"Since the day of my birth, my death began it's walk. It is walking towards me, without hurrying." Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
And in the course of time will return to that form so...we all get to go to the heaven but not in one piece or one place. Alex
Death is a definition. It's an observable change in a set of chemical reactions. If there is a woo-soul, what it woo-does when the chemical reactions change has nothing to do with death.
You're not listening. Death is a definition; it's what changes in our body chemistry. You don't prove definitions. You might as well ask for "proof" that a bird is a bird.
But it is. If you want to call your soul flapping off into eternity "death" nobody can stop you. But death is still what it is.
Perhaps an "assumption" when limited to the internal perspective. A conscious agent can experience its own dying process (slow rather than immediate). But not confirm its own death in a subjective context. The latter is left to surviving people to validate from the external perspective of that body becoming non-functioning matter (non-living). With the private experiences of the deceased individual assumed to have likewise terminated rather than their re-associating with an object in some other reality or this one (afterlife, reincarnation, multiverse copy, replay of the same life in block-time / eternalism, etc). Jesse Bering: The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife. As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a 1994 article for the Humanist: "Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally." Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died. You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a “you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done, it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way: “When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!” This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.” --Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death; October 2008 Scientific American Magazine
Yes, some of our atoms will possibly go to making-up other life (animals) on Earth or elsewhere. I have done the supernova bit, now I wondering if any of my atoms will ever end up in a black hole.
As I said, death is defined as, "formerly alive but no longer alive." The chemical reactions required to be "alive" are no longer working. New reactions have taken over.
Contentment can't die because it isn't alive. Of course the physical state of the brain that we call "contentment" certainly does come and go.