My wife has this horrible idea that when you die, you expire, like batteries (Not the rechargeable kind).  That everything just shuts off.  I tried reasoning with her that her assertion is hopelessly false because in order for nothing to exist anymore you must be aware of this so you must still be conscious.

I personally think when we die, our physical manifestation "expires", but our "spirit" still lives on, like you're stuck in your own head.  

I also find it kind've odd that she still lingers on these thoughts, and has so for many years.  I got over the "What if I didn't exist" train of thought when I was around 8-10.

So what do some of you guys think happens when we kick the bucket? 

Nothing happens when you die. Spirit and brain are the same. Neural impuls make you 'aware' when the brain shuts down so does everything else.
The body slowly turns to dust and you will be gone totally.
Stop romanticing your death.

You stop living, some people cry, your family anties up the $8,000+ it costs to bury/cremate you, and life moves on without you.

That's what happens when you die. 

Oh really? I didn't know that!

This is like the "Heaven" thread :P
I have a religious point of view so my answer would be that there's a lot for us once we die

Life goes on for other people, but not for you. Your body shuts down, your brain erodes and you have no thought. There will be no moving to othe rplains of existence.

God you people are so morbid and pessimists. Here I thought I was a bad pessimist. :/ Maybe I just think more deeply than some of you.

I'm an optimist. I'd like to think than when we die people mourn our loss and then celebrate our life. But I'm open to the possibility that it might be the other way around.

But to be serious for a sec. I'm an existentialist when it comes to life and death. At the moment of our death we cease to exist outside of our physical corpse. But that is in no means a sad or hopeless concept to me. We've got a short span on this verse, so we need to make sure we fill what time we have with as much living as possible. And hopefully, we'll have an impact that will outlast us.


As Jean Paul Sartre said "Death is a continuation of my life without me"

Okay, here's my view on the matter:

There are three problems with how we observe the universe we exist in, namely, we have to use light to see, our methods of evaluation can ultimately only be done on a comparative scale, and our methods of observation must be done with time as a unidirectional vector.

If we see a house next to us, we'd say the house is big, but if you put it next to the empire state building, we'd say its small. Even if we use measurements, like "this building is 10 stories tall" the increments of measurement are entirely arbitrary.

As for the light issue, we cannot observe the location and velocity of a photon at the same time, because we use light in order to see. The only way we can tell where a photon is would be by hitting it with another photon so we could see the results, but the moment one photon would hit another, we would change it's velocity.

Then finally, the issue of time. Our lifespan is limited, and during it we can only observe the barest glimmer of a fraction of a percent of how the universe operates. We don't have save points to go back to that exact circumstance and check what other possibilities could have happened instead of what did. We can develop similar situations and see how they unfold, but ultimately it is impossible to create the exact same circumstances.

When we die, those limitations to our observation become null and void. Because we no longer have a physical manifestation within the universe, we no longer influence the universe by observing it. Thus we can learn completely unhindered and gain knowledge that would be impossible while still alive, which will let us come closer to the ultimate truth of the universe. (come closer to God, however with God being infinite, there will always be something more to achieve in the effort to come closer to it)

However, there are important lessons that we must learn from being alive. If someone told you that 2 + 2 = 4, without you ever seeing the physical process of 2 + 2 and then seeing them both together so that you could see 4, it would have no real meaning to you, and your ability to conceptualize it would be hindered.

That is why we need to continue to live as long as possible, even though dying ultimately will allow us to learn far more than we could alive. Unless we develop a strong foundation during our life, we'll be handicapped when we die. At the same time though, death is not something that we need to fear, as long as we used our life effectively.

However, when I say "learning" I don't just mean scientifically. There are also matters of Right and Wrong, Existence of God and of ourselves, Love, Sorrow, Hatred, All emotions, Creation and Destruction, Peace and War, Balance and Discord, Growth and Stagnation, Logic and Faith.
If during life, we haven't come to understand these issues properly, it will cause problems after death. It is from this that I feel the concepts of Heaven and Hell stem: If you have learned properly, you will be able to recognize the truth of what you learn after you die, and it will be a heavenly place to you, but if everything you had learned during life is wrong, and you are not able to accept that you are wrong and make the effort to learn what is right (repentance) before death, then everything you learn after death will conflict and you will be stuck unable to learn anything. Which will essentially be an eternity of torture.

^^^ That's the kind've answer I was looking for. *moan*