[...] That one second there will be a you. And the next second there will not be a you? That's the premise at least, until we actually undergo this bungie cord jump into totally opaque unknownness. Let's think about what death means for a moment..
Death is a significant milestone for public observations of the soon-to-be buried or cremated body, but not as privately significant as qualitative consciousness terminating. The deepest forays into human vegetable-hood don't coincide with death. While living matter in that state still has a future or worldline to wrap-up, the phenomenal continuum associated with it has prematurely run into its permanent brick wall (barring a miracle mental resurrection).
At least deteriorating into a p-zombie phase seems impossible, where one would still be walking about and appear to other people to be aware and having experiences, but just as much be basking in an absence of everything as when dead. While there's such a condition as blindsight, apparently the rest of the modes lack discovered equivalents (deaf-hearing, odorless-smelling, unfeeling-somatosense, blank-introspection, etc). Even if the latter deficits were the case, the chance of suffering all of them at once would be an extraordinary convergence.
Should the "real" status given to
this particular moment simply be a biased gift of cognition (i.e., validity of block-time), then this would not alter the final functioning configuration of D_Smith's body or the final coherent instant of D_Smith's experiences from having no further modifications or developing versions of D_Smith to cognitively shift or transit to. In the past, six-year old D_Smith yet has plenty of "track" left ahead for gradual transformations into very restricted new identities, but elderly D_Smith has tapped into the last of those. It's either return to the general empty abyss that sufficiently disorganized matter is like to itself or somehow rewind out of that to the similar nothingness that a fetal mind was emerging from in the womb 91 years ago. Or as a remote third option, appeal to some multiverse hypothesis that sports a parallel reality where D_Smith remains alive but minus the specific memories of this world. ["Smith, we're ready to transplant your brain into the robo-body, thanks to ancient Greek progress avoiding its fizzling-out or being interrupted for _X_ centuries."]
[...] Whatever else the AFTERdeath may be, death itself is simply the angst-generating presence of our total and eternal absence from the universe. How is such a thing even conceivable? [...]
If awareness and reflection were perversely still available, it would at least be egotistically comforting that the rest of the universe had disappeared along with the presence of one's body and thoughts, too. Of course, the cosmos is still being manifested and understood by other surviving minds, but it's too broadly stupid and devoid of passion to appreciate finally having such empirical and intellectual evidence for its existence after billions of years. While dying, there's always that rather useless bit of self-esteem which the doomed, insignificant human can feel in contrast to his/her rule-following yet "more clueless and insentient than a microbe" nature god.
