of thought for me because I could never really understand how you could actually FEEL things if you were dead. I.e., eternal torment). The best I could come up with was the fact that there was existence before there was a "me" to perceive it, so therefore it must be the same thing to be dead as it was to not have been born yet. This made perfect sense to me and was in fact comforting because I'm not "scared" by the world existing before I was born. I didn't know it was happening. So if you don't know, then you can't be upset. Anyway. There is a fantastic article in Scientific American that talks about the actual way our brain reacts to the idea of death.

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”

And this is why I love science. I just wish I was smart enough to be a scientist! Maybe in my next life. ;-)