What Happens When You Die?

Liv has been reading the Diary of Anne Frank. Anne has a lot of time to wonder about the imminent possibility of her own death. Liv asked me if I'm scared of death. Scared of death, no. Scared of dying, yes. And here's where I make up the rest of the conversation:

Why not scared, and why scared?

I'm not scared of death because I don't have a soul. I don't believe anything from my body will persevere after I die.

If you don't have a soul, how can you think? What makes your mind work?

I believe my mind is a biological illusion. It's important for survival and proliferation. Complex minds allowed Homo Sapiens to become the most dominant species on the planet. This kind of advantage would promote evolution of a mind. So we evolved it. I don't claim to know exactly how this evolution took place, or how minds work. But evolution has produced some extremely complex systems and ingenious solutions: for example the internal area of a your circulatory system is the more than that of a football pitch.

"Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he'd never been religious, he realised now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at-odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more."
from Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Are you worried what will happen to your body after you die, or what there will be there?

No worries, because there won't be anything. Not endless blackness, or any similar quantifiable nothingness; but a complete end to me. But I am worried about dying. I don't think it will be fun in any way. Life is everything, I don't believe in anything else, so to lose life is to lose all:

"There is no more deep-seated biological instinct than that which expresses itself as a firm grasp upon life, there is more dignity, as there is more hamnity, in fighting for life than in passive abdication from our most hardly won and most deeply prized possession."
Biology and Man's Estimation of Himself,
by Peter Medawar

And if that all sounded a bit morbid, you could read an Introduction to Atheism! Something yummier tomorrow, I promise!