Transforming Consciousness:
What to Expect at Death
Buffalo State Freethinkers
October 21, 2011
Thomas W. Clark
Center for Naturalism
Naturalism.Org
Overview
1. Naturalism: a worldview
2. Consciousness and persons: natural phenomena
3. Death: the end of you, a particular person
4. The secular mistake: expecting oblivion at death
5. Thought experiment: transforming consciousness
6. Death and birth: the radical refreshment of
consciousness
Naturalism as a worldview
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6 questions a worldview should answer:
 How do we know what’s real? – epistemology
 What exists? – metaphysics and ontology
 Who are we, essentially? – human nature and
agency
 How ought we behave? – ethics
 How can we best solve our problems? – apps
 What’s it all about? – existential concerns
Worldview Naturalism
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Epistemology: empiricism, public evidence.
Metaphysics: nature is what exists, no evidence
for the supernatural.
Human nature: we are evolved, physical
creatures, completely within nature – connection.
Ethics: progressive, humanistic and egalitarian –
compassion.
Practical applications: based in a causal
understanding of behavior – control.
Existential concerns: at home in a wild universe.
Consciousness
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Consciousness a natural phenomenon associated
with certain sorts of brain functions.
A private, subjective, qualitative reality –
unobservable from the outside.
Your personality and conscious sense of self:
dependent on the brain – no soul necessary.
Explaining consciousness: the “hard problem”.
Consciousness always present for itself: we don’t
ever find ourselves absent from the scene.
Death: the end of you
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End of functions that support your consciousness.
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End of the characteristics that define you.
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No evidence that anything non-physical continues.
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Memories of past lives, near death experiences
are naturalistically explicable.
Conclusion: death is the end of this consciousness,
this set of experiences, this person.
Question: what should we anticipate at death?
Expecting oblivion at death
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Philip Larkin, poet: “…total emptiness for ever, the sure
extinction that we travel to and shall be lost in
always…this is what we fear – no sight, no sound, no
touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, nothing to
love or link with, the anesthetic from which none come
round.” – from “Aubade”
Anthony Burgess, novelist: “If there is only darkness after
death, then that darkness is the ultimate reality… In the
face of the approaching blackness, which Winston
Churchill facetiously termed black velvet, concerning
oneself with a world that is soon to fade out like a
television image in a power cut seems mere frivolity.”
Expecting oblivion at death
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“When I die I won't go to heaven or hell, there will
just be nothingness.” – Isaac Asimov
“For only death annihilates all sense, all becoming, to
replace them with non-sense and absolute
cessation.” - F. Gonzalez-Cruzzi, "Days of the Dead"
in The New Yorker
“I will never lose that immanence of nothingness, the
certainty of mortality." - Arthur W. Frank
"...I hope that when the time comes to face death, I
will feel stronger, and less afraid of falling into an
empty black abyss.“ – Larry Josephs
The case against oblivion
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Mistake: to anticipate nothingness or oblivion is
to project yourself into a situation after death.
It’s to suppose that we will undergo nonexperience, therefore inhabit “nothingness.”
Epicurus’ correction: "When I am, death is not,
and when death is, I am not."
Death won’t be an experienced fact for us, we
won’t undergo the end of experience.
So, what should we anticipate at death?
Transforming consciousness: baseline
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No subjective gaps in life: you are always present
for yourself despite interruptions in consciousness.
Despite the fact that we are frequently and regularly
unconscious (asleep, perhaps drugged, knocked out,
etc.) these unconscious periods do not represent
subjective pauses between periods of consciousness.
For the subject there is an instantaneous transition
from the experience preceding the unconscious
interval to the experience immediately following
it. This is true from birth to death: call this “personal
subjective continuity”.
Transforming consciousness: step 1
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Spectrum of transformations, minimal to radical.
During an unconscious period, induce some
changes in personality and body, but it’s still
recognizably you who wakes up.
However long the unconsciousness lasts and
wherever you wake up, there’s no subjective gap.
You are still present for yourself, continuously.
As in regular life, personal subjective continuity is
maintained across the objective interruption in
consciousness.
Transforming consciousness: step 2
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Greater changes induced, so an indeterminate or
new person exists. No more personal subjective
continuity.
But no subjective gap in consciousness: the new
person’s experiences directly follow yours.
If there are no subjective gaps between you and a
somewhat altered you, why should there be any
gaps between you and the resulting new person?
Consciousness has been transformed: it has a
different personal context, but is continuous across
the transformation for the subjects.
Transforming consciousness: step 3
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Radical changes in person, time, and location – the
far end of the spectrum of transformation.
You still have a continuer, perhaps in a galaxy far
away in the far future – still no subjective gap.
Conclusion: consciousness is continuous across
transformations in its personal context: call this
“generic subjective continuity.”
Radical transformation ends you the person, hence
you have died, but consciousness continues.
The subject is still present for itself: no subjective
gap or nothingness into which you have fallen.
What to expect at death
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Normal death and birth: a natural, extreme case of
radical transformation and generic subjective
continuity, not the end of experience.
Death is the radical refreshment of consciousness:
no personal subjective continuity after death,
nothing carried over, no woo.
But, don’t anticipate nothingness, rather
somethingness: generic subjective continuity.
Consciousness is always present for itself, for
better or for worse.
Make the best of it!
That’s all folks….
Thanks!
www.naturalism.org
www.naturalism.org/death.htm
www.naturalism.org/consciou.htm
twc@naturalism.org