Are you dead before you are born?

billydkid

Illuminator
billydkid
Joined
Aug 27, 2002
Messages
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Not sure if this belongs here, but it is a silly question anyway. I have asked others this in the past and maybe even in here. Do we already know exactly what it is like to be dead because we were all dead (not alive) before we were born? It seems to me it wasn't all that bad - though I don't remember much.
 
That's an absurd question. You cannot, by definition, know what it's like to be dead. There's nothing to know - you're dead.
 
billydkid said:
Not sure if this belongs here, but it is a silly question anyway. I have asked others this in the past and maybe even in here. Do we already know exactly what it is like to be dead because we were all dead (not alive) before we were born? It seems to me it wasn't all that bad - though I don't remember much.
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The last corpse I looked at was remarkably mute.

Are you asking what was your face before you were born?
 
billydkid said:
I don't remember much.
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Pay attention to this part. Consider why it is that you remember nothing from before you were conceived. Since nothing of you existed before your conception, you were literally unable to know anything. Not knowing gets you almost all the way to not remembering.

Obvious answers are often very useful.
 
volatile said:
That's an absurd question. You cannot, by definition, know what it's like to be dead. There's nothing to know - you're dead.
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I think the absurdity of it resides on a different level, even. Strictly speaking it doesn't even make sense to say "He is dead", because there no longer is a "he" to be anything.

It is not like anything to be dead, because it actually isn't anything to begin with.

So, to answer the OP, not existing is always the same, regardless of whether that is before or after an interrupting period of existence - but it is not something you do, because there isn't a "you".
 
volatile said:
That's an absurd question. You cannot, by definition, know what it's like to be dead. There's nothing to know - you're dead.
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Oh yeah!?!@?

Just listen to side one, track seven on Revolver. There. I run rings around your logic.:D
 
Accepting that the question really means "are you dead before you are self aware" (since late-term fetuses are most definitely alive) I would still say "no". Death is, by most accounts, defined by the loss of life. Is a rock dead? No. It is simply not alive, although poets may metaphorically refer to it as "dead, unfeeling matter".

I would say though that you have the same degree of self-awareness before conception as you do after death, which is to say, zero.
 
I was merely disorganized!

All of those atoms that form my brain and body were all over the place!

Glad that it all sorted itself out.
 
Well, apparently some were unable to see the slightly comical tone of the OP. That being said - is not being alive the same as being dead? Are they essentially equivalent? If was trying to be funny with the "I don't remember much." bit, but as usual no one appreciates my humor.
 
Rodney said:
Then consider why it is that you also remember nothing from the time you were conceived until the time you turned 3 or 4.
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The brain starts becoming programmed by the environment as it develops... it takes a while until we get memory... but you sort of fade into consciousness... and if you lose your marbles as you grow older, you fade out too.
 
billydkid said:
Well, apparently some were unable to see the slightly comical tone of the OP. That being said - is not being alive the same as being dead? Are they essentially equivalent? If was trying to be funny with the "I don't remember much." bit, but as usual no one appreciates my humor.
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I suppose you could say there was a semantic difference between not being alive and being dead. The first as a negative simply requires a lack of life. The second presupposes a former life. One could say my imaginary friend or Bigfoot were not alive. They have never been alive. But one could not say that Bigfoot was dead as that would imply he had lived previously.
 
articulett said:
The brain starts becoming programmed by the environment as it develops... it takes a while until we get memory... but you sort of fade into consciousness... and if you lose your marbles as you grow older, you fade out too.
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Do you agree or disagree that the fact that you can't remember anything prior to your birth proves no more than the fact that you can't remember anything prior to your third or fourth birthday?
 
Rodney said:
Do you agree or disagree that the fact that you can't remember anything prior to your birth proves no more than the fact that you can't remember anything prior to your third or fourth birthday?
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I can't even tell what you are saying. You can't remember anything before your birth because you have no brain... a brain... specifically a hippocampus is required for memories to form. You can and do have some degrees of memory and you are programming your body and how it works from infancy or prior... you cannot experience all the details of vision without this early programming (kids who were blind in infancy don't understand pointing at an object for example even when given sight later)-- but just because you don't remember your brain learning to "see", doesn't mean that the memory isn't there. We have increasingly detailed memories as we get into an age where such memories were important to our species... A dog doesn't need to know why he's hungry or how he knows to beg for food... a human is helped by knowing how they know and remembering and sharing the details via language. Our earliest memories tend to correspond with our development of language... we are able to narrate our lives to ourselves because we have the words to do so.

You can't have memory without a brain.... you have no brain before your conception... no self... no sense of self... nothing to remember. Just like the memory on your computer... it's material dependent... it doesn't exist absent your memory card.
 
articulett said:
I can't even tell what you are saying.
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It's pretty simple: You and DoubtingStephen seem to think the fact that you can't remember anything prior to your birth proves that you didn't exist prior to your birth. But, by that logic, you also didn't exist prior to your third or fourth birthday.
 
billy- I've often said this to people who consider themselves authorities on the "afterlife".
Functionally, I think not yet being born and being dead are identical experiences- and like you, I ain't afeared of either one!
(being dead is a doddle- it's the process of getting there that can be dodgy.)
 
Rodney said:
It's pretty simple: You and DoubtingStephen seem to think the fact that you can't remember anything prior to your birth proves that you didn't exist prior to your birth. But, by that logic, you also didn't exist prior to your third or fourth birthday.
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Rodney - there are different types of memory. I suggest you look them up, and then tell me is there is no memory formed before 3 years of age.
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
That's really sick in an Oedipal sort of way. Did you pull a Revolver on old dad too?:)
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Strictly speaking, no. My Ma is a butch-dog lesbian with a mullet, and Pa is a Brazilian still-pre-op male transsexual. Pa takes pills to augment his cleavage, Ma is flat as a communion wafer on a marble corporate foyer floor.
Out of habit Pa and I are still physically closer, and whenever we embrace my head instinctively starts to lower towards the former joyful objects of my childhood.

Honest.
 
Rodney said:
It's pretty simple: You and DoubtingStephen seem to think the fact that you can't remember anything prior to your birth proves that you didn't exist prior to your birth.
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That is not what I think at all, and it bears little resemblance to what I wanted to convey.

I think that if a person finds it puzzling why they can not remember anything before birth they ought to consider not existing as the most probable cause of that result.
 
Normal Dude said:
Rodney - there are different types of memory. I suggest you look them up, and then tell me is there is no memory formed before 3 years of age.
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I didn't say that there was no memory formed before 3 years of age.
 
Unfortunately for you chaps, lack of memory is no strong indicator of anything.

When a consciousness, for whatever reason, enters into amnesia.. does that mean that that consciousness could not have existed prior to the onset of the amnesia?
Obviously not. Otherwise, there could be no possible origin of human beings with amnesia.
 
DoubtingStephen said:
That is not what I think at all, and it bears little resemblance to what I wanted to convey.

I think that if a person finds it puzzling why they can not remember anything before birth they ought to consider not existing as the most probable cause of that result.
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Fine, but we know that logic does not apply to the period between conception/birth and the first few years of life, so why do you think it applies before conception/birth?
 
Rodney said:
It's pretty simple: You and DoubtingStephen seem to think the fact that you can't remember anything prior to your birth proves that you didn't exist prior to your birth. But, by that logic, you also didn't exist prior to your third or fourth birthday.
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No Rodney... you are using your theist logic again to promote the idea that you were a "soul" before birth. You actually fade into consciousness as the embryo you are begins to differentiate and form neurons... which then are programmed by the environment. You don't exist before you were conceived any more than your dog does. You don't need to know about your dog's memories to answer or understand the question in the OP as it relates to him. Why would you assume you would have more. The evidence suggests that you were nothing before you faded into consciousness just as you will be nothing when you are gone. You won't exist. You are what your brain interprets "you" to be.

You created your own false analogy to prop up what you want to believe. Nobody can really say for certain what anybody is before they are born or after they die... but the evidence is rather compelling for the notion that the brain gives rise to self--and there is no kind of consciousness of any sort that can exist absent a brain. Not demons, thetans, ghosts, gods, or souls. It's a nice idea, but semantic games don't make it true. Moreover, human beings have no way of knowing about invisible immeasurable entities-- there is no way to distinguish such things from delusions of such things.
 
"Are you dead before you are born?"

Before conception there is no physical something that could be refered to, by me or anyone else, as dglas, except perhaps as an idea between wannabe parents. After conception there was a something that later did become a dglas. Until the persona and identity of dglas was socially constructed, however, there was no dglas to be alive or dead. The question fails for lack of a referent.

Until the socially constructed sense of self-awareness, the only dglas that existed was in the minds and behaviours of others, and then only as a non-sentient bundle of tissue with potential to become a self-aware entity.

Self-awareness is not a criterion for life/death. If you think there is, tell it to some bactieria. If they give you a nod, let me know. The question does not hinge on awareness.
 
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At what precise point does non-Dglas become Dglas? And what happens at this precise point to bring Dglas into being?
 
plumjam said:
At what precise point does non-Dglas become Dglas? And what happens at this precise point to bring Dglas into being?
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Lessee, should I answer you, knowing that you cannot be arsed to bother reading responses you don't like?

Oh, well. Maybe someone else will read it...

That is a point of contention, is it not? Certainly parents have an idea of a person when caring for their baby, whether that person is a full-fledged self-aware entity (even if we could properly define such a thing) or not. All we have are rough benchmarks, plumjam. That would be part of the social construction of self of the parents, I suspect, and a socially negotiated understanding of what it is to be a person.

It probably becomes appropriate to speak of dglas as dglas at the point where it can be socially verified (such as is possible) that a self-aware entity has developed with that understanding of self. Many societies, including our own, promote non-self aware entities as persons for the purposes of protecting the lives of potential contributors to our society (even if just as a workforce grunt). This may be mostly a function of biological instinct, social convention and/or a matter of the hard practicality of the helplessness of newborns. In deference to the parental instinct to protect and nurture their children, social conventions posit the identity of a person before self-awareness actually exists.

What I am saying is that identity is a social construct. Ideas, identities, so-called "non-material concepts" and theoretical frameworks exist in a social context, which means that their effects are material. And they need not have supernatural elements included. These ideas of things are material (in that they reflect in our behaviour and the development of our physical realm), but one must be careful to avoid confusing the idea of a thing with the thing itself. It is perfectly possible to have an idea of a thing that simply does not exist. Unicorns, say, or ....

Assuming you can get a rough agreement on what the God-concept means (if anything), the god-concept is verifiable in the the bahaviours supervening upon it can be measured. This does not indicate the existence of God other than as an idea, however.

"What happens at the precise moment to bring dglas into being?"

Why are you assuming a sharp, instantaneous distinction between dglas and not-dglas? I would tentatively posit that it becomes socially verified that there is a self-aware entity with the label "dglas," but I see no "Eureka" moment where, POP! dglas suddenly sprang into being. We posit such Eureka moments as a matter of political convenience or as arguments to justify this or that social policy in the face of competing, negotiated values. Instead of seeing it as a POP! moment, one might be better served to see it as a gradual process. Actually, it seems that we, as a matter of convention, assume personhood until personhood is disproven, but we need not necessarily do so.

Hidden in your question is the assumption that there is a single moment of causation that turned that lump of tissues into dglas. Why are you assuming this?
 
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billydkid said:
Do we already know exactly what it is like to be dead because we were all dead (not alive) before we were born?
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Well, I don't think the question is that absurd, I find it quite answerable.

I would agree that the experience of not living is essentially the same before someone is born and after they die. But we do not "already know what it is like to be dead" because we have no memory of our nonexistence. On yet another hand, the experience of not living was null, and so one could argue that our memory of that experience is, coincidentally, complete - we recall nothing from that period of time, which happens to be exactly what it was like: nothing.

That was a materialistic viewpoint. You would get a different answer from an idealistic or dualistic viewpoint: if, hypothetically, our identity was not completely a product of the structure of our mortal bodies, then we could be missing out actual experiences from before we were born. But in that hypothetical case it wouldn't also follow that the experience of before-life must be the same as the experience of after-life (almost all religions assume that it isn't), so one really couldn't say much at all.

billydkid said:
It seems to me it wasn't all that bad...
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This implies that not living is by default bad, and so it all boils down to one of the most basic human emotions: the fear of death. As long as the reasoning in the OP (that it can't be that bad not to live since we all had already been in that state for billions of years) helps to alleviate someone's anxiety of the inevitability of death and allows them to live a fuller life, I think it's a valid way of dealing with the ultimate.
 
plumjam said:
Strictly speaking, no. My Ma is a butch-dog lesbian with a mullet, and Pa is a Brazilian still-pre-op male transsexual. Pa takes pills to augment his cleavage, Ma is flat as a communion wafer on a marble corporate foyer floor.
Out of habit Pa and I are still physically closer, and whenever we embrace my head instinctively starts to lower towards the former joyful objects of my childhood.

Honest.
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That does explain a bit, yes, yes indeedy.
 
Rodney said:
Fine, but we know that logic does not apply to the period between conception/birth and the first few years of life, so why do you think it applies before conception/birth?
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I dispute your assertion that "we know that logic does not apply to the period between conception/birth and the first few years of life".

And it really is not necessary for you to describe my positions, that's the part I do.

Logic applies.
 
Regarding the OP, I would say that I can apply my concept of not-yet-existing to that of no-longer-existing. Sort of a "non-existance is non-existance" thing. That's one of the reasons why it's important to have a good life and accomplish what we want to accomplish while we're here. No latter atonement, punishment, return, or conscious influence.
 
plumjam said:
At what precise point does non-Dglas become Dglas? And what happens at this precise point to bring Dglas into being?
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At what point in our evolutionary histroy did we become human? There is no precise point for that and there is none for when we come into being. There are just arbitrary points that anyone can pick and defend in an argument.

Your question is as absurd as the theist who claims that for evolution to be true, and species can't inter-breed, then there must be a point where one of our ancestors was a different species than its own offspring and could not inter-breed with them.

That's not how it works. Evolution works on a sliding scale, so does consciousness and life itself.
 
DmKrispin said:
Regarding the OP, I would say that I can apply my concept of not-yet-existing to that of no-longer-existing. Sort of a "non-existance is non-existance" thing.
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Exactly! What we call existence (an arbitrary label) is a very brief period in the lives of the atoms and molecules that make us up. We are just a brief state/configuration that they find themselves in. They were in a different state/configuration before and will be different one after.
 
Of course, I probably should not have used "before you were born" since you are living for some time before birth. For most of us, I suspect, our fear of death is all about no longer existing, but for many the fear of death is much more complicated - for those who can not conceive of the idea of non-existence. I have said and some other have echoed that the only thing more frightening than not existing anymore is the notion of existing for eternity - of not being able to cease to exist, ever. I suppose you could argue that our "souls" are much more well adjusted to eternal existence than we are a human beings, but it is hard to imagine being yourself anymore once you are reduced to your well adjusted soul essence.
 
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