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Alzheimer's and Consciousness

Temporal

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The parent of a colleague at work has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and they are already experiencing the early stages of dementia. I have also had a personal encounter with someone who declined until death due to Alzheimer's. I wanted to bounce some ideas about consciousness off this community. Feel free to critique them if you want, I am open.

I have reframed the common way of viewing Alzheimer's. I think it's a natural process. When you die, you fully let go of this personality. I'm not saying nothing moves on, but I don't believe this ego does. It is temporary. What Alzheimer's shows us is this process of ego dissipation happening more gradually, instead of all at once like if you experience death with ego relatively in tact. People are disturbed by it because they are not used to seeing it in slow motion. In most people's idea of death, it happens more immediately... which is why religion and other philosophies have more room to speculate. It even gives us room for our denials or hopes about death. Alzheimer's shows you the truth, and that can mess with ego's non-verifiable concept of itself and the way it self-references.

Alzheimer's has taught me that this personality, this "I" that we keep referring to, is not real. It is not inherent. When you are born, someone tells you that you're a "you", that this is your name, and you are a person, with a self. It's repeated so many times to you that you assume it is true. This does not survive death.

However, there is something much more subtle and still unique that does remain. It's your essence and it can never be affected by anything that is happening in the body. When people say "I will live on forever"... it's true in that the unnameable, permanent aspect of being will go on, but "I" will not. Whatever or whoever you were told that you were does not. So I don't view Alzheimer's in a negative or scary light.

Once you realize that the story of "you" is a very temporal one, life has a lot more freedom and meaning. At least, that is where I'm coming from. Just a side note too - this is not an escapist philosophy. It's quite the opposite.

In relation to Alzheimer's, I often hear that people say they would rather commit suicide than suffer to the bitter end. Theology has long been against suicide because suicide falls prey to despair, despair is a privation of hope, and suicide allows no time for subsequent forgiveness. So I think that there are reasons for a fear of damnation due to suicide; though I personally think that despair in such a situation is forgivable. Despair in the face of certain mental oblivion strikes me as an exceptionally understandable sin.

To actually go through with it takes either great courage (if you believe that this "you" is real), or a profound and deeper understanding of what you are about to do. It's the ultimate detachment. In other places in the world it is an acceptable or even honourable way to die. We live in the Universe and we are also part of it. To die is to simply return to what you already are. The notion that there can be damnation attached to that, to me, is a form of attachment in of itself - that death must be something or mean something. Your understanding of meaning is just as temporal as you are.

People have ideas about death that they think are real - I count myself as one of them. But you have to wonder what is asking the question.
 
My mother died of Lewy Body Dementia on February 13, 2011. She was brilliant. It hurt so much to see all of that stripped away to 'nobody home'. I have posted elsewhere of my intent to go to sleep in a snowbank, clutching a DNR, should I find out that will be my lot in life. Right now I am avoiding going in to "rule out" either Parkinson's or early stages LBD. I know I should, but I'm scared.

I think those of us who would choose a 'Get Out of Hell Free' card should have that option. I love my intellect, quick wit, and humor. I don't want to lose it to some sick, vicious disease.
 
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