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What happens after you die and should I be scared about it?

fear of death would be an irrational fear. i try not to fear anything but the idea of dying - the events prior to death - seem rather scary.
 
Why is it an irrational fear? It seems perfectly rational to me. An organism that is indifferent towards its own survival will most likely not survive for all that long. That's why we're "scared" of events related to death, we want to avoid them. I mean, it is irrational in the sense that death will occur at some point regardless of whether we try to avoid it or not, but if you want to go that far then everything we do is irrational, because none of this will matter in the end.
 
i still think its irrational because you can only prolong it but not prevent it.

'events related to death' and 'death' are not the same thing.

I think you should do whatever you can to keep yourself alive, im not sure you need to fear death in order to do that.

your last sentence concerns the meaning of life and im not getting into it. :)
 
I don't believe in heaven, hell, or that there is a God watching over us that created everything in its image. I believe in the super consciousness. That we are all one in the same experiencing life subjectively. And when we die, our souls move on coming back around full circle as something else, never truly ending because life will continue no matter what...reincarnation basically. Everything is just too perfect for it to be nothing more then random occurence. And what about when this earth is destroyed? Where will our souls go then. Somewhere else obviously, because there is always something more.

If you live life in a way that feels true to you, then you should have no fear in death.
 
I don't know, I am sceptical about the concept of the soul. I think its wishful thinking to believe any individuality is retained after the body's death or that our mortal bodies contain something of ours that is immortal. In terms of evidence, we only have evidence that our physical components continue to be reused.
 
Epicurus on Death

One of the greatest fears that Epicurus tries to combat is the fear of death. Epicurus thinks that this fear is often based upon anxiety about having an unpleasant afterlife; this anxiety, he thinks, should be dispelled once one realizes that death is annihilation, because the mind is a group of atoms that disperses upon death.

If death is annihilation, says Epicurus, then it is 'nothing to us.' Epicurus' main argument for why death is not bad is contained in the Letter to Menoeceus and can be dubbed the 'no subject of harm' argument. If death is bad, for whom is it bad? Not for the living, since they're not dead, and not for the dead, since they don't exist. His argument can be set out as follows:

  • Death is annihilation.
  • The living have not yet been annihilated (otherwise they wouldn't be alive).
  • Death does not affect the living. (from 1 and 2)
  • So, death is not bad for the living. (from 3)
  • For something to be bad for somebody, that person has to exist, at least.
  • The dead do not exist. (from 1)
  • Therefore, death is not bad for the dead. (from 5 and 6)
Therefore death is bad for neither the living nor the dead. (from 4 and 7)

Epicurus adds that if death causes you no pain when you're dead, it's foolish to allow the fear of it to cause you pain now.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/epicur/#SH5g

 
^That is quite brilliant actually. Almost Buddhist... I'm reading Alain Dr Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy, my first introduction to epicurean philosophy (chapter 2). Whole book is highly worth reading.
 
I see one major point the argument is missing, Sigmond. Death as an occurrence is neither bad nor good, it's just a process that happens. However, you have to take the subjective experience of people into account, do you not? The emotional effect of approaching death has a significant effect on a person, and the process of dying might be physically unpleasant or even unbearable. I don't think you can dismiss those factors.
 
belligerent drunk said:
I see one major point the argument is missing, Sigmond. Death as an occurrence is neither bad nor good, it's just a process that happens. However, you have to take the subjective experience of people into account, do you not? The emotional effect of approaching death has a significant effect on a person, and the process of dying might be physically unpleasant or even unbearable. I don't think you can dismiss those factors.
Click to expand...

I think Sigmond more or less meant that we should not fear death itself, but fearing the act of dying or events that might invoke death as an effect are/is perfectly rational. But I might be wrong, it's just how I took it.
 
I believe in conservation of energy, but not conservation of my own specific consciousness. all the little atoms in my body when I die will just be released into the environment for other living things to feed upon. ever since studying natural science, I became truly atheist and stopped worrying about afterlife. :)

the reality we can experience is already so wonderful and complex, so why do we even need heaven?
 
How can you separate death from the process of dying? In order to achieve death, you have to die. And it all happens while you're still alive. It makes no sense to argue that death is irrelevant in human context because it obviously isn't, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it and wouldn't fear it.

And another thing I may have worded poorly is the emotional aspect of it. I'm healthy and overall well, so I'm unlikely to die any time soon, however I still acknowledge the fact that if I do, I will leave a lot behind and my subjective experience will stop. For example, I want to further explore the natural world and learn more about it (which I won't be able to do once I'm dead), I don't want to leave my lady and so on. Yes, it won't matter to me when I'm dead because I won't be able to think about those things, but they matter to me now, and it is important.

Unless I'm really missing something about the thing you guys are talking about, I don't see how you can dismiss that part of death. They are not separate.

Bagseed said:
I believe in conservation of energy, but not conservation of my own specific consciousness. all the little atoms in my body when I die will just be released into the environment for other living things to feed upon. ever since studying natural science, I became truly atheist and stopped worrying about afterlife. :)

the reality we can experience is already so wonderful and complex, so why do we even need heaven?
Click to expand...

This is what I've also come to believe. What happens after death is unknown and nobody really knows, so maybe it's time to stop worrying about that and focus on what is NOW, what we can experience and try to get the most out of it?

I understand why people before us felt the need to invent heaven and all that. Life wasn't easy and they wanted some gratification, among other things. But in the context of modern civilization, it really is redundant. We know so much about the world that we know that we don't SO MUCH more, and it's incredibly exciting to learn about reality; but even for those who are not interested in such things, life nowadays is so much more than it was at the time of conception of ideas like afterlife.
 
^yes. unfortunately, sometimes it is rather hard to focus on the present as a human being. I still haven't discarded the idea of the universe itself having some kind of self-awareness, but we won't ever be aware of it, same as a neuron in my brain won't ever be aware of the bigger structure it is part of.
 
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