its pretty simple to imagine being nothing: go to sleep
There is brain activity in sleep, obviously while dreaming, but also in other stages, that seems to indicate some very dim level of consciousness - without memory or thought, perhaps, but the processes from which consciousness emerges are still underway. But I'm being pedantic. General anaesthetic might be a better example, though even then the brain continues to zap signals to the other organs and keeps the body alive. Anyway, let's go with anaesthetia as the comparison, because it's the closest thing we have to death.
When you're anaesthetised, you don't experience. Therefore from your own perspective, it doesn't happen. You can't experience nothing, so you don't. 'Nothing' is impossible.
It would be like a great swathe of non-existence appearing in the middle of our spacial universe. It can't happen. It just doesn't work.
Or, travelling beyond the borders of the universe into non-existence. Also can't happen because by definition, it isn't there.
The same is the case for qualia, inner experience. By definition, we cannot in our realities experience non-experience, so we don't. To us, anaesthesia never happens, and death never happens.
I do feel like I'm tripping over my own (il)logic here, not sure what I'm trying to prove. Perhaps everything I just said actually
disproves the primacy of consciousness, which kind of throws a spanner into all my philosophical musings for the past two or three years.
Anyway, life after death is a whole other matter. We could go into near-death experiences, and hypothesise that they result from the pineal gland excreting dimethyltryptamine into the brain, but all these things are rather tentative and I don't think any of us will ever know until we get there, unless there is no 'there' in which case we'll never know. However, life after death seems distinctly possible to me. All it requires is another form of body to carry on the memories of an earthly life. The question is, what sort of mechanism would that be, and why does it care about human (or other) existence enough to preserve it? I don't have any strong reason to believe it, but it could be true. Still, it all seems beside the point of this (double negative?) I've constructed.
One thing I can't get my head around is that, at the bottom of it, your hole in the donut is all there is. Every particle in existence is formed of an energetic web in the void between other particles, and that energy is itself just an expression of probability on a quantum level. In a temporal and experiential sense,
read this. The first paragraph is all about the continuous flow of non-existence:
By the time you finish reading this sentence, you will have ceased to exist. In the time it took me to write it, I stopped existing too. I then used the experience to remind me just how little we have to fear from dying.
... from which we nonetheless continue to exist in this temporal, spacial reality.
Finally, during that LSD trip, there was a point where I felt like an incredibly sharp aether blade was piercing my heart. Everything about it felt so familiar - the fading of consciousness, the blackness all around, the creeping sensation of death, the squeezing of muscles getting deeper and deeper. Why was it so familiar? Perhaps, I thought, this was how I died in a past life, and this is a leftover memory of the traumatic event. But I've long rejected reincarnation because physical causality trumps it. However, if all we are is the universe perceiving itself through a neurochemical vessel, and those memories are indeed preserved beyond the death of the body, then perhaps some element of them can be distributed to multiple new vessels, or multiple vessels can compact into one. So, perhaps I am living the lives of a thousand others who died before I was born, and when I die, my experiences will be distributed to thousands more.
To me, this solves the dilemma of non-existence. I may not consciously remember 'my' past lives, yet my experience never ends, because ultimately I am the entire universe, connected to everyone and everything else, yet living out a consistent strain of memory over a span of many lifetimes, eventually to reunite with the other, more alien conduits of the consciousness matrix. However, I don't have any strong reason to believe this either.
Yes I know. I'm insane.
Non-existence is an absurdity, arising from the limitations of intellectual reasoning and relative human mind that likes to think in terms of opposites. The most fundamental thing in reality is awareness. There is nothing outside of it. It is "existence". There isn't non-awareness.. it is an impossibility.
Trying to answer these questions with language is a fools game and it is why philosophy in the 21st century sucks balls. Real philosophy does not arise out of word games and intellectual masturbation, it comes from direct experience that can only be achieved through the vehicle of your own body/mind. ps: Trying to arrive at great revelations through psychedelics is also a fools game.. once you realize how relative the human mind is adding another layer of confusion to the mix is, well, foolish.
I like this. Still going to use psychedelics to explore qualia, though. It's too much damn fun to stop!
