A fascinating article that explores the state of death and why we have such a hard time coping with it.

What a great article! It's full of arguments that I've felt/ thought but never have been able to recapitulate before. The idea that because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough, sums it up in a nutshell.

very thought provoking, thanks

Two thought experiments I've toyed with are imagining my pre-birth condition and another is imagining a situation brought up by one of the commenters of a child born without any sense organs at all. No smell, hearing, taste, sight, or touch. Without senses I'd argue we'd have no memories. Without touch we'd have no spatial awareness. In fact, I'd argue that we'd have no "we". WE wouldn't exist since there would be no experience to observe our separateness from the "other".

Well said, AtlLiberal!

After reading the entire article at the source site, I gave my final decision: I definitely won't die, it's not good.

Thanks for the clip, AtlLiberal. Great article.

I'm with Invictus. Great article - thanks for the clip!

I often do see mass religion as a security blanket so we, as humans, can cope with death.

Here's another interesting thought experiment - can anyone remember anything from a time before learning to talk?

can anyone remember anything from a time before learning to talk?

I remember images and emotions that I later verbalized. The question I suppose is if these memories were in fact authentic or influenced by hearing family stories repeated. The older I become the vaguer the memories from this time become and increasingly are supplanted by the verbal interpretations. Another fly in the ointment is since learning to talk is a gradual process there is no clear demarcation of when this occurs. It could be argued that speech is learned first as a recipient (passive) and then later as an initiator (actor).

Interesting question!

My earliest clear memory is pre-verbal. It was a family gathering, probably a birthday but not mine. I was crawling but unable to walk, and my doting relatives were holding out birthday cards for me to look at. The one thing I remember most clearly was a feeling of frustration because those idiots knew I couldn't read but they kept actking as if I understood what the cards meant.

Could this be slightly fictionalized? Sounds to me they were simply letting you look at the pretty pictures. The rest sounds like what might be embellishments added to enhance the story and became part of the memory after the fact. Sounds like reasoning that would be difficult for an infant to develop where you intuit the motivation of others.

But hey, it's your memory. To claim my interpretation is more correct certainly would be arrogant on my part. I saying that family lore is filled with stories half remembered and colored later. I can't help but keep thinking about the false memory stories we read about concerning alleged child abuse.

I've always said that if I didn't like being dead I'd come back.

They were holding the cards open and most of them didn't have pictures.

Well, that's quite a story.