Natural Eternal Consciousness aka the Last Moment Hypothesis

[wiggy]

This is inspired by the thread " What do you think happens when we die?" and others like it. Since this forum is morbid by nature, discussions regarding a post death experience are never too far off. Religious descriptions of afterlife and ideas that are derived from them(consciously or unconsciously) are usually brought up, but I think the various hypotheses of naturalistic afterlives also merit some discussion, especially among the atheists and agnostic atheists on the forum. Among those, the theory of Natural Eternal Consciousness is one of the more fascinating and terrifying that I have come across.

In simplified terms, the theory states that our state of consciousness is completely governed by the material state of our body. At the moment of death, the physical mechanisms that result in our perception of consciousness cease to exist, and as such the death of the body and the death of the mind are identical - critically, one implication of this is that you can never perceive death itself. The NEC theory asserts that the perception of time is governed by consciousness, and by extension, the physical body. The implication of this is that from the perspective of the subject, death never occurs - we simply stop perceiving time. We interpret reality as a series of discrete events, and at the moment of time it is not the case that everything goes black, rather that we continue to permanently experience the last moment immediately preceding death, frozen in time.

Seriously considering this hypothesis will naturally bring up all sorts of considerations, existential and practical, for someone seeking to end their own life. I personally find it terrifying. Suicide is very rarely a pleasant experience - death is not truly instant regardless of the method you choose, and the moments immediately preceding it are usually filled with pain and discomfort(this is true for natural death as much as suicide). Additionally, regardless of the pain imparted by the process of death, it's likely that one will be in mental anguish in the moments leading up to suicide. If you are persuaded by this hypothesis, it seems to me that you should take steps to guarantee that you will be in a very pleasurable state of mind in the moment immediately preceding death. Of course, even if you elect to kill yourself with a heroin overdose or use some other mind altering substance in combination with another method(e.g. taking ecstasy before killing yourself with a gun), it doesn't seem to me like that would guarantee a pleasurable "last moment". We know that consciousness is alterable and in a sense modular, which may indicate that your state of mind would go through alterations as different parts of your brain stop functioning. In that sense, the "last moment" experience would be completely unpredictable, and likely different than anything you would experience during normal life.

One inescapable limitation of any theory or hypothesis that tries to infer or describe post death experience, be it scientific, philosophical or religious, is that it's completely unfalsifiable. It is currently impossible to obtain any subjective data from a state of death and bring it back to the world of the living. Still, I think it's worth thinking about. Personally, giving it a bit of thought I find the hypothesis unconvincing, as I believe it has some fundamentally invalid concepts/operators - however, the point of this thread isn't to push back against the idea, so I'll refrain from including my own thoughts in the OP.

Source(the full article is available for free, but requires you sign up):

The Theory of a Natural Eternal Consciousness: The Psychological Basis for a Natural Afterlife

Bryon K. Ehlmann

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Focusing solely on the near-death cognizance of the dying, rather than the material per- spective of the living, reveals a new understanding of death. Its significance to psychology, philosophy, and religion is huge for what emerges is a long overlooked phenomenon: a nonsupernatural, relativistic, and timelessly eternal consciousness, which can be a natural afterlife. Ironically, the validity of the theory of a natural eternal consciousness (NEC) assumes the loss of all materially based consciousness with death — more specifically, the permanent loss of time perception. The theory claims, and the article deduces from empirical knowl- edge, that by imperceptibly entering the timelessness before death, one's last conscious moment, whatever the type, becomes by default — psychologically, from one's perspective —a forever present moment. To help explain and validate the theory, the article presents thought experiments and a formal model of all of life's moments and all transitions between periods of time perception and those of timelessness. An open-minded reading should reveal that the NEC does not threaten faith in a god or a heaven.​

The Theory of a Natural Eternal Consciousness: The Psychological Basis for a Natural Afterlife

Focusing solely on the near-death cognizance of the dying, rather than the material perspective of the living, reveals a new understanding of death. Its significance to psychology, philosophy, and religion is huge for what emerges is a long

www.academia.edu

 

[EvisceratedJester]

Sounds interesting but I don't buy it.

 

[pthnrdnojvsc]

1 micro second after my brain dies it's non-existence forever

A human is only another animal which evolved from a cell which evolved and is chemical reactions

a human is just a machine , chemical reactions

do machines or chemical reactions have afterlives, a soul or reincarnate ? no

 

[wiggy]

1 micro second after my brain dies it's non-existence forever

A human is only another animal which evolved from a cell which evolved and is chemical reactions

Although the argument is framed from a human perspective, it extends to any animal(or anything, really) which perceives consciousness as a result of a physical mechanism.

 

[ShatteredSerenity]

Note that the author Bryon K Ehlmann has no academic background in psychology or neuroscience, he was a computer science professor instead. He retired in 2012 and started writing about psychology, dreams, near-death experiences, philosophy, and religion.

The journal he published this paper in, the Journal of Mind and Behavior, has an impact factor of 0.44 which is quite low. For reference a reputable journal, Neuroscience of Consciousness, has an impact factor of 4.31. That means he published in a journal with a fraction of the citations of a major journal, and such journals tend to have lower quality of peer review.

I can't blame the guy for pursuing his interests, but he's abandoned mainstream academia for fringe science instead. Researching the biological basis of consciousness is one of the hardest problems in science, and Byron is simply glossing over the biological foundation and jumping straight to fantastical theories about human perception of time.

 

[wiggy]

Note that the author Bryon K Ehlmann has no academic background in psychology or neuroscience, he was a computer science professor instead. He retired in 2012 and started writing about psychology, dreams, near-death experiences, philosophy, and religion.

The journal he published this paper in, the Journal of Mind and Behavior, has an impact factor of 0.44 which is quite low. For reference a reputable journal, Neuroscience of Consciousness, has an impact factor of 4.31. That means he published in a journal with a fraction of the citations of a major journal, and such journals tend to have lower quality of peer review.

I can't blame the guy for pursuing his interests, but he's abandoned mainstream academia for fringe science instead. Researching the biological basis of consciousness is one of the hardest problems in science, and Byron is simply glossing over the biological foundation and jumping straight to fantastical theories about human perception of time.

I agree that framing the theory as psychology or neuroscience is tenuous(though it can be strengthned by taking those elements into account). Looking at it through the lens of philosophy, which by my account is the only legitimate way to broach such a topic, I think the argument is very interesting.

 

[pithyone]

Time dilation in dreams has been proven more or less false so I struggle to see how the mind would gain the ability to pause time right at the end of life.

 

[Eudaimonic]

my take: https://sanctioned-suicide.net/threads/continuous-brain-activity-after-death.189536/#post-2873144

 

[wiggy]

Time dilation in dreams has been proven more or less false so I struggle to see how the mind would gain the ability to pause time right at the end of life.

What's proposed here isn't quite the same as the idea of time dilation during dreams or psychedelic states. Rather, that the the cessation of perception of time altogether would prevent any alteration to the present state of consciousness.

my take: https://sanctioned-suicide.net/threads/continuous-brain-activity-after-death.189536/#post-2873144

I largely agree with what you're saying in the context of the thread you were originally replying to - however, what's proposed in that thread seems to me different than NEC. The validity of NEC does not necessitate that consciousness is non-physical - in fact I believe it precludes it.

I do agree about your point about it being unfalsifiable, and that near death experiences cannot be used to inform any theory regarding a naturalistic afterlife.The evidence of brain activity near death does not seem particularly pertinent to the hypothesis one way or the other in my opinion. As I understood it, it is not the case that the brain is "locking in" that final moment through some physical process - if that were the case, someone who were killed by a gunshot wound to the brain stem or vaporized by a bomb would be immune to the implications of the Hypothesis.

As for my own objections, the NEC theory suggests that consciousness is "paused", however that statement doesn't actually mean anything. It's well enough to imagine a moment in time being paused as a cognitive tool when trying to understand a process, but the reality of the universe is that time is never paused - it would be like suggesting that something is moving faster than light, or that a value is being divided by zero. It is simply not a valid concept.

Even if we assume that time can be paused - what would it even mean to perceive a paused moment in time? For instance, if one were listening to a song on the piano, does that mean that the note playing at the moment of death would be perceived as an eternal hum, kind of like when a computer crashes? That's not a paused moment, it's just a constant process - it doesn't truly eliminate the concept of time. The passage of time seems to me an indispensable element to the concept of consciousness, because consciousness itself is a process.

 

[Eudaimonic]

What's proposed here isn't quite the same as the idea of time dilation during dreams or psychedelic states. Rather, that the the cessation of perception of time altogether would prevent any alteration to the present state of consciousness.

I largely agree with what you're saying in the context of the thread you were originally replying to - however, what's proposed in that thread seems to me different than NEC. The validity of NEC does not necessitate that consciousness is non-physical - in fact I believe it precludes it.

I do agree about your point about it being unfalsifiable, and that near death experiences cannot be used to inform any theory regarding a naturalistic afterlife.The evidence of brain activity near death does not seem particularly pertinent to the hypothesis one way or the other in my opinion. As I understood it, it is not the case that the brain is "locking in" that final moment through some physical process - if that were the case, someone who were killed by a gunshot wound to the brain stem or vaporized by a bomb would be immune to the implications of the Hypothesis.

As for my own objections, the NEC theory suggests that consciousness is "paused", however that statement doesn't actually mean anything. It's well enough to imagine a moment in time being paused as a cognitive tool when trying to understand a process, but the reality of the universe is that time is never paused - it would be like suggesting that something is moving faster than light, or that a value is being divided by zero. It is simply not a valid concept.

Even if we assume that time can be paused - what would it even mean to perceive a paused moment in time? For instance, if one were listening to a song on the piano, does that mean that the note playing at the moment of death would be perceived as an eternal hum, kind of like when a computer crashes? That's not a paused moment, it's just a constant process - it doesn't truly eliminate the concept of time. The passage of time seems to me an indispensable element to the concept of consciousness, because consciousness itself is a process.

Yes, I agree with all of this. The most relevant part of what I wrote was "Consciousness-moments necessarily have a duration. They cannot be sliced up and therefore experienced as atemporal, as they are not objects."

 

[Whale_bones]

This is quite interesting, thanks for sharing! For me it's a really... dense article and I got about 1/3 through before needing to stop (planning to go back to it later). Out of curiosity, have you read the whole thing? Makes me wish I could read as quickly and easily as I used to

Even if we assume that time can be paused - what would it even mean to perceive a paused moment in time? For instance, if one were listening to a song on the piano, does that mean that the note playing at the moment of death would be perceived as an eternal hum, kind of like when a computer crashes? That's not a paused moment, it's just a constant process - it doesn't truly eliminate the concept of time. The passage of time seems to me an indispensable element to the concept of consciousness, because consciousness itself is a process.

From my understanding, the concept revolves around the dying/dead person's perception of time, and any real passage of time is irrelevant. Starting from the idea that we only perceive time through the passage of events, no matter how small; the only way we know one event or moment has ended is when it's replaced by another.

The article gives the example of being in a surgery room and counting down from 100 as you're being given (general/full) anesthesia. You start counting down, 99, 98... say you get to 92. At that moment your brain is fully expecting your "next" moment to be counting 91. Or to be more precise, your brain might expect the next 1/100th of a second to take place, whatever fragment of time a conscious being is able to perceive.

You're not able to perceive the moment when the anesthesia causes unconsciousness; your last conscious moment was counting 92 and there's no next event to mark that that one has passed. Nor are you able to perceive that you're now in a state where you can't perceive time.

The only perception was your last conscious moment; and you didn't know it was your last, you were just in it while your brain expected the next moment to come. So if that next moment never comes, to the experiencer, it's eternal (even though living humans are still experiencing time passing.)

It's overall an interesting concept to me, because how would a brain perceive that time had ended if it was no longer perceiving events in any way? How does that last moment "end" if there's no next moment to denote its end?

But it does seem like conjecture is used in some places and I think there are holes in it, I'll have to read the rest to see if those are explained.

 

[Eudaimonic]

@wiggy Curious what you think of these criticisms that someone wrote regarding the NEC:

"First, to establish that it's even logically possible to transition from experience to non-experience without remaining stuck in one's final moment as is argued by the NEC theory, a thought experiment. Imagine a being identical to a human as we know them completely, exactly the same in every way, except that their perception is continuous instead of discrete. This being's experience looks exactly the same from their perspective as ours does from ours, but it actually is continuously processed and indivisible into discrete temporal snapshots. Such a being is logically possible, since there's still debate within the scientific community as to perception even really is discrete (though most likely, it is.) Imagine that such a being dies, its consciousness gradually fades into nothingness. What exactly would this being remain frozen in? There is no distinct temporal snapshot to serve as its final "moment" since its perception is defined by change and process, and so the being collapses into non-experience without remaining in its final moment from its own perspective since there is no distinct final moment to speak of. We don't know what nothingness is like but in this case, it's the only possibility.

With that established, let's talk about real humans, with their discrete perception. The NEC essentially boils down to the argument that since humans are never made aware of their own death, they consciously believe themselves to be in whatever moment was their last, in a timeless state since nothing ever updates their awareness from there. There's a fundamental problem with this. Ehlmann assumes perception, consciousness, and aware to be the same thing in a way that they just aren't. Perception is the stuff you experience regarding the outside world; consciousness is your overall experience of yourself, and awareness is simply your state of knowledge and alertness regarding both of the above. So, imagine this: You're lying in bed at night, and you begin to fall asleep. Your consciousness is gradually fading, and you're drifting off when you suddenly get that weird falling sensation, and you're jolted awake. It's only after this happens that you realize you were even falling asleep, right? So, you were in a state of consciousness but not of awareness as you were falling asleep, experiencing something yet not fully aware that you're experiencing it.

So if the NEC is about awareness, and it's possible to enter a state of unawareness while still conscious, and then INTO unconsciousness (and in fact, in any case where you become unconscious, this would be the case since consciousness necessarily takes time to dwindle and we know awareness dwindles first) then as your consciousness fades into nothing, you become unaware and so as you become unaware… What awareness is left to remain stuck in?

None, and so you enter unconsciousness and nothingness without an aware moment to act as your last one to remain paused on. So, the NEC fails on this basic conceptual level, as it conflates awareness with consciousness. They're two different things and even if a transition from both fully aware and fully conscious to unaware and unconscious is impossible, it would appear that a transition from aware and conscious, to unaware and conscious, THEN to unaware and unconscious is possible, unless you want to argue you'd remain eternally aware of a moment of which you're not aware, which is… a claim you could make, I suppose.

So, here's a neat fact: We're still not done. Ehlmann actually makes equivocates consciousness with a THIRD thing, that being visual perception. Consciousness, as I understand it (though I may be mistaken here, I'm fairly certain I'm not) isn't actually discrete. Several processes of it work in discrete ways, but at different rhythms, so the underlying sense of self and time that comprises consciousness has to be continuous in order to accommodate these separate temporally discrete processes! There have been studies done on auditory perception, and while it also seems to be temporally discrete, it works separate from and at a very different pace to visual perception, and they're experienced simultaneously under ordinary circumstances BUT to further demonstrate that they are decoupled in some way, they can get out of sync! There have been cases of people whose visual and auditory perception get out of sync, so they'll perceive someone's lips moving and THEN afterwards hear their voice, so the two processes are separate and decoupled, and the only way a consciousness could receive two separate discrete processes is for it to be continuous. Think of it like the internal processing of a computer versus the visual and auditory output it makes, the frames of a computer interface's visuals and the tiny samples that make up the sound it puts out through speakers are both discrete, but separate internal processes generated by CONTINUOUS processing for which "time" is not dependent on either of those processes. So human consciousness is continuous. So, those hypothetical beings from earlier exist, actually, and we are them. So, the NEC is false, because it is impossible for us to have an all-encompassing temporally discrete "conscious snapshot" to remain timelessly frozen in as we enter unconsciousness.

So, the NEC fails on every level by conflating consciousness, awareness, and perception."

Starting from the idea that we only perceive time through the passage of events, no matter how small; the only way we know one event or moment has ended is when it's replaced by another.

The problem with this is that a durationless experience does not seem possible or coherent for that matter.

 

[wiggy]

This is quite interesting, thanks for sharing! For me it's a really... dense article and I got about 1/3 through before needing to stop (planning to go back to it later). Out of curiosity, have you read the whole thing? Makes me wish I could read as quickly and easily as I used to



From my understanding, the concept revolves around the dying/dead person's perception of time, and any real passage of time is irrelevant. Starting from the idea that we only perceive time through the passage of events, no matter how small; the only way we know one event or moment has ended is when it's replaced by another.

The article gives the example of being in a surgery room and counting down from 100 as you're being given (general/full) anesthesia. You start counting down, 99, 98... say you get to 92. At that moment your brain is fully expecting your "next" moment to be counting 91. Or to be more precise, your brain might expect the next 1/100th of a second to take place, whatever fragment of time a conscious being is able to perceive.

You're not able to perceive the moment when the anesthesia causes unconsciousness; your last conscious moment was counting 92 and there's no next event to mark that that one has passed. Nor are you able to perceive that you're now in a state where you can't perceive time.

The only perception was your last conscious moment; and you didn't know it was your last, you were just in it while your brain expected the next moment to come. So if that next moment never comes, to the experiencer, it's eternal (even though living humans are still experiencing time passing.)

It's overall an interesting concept to me, because how would a brain perceive that time had ended if it was no longer perceiving events in any way? How does that last moment "end" if there's no next moment to denote its end?

But it does seem like conjecture is used in some places and I think there are holes in it, I'll have to read the rest to see if those are explained.

The surgery table example, as presented, appears initially sound to me. However, I think the way that it frames the passage of time as a countdown is a microcosm of why I'm unable to stay on board. By the argument's own definition, humans perceive time as a series of discrete intervals(hence the countdown example), but I'm not sure that's actually true from an existential perspective. Firstly, because I don't believe there is actually such a thing as a discrete interval or a discrete event, those are just cognitive tools - and I don't believe that we perceive it that way either(in a way that would satisfy the argument), only that we are able to abstract it as such post hoc. At what level of resolution that goes on, I have no idea - but even if we were to imagine the conscious experience as watching a film where every 1/24th of a second a new frame is fed to a projector, the moments between each frame would not exist in the absence of time.

We could no more perceive a "moment in time" than we could perceive occupying the same space as another object at the same time, or negative mass, or whatever physical or logical impossibility. A key distinction is that there's nothing stopping us from believing we are perceiving those things - my point is that we wouldn't actually be. However, I feel the argument necessitates a genuine perception of a moment in time, since the post-hoc illusion of a moment would not be possible in the absence of the conscious mind.

Since the argument is inherently unfalsifiable, we are left to wrestle with our intuitions. It could be the case that what appears impossible from the perspective of a living consciousness is possible in death, and that would forever be mysteryous to the living.

@wiggy Curious what you think of these criticisms that someone wrote regarding the NEC:

I'll need some time to properly digest this one, but I have some preliminary thoughts at least.

"First, to establish that it's even logically possible to transition from experience to non-experience without remaining stuck in one's final moment as is argued by the NEC theory, a thought experiment. Imagine a being identical to a human as we know them completely, exactly the same in every way, except that their perception is continuous instead of discrete. This being's experience looks exactly the same from their perspective as ours does from ours, but it actually is continuously processed and indivisible into discrete temporal snapshots. Such a being is logically possible, since there's still debate within the scientific community as to perception even really is discrete (though most likely, it is.) Imagine that such a being dies, its consciousness gradually fades into nothingness. What exactly would this being remain frozen in? There is no distinct temporal snapshot to serve as its final "moment" since its perception is defined by change and process, and so the being collapses into non-experience without remaining in its final moment from its own perspective since there is no distinct final moment to speak of. We don't know what nothingness is like but in this case, it's the only possibility.

First off, I think the idea that we perceive time as a series of discrete events is somewhat confusing in the context of the NEC. We presume a material worldview, so it's fair enough to assume that whatever the higher level resolution of physical input that produces consciousness(Synapses, I suppose?) is not a permanent event. Either that or we abstract reality into intervals at a higher level resolution, I don't believe it makes a difference. My objection would be that consciously perceiving time as a series of discrete events does not make it so, and the NEC necessitates that a discrete moment in time actually exist. The counterpoint of a being with a continuous perception of time is a good way to drive this point home, but even if it were physically impossible for such a being to exist that would not validade the NEC.

As far as the divide between consciousness and awareness, I'm not sure what to think. The distinction between thew two seems arbitrary to me, so in principle I don't see a problem with treating the two as part of the same set. Further, if awareness pressuposes consciousness but not the other way around, wouldn't it be possible to repurpose the NEC as an eternal state of consciousness without awareness? This would be a more benevolent version of the argument in my view.

Regarding the third point about whether or not consciousness is actually discrete - I'm ignorant of neuroscience, but I like it because it confirms my intuitions lol. I suspect the notion that we perceive time as a series of discrete events is correct in certain contexts, but not literally true. However, as I had mentioned, I think even if all data clearly pointed to us perceiving the passage of time in a discrete manner, that would not validate the NEC.