Death

At first your vision becomes distorted: Points of light sprinkle themselves onto every visible surface. Clouds of color flourish across your retina. Some visual details began to blur out while others exaggerate. Errors randomly emerge in your perception of motion. Faces of others nearby warp and fade until you cannot recognize them. Bizarre artifacts overlap throughout your vision until your surroundings are indistinguishable.

Meanwhile, a loud ringing in your ear tries to drown out the mixed voices of those around you. Your understanding of perfectly audible English deteriorates until it sounds like gibberish. Whirring and swooshing noises swell. Your ears feel plugged and a tight ache encompasses your scalp.

You feel like you are floating; a suspended, bodiless point in space. You seem to sink into the floor while rising up through the ceiling; your head and feet feel as though they are intersecting with the walls. You can no longer distinguish yourself as separate from the room.

Your condition worsens. All your senses merge into one stream of random nonsensical signals. Incoherent thoughts populate your consciousness: You taste an orange. For a brief moment you are intrigued by the thought of holding an orange in your hand. Immediately after you feel an immense familiarity with the exact moment, and you are flooded with a dream like emotion; the illusion that you remember doing this when you were a young child. The structure of logic falls apart and simple concepts like the passing of time, or up and down, no longer make sense to you. Your awareness downs in a torrential river of random, garbled stimuli.

By now a few minutes have passed since the onset of these strange symptoms. Regions of your brain are incrementally attacked by a plague, destroying information that make you who you are: Your memories of the past and the people you grew up with. Your beliefs and your dreams you hoped to achieve in your lifetime.

The treasured memory of coming home to your mom and dad from your first day of school is erased. The warmth you felt when you hugged them, ate home-made cookies, and told your them about your experiences that day; erased. The sleep over at your first friend's house when you were 7; erased. The camping trip you had when you were 11; erased. First day of work; erased. The skills and talents you spent years refining are erased. A wealth of knowledge and experiences are erased. All your emotions, dreams and passions are erased. Your desire to keep living is erased.

You are erased - gone forever.

And you will never be able to see any of the people you love, ever again.

---

I cannot expect anyone to find solace or closure in this part of life. I'd prefer that it simply be seen as something that sucks, and that there is no comforting way to look at it. Human beings, as well as all other forms of sentient life, are beautiful precious parts of the universe that deserve better. The only comfort I can find in it is in knowing that I tried my best to change it, rather than having formed some stupid way of looking at it to convince myself it was acceptable. (To be continued.)

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Is mortality a curse that stifles the expectations we can place on our lives, forcing the lot of us to let go of the dreams we have that demand more time than what our bodies can provide? Or is it a blessing that relieves us from unrealistic responsibility, gives value to the time we have and protects us from enduring infinity; a length of time mathematically impossible to fathom? Who would want to live that long anyway?

I would. At least, I would always want to exist in some conscious way. It is hard imagine that some people actually embrace a fate of nothingness like it is the completion to their life, and for me, this fact is disturbing.

After an interview with some of those who shared this belief, I learned the rationale they used to support it, and often came back with the same list of reasons. Remarkably, I could easily find problems with them.

"A conscious being could not psychologically withstand an endless existence. Eventually, one would run out of new things to experience and suffer eternal boredom thereafter."

The first error of reasoning for this defense is either a misconception of the human psyche, or a lack of grasp in the concept of consciousness. Using anything other than human beings as the subject for this defense is pointless because it would be pure speculation. We have nothing to tell us what emotions other forms of life beyond earth feel, other than by what we can learn from our own bodies. In other words, using deities, spirits, aliens, or other supernatural beings as the test subjects would not work because we don't know anything about them.

The tendency for us to become bored with things we are familiar with is a part of being human. It is an emotion like anger or lust and can be controlled to suit the conditions of our environments. Thus, it is not an all-encompassing rule of consciousness for us, or anyone else who may be on the other side, to get bored of their existence. And since it is only logical to use humans as the subjects in question, keep in mind that if an immortal human being were to experience psychological disorders from living too long, our technology would have grown enough by then--if not by now--to correct them and restore his or her quality of life.

It would also be wrong to assume that an immortal person would feel dread from realizing that there would be no end to his existence. There is no magic time limit for which an immortal, healthy human mind would decide in the middle of it's everyday functioning that it wants to die; we are designed to live life 24 hours at a time and it is atypical to perform any extensive planning for more than 30 years ahead--the lifespan we would have if it were not for modern science. In other words, modern lifetimes have artificially extended beyond the 30-year lifespan for which we were adapted to live; our brains would not have a natural reason to care about the endlessness of an endless existence. Besides, we young adults take for granted the fact that when we go to sleep each night we wake up the following morning, and we have the habit of assuming 99% of the time that this will always be the case; I haven't felt any dread from it.

Ultimately, the effects of familiarity with an experience wear off after a while. As old information stored in the brain becomes no longer useful, it is slowly replaced with information that is. You could come back to something you have experienced 1,000 years ago with a slight glimpse of recollection, but you'd be practically learning it all over again. A 1.4 kg brain being in very finite capacity could never store enough memory to familiarize itself with everything of our universe that is interesting or beautiful. This would be more of a problem overall considering the statements beforehand, but one that future transhumanist technology could fix.

However, this is not to say that an eternal life originating from earth doesn't have the potential to be emotionally challenging. But this challenge would be identical to that which we would potentially face in an ordinary mortal life. As long as our technology has room to grow and as long as we have new things to discover in this universe and the other universes beyond it, boredom would only ever be something you choose to feel. With life, eternal or not, there is always a way to expand yourself.

Future rebuttals will be presented in upcoming blogs.

First Post

The purpose of this blog is to bring forth my ideas to the public as well as to organize significant points in a way that is presentable to YouTube. My username on YouTube is AgnosticDragon103.
http://www.youtube.com/user/AgnosticDragon103

I try my best not to hold prejudgements against an idea or cator to the ideas that are more popular. I was most strongly influenced to create this blog by the ongoing conflict between Atheists and Theists. Here are my stances regarding some of the controversy:

• An afterlife is plausable.
• Purpose and morality are objective, but open-ended.
• Those who consider Death--Eternal Tranqulity--to be favourable over Eternal Life are morons.
• Concepts like Nihilism or Relativism are the results of people lazily pulling easy answers out of their butts--to the toughest questions of life no less.
• Atheism is just "hip" these days; people tend to follow popular figures like Richard Dawkins too closely.