I'm going to say it will be similar to the experience prior to birth / conception, ie. we were nothing, and to nothing we shall return.
It's a scary feeling if you can grasp it. Grasping non-existence from within existence is difficult, I've consciously tried to do it and succeeded a couple of times, but it's fleeting and both times it affected my breathing and heart rate in a similar way to fear or panic or pain.
As someone who was born, I can attest that the experience of not being born consisted of billions of years passing by in an imperceptibly short instant, followed by being five.
So you will experience something then, if you say that you experienced this nothingness before you were born :D ;)
What I was aluding to is that people have profound consciouss experience when they are dying. Even clinicaly dead people with zero brain activity. But even if EEGs can't detect extremely low brain activity, it's still weird to have such rich experiences.
I would have never found metaphysics in my life, if i didn't have a few unnatural experiences. I would not find the big explanatory gap between experience and matter, which is so obvious to me now. I would still be a materialist while not even knowing I was one, like many here in these comments.
Before I was a materialist like you and I was not afraid of dying, because like you, I thought it's just lights out and I am no more, so I can not suffer. But now I am more afraid od death, because of the unknown that follows.
> What I was aluding to is that people have profound consciouss experience when they are dying. Even clinicaly dead people with zero brain activity. But even if EEGs can't detect extremely low brain activity, it's still weird to have such rich experiences.
This is an extraordinary claim, any sources for it? Specially the point about "profound conscious experiences" in "clinically dead people with zero brain activity".
Do you know whether we live in a computer simulation?
If we do, well it would seem trivially possible for our simulators to provide us with an afterlife if they wished–and we honestly could have no idea what they might wish.
If you claim to know we don't live in a computer simulation, or that if we do, our simulators would be unlikely to grant us an afterlife–how do you know that?
P(we live in a computer simulation) ~= 0.5
P(there is an afterlife|we live in a computer simulation) ~= 0.5
Therefore, P(there is an afterlife) >= 0.25 even if we assume P(there is an afterlife|we don't live in a computer simulation) = 0.0 (which is itself highly debatable)
I go through that exercise of visualizing the void and it is fascinating and terrifying at the same time, especially if you do it before going to sleep.
That being said, you can't just assume that existence is bounded by your living memories. You might as well have been everything instead of nothing prior to being spawned and you just don't remember it.
> you can't just assume that existence is bounded by your living memories
I was going to raise that, but couldn't find a short enough way to describe it properly. Something like:
Existence beyond what you can actually remember doesn't matter because it's outside any bounds of practical discussion; it should be excluded from consideration. The same way it's impossible to predict anything 'before the big bang' because we only have 'after the big bang' as useful evidence. There is no way to verify any continuity if you can't remember it or if there is no evidence of it. There's no guarantee you can even comprehend what it could be, 'you' as a concept may not even exist and it's unlikely to be relate-able to anything in this living world. Maybe you return to being 0.00001% of the collective consciousness of the universe, or any other crackpot thing anyone wants to suggest. Flying Spaghetti Monster.".
If you're a materialist and you think there is no afterlife then I don't believe there would be a void. There's no mechanism for "you" to perceive a void or perceive time.
Its the difference between:
"I see nothing when I close my eyes" (actually you 'see' darkness over time)
and...
"I see nothing through my elbow" (You really don't see anything through your elbow because the capacity for it just doesn't exist.)
Even our basic perception of time is mediated by the structure of our brains... and without that there's no difference between one second and a trillion^trillion years.
I've always wondered why doing it before sleep amplifies the anxiety
It's very easy to grasp, do you remember what it was like before your first memory? No? That's what it's like.
Nope. That's a long way from grasping it. That's seeing it from a distance and understanding the general shape.
I may just be defining 'grasp' differently to you though.