Death ​

I try to live my life enjoying each moment and moving towards the future I want. One day I will die. And I don't want to regret any of the precious and limited time I spent in here.

I don't much think about life after death as there is no point to it. I don't think about going to sleep or waking up, it just happens.

If I can form and retrieve memories, I am alive. So I try to do my best in making that process going smoothly with proper exercise, sleep and happy outlook on life.

Its nice there are many humans working on aging and longevity, specifically rejuvenation & eradication of diseases. I hope to contribute to the field too soon.

From the psychedelic experiences I had in my life, I learned to appreciate the complex nature that is the human brain. Its ability to detect patterns in everything and draw connections is truly marvelous. Listening to all of Alan Watts's works on some tryptamine or lysergamide is something everyone should try to do once in their life as in my personal experience it made me truly content with my place in the universe. There is no meaning but the one you care enough to care about. And it seems the only true goal of conscious life is to understand itself. Explore the cosmos.

The other neat thing about psychedelics is their ability to induce ego death by shutting off default mode network. Having your short term memories suppressed so much that you forget that you even took the drug or that you were/are a human being is crazy experience. I had this on Salvia and life is never really the same after this. Even if it's all just a drug.

With all that said, there is only one real conclusion to draw knowing all this. Have fun. Be nice. And don't worry about what might happen or what has already happened. In the end, it seems even the universe will eventually go dark and 'die'. Probably to eventually be reborn again.

Your parents miss you and wish you'd call. Later you'll miss them and wish you could.

Spend more time with ones you care about. Be aware of your ego and be a kind and loving person.

It's a matter of time that death can be avoided. Fastest way to get to this future is getting to AGI.

I do think, when you die. That's that. You maybe will have some interesting DMT like experience as you go but then you and all your memories will cease to exist. Liked this conversation that talks about this topic.

But as far as there are living beings in the universe, life and thus ability to experience things will never stop until at least heat death of the universe arrives. There will always be an observer to the experience and most likely 'you' will be born again into some living being, statistically likely some insect. Thus I find it so important to treat others including animals with care and love. Not eat them. Make their existance as pleasant as possible, not just for them but even egoistically for your future 'you'.

At least I try to live my life believing this. It kind of grounds me and gives me purpose too. Find out all there is to find out about how the universe works. And make every living being existence as nice as possible.

Having said the above, anesthesia has this strange property of putting consciousness into hibernation mode for a certain time where when/if you wake up from it, you have no sense of how much time has passed. This doesn't happen with sleep where you will have some sense of time passing between. But even with that, assuming existence is eternal and there will always be someone experiencing this reality, this blip in time, no matter how long it is. Even with perhaps the heat death of the universe will be instant from the perspective of the observer. Not sure how you can research this field, nor have I read the literature on near death experiences or experiences of someone clinically dying and somehow coming back. Most say some strange mystical things or say nothing happened at all inbetween kind of like anesthesia. In anyway, whatever happens, happens.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Notes ​

• Whether you fight it or go with the flow, the same result will appear, the body will dissolve until all that is left is the consciousness.
  • You mistakenly call your consciousness your soul. But you are right, it was ripped from your body because you fail to realize that they are not the same. You are life having a human experience, not a human having a life experience. You felt it, you were not alive or dead, you just were.
• It is one of the most remarkable things that in all of the biological sciences there is no clue as to the necessity of death. If you say we want to make perpetual motion, we have discovered enough laws as we studied physics to see that it is either absolutely impossible or else the laws are wrong. But there is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before the biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured. - Richard Feynman
• The fact that it ceases to exist in deep sleep and under anesthesia is strong evidence that there is no afterlife for "you."
• So then, when you die, you’re not going to have to put up with everlasting non-existence. Because that's not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when they die they’re going to be locked up in a dark room forever and sort of undergo that. But one of the most interesting things in the world – this is a yoga, this is a way of realization. Try and imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Think about that. Children think about that. It’s one of the great wonders of life. What will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? And if you think long enough about that, something will happen. You will find out, among other things. That it will pose the next question to you. What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? That was when you were born. You see? You cant have an experience of nothing; Nature abhors a vacuum. So after you're dead, the only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same sort of experience of before you were born. In other words, we all know very well that after people die. Other people are born. And they're all you, only you can only experience one at a time. Everybody is I, you all you are you. - Alan Watts
• Highly successful people are the ones who want their last breath to be completely regret-free.
• Seems clear that the central project of the post religious west is a complete denial of death. Sending the elderly away, plastic surgery, health food, eternal teenage infantilism— all of it in service of denying that death could possibly come to our lives.
• I want to be remembered as a good friend.
• Living is what happens when you stop worrying about dying.
• A man who understands the Tao in the morning can die contentedly in the evening.
• It's important to remember that death is not some mysterious state, or something new. Everyone here has already experienced death before they were born. It's the same thing as fainting, you lose consciousness and time skips forward. To call it nothingness is not correct, because that gives the impression of a somethingness. Consciousness cannot be destroyed, but since there is nothing to be conscious of, there is no experience, just an instant timeskip. When you die, if you have not had spiritual training, your brain will release trippy chemicals to make the transition easier for you, and after that you will simply awake in your new form, with no memory or experience of the time that passed inbetween, whether it was the next day or the death and rebirth of the universe.
• I don't think there is life after death, at least not in a "my consciousness persists and I go to heaven" type of way. All of the choices I've made, and the impact I've had on the world are my afterlife. I cease to exist, but my ripples remain. So every tree I've planted, each person I've impacted, how I've raised my kids, the hurt that I've caused people, and the kindnesses I've done, all of it continues after me, and that's my afterlife. Psychedelics always make me feel insignificant as an individual, but simultaneously epic part of the collective. The me part doesn't matter, it's the us that persists. So while I'm existing as an individual, my priority is the group which lives on.
• I think we’re all going to die and disappear. I don’t believe in literal afterlife, stateful reincarnation, etc. There is a feeling of “nowness” that you feel right now. it changes with every moment. it’s like you’re flowing through time. in that sense once you run out of those moments, you’re gone. no more experiencing.
• Grief Is the Price We Pay for Love.
• Personally if I meditate on this I see constant movement and change and ultimately arrive at no-self but obviously these experiences are also influenced by my interpretation of concepts which seem true. The sense of self I conventionally have seems to be reconstructed over and over during consciousness with self referencing memories but those are subject to change in brain disease. There’s also awareness itself but it’s only present when I’m conscious so that’s not been the same. In open awareness I can lose all self reference and I just exist but why would I think part of any of these experiences could transfer to another body? Also awake awareness is not concerned with rebirth or any continuation because it just exists. Only the ego cares about rebirth or reincarnation because it wants to keep existing and be important.
• We become a memory in the hearts and minds of those who loved us and those whose lives we influenced, positively or negatively. The values we lived and the lessons we taught people pass on from person to person until someday, our names are said for the last time, our memories are remembered for the last time and the last person who knew us dies, killing us a second time.
• I know that the ones who love us, will miss us.
• I have been in true 'life or death' situations (in other words, I'm alive because others were slower or less able to draw their weapons and fire). In those sorts of situations time truly does slow down. I replay those times endlessly in my dreams/nightmares but either way it seemed like both at the time and in my mental replaying of the events that time slowed down to a crawl. During endless sessions with various mental health professionals it seems that people involved in car crashes have the same slowing down of time. Based on what I've learnt, the time differential boils down to muscle memory (much like a batter hits a fast ball) that can and does initiate a response before the brain processes the event and that the mind catches up afterwards and is able to replay the events in a somewhat coherent way.

Links ​

• Ralph Metzner: Death
• Practicing Death (with 5-MeO-DMT)
• What do people die from?
• Living is Dying – How to Prepare for Dying, Death and Beyond
• How do you prepare the experience of dying? (2020)
• Farewill - Wills And Probate Experts. Simpler Cremation Service.
• How to Live with Dying (2020) (HN)
• Near Death Experience Research Foundation
• The Leading Causes of Death in the US for 2020
• Empathy - Helping people navigate the journey after losing a loved one.
• How do you cope with knowing you will die someday?
• Movies that explore the concept of dying (2021)
• How do you come to peace with death? (2021)
• Ask HN: How to cope with the death of a dear person? (2021)
• On death and dying - Timeline of my relationship with death, its inevitability, and my futile resistance.
• No Death, No Fear
• Saying Goodbye (What a Wonderful World) (Reddit)
• What’s the legacy you want to leave behind? (2021)
• Norm Macdonald on his funeral
• Death (HN)
• Ask HN: What can you do to help the grieving? (2021)
• Ted Lasso Rick Roll us on a Funeral
• Судмедэксперт: интервью о жизни и смерти (2021)
• What Animals Think of Death (HN)
• List of Unusual Deaths
• A neuroscientist prepares for death (2021) (HN)
• Psychogenic death, the phenomenon of “thinking” yourself to death (2021) (HN)
• What do you think really happens after death?
• Very few months to live, I'm scared of death
• What if death wasn't the death we expected? (HN)
• World Mortality Dataset
• Neuroscientists have recorded the activity of a dying human brain (2022) (HN)
• Hidetaka Miyazaki sees death as a feature, not a bug (HN)
• Regrets of the Dying (2010) (HN)
• Mourning loss as a remote team (HN)
• Life does flash before your eyes, when you die
• What are your views on Afterlife after doing psychedelics?
• Такой я жить не хочу (2022) (Tweet)
• Cheat sheet for if I'm gone (HN)
• Do dogs know they’re dying
• I would like to make sense of having to put my dog down
• How are people not freaking out about death?
• How the body decomposes after death
• Biologist explains death | Michael Levin and Lex Fridman (2022)
• Books about Death (2022)
• Technology that lets us speak to our dead relatives has arrived. Are we ready? (2022)
• People who've lost a parent suddenly, what are things you wish you'd done before your parent passed?
• Posterity - Create a legally binding plan for the event something happens to you, and share it with your loved ones. (HN)
• How does it feel to die?
• Sam Harris & Roland Griffiths - Psychedelics & Mortality (2022)
• Games to play when dealing with grief from death (2023)
• Movies to process grief from death (2023)
• Do you use a dead man's switch? (2023)
• End-of-Life Dreams (HN)
• Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences (2023) (HN)
• Ask HN: What do you put in a “in case of death” file? (2023)