We Can Never Die?

For the longest time, I haven’t been able to get this idea out of my head. Perhaps it’s because I can’t see a way to think around it.

As much as I would like to believe otherwise, I don’t think that anything happens after we die. Once you’re dead, you get buried, then you become a lump of organic matter that gets eaten up by whatever bacteria and creatures your corpse shares the ground with.

I don’t think there’s a heaven and I don’t think there’s a hell. This means I don’t think there’s anything else other than nothing.

So if we take this as black, that there’s no afterlife, and you simply stop experiencing when you die: There’s nothing. No eternal blackness. Nothing. You just cease to be.

If this is the case, then we can’t experience nothing. It’s just not something that it’s possible to do. Because if we were there to experience the nothing, then we’d be experiencing something, and it’d no longer be nothing.

Our perception of reality comes from our minds, right? So the perception, for each person, of what it means to be alive, is happening in each of our heads. Of course we know there are other people, and we know that each other person experiences life an in its infinite complexities. But we can’t experience any other perspective outside of our own heads.

Does this mean, then (and this is what I’ve not been able to get out of my head for years and years and years) that because we can’t experience anything beyond our own minds, and we can’t experience being dead (because there’s nothing to experience), from our perspective, we never die?

If one minute you’re walking along, and the next minute a piano falls from the sky and lands on your head, like something out of Looney Tunes, killing you instantly, your perception of the world just stops.

So from your perspective, the piano didn’t fall on your head. From your perspective, you were walking along like normal, maybe thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner, and then you weren’t.

Not even “and then you weren’t”, you just stopped being. But because you can’t experience the whole “not being” thing, to you, you didn’t die.

Does that make any sense at all? I honestly don’t know.

But what I do know is that this theory (if it’s even a theory) has been rattling around my otherwise fairly hollow noggin for decades. I literally remember being sat on the floor as a kid and this idea randomly popping into my head. Probably not with fancy words like “perception”, but maybe with the metaphor of Looney Tunes.

Since then it’s just grown and grown, and honestly gotten more annoying.

Is it comforting? Don’t know to be honest. Is it true? Who knows! There are plenty of stories of people who have had experiences where they’re pronounced medically dead, who then recall seeing figures, or tunnels of light, or whatever.

So maybe that blows my theory out the water?

Or it could just be the DMT.

PS: I just put all that nonsense into Chat-GPT to see if I make sense, and it replied with this:

In essence, the passage raises questions about the nature of consciousness, the limits of human perception, and the implications of mortality on our subjective experience of reality. It suggests that because we cannot experience nothingness or our own death, our subjective perception may lead us to believe that we never truly die.

The ideas presented in the passage find parallels in various philosophical, scientific, and spiritual discourses that contemplate the nature of consciousness, perception, and mortality.

Adding “Philosopher” to my CV as we speak.