What Happens When You Die?

Two essential things happen when a conscious organism dies:

  • The organism’s brain stops working, as a result of either a direct injury to the brain or a lack of oxygen to the brain.
  • The consciousness that is associated with the working brain disappears.

But What Happens to You When You Die?

What most people mean when they ask, ‘what happens when you die?’ is ‘where do you — the thinking you — go?’

There is a common misunderstanding about consciousness: that it exists apart from the workings of the brain. There is no reason to believe that consciousness — or awareness, or thinking — is anything other than an aspect of the electro-chemical activity within the brain.

Although the detailed workings of the brain are poorly understood, it has been obvious for a long time that the functioning brain produces consciousness:

  • Damage to particular areas of the brain results in predictable changes to specific aspects of consciousness and personality.
  • Memory, the one essential aspect of consciousness, is clearly related to the physical structure of the brain. This is especially obvious in the growing and then declining strength of memory as the organism ages.
  • There is no credible evidence that any aspect of consciousness reflects anything other than physical experience.

Where Does the Noise Go?

A good — though imperfect — analogy would be to ask where the noise of a car engine goes when you switch off the engine. You get into the car; you put the key in the ignition and start the engine; and the noise appears. The noise is obviously an aspect of the workings of the engine: the metal parts rubbing against each other, the explosions in the pistons, the gases passing through the exhaust system, and so on.

Asking where you go when you die is like asking where the engine noise goes when you switch off the engine. The noise was there, then it wasn’t there. So it must be somewhere else!

Of course, it’s the wrong question. The noise is nowhere when you switch off the engine, just as it was nowhere before you switched on the engine. Just because it existed at one point in time, does not mean that it existed at an earlier or later point in time. Everything we know about car engines tells us that there is nothing to the engine noise except what is happening to the physical components of the car.

Even the simplest animal brain, let alone a normal adult human brain, is a vastly more complex machine than a car engine, and it works in a quite different way. But as with the noise of a car engine, there is no reason to believe that consciousness — the intangible thing that all self-conscious beings think of as themselves — is something that exists separately from the workings of the brain.

One of Many Brief Permutations

When your brain ceases to function, you — a unit of subjective experience and memory — vanish. The physical components of your body will be dispersed and reorganised in innumerable different permutations over the aeons after your death, but those permutations that resulted briefly in that unit of subjective experience and memory known as you will have disappeared for good.