Transforming Consciousness: What to Expect at Death

1. Transforming Consciousness:What to Expect at Death Buffalo State Freethinkers October 21, 2011 Thomas W. Clark Center for Naturalism Naturalism.Org

2. Overview 1. Naturalism: a worldview 2. Consciousness and persons: natural phenomena 3. Death: the end of you, a particular person 4. The secular mistake: expecting oblivion at death 5. Thought experiment: transforming consciousness 6. Death and birth: the radical refreshment of consciousness

3. Naturalism as a worldview • 6 questions a worldview should answer: • How do we know what’s real? – epistemology • What exists? – metaphysics and ontology • Who are we, essentially? – human nature and agency • How ought we behave? – ethics • How can we best solve our problems? – apps • What’s it all about? – existential concerns

4. Worldview Naturalism • Epistemology: empiricism, public evidence. • Metaphysics: nature is what exists, no evidence for the supernatural. • Human nature: we are evolved, physical creatures, completely within nature – connection. • Ethics: progressive, humanistic and egalitarian – compassion. • Practical applications: based in a causal understanding of behavior – control. • Existential concerns: at home in a wild universe.

5. Consciousness • Consciousness a natural phenomenon associated with certain sorts of brain functions. • A private, subjective, qualitative reality – unobservable from the outside. • Your personality and conscious sense of self: dependent on the brain – no soul necessary. • Explaining consciousness: the “hard problem”. • Consciousness always present for itself: we don’t ever find ourselves absent from the scene.

6. Death: the end of you • End of functions that support your consciousness. • End of the characteristics that define you. • No evidence that anything non-physical continues. • Memories of past lives, near death experiences are naturalistically explicable. • Conclusion: death is the end of this consciousness, this set of experiences, this person. • Question: what should we anticipate at death?

7. Expecting oblivion at death • Philip Larkin, poet: “…total emptiness for ever, the sure extinction that we travel to and shall be lost in always…this is what we fear – no sight, no sound, no touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, nothing to love or link with, the anesthetic from which none come round.” – from “Aubade” • Anthony Burgess, novelist: “If there is only darkness after death, then that darkness is the ultimate reality… In the face of the approaching blackness, which Winston Churchill facetiously termed black velvet, concerning oneself with a world that is soon to fade out like a television image in a power cut seems mere frivolity.” 

8. Expecting oblivion at death • “When I die I won't go to heaven or hell, there will just be nothingness.” – Isaac Asimov • “For only death annihilates all sense, all becoming, to replace them with non-sense and absolute cessation.” - F. Gonzalez-Cruzzi, "Days of the Dead" in The New Yorker • “I will never lose that immanence of nothingness, the certainty of mortality."  - Arthur W. Frank • "...I hope that when the time comes to face death, I will feel stronger, and less afraid of falling into an empty black abyss.“ – Larry Josephs

9. The case against oblivion • Mistake: to anticipate nothingness or oblivion is to project yourself into a situation after death. • It’s to suppose that we will undergo non-experience, therefore inhabit “nothingness.” • Epicurus’ correction: "When I am, death is not, and when death is, I am not." • Death won’t be an experienced fact for us, we won’t undergo the end of experience. • So, what should we anticipate at death?

10. Transforming consciousness: baseline • No subjective gaps in life: you are always present for yourself despite interruptions in consciousness. • Despite the fact that we are frequently and regularly unconscious (asleep, perhaps drugged, knocked out, etc.) these unconscious periods do not represent subjective pauses between periods of consciousness. • For the subject there is an instantaneous transition from the experience preceding the unconscious interval to the experience immediately following it. This is true from birth to death: call this “personal subjective continuity”.

11. Transforming consciousness: step 1 • Spectrum of transformations, minimal to radical. • During an unconscious period, induce some changes in personality and body, but it’s still recognizably you who wakes up. • However long the unconsciousness lasts and wherever you wake up, there’s no subjective gap. You are still present for yourself, continuously. • As in regular life, personal subjective continuity is maintained across the objective interruption in consciousness.

12. Transforming consciousness: step 2 • Greater changes induced, so an indeterminate or new person exists. No more personal subjective continuity. • But no subjective gap in consciousness: the new person’s experiences directly follow yours. • If there are no subjective gaps between you and a somewhat altered you, why should there be any gaps between you and the resulting new person? • Consciousness has been transformed: it has a different personal context, but is continuous across the transformation for the subjects.

13. Transforming consciousness: step 3 • Radical changes in person, time, and location – the far end of the spectrum of transformation. • You still have a continuer, perhaps in a galaxy far away in the far future – still no subjective gap. • Conclusion: consciousness is continuous across transformations in its personal context: call this “generic subjective continuity.” • Radical transformation ends you the person, hence you have died, but consciousness continues. • The subject is still present for itself: no subjective gap or nothingness into which you have fallen.

14. What to expect at death • Normal death and birth: a natural, extreme case of radical transformation and generic subjective continuity, not the end of experience. • Death is the radical refreshment of consciousness: no personal subjective continuity after death, nothing carried over, no woo. • But, don’t anticipate nothingness, rather somethingness: generic subjective continuity. • Consciousness is always present for itself, for better or for worse. • Make the best of it!

15. That’s all folks…. Thanks!

16. www.naturalism.org www.naturalism.org/death.htm www.naturalism.org/consciou.htm twc@naturalism.org