Question: Is there anything after death? - Will we know when we're dead?

Ed Bracey answered on 7 Nov 2017:

The world keeps turning, and moves on, but we disappear.
Our brains make us what we are.
We know this because without them, or if there’s damage to them, our minds dissappear or change.
For example, there was a famous case of a guy called Phineas Gage, who survived having part of the front of his brain blown off, and his entire personality changed!
So in the same way, I suspect when your brain stops working completely, so do you.
I imagine this doesn’t feel any different than going into a deep, dreamless sleep.
However, I think you live on as memories in the minds of all the people you’ve known well. Your actions, the things you’ve done with them will change how they behave, so there’s a part of you in them always. And some of them, say if you have kids, will pass on things they learned from you to their kids, and so on. So like memes, parts of your mind can continue spreading long after you’re gone.
For me the idea that there’s no afterlife makes me want to enjoy the one precious life I have so much more! It makes it so valuable and rich and wonderful, and makes spending time with the people I care about so important to me!
In a slightly more Sci Fi way, I love the idea that at some point in the future, human beings will figure out time travel and go back in time and collect us as we die, upload our minds into a simulation and ask us if we want to carry on living in that world! Quite fanciful I guess.
Phineas Gage (not for the faint hearted!):
Lessons of the brain: The Phineas Gage story