:
Yeah, minus the "forgotten about" part. We still remember our ancestors, right?
|
Oh yeah? Name your great-great-great-granddaddies, then.
The brain stops "minding". The mind, consciousness, is a verb. It's what the brain does. The energy of the active processes disperses as useless, entropic heat, which is exactly what happened throughout life, too, only now it won't be replaced by the neurons' metabolism. The unique structure of that brain (as it was at death, since it changes throughout life) that are the physical presence of memories and personality, and all physical and biological damage sustained throughout that life, begins to be lost as integrity is lost through putrefaction. Nothing besides the useless cadaver of that person remains. But those remains are not the only leavings that person has left. All through life, veritable tonnes of that person's living matter escaped into the environment, in the breath, urine, sweat. And it would be readily consumed by innumerable living organisms, incorporated into their bodies, and lost again just as easily, or re-purposed wholesale by the organism that consumes them. Some of it certainly returned to human bodies, perhaps even the same. The meager carcass we burn or bury is but a final eddy in the great wake of molecules churned up worldwide by that person's brief existence. And what is left will live again as certainly as the bastard's oceans of urine already is.
BUT I ALMOST FORGOT!
The mind is a verb, and all verbs are special and divine. Just as an ineffable essence of tea-stirring survives the moment I put down the spoon to drink it and undoubtedly exists indefinitely in the Afterstir, there is also an essence of consciousness that obviously survives brain death and exists indefinitely in an Afterlife. Because that just makes sense.