What does it feel like to be dead?

What does it feel like to be dead?

Probably not nothingness. Here's a thought experiment: 

A man offers you $1 million to participate in the following experiment: Be killed in a painless, non-inconveniencing manner, and immediately thereafter "resurrected" using a super-high-resolution 3D printer which re-creates you from raw materials (with perfect precision down to the very last atom and neuron in the exact same state right before you died). Would you participate because you believe you will persist in the replica and enjoy the $1 million (continue living life)? Or would you decline because you believe the replica is just a separate individual with your same thoughts/memories and the original you would be dead forever (feeling nothing, never able to enjoy the $1 million)? 

• If you decline (you think the replica is a separate individual who gets to enjoy the $1 million, and you'll be dead forever), then you must also fear "death" in 10 years, even if you live. That's because every decade or so, every single atom in your brain has been cycled out due to eating food and pooping poop, so you retain almost none of the original materials that made your brain 10 years ago. If your identity is tied to the specific atoms that make up your brain, you already died many times.

• If you participate (you think you persist in the replica), then you agree you would continue to experience the world in this replica. That raises the question: If the brain were a tiny bit different, would it still be you? Of course, because when you get a concussion, your brain becomes damaged, but no one says their consciousness is being replaced by another observer. But then you realize, you could make a replica of you whose brain is 99.999% the same as yours. And, you can't see the world from two viewpoints at once. Actually, maybe even a mouse brain is 1% the same as yours, and you obviously aren't seeing the world 1% from a mouse's point of view. And you start to realize the only solution to this whole conundrum: Somehow, the pure feeling ofawareness in the present moment must a fundamental property of the universe.Emotions, qualia, ego, identity etc. are manufactured by the brain, but the single bit of "I am aware therefore something exists" is not.

The fact is, we don't know how "consciousness" (the uncanny feeling of being certain one's own present moment of awareness exists) happens. A human brain is only "more conscious" than a rat brain because it is more complex. It is only "more conscious" than a pile of falling dominoes because it is more complex. Since the uncanny "I, right now, am here" feeling does not appear to be explained by brain activity, it makes sense for it to be a ubiquitous property of the universe that exists whenever anything interacts with anything. Death would then be more like separation from ego/self rather than complete consciousness shutdown, which is more like everythingness than nothingness.