"I cannot admit it," said Sergey Ivanovitch, with his habitual clearness, precision of expression, and elegance of phrase. "I cannot in any case agree with Keiss that my whole conception of the external world has been derived from perceptions. The most fundamental idea, the idea of existence, has not been received by me through sensation; indeed, there is no special sense-organ for the transmission of such an idea."
"Yes, but they--Wurt, and Knaust, and Pripasov--would answer that your conscousness of existence is derived from the conjunction of all your sensations, that that consciousness of existence is the result of your sensations. Wurt, indeed, says plainly that, assuming there are no sensations, it follows that there is no idea of existence."
"I maintain the contrary," began Sergey Ivanovitch.
But here it seemed to Levin that just as they were close upon the real point of the matter, they were again retreating, and he made up his mind to put a question to the professor.
"According to that, if my senses are annihilated, if my body is dead, I can have no existence of any sort?" he queried.
The professor, in annoyance, and, as it were, mental suffering at the interruption, looked round at the strange inquirer, more like a bargeman than a philosopher, and turned his eyes upon Sergey Ivanovitch, as though to ask: What's one to say to him? But Sergey Ivanovitch, who had been talking with far less heat and one-sidedness than the professor, and who had sufficient breadth of mind to answer the professor, and at the same time to comprehend the simple and natural point of view from which the question was put, smiled and said:
"That question we have no right to answer as yet." (Leo Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina)
This conversation appears in a novel that was written over 130 years ago. Those questions are still being asked by those neuroscientists who study consciousness. In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Antonio Damasio argues that such a structure exists in the basal ganglia and the hypothalamus as it organizes information from the brain stem and the neocortex. He suggests that the awareness of an existing self is a result of an ongoing comparison of an existing bodymap with bodymaps constantly created in response to internal and external stimuli. (I can't do justice to his well-reasoned and insightful prose, so I won't try to regurgitate his material. Read the book if you really want to know what he said. Better yet, read all his books.)
By that definition of consciousness, I maintain awareness of myself because of the barrage of images that continue to change my organism. The arrangement of seaweed on the beach sends a pulse of photons onto my retina, a chemical rush from my amygdala where that pattern recalls other associations pre-coded with emotion, a dance of directives from my sensory-motor cortex, a film of proprioceptive relationships that orient my body to the seaweed, and countless other images racing through my brain. Each neuron in the process works as a binary system that either fires or doesn't according to how it integrates the flow of excitatory and inhibitory stimuli coming into its dendrites. That way there are thousands upon thousands of organs to transmit the idea of existence.
One can even question the what the meaning of 'is' is (preferably at one's leisure rather than when on trial for perjury). The organization of stimuli into discrete items, such as a feather, a piece of seaweed, sand, an ocean, my body, and not into an abstract pattern of interference between electromagnetic waves is part of our typical way of thinking. When we interrupt that thought pattern with psychotropic drugs, meditation, sleep deprivation, or other state altering methods, we can also lose the ability to identify with a self. In the extremes, those kinds of interruptions do lead to a variety of unconscious states up to and including death. On the other hand, such experiences can expand our recognition of identity to include the totality of the energy field we call the known universe.
We may have no right to answer the question of what existence we will have when we no longer can sense through our bodies. The best we can do is recognize that while we do live what we sense is integral to who we feel ourselves to be. Our choices and our filters define what we know of existence. Death remains the ultimate mystery, an unparalleled shift of being that we can't know until we try. The comfort we can take is that if there is no existence after death, there is no one there to notice. If that doesn't strike you as a comforting thought, then you might consider meditation. It is a practice designed not just to reduce the stress in life but also to change the attachment to self in existence. In other words, it's not necessarily a preparation for death itself or for a ticket to a better afterlife, but it's a practice for a peaceful passage into whatever change of consciousness death entails.
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