According to my extensive research in this field, the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.

Posted: March 9th 2009

See all questions answered by Dave Hitt

Your body decomposes (or is cremated), and goes back to the earth. That’s all.

A lot of people find that depressing and use that as a reason for believing in god, but they’re confusing their desires with reality.

What you believe does not change what happens after you die. If god does not exist, then there is no afterlife, and that’s just the way it is.

Posted: February 26th 2009

See all questions answered by Eric_PK

I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You won’t know anything at all about it because all the senses with which you “know” anything will have died with the rest of your body.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that so many humans find it so very hard to accept the knowledge of their own permanent mortality, when they have no such qualms about accepting the reality of death for, say, a wasp or a lion or a whale. Whilst it’s almost certainly true that consciousness is more highly developed in humans than in even the most intelligent of other animals, the mechanisms of life and death are no different in us. There is no reason why greater consciousness should mean we don’t “really” die the way other animals do. The only difference is that we’re more able to reflect upon it – and, unfortunately, worry about it.

For all that many religious people claim that belief in life after death is a comfort to them, I think for many people the notion of any kind of consciousness after death is profoundly disturbing. A lot of that is down to the grotesque images of eternal torture with which the religions have tried to coerce belief over the millennia. If it weren’t for that hideous nonsense, there would be nothing for which we would require the alleged comfort of belief in heaven in the first place: after all, what is there to fear in the equivalent of an endless, utterly dreamless sleep?

Posted: February 26th 2009

See all questions answered by Paula Kirby

Hopefully they wouldn’t bury you in a floor. The next resident of that home would be very disturbed once you start to smell. And I don’t think you’ll care if the urn is dark or not once you’re in it, if you choose that route of remains handling. Ashes generally don’t have functioning eyes.

But I think Mark Twain answered your question better than I could, so I’ll yield the floor (hopefully the floor with no bodies in it) to him:

“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 for it.”

Amen

Posted: February 26th 2009

See all questions answered by Reed Braden

Your body will almost certainly decompose in a receptacle somewhere. You know this of course, but you seem worried that you will consciously experience this process. Otherwise you wouldn’t care that the inside of an urn is dark.

This is a common unconscious perception: that even in the absence of a structured afterlife, we will somehow persist after death, and suffer forever in darkness and silence, either trapped in the remains of our bodies or lost in a total void. It’s easier to visualise than not existing at all. The “dead in a box” monologue from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead addresses it directly.

I struggled with this at one stage. I knew it was irrational, but it was emotionally powerful nonetheless. I found that the simplest way to alleviate the fear it creates is to acknowledge that even if something of the consciousness does persist, it is not only without sight, hearing and a sense of touch. It has no sense of time either. It doesn’t experience eternity going by, so it doesn’t even get bored.

The thing to ultimately realise is that in the absence of souls or other transcendental sources of consciousness, “you” ceases to exist upon death. Therefore trying to imagine what happens to “you” after death is a fruitless exercise, like asking what George Washington thought of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Posted: February 25th 2009

See all questions answered by SmartLX

By you, I am guessing you mean your consciousness. If that is the case, then that will not rot as it is an emergent, non-corporeal property of your brain. However, your non-functioning brain – the former producer of that consciousness – will rot (unless your body is cremated). Most uncremated bodies decompose in coffins buried in the ground (not floors).

Consciousness ceases once the brain stops functioning so you will not be aware that you are in a dark urn as you will no longer be. The end of our consciousness is similar to the lack of consciousness before our birth.

Patients whose hearts are beating but whose brains are not functioning are considered clinically dead as they are permanently unconscious. Their bodies, however, do not rot if heroic medical measures are used to keep their bodies functioning.

To be mortal, means we die. To die means that our life is over. Were we dead before we were born? In a way, we were. So we are just returning to that unborn state once again, that is, the state of not being alive and conscious.

Posted: February 25th 2009

See all questions answered by logicel