Subjective Immortality: How to Live Forever

At this point, I'd like to use my blog to quickly summarise philosophical breakthroughs that I've made.

The argument I'll make has already been touched upon by Wittgenstein and Epicurus, but I didn't know this until after I'd made the discovery for myself.

Wittgenstein asserted that "death is not an event in life", whilst Epicurus claimed that "death is nothing to us."

In my view, for all intents and purposes, death does not even exist, except in the case of other people.

I have no religion and nor belief in the afterlife. So how can I not believe in death? Am I saying that we can somehow survive death? Not quite.

Current scientific knowledge suggests that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. We know this because objects without a brain show no sign of consciousness. (Actually I might argue against this is in a later post).

Shutting down parts of the brain literally shuts down certain aspects of consciousness. For instance, when we sleep, the frontal lobe becomes largely inactive, meaning that we can experience things with no continuity whatsoever and not question our reality.

In a dream, maybe you are in a car but you're at work but your grandmother is there and then you're in her house and she's baking cookies which you can't manage to put into your mouth even though she died years ago. And yet you won't suspect that anything is wrong.

This shows how deeply connected to consciousness the brain is. When we die, our entire brains shut off. So too, I argue, must our experience.

But human beings (and presumably other animals) live subjectively. Sure, we do science to try and find objective truth about the world, but all that really exists to us is what we are experiencing.

I assume the moon is still there right now, but I'm inside and my curtains are closed, so whether it is or not makes no difference to me, unless I feel the effects of a disappeared moon directly (which is likely).

So all that really exists to me is what I experience. I will never experience death, only the moments just before.

Therefore, from a first person perspective, death never arrives.

The time for which you are alive, is all the time you will ever know. It is eternity.

Wittgenstein sums it up better then I'd ever be able:

"If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present."

In which case, belief in an afterlife does not mean living forever. It means always waiting for death, not being present now. If we accept that this life expressed as the consciousness we experience right now until the second our brain shuts down completely is the only life we are given, then we must live in the present and we must live forever.