What happens after you die?

Question: What happens after you die?
- Keywords:
  die
Asked by Kace to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 6 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by 766nepk47, midget, Ayrton.
- Yo Yehudi answered on 6 Nov 2017:
  
  Well, generally our bodies get buried and we begin to rot (not necessarily in that order, ew).
  I’m not religious, so I am reasonably doubtful that there’s anything to see or experience after death, but religions all seem to have different ideas about what happens to your soul/consciousness, whether it be an afterlife (good or bad) or perhaps even coming back as another living being. Without having died (that I remember at least!) it’s hard to know for sure, and I’m not terribly keen to try it out….
- Ed Bracey answered on 6 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
- Oli Wilson answered on 6 Nov 2017:
  
  If you fancy reading some detail on the physical processes that happen to bodies after death, you might like to read this article from the excellent Mosaic Science magazine (but be warned, it gives quite a bit of detail on a subject that lots of people would be sqeamish about) https://mosaicscience.com/story/what-happens-after-you-die. In essence, the body’s chemicals start breaking down its tissues, followed by our natural gut bacteria and other animals like flies (if they can get to the body).
  By that point, though, the person is kind of gone – there’s more to you than your body, after all. Whether there’s a heaven, any sort of afterlife at all, reincarnation or just nothing at all isn’t really a question science can answer. I know what I hope for, but I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see!

Question: What happens after you die?

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