On My Biggest Fear :- Being just an organic machine.

There's this nifty little Facebook application that's called "How well do you know me?". Essentially, it allows you to create a quiz that has questions about you which you feel that only people who "really know you" would know. You send it to your friends and they take the quiz and then you get the results.

So I created one of these quizzes and not surprisingly, not many people scored well on it(something I'll elaborate in a future post). One of those questions was "What is my biggest fear?" Now while most people had thought it would be to go shopping with females(note to self:- a future post here warning the inexperienced on why one should never do that). But no. The thing that I'm really afraid of is "Being just an organic machine." So this post is an attempt to explain it.

Have you ever had a sleepless night where you were afraid to fall asleep? Afraid that you'd never wake up? That's happened to me sometimes. Especially when I start thinking on what exactly does it mean to "sleep". My personal experience about sleeping is that I tend to fall on my bed and then the next thing I remember is that I'm waking up with the sun shining on my eyes. And this happens all the time. Without exception. Except maybe for some dreams which are vivid or energetic enough that I have some amount of conscious awake at that point of time.

That set me thinking. When I'm sleeping, the only time I'm aware of anything, is when I'm not in deep sleep but in some sort of dream. Thus, essentially when a person sleeps, the brain stops functioning. Every functionality of your brain, in fact of your body is turned off. When some parts of your body do get "switched on" (by mistake or by intent), what you get is yourself rolling around to get more comfortable or dreams.
Scientists with their fancy tools and instruments have attempted to map the brain activity during various times. What they seem to be saying is that the brain is not inactive during sleep but it's just less active. Thus, our ability to think is one of the first ones to go when we sleep to give preference to life sustaining ones like heart-beats and breathing.

So the whole point of my argument is that your ability to think is greatly reduced when you're brain is resting. What happens to it after death? Death is when your brain will get switched off completely. For real. What would it be like? Will I go into the promised "heaven"/"hell"(this suggests another future post on why I'm agnostic) with all my memories and my ability to think? What is it like to "not think"?

I believe one thing is pretty clear. On dying, you stop thinking in the sense that there are no more electrical signals flowing through your brain. It's similar to sleep, only wayyyyy more intense. Here, you really can't think, feel, see, hear, taste. Nothing. For real. Ever tried to imagine that? Try imagining that you're asleep. It's simpler.

But seriously, that's what I'm really afraid of. That at the end of the day, I'm just an organic being. My thoughts are electrical currents flowing in appropriate sections of my brain. Looking at myself the way an alien(who need not even be organic) who has never seen humans before would, I see a bunch of atoms desperately trying to stick together. All to end up being reused in other items even before I "die"(the typical theseus ship paradox).

So that's what I'm afraid of. (That's also the main reason why I'm agnostic.... I'll post on that too soon. For anyone whose going to come to me with explanations saying I have a "soul", "god" will "help" me etc etc please wait for that post. Read that one first before commenting. A bit of patience. Will post again on this within a few days.)