crocodile deathroll

Your brain is the vehicle of your life's memories and that is about all. So once you die it will be all total amnesia for you, and you will even lose your sense of place and time in the universe.
But the brain is not made of special exotic matter that is unique to you. It is only consists of ordinary baryonic matter that on a sub-atomic level is identical that the brain matter in the next guy, which mirror the same physical processes.

It is just how your brain matter is configured and not the brain matter itself that make you you

So with all brains have homogenous physical processes at a sub-level, when you die and you have no prior memory of ever existing your sense of self could just as easily make a switch and be rebooted by another brain in the universe at random place and time as though it is just another one life experience just like what happen with this one. The new brain will just configure itself to your new egocenter and it may as well be a another one life experience.

CDR

Secular Elation

It is just how your brain matter is configured and not the brain matter itself that make you YOU

Yeah, and...? I understand that the configuration of my brain matter is what makes me me. If you took 10 different brains from 10 different people they would all look the same. But in the details, they are far different.

Darwin26

...is a fate worse than death.

Life is just an interruption to a blissful non-existance

crocodile deathroll

Yes very very different. That is why I cannot remember your first day as school as the information boundaries are separated, but is all merges as we trace out development further back when all our neurons were merely obeying a genetic program to fit the genetic scaffolding of our baby brains. This genetic progam for brain development has no well defined information boundaries.

crocodile deathroll

Oh where's that .44 magnum I want to get back to sleep

Z500

but that implies that you can even comprehend that you had it in the first place. after death, there's nothing left. you just aren't

Albert Cipriani

Hi Bill,
Long time, no argue.

You opine that the human subject of a perfectly efficient sensory deprivation chamber would not be able to sense the difference between his conscious and subconscious brain waves, that is between waking and sleeping:

Ninety-something percent of what the brain does, it does without our conscious awareness: breathing, circulation, modulating our temperature. But when we sleep, it does all these things more slowly. The question then becomes, why wouldn’t a never-conscious person not be able to be conscious of these internal rhythms?

I agree with you that such a wretch would never be capable of consciousness even if he were removed from the chamber for, as you say, his higher level cortex functions (upon which his five senses are contingent) would be a hopeless spaghetti of unwired connections. But you give me no reason to accept your assertion that his cortex could not wire itself to perceive the only sensorary thing that is still going on, his brain’s periodic slipping into a dream state. – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

tronvillain

Yes, though in the strictest sense death is not accurately described as a "fate." Given what we know about how human beings work, death appears to be the end of the individual, so death is not really something that happens to someone or that someone experiences. I say yes however, because I can think of countless experiences (pain and humiliation and loneliness) that I would consider far worse than the simple end of all experience.

Quantum Ninja:
Actually, experiences of sensory deprivation seems to indicate that you would start hallucinating before too long, so perhaps it would not be so terrible.

tronvillain

exnihilo:
While death requires life by definition, it does not appear to be the case that life requires death. Oh, death has been a key element in the evolution of life on Earth (given how it enhances differential reproductive success) and seems stastically inevitable given physical law, but life without death is certainly logically possible. In a way it actually exists, since every cell in every organism on Earth has been continuously alive for billions of years: for them, up until this generation death has always been something that happened to other cells

Dubin

What if the hallucinations are malign?