We rot and become worm food. If we are cremated our atoms are converted into heat energy.

As far as NDE it is just a mind trick. In times of extreem stress the brain activity can produce false immages so intense that they feel real. The same effect can be felt on halucenagenic drugs.

I did acid and once talked to a picture of Jerry Luis on a bubble gum machine. At the time it happened it realy felt real. But yet you wouldnt buy it if I litterally thought it was real.

People dont understand how the brain works and how it can fool us and give us false immages. That is all NDE is. 

The point is, that these claims that you hear are just emotional reactions people have to their intense brain activity that produce false feelings that feel real.

FOR EXAMPLE ONLY: If these same  people were shot in the head with a shotgun and their brains were shattered like a pumpkin  they would not have the phyisical capability in their brains to have that same "experiance". 

This is just another hocus pocus claim that people make out of lack of understanding of the human brain. Once the brain permanatly dies the neruons perminantly die and that is it. No magic daddy or devil with a pitchfork needed to understand normal human biology. 

What happens after death is unknown. When asked, I replied "excellent question. It would be interesting to find out".

As I have studied quantum computing, it can shed interesting light on the notion of infinite/eternal consciousness in the universe, and its possible implications for what occurs after death. I was having a discussion with Captain Pineapple on the subject and here is what I wrote:

The concept of sentience presupposes the concept of information. This is reasonable enough. Sentience is merely a higher form of information processing, or computation. Think of God, a maximally intelligent entity, as maximally sentient. For this a tremendous amount of computational power would be required. The information gradient which feeds computation is based on thermal inequality, or the transfer of energy packets between molecules. These energy packets contain data, which then becomes information when a conscious entity assigns meaning to it. In quantum computing this is called "It from bit" which says the universe exists when it has the capacity to observe itself. This does not mean that there are conscious entities reflecting on the universe, but rather that the universe now contains data, which is stored, ultimately in the fundamental particles of it's composition. In humans this information is shuttled between firing neurons by calcium, magnesium and potassium ions, which create an electrochemical voltage gradient inequality, holding the information. In a computer it is created by electrical pulses representing one of two choices at the atomic level traveling between silicon imprinted circuits, in a quantum computer it is stored as six states known as superpositions.

We can therefore conclude that data is expressed through inequalities in energy, and to that end, a near-infinite level of information resounds throughout the universe. An atom is essentially an organized packet of energy, a photon is the same, except that it is a massless wave. The fantastic variety of ways for energy inequalities to be expressed is born out in the existence of different atoms and different molecular structures into which they might array themselves, in addition, of course, to the different wavelengths for electromagnetic radiation in the photon packet to be expressed. For instance, the information in DNA is stored as four  bases transcribed via codon grouping into amino acids, thus dictating the order of proteins.

Anyone studying matter has a small problem to overcome, namely what is it that gives it it's, well, physicalness (I apologize, there is no better word for it). It's substance. The Greeks thought that you could reduce something by an infinite number of steps. Quantum physics says no. When we shatter the atom below the level of the quark (and all those other particles that stream out when we smash them together like W-bosons etc) we find that we cannot reduce it anymore. I shall go into this into detail in a moment. Well, presumably, when people mean the unique property of matter giving it its substance, they mean its mass. Mass is the mysterious force which gives inertia to an object in motion. The answer is the Higg's boson particle, which physicists now confirm, will almost certainly be discovered when the LHC magnet is turned on underneath Geneva at the CERN institute. If you feel the need to go into why the Higg's Boson causes matter to resist a force applied to it in motion (otherwise known as mass) you can ask me, otherwise I shall skip electroweak gauge theory (the science behind it) and move on.

There is definitely a lot of human perceptive prejudice with the atom. We imagine it as a little ball, a solid sphere of substance inside which are more little balls called protons and neutrons, with smaller little balls called electrons zooming around it. In reality, this is not what an atom is like. That is absurd. Presumably I don't need to point that out. Nonetheless, (I promise all of this will have a point, bear with me) an atom does behave as though it had a fixed radius due to the strong repulsions caused by interacting electron clouds and the very tiny dipole that results. This is called the van der Waals radius. An atom therefore, behaves as if it had a specific boundary, whereby anything within the boundary (the protons, neutrons and electrons) belong to it. And for all intents and purposes, it does. Nonetheless, an atom is not a little ball. It is not physical the way we understand it.

An atom is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. Inside each of the large particles are several groups of quarks. The particles can be grouped into three generations. The first of which contains the electron, if you are interested. Inside the generations are all six colors of quarks as well as several strange particles like tau and neutrinos. All these particles are called fermions, and they make up all the familiar matter that makes the trees, the mountains, the dog, you, me etc. None of these particles has a mass the way we understand the term. It does not have a physical quality giving it "substance". Rather all are created by different spins on electromagnetic interactions with the other type of particles, bosons (which make up photons, gluons Higg's Bosons and all the other particles or waves responsible for interaction with the fermions to create matter). At this level, matter then, has no physical substance, rather it is comprised of organized packets of energy, the arrangement of which gives the illusion of fixed entities we call atoms.

If you, like me, are a String theorist, you believe that the fundamental, the end of reductionism, comes at the string, a vibrating eleven dimensional membranous string whose size relative to the atom compares to an atoms size with a galaxy (This should not surprise you. After all, the nucleus of an atom compared with the whole atom is roughly comparable with a sand grain placed in the middle of a football field). The different vibration of the string causes the different fundamental particles to switch spin charge. If I pluck a string thusly, I get particle such-and-such. The universe, then, is a symphony of strings, the organization of which into energy packets, and the exchanges and grouping of these packets creates data and thusly, information.

Regardless of which Grand Unifying Theory you subscribe to, you accept this fact. Data is created by inequalities in energy, and the exchange of these inequalities by grouping organized packets of this energy together. The packets of energy are organized in such a way that they are defined entities, which, of course, is the "physicalness" which we were trying to understand earlier.

There can be no doubt in your mind now. Whichever way this information is expressed, there is no doubt that it is fed by matter, physical substance which makes up the universe. The universe then, can be viewed as a stream of data fed by changes in energy, conscious entities in this universe can perceive small chinks of this data as information.

Perhaps this is the best equivocation of God. Not some ethereal spirit, but rather a physical substance. Due to the nature of the energy gradient, there is theoretically, infinite conscious experience in the universe, with the flow of ideas never ceasing, except when it comes the day that the universe reaches maximal entropy, but fear not, for new universes, according to hyperinflation, are constantly being born for all eternity.

One of his responses, which struck me particularly, was:

I do think that there is no consciousness after death is non sequiter. Life doesn't bring conciousness, conciousness brings life.

 

And on the subject, I posted this interesting video:

You should watch this video, it is exactly what you and I have been talking about. It is called Surviving the Singularity, and is supposedly about Kurzweil and the AI singularity, but in reality, it is entirely about consciousness and evolution. It is the inspiration from which I drew for my work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDqaMFHGEZ8

Ignore the politics in the last few minutes

 

One could deduce that since our consciousness is created by a biochemical stream, it ends at death. But if this is merely a spot on a spectrum of infnite consciousness, the notion of death is incoherent. In quantum paradoxes regarding multiverse, there are other important views on the matter, which were expressed best, I believe by David Deustche in The Fabric of Reality. 

I don't know what happens when one dies. I have never been dead. Best to ask a dead person and see what they think. The silence one has in response would seem to indicate the direction in which one goes.

Mary Roach has a book out now called "Spook" that's about different, non-Christian/religious efforts to pin down what happens after death. She examines, for example, the experiments in which scientists tried to measure a change in mass of a person who just died to see if the soul has physical mass, the whole culture of assumed reincarnation in India, and some of the quantum/energy/information theories that Deludedgod refers to.

It's a good read, not too technical, very engaging, and gives a good non-theistic perspective on the question.

I echo the statement of most people who have responded...I believe we simply exist to be conscious, somewhat like an endless dreamless sleep. Of course, nobody can know for certain, but that seems to be the most logical and plausible explanation, at least in my opinion. I don't believe in a soul, so when you're brain stops functioning, you stop existing as anything more than an unanimated body. I don't find this idea at all distressing. I like the idea of knowing that the end is just...the end. 

I'd like to be embalmed, dismembered and systematically distributed throughout the rides and attractions at Disneyland.

Billions of years passed before I came into being, none of which I can remember. I have very little evidence to expect any other outcome than this again when I die.

I can't picture what would be left for me to process anything with. Without eyes and a brain, I cannot see. Without ears/eyes and a brain I cannon sense or process languages or meaning. If there was any manner of "being" left without these rather important processes attached to it, I doesn't seem like I'd have enough tools left to be aware of it.

 

 

 

 

                          Come and join us.   Or ELSE  we will track you down and drag you here!!!

Coincidentally enough, I just posted a link to an article from Vic Stenger (God the Failed Hypothesis) that answers the questions of what we do know about the possibility of life after death.

Hehehe

Stenger is refuting all of the claims made by people on near death experiences, out of body experiences and all the so-called "proof" that people have tried to submit as evidence.

It's really just a detailed page on how the claims of afterlife are all contradictory in religion, how the mind can fabricate all sorts of fanciful stuff, how NONE of the claims have ever been backed by any scientific study. Umm the link is on another page, but here it goes, it is a bit detailed and lengthy, but pretty much refutes the afterlife notion thus far.

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/RelSci/LAD.pdf

 

I see you are an ex-minister.  Have you heard of the book "Losing Faith in Faith: Going from Preacher to Atheist".  Now THAT'S a catch title!  Did you write that? LOL!

You have heard of Godless  by Dan Barker right ? The evangelical preacher that now heads the Freedom from Religion Foundation ?

 

http://www.amazon.com/Godless-Evangelical-Preacher-Americas-Atheists/dp/1569756775

 

Q: What happens when you die?

A: NOTHING

 

Like Terry Bradshaw said, KISS i.e. Keep it simple stupid. 

Remember what it was like before you were born? That's what it feels like to be dead.

Yeah but your brain and thus all your sensory abilities will be gone and wasted away so you can't expereince or sense anything in that vacuum or anywhere else! So to us it is NOTHING!  You can speculate all you want but there have been over 10 BILLION humans that have died and NOT A SINGLE ONE has come back to tell us of an afterlife. 

You can't give obscure cases where crackpots make unsubstantiated claims.  Have the dead person present himself to ALL of us if there really is an afterlife.

Robert Allan Monroe, Raymond Moody, Edgar Cayce's patients and many more gave us quite a clear idea of what happens when we die.
Our sensoric abilities to perceive this world will be of course lost by death of the physical vehicle. But that is only a part of our existence. There is a great unseen part of the world, unseen matter, unseen energy, invisible electromagnetic wave frequencies, and so on, maybe even other dimensions predicted by M-theory. There is a lot of space for etheric body, astral body and other vehicles of consciousness after death.

The experiences show that this phase is equivalent to our sleep. Sleep activity of a common and advanced person is very different, in the sense that their astral vehicle is very different. A commoner's astral vehicle has a volatile, formless, amoeboid shape of ill colors and misplaced centers. Such an astral body does not go far from a sleeping physical body. An advanced person's astral vehicle takes on more humanoid form, is more impervious, colourful and shining, and is able and willing to go out into the astral world to experience adventures that have nothing to do with his waking life. In this way, people see things they never would have seen or thought of in their life, and so these cannot be a by-product of their brain. Specially people they meet there and greet them like old friends, never having seen them in real.
Laws of this world are somewhat different from ours, to understand what we were doing in the dream is like for a grandma to come to television in the middle of Matrix trying to understand what the film is about. So while common people usually stay near their sleeping body and dream of brain processing their daytime memories, astrally advanced people experience the astral life and are also more likely to remember something of what they were doing in there. Some are even able of lucid dreaming.

You'd love to hang out with early 20th century Theosophists like Helena P. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, colonel Olcott, and so on. For example, in HPB's biography there's not uncommon case how they spent a weeked on Olcott's farm and observed straight 19 ghost materializations... If you want to see things, you've got to hang out with the right people.

 

How can you remember past lives, when you don't even remember yesterday's dream? If yes, consider all these dreams you had and then forgot. Hell, people even forget almost all of their waking time. That is Maya, illusion of the solid non-transparent world, while most of the world is invisible and permeating our so-called solid matter.
Yes, there are some cases of saints or children describing their past lives and sometimes it is even confirmed by investigation that such a person existed. 
Think of how many children were told to not make up stories about their past lives and invisible friends. How many past lives and ghost observations were lost in this way. The only good thing is, that there will be still more people born with clairvoyance of some sort, so eventually it will be impossible for scientists to ignore.

Riiight.

There are of course many misinterpretations and folk superstitions about karma, eastern theologians did no better than the western when they misinterpreted the virgin birth of Jesus or salvation.
Karma is one of natural laws like gravity is, and just like gravity it can be circumvented by right conditions and knowledge. Teaching of eastern theologians to accept our karma passively as inescapable suffering is wrong.

Hi Brian,

In your case, you wake up in hell.

That's the kindest way to put it.

Respectfully,

Jean Chauvin (Jude 3).

Perhaps he is relying on the "infinite reference point" for his information. Which could be ok, if it were not for the fact that the infinite reference point just happens to not exist.

O.o

I'm a murderer. I hope the cops don't get me.

 

I'm only a lustful pervert part time, what are my chances?

Right, and thats what they all say. "Don't blame me, my god told me this."

Yea, so why don't you get out of the way and let us deal with him. Why would you need to defend him? Is he too weak to handle us himself? He needs you to protect him?

That's like West Side Story when the minions hide behind the gang leader and shout, "WHAT HE SAID".

When believers of any label say, "Dont pick on my god", I get the image of a midget standing spread eagle in front of the Terminator shouting, "Don't hit my god, you might hurt him".

"The bible says"

So what?

"The Koran says"

"The Torah and Talmud say"

"The Rig Vedas say"

And all their minions have as much evidence to justify saying, "Don't blame me, I'm just the messenger" as you do for your pet god.

It is called circular reasoning.

Can we ban Jean Chauvin for committing the sin of being a Christian? If not then for being French?