The mind is what the brain does .

When the brain stops doing, the mind stops being.

There is no darkness, there isn’t even nothing, because there’s no you to experience it.

Where do the ripples on a pond go if the water dries up? There are no ripples, because there’s no longer a pond for them to be on.

If you believe your self, your awareness, your consciousness are manifestations of neurons firing in a brain, then as soon as those stop, you cease to be.

I believe that those neurons are a sort of radio signal, and that the self as I know it is a kind of wave transmitted from some time/place. When the body dies and the brain dies with it, I believe that connection is gone, and that signal is lost, but that the time/place from which the signal originated still exists. This doesn’t indicate that I, the self, still am somehow alive or exist in some other way, the specific manifestation of myself as who I an is gone in this case, but I do take some solace in the fact that the signal that propagated the awareness of my own being still goes on.

What I think or what I hope?

I think it will be just like before I was born. I will become nothing.

I hope that I’m wrong and I will be reunited with my loved ones.

Try taking a dmt trip. That often is described as feeling like dying, it’s a strange other dimension but somehow feels familiar. Also the brain dumps a load of dmt at the moment of death. But that’s just the dying stage, the actual dead stage, nothing because the brain has stopped working.

I get reborn in the world that i helped create …

I don’t know what - if anything- comes after. But I do like the Buddhist analogy of death being like a wave falling back into the sea. The wave is gone but the matter and energy that constituted it survives and are eventually repurposed for the formation of another wave. Or a bird, or a tree, or some other part of the natural world.

It’s like dreaming (like you do when you go to sleep) except moreso

Wait… you all don’t know?

Do you remember what it was like before you were conceived? Like that.

You become what you were before you were conceived.

I’ve died. It’s a permanent state of unconsciousness. No thoughts. No dreams. No life flashing before your eyes. Just nothing.

Whatever it was like before you were born. You return to that, literally nothing to be afraid of

I think that it is exactly the same as before you were born.

Either of two things:

Nothing. However, I don’t think most people quite grasp the meaning of that. Kind of how they think that before the big bang there was just empty space. No, empty space is not nothing. There’s no empty space, there’s no time, there’s nothing. By definition it cannot be experienced. Experience simply ends. It’s as if nothing ever happened. The universe could just as well have never existed.

The more optimistic theory is that consciousness is in a way immortal. You can only experience being, not not-being. It’s kind of how when you go under general anesthesia and then wake up it’s quite unlike sleeping. When you’ve slept you have the sense of time having passed in between. With general anesthesia this is not the case. One moment you feel sleepy and then you wake up in another room. From your subjective experience you never lost consciousness to begin with. Whose to say that something similar doesn’t happen with death. Instead of experience ending it just moves elsewhere. It’s a pretty difficult concept to explain but it’s somewhat similar to the idea of quantum immortality.

Sweet, silent oblivion.

If I’m wrong I’m gonna go full on Karen on whatever jackass is in charge.