Does anything ever really just "cease to exist" ??

Question

People who are not spiritual say that we will just cease to exist after death but I don't think that's possible. I'm not arguing towards the possibility of an "afterlife" ...but since matter and energy can never really be broken down but changes form, it may be possible that we may once again "live" or "exist" again after death. I think that after we die, in trillions, trillions, trillions, etc. of years we will somehow reassemble again and live again or something. I don't know how to explain it but hopefully somehow you can understand the gist of what I'm trying to say...

Scientists are uncertain as to whether consciousness if the product of chemical reactions in our brain or if it is was actually controls the brain (I think), either way, consciousness is a form of energy. Doesn't energy just leave the body after one dies? I would like to learn more about the working mechanisms of consciousness...

Please, no answers about God or any religion, I'm not really interested in that stuff.

Answer 1

> "People who are not spiritual say that we will just cease to exist after death but I don't think that's possible. I'm not arguing towards the possibility of an "afterlife" ...but since matter and energy can never really be broken down but changes form, it may be possible that we may once again "live" or "exist" again after death."

Obviously, our physical bodies persist after we die (for a while anyway), and the atoms that compose it exist for a much longer time. However, you as a person, as a living, thinking, conscious being, do not persist beyond the time of death.

What, then, has happened at the time of death? There is no measurable difference in composition between a body 1 ms before death and 1ms after death.

The thing that has happened is that the neurons in your brain have stopped firing in a coherent, coordinated manner (and, rather quickly, they stop firing at all).

> "I think that after we die, in trillions, trillions, trillions, etc. of years we will somehow reassemble again and live again or something."

For this to occur, something would have to somehow record your mind-state before death: the *exact* positions and energy-states of all the molecules in your brain. This is a phenomenally difficult task, as your brain will contain roughly 5 x 10^25 molecules.

> "Scientists are uncertain as to whether consciousness if the product of chemical reactions in our brain or if it is was actually controls the brain"

No. They really are not.

Science only measures actual, physical objects and phenomena. "Consciousness" is a product of the chemical reactions in the brain.

It is not a non-physical thing "inhabiting" the brain; this would put it in the same category as the soul - a supernatural phenomenon (and therefore not open to scientific investigation).

You might be interested in reading "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales", by the neurologist Oliver Sachs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_man_who...

Answer 2

What apart from belief in politicians being honest?

Answer 3

First of all, nothing "is" a form of energy -- not really. Energy is a property, not a thing with existence unto itself. You will never find a clump of "energy" existing out there, you will only find things that POSSESS energy. (No, not even light "is" energy, it too possesses it as a property -- many people are confused on this part). Think of it as being analogous to this -- you will never find "length" anywhere in the universe, only things which possess it as a property.

That being said, the mind is most likely -- if we're not considering religious "explanations" -- an emergent property of the neurochemical structure of the brain. Emergent phenomena are interesting in that they *can* simply cease existing; this is because they are defined by the structure of something else. For instance, if I have a simple computer with a chess program on its hard drive, that chess program exists emergently from the structure of the electronics in the computer. If I were to smash the silicon chips in the computer that structure is no longer there, even though the silicon chips are still existing (albeit in many pieces), the structure that once defined the computer program no longer causes a chess program to emerge.

Likewise, if the brain is destroyed or can no longer function because the heart doesn't provide it with oxygen (etc.), the holistic structure that causes the mind to emerge is gone and therefore the specific consciousness that was "you" no longer exists. At that point it becomes a controversial philosophical question whether, if you were to reconstruct an exact replica (or close enough), would that still be "you" or would that be "you-prime" (a clone of you)? That's an entire debate unto itself and philosophers aren't of one mind on how to resolve it.

So basically, given the premise that the mind is indeed emergent of the brain, then yes it is entirely possible for emergent things to "cease to exist."

As a side note, you mentioned trillions of years from now the mind being reassembled -- given infinite time in a stable universe every logical possibility will occur infinitely. However, our universe is approaching the heat death and it's a good question whether after the heat death occurs random reversals of entropy will be sufficient to generate infinite possibilities even if given infinite time -- as it's thought that there *isn't* infinite matter to work with or infinite space.

Hope that helps.