Claudia Lucía Medina Guardiola
July 21, 2025
It was a night in Istanbul. I was traveling with my family. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a thought of death took over my mind that refused to leave my brain, which spiraled into a week-long metaphysical crisis. Therefore, as I usually do, I started investigating different plausible theories on what happens after the inevitable.
I explored various theories, ranging from the concept of going to heaven to the idea of becoming the universe itself. And based on the materialist theory of death (which I am not particularly fond of), I concluded that death does not occur from a subjective point of view. Since, if death is the non-existence of something, and consciousness cannot experience non-existence, then death does not happen in consciousness.
This is not meant to be an academic or research paper on death. It is a reflection of a sixteen-year-old trying to make sense of one of the most complex and debated subjects for centuries.
To get started, it is important to understand what materialism is and its idea of death, since that is what my thesis is based on. According to Britannica Encyclopedia, materialism in philosophy is that all facts (including consciousness) are causally dependent upon physical processes. This means that the human mind and “soul” are completely dependent on the neurons and nerves inside the brain and that our experience is a mere complex chemical process. When those neurons die, the consciousness dies along with them.
Of course, there are many philosophies that do not agree with materialism in this matter. For instance, Plato suggests that consciousness exists independently of the body, that the world of physical senses and the world of abstract forms are fundamentally different. Meanwhile, other instances, like Buddhism, propose reincarnation, or the Abrahamic religions, an afterlife. These show that the debate of death is far from over and that our current knowledge of reality has not yet reached a definitive answer.
However, from the perspective of materialism, our “soul” is incapable of living or transcending into something or somewhere else (worth mentioning that materialism believes there isn’t anything above us). That there is no “self” without a functioning body, as the body itself is the “self”. So, people who follow this philosophy believe that when the body ceases to function, so does our subjective conscious experience. No afterlife, no reincarnation, no nothing.
Many may say that this philosophy did not arise until science took over every field, and therefore, it can be wrong because we are just starting to discover its limits. However, there have been many materialists since ancient times. For one, Epicurus. He is the famous Hellenistic philosopher who claimed that “Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not.” This sentence alone both terrified me and calmed me down. And since then, many philosophers and (now) neuroscientists have joined the stream of materialism.
The latter explanation does not mean that I agree with the idea at all. Materialism, in my opinion, is very limited to only what we see in the natural world, without questioning whether there could be something else (note that when saying “something,” I am not referring to anything in the natural world). However, their idea of death captivated my eye. Although it was uncomfortable to hear that nothing happens after death, I later figured that if nothing happens, then it cannot occur.
The term “nothing” has been widely debated, as it represents the absence of something. It is impossible to define the concept, as it is not a concept in the traditional sense. This means that even the perspective of “the absence of something” is framed by what our idea of what absence is, which already implies existence. For example, we imagine nothing as a dark or empty room, or as a void, when we should not be able to picture it at all, as it is not an “it.”
When stating that “nothing happens after death,” one will imagine it as being deeply asleep, or under anesthesia. However, things are happening in the body; something is going on, even if it is unconscious. But when the body quits functioning completely, there is no person to anesthetize or someone sleeping –there is neither beginning nor end, making this analogy fail. I have been thinking for a while about a metaphor that could enlighten the reader, but any that can be imagined will likely be wrong, since they require experience. Parmenides articulated it very clearly, as he believed that only the being exists, and that the non-being is therefore logically impossible.
The point is that if nothing happens after death, then death doesn’t happen at all from a subjective point of view –I say subjective because we can see when someone dies. I showed a quote from Epicurus earlier in this reflection, in which he says that “...when death exists, we are not.” However, I would argue that death does not exist in consciousness, as it is nothing, and nothing is the absence of existence.
It is important to note that I am not claiming that the experience of dying does not happen. Before death itself, the body will start failing while we are still (somewhat) conscious.
I remember that night in Istanbul, where I could not possibly imagine any of the theories of death happening to me or my loved ones. I am not very fond of the materialist hypothesis of death, it seems impossible for me to align with religion, and I cannot seem to correctly comprehend the other theories of it. That is the reason why I came to the rather strange conclusion that death does not even arrive when we leave, because there is no “arrival” for nothingness. Dying happens, but death does not.
So, if death does not happen at all, why should we be scared of it? Why should we fear the ultimate definition of nothing? Maybe, what we fear is not what happens after death, but what doesn’t happen after it. And sadly, that is something we won’t be able to discover when the moment arrives –or not. A good friend of mine once told me that dying occurs to everyone, but ironically, no one knows what it is like, or if anything happens after it.
Although this reflection was written to argue and showcase a theory of death, it doesn’t mean that I fully support it. I have no idea or certainty of what happens after the inevitable, or if it even happens. Even though I wrote this to cope with that fact and try to find an answer, I still have doubts about my conclusion. Regardless, if I base myself on the theory I composed, perhaps death is not when we arrive at the end of the tunnel, but rather that tunnel never existed.
Smart, John Jamieson Carswell. "Materialism". Encyclopedia Britannica, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/materialism-philosophy.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. "denial of Not-Being". Encyclopedia Britannica, 2010, https://www.britannica.com/topic/denial-of-Not-Being.
Van Gulick, Robert, "Consciousness", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2025 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#RepThe
Winter, Max. “Dualism (philosophy of mind)”. EBSCO, 2022, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/dualism-philosophy-mind