by Joseph Palazzo

Created on: June 06, 2009

The inclination to believe in an afterlife is part of the human condition. The drive for survival makes it neigh impossible for our consciousness to come to terms with the concept of mortality. It is evolved into us and demands that we stay alive, in full spite of logic and basic common sense. For those who chose the road less traveled by, we took a detour labeled precisely that, logic and common sense.

While religion has not failed yet, the churches are still frequented, prayers are still said, there does exist a growing community of people who turned to science to answer those unanswerable questions. Trying to answer that great question of 'what happens to us when we die' leaves one somewhat uncomforted by the only obvious response, game over. Scientifically, your brain is an organic computer, based upon unfortunately volatile memory. Upon death there are no current means to extract useful information from our memory; who we are is lost. Cold, hard, uncaring, unloving, depressing, harsh, and a whole host of generally negative adjectives are used, usually in combination, to describe the feelings associated with this. Not to mention that our subconscious will not accept it, studies have shown that with few exceptions all people believe in an afterlife in the moments before their death, in a last ditch effort to not die when their mortality smacks them in the face.

Coping with the concept of death is done in the same process that we used to determine that their will be no harps, fluffy cloud sofas, and certainly no 7 virgins. Break down what death is exactly and try to understand it. Work out what it is, where the problem lies, and what you can do to control it. Death is our brain, our computer, malfunctioning and ceasing to operate. The manifestation of this event is that our body ceases to operate, temperature drops, metabolism ceases, no response to external stimuli, and no cognitive thought. To the third person there is only a slight of difference between this and a sleeping person. Death is also inevitable, very much like sleep. It all seems very mundane in these terms.

At this point we defined death (the viewing part) which unfortunately is inevitable. We can now analyze the effects that it has and pinpoint where we have some leverage to control these effects (the coping part). So we can't do anything just yet about the dying part, but that's not the issue. It's the scary, unpleasant, queasiness that we all have just beneath the surface when we think

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