That's a good point, though I think it's also fair to say that you won't experience unending nothingness after death from that perspective, either. I can see how coming to accept that the world existed before our experience began could help one confront the world will continue to exist after our experience has ended.
I'm looking forward to the nothingness, the first 14billion years was nice enough. It's the time between everyday life and nothingness that worries me.
Idk, sounds kinda scary. Idk what it was like before, because I lacked consciousness to experience it. And the idea that it all ends, back to nothingness forever. We live a few years. Pretty much nothing, if we consider the forever before, and the forever after our existence.
It's something I recall fearing as a kid, due to the scary unknown. Glad to have enjoyed a decade of bliss. Too bad the fear has come back to haunt me. It's not constant, though. Sometimes it comes, outta nowhere. Real strong. Not fun. But I don't live day to day in fear.
The thing is, once youre dead, there won't be consciousness, you will not have any perception of a void, you won't know anything because you will not be.
Marc Maron put it into good perspective. He was hiking in the hills and passed out. He noted that he could very well have been dead, and that would have been that. He wasnt scared because he wasnt conscious.
You can't be afraid when you dont exist and you will not be aware of anything.
I don't believe in God nor am I religious, but consciousness just feels so fucking weird man. Everything in the world can be explained through science and physics, cause and effect, hell even our brains and actions are just a chain of atoms interacting. But consciousness just feels so out of place. Why am I? Why am I even aware of my own existence? Why has a set of atoms resulted in my non-material consciousness? It feels so out of place. Why isn't it just a bunch of atoms bumping into eachother, why am I capable of feeling and thinking?
I think about this more than anything in those quiet "run the brain's existential dread garbage collection routine" moments.
Self aware consciousness is just so wild. Like you say, how does it even exist? But it's also so common on our little planet here (even if we only count the humans) that it is as commonplace as it is spectacular.
It feels like this magical "extra" thing, but at the same time the evidence kinda suggests it's just something that naturally happens once you get complex life.
I think it's important to point out that the bicameral mind is one theory, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's true. One of its major criticisms is that it suggests consciousness only arose in humans around the time we started writing about it, and that it didn't exist in humans before then. It's also entirely possible that humans were conscious way before that, but when we started writing about it was just when we developed the cultural concept of what consciousness is.
The theory also seems to imply there is something special about human metacognitive processes compared to other animals, which would therefore imply that animals are not conscious. That seems weirdly reductive when various non-human animals show some evidence of self-awareness (mirror spot test, Alex the grey parrot).
It's a nice theory which ties lots of things together, but it's no more true than any other theory of consciousness at the moment.
I was really curious to check out that first book after your short version.
But damn, the subject matter of that second book might draw my attention first. The Buddhist approach & techniques made so much sense to me in a completely pragmatic way.
I might have to order myself physical copies of both of these to read outside by my koi pond on cool fall days. The fact that the whole scene will be so on the nose to the point of being cliched will just amuse me further, lol.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Edit: oh jesus christ there's a koi on the cover of Why Buddhism is True, haha. Looks like I should invest in the hardcover.
The weirdest thing to me is that it's literally impossible to measure and detect whether something has consciousness. Every other thing in our universe can be measured theoretically, even if not by our current tools, but there is no way to confirm that someone else is experiencing what I am experiencing currently. It's just so weird.
You are the construct of a million cells, an evolutionary "trick" that allows all the pieces to act as one. Your task is to percieve your environment and survive in it.
Sure, I get the biology and technical aspect of it and I can understand that something could evolve whose atoms would move in such a way that it results in an object that is capable of responding dynamically to its roundings, plan and think. But for that collection of atoms to then result in this experience, I feel is extraordinarily exceptional.
The thing is, once youre dead, there won't be consciousness, you will not have any perception of a void, you won't know anything because you will not be
Do we really know this though?
What if upon death we exit the simulation?
Sometimes I think non-sim me decided to play life on hard mode. I’d kind of like to kick his ass for that. But then I realize he is me.
Do we really know our dentists aren’t CIA agents installing radios but calling them fillings?!
What happens after death is just about the least concerning thing I can imagine. (yay rejoice!) Anywhere from seconds to decades of stuff to worry about before that! :) (oh no anxiety again sorry!)
That's precisely the scary part. A nothingness, for all of eternity. It ends, never to continue. I do not know what it is like. Just… not seeing. Not hearing. None of the senses, and no thoughts either. No consciousness.
I wouldn't be scared after dead, cuz I'dn't have the consciousness for that. However, being alive, I can. I can fear the eternal nothingness of inexistence
I think this may or may not have some connection to a post from that monkey in the brain guy who also has a TED Talk (Tim Something?). I recall seeing a post of his about life or something. Talked about how short our lives are in the grand scheme of things. Had even an image with days or weeks or months of life, like a progress bar
On the other hand, reading that people actually close to death don't worry as much as people imagining being close to death, iirc, may have had a positive impact in my fear. Though I recalln't well
Dear brother/sister rest your mind. You cannot control what will happen and worry/fear will only agitate you.
I don't like the idea of life being over, but it is inevitable. Seek acceptance and peace with this so you do not waste your precious hours with unnecessary discomfort. There is so much more to enjoy while we are still here!
Loss of life is followed by mourning - except when it is our own. Some spend decades mourning the end of their lives because they are scared of facing it down. You've done the big scary part already. Now spend the time taking yourself through all of your fears. Once you come to acceptance it doesn't change what will be, but it will trouble you a lot less.
Well, there technically may not be an eternity. Universe is 14 billion years old now....in 32 trillion years or so the last black holes and last particles will cease to exist. Time will no longer have any meaning, and the nothingness will be all there is.
Well, maybe not eternity, but that sure is a whołe lot of time for someone who'll be around for probably less than 100 years (not sure why 100 is the number I think of when I think of an age limit to life. Is this a common occurrance, folks? Or just me? I mean, I do know some people go past it, but still…)
Why are you so sure about this? Believing there is no reincarnation is just a religious dogma of Christianity or rather all abrahamitic religions and therefore deeply engraved in our culture so we don't even consider other possibilities. Similar to how in buddhist and hinduistic cultures reincarnation is the default way of imagining life before birth and after death.
Believing there is no reincarnation is just a religious dogma of Christianity
I don't know that that's true.
We as a society don't know what happens when we die, conscious-wise. To state "we definitely do come back" or "we definitely don't" would be incorrect, just like saying "there's definitely aliens" vs "there definitely are not".
However, we can use evidence we've gathered over thousands of years of existence and make assumptions. Unless I'm mistaken, there's little evidence that has been accepted by the scientific community (Western or Eastern) to support reincarnation, so to say that "we don't come back" is a Christian dogma is a little unfair.
To be clear I don't have a strong opinion on reincarnation. I've heard compelling stories that are hard to explain otherwise, but I feel like we'd have been able to gather at least some concrete data on it over the span of our existence.
Brother, you and I are the universe recycled / reincarnated over and over again living life one day at a time like a real metaverse. This consciousness is a dream, although we can't tell because we're inside the dream. Unlike the dreams in our sleep, biting this finger hurts for real, but real is a thing you perceive just like how we perceive money to be real in an engaging game of Monopoly.
This is the way. Life can only be recognized as such in the context where an absence of life is also present, but ultimately both (life and no-life) are just interpretations of what we call existence.
That's exactly my point. What's the concrete data against reincarnation would someone from a buddhist culture ask (probably even when they aren't religious). I am just saying what we accept as default and for what we demand evidence depends on the cultural background.
I might have formulated it exxagerated. But believing in "YOLO" is as evidence based as believing in reincarnation.
Similar as atheism is a belief as well: believing that there is no god. How do they know? It seems my point of view is more agnostic than most here.
Words like "atheism" or "agnostic" make sense as shorthands for everyday conversations or labelling, but if you want to be rigorous about it, it makes more sense to use 4 categories:
Gnostic theist: I know there's a God, I've met Him, I feel it, I have faith, etc.
Agnostic theist: I don't know if there's a god or not, but I prefer to believe there's one
Agnostic atheist: if we don't know if there's a god or not, there's no reason to believe there's one. Do you assume there's an invisible giant teapot orbiting Earth because there's no proof to the contrary?
Gnostic atheist: a god can't possibly exist, the concept of a god is illogical, etc.
I'm agnostic atheist, but maybe there could a firm reasoning for the gnostic atheist position. I don't know, I would have to read and think about it more.
Interesting categories, but I don't find myself in any of them: We don't know if there is a god therefore I neither believe in its existence nor in its non-existence because it doesn't matter anyway. If god(s) exist they either don't affect human lives or they do it without letting us know how and why. In both cases there is no reasons to change anything in my life.
I think this view is called apathetic or pragmatic agnosticism.
I don't know, that seems very similar to agnostic atheism to me. Is there any situation where you would act differently if you'd consider yourself agnostic atheist instead of apathetic agnostic?
I don't know but there are probably explanations. One that I could imagine is that there really is only one consciousness or soul that splits itself up in as many parts as it wants to experience the universe and itself.
You could ask questions like that about the belief that there is no reincarnation or soul as well. Where does consciousness come from? What is it? How can electrochemical reactions be the equivalent of tasting a pizza?
I don't believe in a soul. That is definitely not religious dogma.
The idea that reincarnation is the default and one would have to be indoctrinated against it is... I would say, a very interesting position to take, if I'm being polite.
I am rather saying it is nothing we can prove or disprove and both views ar equally legit. It just seems to us one view is more legit because of our cultural background.
Same as with God? I don't think so. Don't you think there are things that cannot be proven or disproven? My point is the default position depends on the cultural background.
Sure? Christianity? Nah, atheism. I just don't walk around believing stuff just because other people believe it. And if reincarnation is real I don't see it as coming back, you're a different person after all.
About 22 years ago or so, after not taking psilocybe mushrooms for a couple years, fasting for 24 hours, I took an uncounted tens of grams of dried, fine-powdered, strong psilocybe semilanceata, hot, in just lemon juice, and chugged that pint of thick mushroom super-lemony brew down as fast as i could. It started coming on FAST and STRONG. Ran the 3 strides to the bathroom sink with need to purge, which didn't last long nor purge much of it... clinging to the sink as I slumped down, with the trip immensity roaring at the doors bursting in at all the seams, I tried to steady myself, I meditatively focused on a drop of water, empathising with it likewise clinging to the underside of the sink. I empathised my way instantly to know where every molecule, and every atom, of the water in there, had ever been, and it was a short jump from there to realise I could do that with everything. My experience is that every atom, every subatomic particle, have omnidirectional infinite sense of the entire cosmos.... and this was only in the beginning seconds of the hours long trip, the ability to see behind things, to know from every perspective, everybody, all time, all times, all dimensions, all realms, all places, all interacting potentials... I cant speak to it really, only to say I remember I did experience it. Cannot take it all back with you.
First exchange with other people after I came out of the toilet, friends had come around, one asked "how was it?", and with it all still being fresh, the immensity of having experienced omniscience, sought to offer what I thought was the most beautiful thing of it all... I said, with all glowing reverie "I know death". The look of horror on the poor dear's face though. Ho ho ho.
But yeah, get that... we mere mortals, many, all around, can experience omniscience.
Because, now that i aquired conciusness, i dont want to lose it. i dont want to re experience nothingness. ffs id rather suffer for eternity than not live at all.
if religion wasnt so unbelievable id probably be religious. but alas i just have to hope that i am wrong in my understanding that there is no afterlife
Without a brain and no small amount of power (20% of your calorie count at rest on average, less when jogging, more when doing the calculus) the age of the universe goes by instantly. You don't track time.
You also don't track heat or pain, or memories good or bad. You don't contemplate your trials and tribulations. You could be in the core of the sun at over a million degrees Celsius and not feel a thing or care how you got there.
The universe has been around for thirteen billion years, and will be around for even longer, and we only get this moment. And then it's gone.
yeah my husband brought this up a few days ago actually and was talking about the movie and I was like do you remember me mentioning that I literally actually did that? 4 times around apparently!
if my mother hadn't forced me out early to intentionally lower my birth weight (I'm the last child and size tends to increase with subsequent births, my next oldest sibling complicated delivery by size alone) I might've succeeded too.
Having grown up with the concept of an eternal hell hammered into my head since day 1, I spent many years fearing the after much more than the transition.
Nothingless void is as believable as afterlife. From scientific point of view neither make sense, it's like we're giving ourseleves some metaphysical distinctiveness from the rest of universe but are merely physical bodies inside of it according to our scientific knowledge. And according to that we precisely know what's after death: we rot in grave, and that's it. But that answer is not satisfying for us, because what we call our consciousness will stop existing at some point, and we try to find logical state of us, when there is no longer us. I don't really think it's possible to describe how's that like at all.
But why call it void if there's no void at all? Or nothingness. There's only void and nothingness when universe ends (according to facts about our universe). Yet people still think about it as a state of our consciousness, when there is no really any 'state' after we die. It's like NULL vs UNDEFINED or uninitialized variable in programming, or at least I see this that way.
We are not cursed to know, we are blessed! We are a fantastic arrangement of atoms that so happen to be arranged into people instead of rocks!
We are, at the end of the day, infinitely small chunks of the Universe able to see, experince, know, and look back into ourselves!
I may be hammered, and the world is in an especially frightening place at the moment, but damn is it good to have my atoms arranged into a person instead of a tree
I did not choose to be here and I resent that there are expectations put upon me when I wasn't the reason I am here now.
I also resent that I was born just to die one day.
It is also fundamentally horrifying that so many people are born into painful awful experiences and then die, with that being more or less mostly all they knew while alive. And that some people live happy lives on its own doesn't justify the horror in my eyes at all.
That said, I wish I could be drunk right now but I'm at work.
We live and we die, but we don't start or stop existing. Everything that is us is still here. And in time, what was us becomes something new and different.
The miracle of life is a rare and magical opportunity for a bit of our grand panoply of matter to direct its own future. And, I believe, the horror of death is in that return to idleness and loss of control. We don't want to return to the sidelines, to be put back on the shelf. We don't want to become mere stuff again. We want to keep playing the game.
... Yeah but... that experience... Never mind. If you're offering that, you missed the point.
Oh, and I've had OBE NDE too... the line's blurred.
"First thing they taught us in StarFleet medical school. Tricorders, good with living people, not so good with dead." -- Dr Bashir to Kira in DS9... or words close to that effect.
If I knew for a fact that I was going to die instantly, without even knowing it happened, I'd be worried about how my loved ones would feel, but okay with it as far as I'm concerned.
This is a very deep and true post for a shitpost. It’s basically when you go to sleep and don’t dream, but you don’t wake up. It’s just a black void of nothingness.
Only during REM sleep, and even then, it's not the same as alert-and-aware consciousness.
During non-REM sleep, during which your body does most of its growth, healing and cell replacement, death stops by for a visit. See also when under general anesthesia.
Unless the universe is truly infinite, then from the point of view of your continuity of consciousness, you will never die, because they will always be somewhere in infinity where you're exact current consciousness picks right up after you die without a blip.
In an infinite universe every configuration of matter that can possibly exist will just due to the laws of statistics. Meaning in an infinite universe there's are infinite identical copies of this solar system exactly as it is, isn't, and everything in-between. Since you obviously can't observe your life if you're dead, in such a universe you will always experience your point of view from the position of a living copy somewhere else that was identical up until that point. Now of course its not the other you physically. But if the mind is exactly the same it is you mentally.
Its more or less the star trek transporter problem taken to a logical extreme. If you step into a star trek transpoter and are reassembled with identical memories elsewhere, are you still you? If its yes, it must also be yes for the universal thought experiment.
Neurodegenarative disorders poke holes in the infinite consciousness idea. Each day the brain slowly wears away, the consciousness of self is never the same.
Not to mention that the universe itself is pretty certain to end eventually. If there isn't a big crunch, then every single atomic partlcle has a half life, one day there will be near 0 protons left.
My take on consciousness is that you essentially 'die' each time you go into a deep sleep. When you wake, a new stream of consciousness starts in a brain ever so slightly different from the one that fell asleep the night before. Your new consciousness remembers everything you once did and is in a brain that handles stimuli and emotions almost exactly as the day before. But it isn't the same, it cant be as cells have died or been replaced during the down time that was a deep sleep.
Better to think there is an end after death, infinite consciousness would be terrible as you would eventually just be utterly sick of existence after a googleplex of years has passed by. I don't understand the concept of heaven, as good as it would be at first, it would eventually become torture of non stop existence.
In an infinite universe every configuration of matter that can possibly exist will just due to the laws of statistics
Not necessarily. There is an infinite set of numbers containing the positive integers, but it still excludes the negative integers. Why should an infinite universe be any different?
I mean yeah, sure, maybe. You're making some pretty lofty claims based on a philosophical thought experiment about a phenomenon we still don't really understand though.
I'm sitting...I don't know..."outside" of time? Observing it all as if you would a timeline while scrolling through a video... I get to a point where the character on screen, which is also me, dies and I pause the video, slap in another stream from another reality where I don't die and I keep going...
Your statement sounds almost identical to my dream....
Your comment reminds me of a video, might have been Tyson, that said something like 'if you look in any direction far enough, you will find another solar system with the exact same properties as ours'. That's infinity. There are infinity possibilities. In that solar system, is there an exact copy of you, and are they reading this comment right now?
Lucky. I think about my own mortality literally every single night, it's become a pattern that I have to just stop thinking about, like, block that thought, think about something else otherwise panic.
I hate hate hate that I'm going to die, I will rage against it for as long as I live (hopefully forever as CRISPR will allow... Right?)
Ah, death anxiety. Check out Heartworm, it's a survival horror game about a girl with death anxiety who goes to a spooky house which lets her pass over to the other side to find the answers she's been searching for her whole life. It's a really beautiful game.
And I am not frightened of dying,
any time will do, I don't mind
Why should I be frightened of dying?
There's no reason for it, you've gotta go sometime
what i'm scared of is not getting to experience things, the fact that i missed out on history isn't much better but at least that was rather difficult to do anything about..
it's like finding an amazing book and thinking about when you'll have read it all, it just fucking sucks
Living in recent times, there's a lot of historic events happening I'd rather not be around for. Just wait until the climate collapse stops playing around with foreshadowing and the dildo of consequences arrives
What I really don't understand is bringing more people into temporarily existing without the ability to get their consent and calling it a "gift" that now they get to face the lovecraftian horror of future non-existence.
Pre-birth is not like post death. The arrow of time doesn't reverse.
Ah, I don't believe it's a case of not remembering.
Many nights I simply do not dream of anything at all, or at least when I wake up I have absolutely no recollection of dreaming about something.
I do also have dreams that fade after awhile as you'd expect, and have occasionally written down things I found interesting about them, but overall my dreams are an infrequent occurrence.
You either do it diligently because you want to dream more, or you don't because you're fine "not dreaming".
I don't care either way, but intentionality and belief are a factor. Doesn't sound like it's a goal/intention of yours currently, and that's fine. Continue to not dream or not recall your dreams.
So like the universe is expanding and shit in every direction. Eventually the universe will hit its maximum point of expanse and start shrinking in every direction until it has shrunk down to its point of maximum density. Then boom a big bang and the universe starts again. We'll be back eventually. Maybe not in this universe or the next but eventually over the course of forever we'll be back.
But would a rearrangement of our atoms into identical beings be the same person as us? Maybe it would be just different consciousnesses having the same experiences, and we would never be back.
Because it was terrifying to be in a state of nonexistence. Thinking about not having what i currently have or even the fact that I'm very much likely not even going to have a state of being where i can even remember the things i had done in my life is truly fucking terrifying to me.
My current self wants to look at more cute bees and sniff more sunflowers. It doesn't matter if my future self wouldn't care (on account of not existing), my current self still really wants to do more of that.
My thoughts immediately go there on abortion: before birth, I never had the consciousness to experience & want life, so I'm incapable of caring about missing out before that capacity to care could even start.
The "loss" is absolutely meaningless to me.
Even under the golden rule, abortion seems okay: I wouldn't care about being aborted.
So why are others caring more than I would?
Which judgement? Are we reincarnated into a form based upon our virtue? Are we trying to die a glorious warrior to feast with Wotan? Does "the god" demand blood sacrifice, killing all? Do we turn the other cheek to vibe with Yaweh? Do we simply sink into the potter's ground, destined to have our current atoms remade, even though we are a single drop of rain, or shall we remain?
Because I forgot what it was like
Can't forget something that doesn't exist.
It did but you wasn’t aware of it at the time
I have never experienced unending nothingness, only noted the nothingness after it was over
That's a good point, though I think it's also fair to say that you won't experience unending nothingness after death from that perspective, either. I can see how coming to accept that the world existed before our experience began could help one confront the world will continue to exist after our experience has ended.
I'm looking forward to the nothingness, the first 14billion years was nice enough. It's the time between everyday life and nothingness that worries me.
Just had a friend die of a heart attack while working in construction with his friends. Didn't make it to the hospital.
That's how I want to go. Just times up one day.
So sorry for your loss. You're right - your friend is "fine" now. It's the people we leave behind that can have a hard time with it.
Thanks
Idk, sounds kinda scary. Idk what it was like before, because I lacked consciousness to experience it. And the idea that it all ends, back to nothingness forever. We live a few years. Pretty much nothing, if we consider the forever before, and the forever after our existence.
It's something I recall fearing as a kid, due to the scary unknown. Glad to have enjoyed a decade of bliss. Too bad the fear has come back to haunt me. It's not constant, though. Sometimes it comes, outta nowhere. Real strong. Not fun. But I don't live day to day in fear.
The thing is, once youre dead, there won't be consciousness, you will not have any perception of a void, you won't know anything because you will not be.
Marc Maron put it into good perspective. He was hiking in the hills and passed out. He noted that he could very well have been dead, and that would have been that. He wasnt scared because he wasnt conscious.
You can't be afraid when you dont exist and you will not be aware of anything.
I don't believe in God nor am I religious, but consciousness just feels so fucking weird man. Everything in the world can be explained through science and physics, cause and effect, hell even our brains and actions are just a chain of atoms interacting. But consciousness just feels so out of place. Why am I? Why am I even aware of my own existence? Why has a set of atoms resulted in my non-material consciousness? It feels so out of place. Why isn't it just a bunch of atoms bumping into eachother, why am I capable of feeling and thinking?
I think about this more than anything in those quiet "run the brain's existential dread garbage collection routine" moments.
Self aware consciousness is just so wild. Like you say, how does it even exist? But it's also so common on our little planet here (even if we only count the humans) that it is as commonplace as it is spectacular.
It feels like this magical "extra" thing, but at the same time the evidence kinda suggests it's just something that naturally happens once you get complex life.
You might find some answers in Julian Jaynes The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
Short version: consciousness is kind of new. We aren't really good at it.
Also, Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright is very good. Less about Buddhism more about how we think and why it works.
I think it's important to point out that the bicameral mind is one theory, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's true. One of its major criticisms is that it suggests consciousness only arose in humans around the time we started writing about it, and that it didn't exist in humans before then. It's also entirely possible that humans were conscious way before that, but when we started writing about it was just when we developed the cultural concept of what consciousness is.
The theory also seems to imply there is something special about human metacognitive processes compared to other animals, which would therefore imply that animals are not conscious. That seems weirdly reductive when various non-human animals show some evidence of self-awareness (mirror spot test, Alex the grey parrot).
It's a nice theory which ties lots of things together, but it's no more true than any other theory of consciousness at the moment.
Correct. In the case of the question, I believe there is value to be gained, even if there are flaws in the argument.
I was really curious to check out that first book after your short version.
But damn, the subject matter of that second book might draw my attention first. The Buddhist approach & techniques made so much sense to me in a completely pragmatic way.
I might have to order myself physical copies of both of these to read outside by my koi pond on cool fall days. The fact that the whole scene will be so on the nose to the point of being cliched will just amuse me further, lol.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Edit: oh jesus christ there's a koi on the cover of Why Buddhism is True, haha. Looks like I should invest in the hardcover.
I got a lot out of Wright's book and I continue to revisit it.
It is a slow read that demands your attention, but it is very enlightening.
I will keep that in mind. I look forward to taking my time with it. Thank you again!
I ordered the other book too, but Wright's book here has definitely jumped to the front of the line.
The weirdest thing to me is that it's literally impossible to measure and detect whether something has consciousness. Every other thing in our universe can be measured theoretically, even if not by our current tools, but there is no way to confirm that someone else is experiencing what I am experiencing currently. It's just so weird.
You are the construct of a million cells, an evolutionary "trick" that allows all the pieces to act as one. Your task is to percieve your environment and survive in it.
Sure, I get the biology and technical aspect of it and I can understand that something could evolve whose atoms would move in such a way that it results in an object that is capable of responding dynamically to its roundings, plan and think. But for that collection of atoms to then result in this experience, I feel is extraordinarily exceptional.
Do we really know this though?
What if upon death we exit the simulation?
Sometimes I think non-sim me decided to play life on hard mode. I’d kind of like to kick his ass for that. But then I realize he is me.
You can't know until then, so what is the value in worrying?
Do we really know our dentists aren’t CIA agents installing radios but calling them fillings?!
What happens after death is just about the least concerning thing I can imagine. (yay rejoice!) Anywhere from seconds to decades of stuff to worry about before that! :) (oh no anxiety again sorry!)
:)
That's precisely the scary part. A nothingness, for all of eternity. It ends, never to continue. I do not know what it is like. Just… not seeing. Not hearing. None of the senses, and no thoughts either. No consciousness.
I wouldn't be scared after dead, cuz I'dn't have the consciousness for that. However, being alive, I can. I can fear the eternal nothingness of inexistence
I think this may or may not have some connection to a post from that monkey in the brain guy who also has a TED Talk (Tim Something?). I recall seeing a post of his about life or something. Talked about how short our lives are in the grand scheme of things. Had even an image with days or weeks or months of life, like a progress bar
On the other hand, reading that people actually close to death don't worry as much as people imagining being close to death, iirc, may have had a positive impact in my fear. Though I recalln't well
Dear brother/sister rest your mind. You cannot control what will happen and worry/fear will only agitate you.
I don't like the idea of life being over, but it is inevitable. Seek acceptance and peace with this so you do not waste your precious hours with unnecessary discomfort. There is so much more to enjoy while we are still here!
Loss of life is followed by mourning - except when it is our own. Some spend decades mourning the end of their lives because they are scared of facing it down. You've done the big scary part already. Now spend the time taking yourself through all of your fears. Once you come to acceptance it doesn't change what will be, but it will trouble you a lot less.
Well, there technically may not be an eternity. Universe is 14 billion years old now....in 32 trillion years or so the last black holes and last particles will cease to exist. Time will no longer have any meaning, and the nothingness will be all there is.
What a shit hand we were dealt.
Well, maybe not eternity, but that sure is a whołe lot of time for someone who'll be around for probably less than 100 years (not sure why 100 is the number I think of when I think of an age limit to life. Is this a common occurrance, folks? Or just me? I mean, I do know some people go past it, but still…)
And you never will. You'll experience it exactly as much as you already have (none). So there's nothing to fear.
The way you are now is the only way you will ever be.
Because there is no coming back.
We only get one ride in this rollercoaster and half of us want to make the ride living hell for the rest of us.
Half? Try an alarmingly small number and they are damn good at it.
Cannot step in the same river twice. Nor with the same feet.
Why are you so sure about this? Believing there is no reincarnation is just a religious dogma of Christianity or rather all abrahamitic religions and therefore deeply engraved in our culture so we don't even consider other possibilities. Similar to how in buddhist and hinduistic cultures reincarnation is the default way of imagining life before birth and after death.
I don't know that that's true.
We as a society don't know what happens when we die, conscious-wise. To state "we definitely do come back" or "we definitely don't" would be incorrect, just like saying "there's definitely aliens" vs "there definitely are not".
However, we can use evidence we've gathered over thousands of years of existence and make assumptions. Unless I'm mistaken, there's little evidence that has been accepted by the scientific community (Western or Eastern) to support reincarnation, so to say that "we don't come back" is a Christian dogma is a little unfair.
To be clear I don't have a strong opinion on reincarnation. I've heard compelling stories that are hard to explain otherwise, but I feel like we'd have been able to gather at least some concrete data on it over the span of our existence.
Brother, you and I are the universe recycled / reincarnated over and over again living life one day at a time like a real metaverse. This consciousness is a dream, although we can't tell because we're inside the dream. Unlike the dreams in our sleep, biting this finger hurts for real, but real is a thing you perceive just like how we perceive money to be real in an engaging game of Monopoly.
This is the way. Life can only be recognized as such in the context where an absence of life is also present, but ultimately both (life and no-life) are just interpretations of what we call existence.
That's exactly my point. What's the concrete data against reincarnation would someone from a buddhist culture ask (probably even when they aren't religious). I am just saying what we accept as default and for what we demand evidence depends on the cultural background.
I might have formulated it exxagerated. But believing in "YOLO" is as evidence based as believing in reincarnation.
Similar as atheism is a belief as well: believing that there is no god. How do they know? It seems my point of view is more agnostic than most here.
Words like "atheism" or "agnostic" make sense as shorthands for everyday conversations or labelling, but if you want to be rigorous about it, it makes more sense to use 4 categories:
Gnostic theist: I know there's a God, I've met Him, I feel it, I have faith, etc.
Agnostic theist: I don't know if there's a god or not, but I prefer to believe there's one
Agnostic atheist: if we don't know if there's a god or not, there's no reason to believe there's one. Do you assume there's an invisible giant teapot orbiting Earth because there's no proof to the contrary?
Gnostic atheist: a god can't possibly exist, the concept of a god is illogical, etc.
I'm agnostic atheist, but maybe there could a firm reasoning for the gnostic atheist position. I don't know, I would have to read and think about it more.
Interesting categories, but I don't find myself in any of them: We don't know if there is a god therefore I neither believe in its existence nor in its non-existence because it doesn't matter anyway. If god(s) exist they either don't affect human lives or they do it without letting us know how and why. In both cases there is no reasons to change anything in my life.
I think this view is called apathetic or pragmatic agnosticism.
I don't know, that seems very similar to agnostic atheism to me. Is there any situation where you would act differently if you'd consider yourself agnostic atheist instead of apathetic agnostic?
So where do the „extra“ humans come from in these religions? What I mean is the increasing number of people being alive at the same time.
I don't know but there are probably explanations. One that I could imagine is that there really is only one consciousness or soul that splits itself up in as many parts as it wants to experience the universe and itself.
You could ask questions like that about the belief that there is no reincarnation or soul as well. Where does consciousness come from? What is it? How can electrochemical reactions be the equivalent of tasting a pizza?
There's a long line to get in.
I don't believe in a soul. That is definitely not religious dogma.
The idea that reincarnation is the default and one would have to be indoctrinated against it is... I would say, a very interesting position to take, if I'm being polite.
An arrogant position even.
Sounds rather arrogant to me to think there is a default position for something like that.
I am rather saying it is nothing we can prove or disprove and both views ar equally legit. It just seems to us one view is more legit because of our cultural background.
No, it is pretty much the default position until you can prove that it happens.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Especially if declining to look.
Same as with God? I don't think so. Don't you think there are things that cannot be proven or disproven? My point is the default position depends on the cultural background.
Sure? Christianity? Nah, atheism. I just don't walk around believing stuff just because other people believe it. And if reincarnation is real I don't see it as coming back, you're a different person after all.
About 22 years ago or so, after not taking psilocybe mushrooms for a couple years, fasting for 24 hours, I took an uncounted tens of grams of dried, fine-powdered, strong psilocybe semilanceata, hot, in just lemon juice, and chugged that pint of thick mushroom super-lemony brew down as fast as i could. It started coming on FAST and STRONG. Ran the 3 strides to the bathroom sink with need to purge, which didn't last long nor purge much of it... clinging to the sink as I slumped down, with the trip immensity roaring at the doors bursting in at all the seams, I tried to steady myself, I meditatively focused on a drop of water, empathising with it likewise clinging to the underside of the sink. I empathised my way instantly to know where every molecule, and every atom, of the water in there, had ever been, and it was a short jump from there to realise I could do that with everything. My experience is that every atom, every subatomic particle, have omnidirectional infinite sense of the entire cosmos.... and this was only in the beginning seconds of the hours long trip, the ability to see behind things, to know from every perspective, everybody, all time, all times, all dimensions, all realms, all places, all interacting potentials... I cant speak to it really, only to say I remember I did experience it. Cannot take it all back with you.
First exchange with other people after I came out of the toilet, friends had come around, one asked "how was it?", and with it all still being fresh, the immensity of having experienced omniscience, sought to offer what I thought was the most beautiful thing of it all... I said, with all glowing reverie "I know death". The look of horror on the poor dear's face though. Ho ho ho.
But yeah, get that... we mere mortals, many, all around, can experience omniscience.
And many are, and ever have. Say hi.
If you know you know
Basically you
Because, now that i aquired conciusness, i dont want to lose it. i dont want to re experience nothingness. ffs id rather suffer for eternity than not live at all.
if religion wasnt so unbelievable id probably be religious. but alas i just have to hope that i am wrong in my understanding that there is no afterlife
You didn't acquire consciousness, you acquired a human life.
Eternity is a loooooong time
Without a brain and no small amount of power (20% of your calorie count at rest on average, less when jogging, more when doing the calculus) the age of the universe goes by instantly. You don't track time.
You also don't track heat or pain, or memories good or bad. You don't contemplate your trials and tribulations. You could be in the core of the sun at over a million degrees Celsius and not feel a thing or care how you got there.
The universe has been around for thirteen billion years, and will be around for even longer, and we only get this moment. And then it's gone.
Because now I know what I'd be missing.
Times like that, we experience it in one direction only
apparently I literally tried to strangle myself on my umbilical cord in the womb but my take on that was that I knew what was coming.
Just like The Butterfly Effect ending we watched in class!
yeah my husband brought this up a few days ago actually and was talking about the movie and I was like do you remember me mentioning that I literally actually did that? 4 times around apparently!
Damn, well done.
if my mother hadn't forced me out early to intentionally lower my birth weight (I'm the last child and size tends to increase with subsequent births, my next oldest sibling complicated delivery by size alone) I might've succeeded too.
Bought the ticket. Take the ride. Came here with purpose, despite the trepidation.
The After is not what we fear. It is the pain of the transition
Having grown up with the concept of an eternal hell hammered into my head since day 1, I spent many years fearing the after much more than the transition.
Ah well, Religion does that for you.
I'm not afraid, I'm annoyed. I'll never get to finish my unfinished books. >:(
Or my Steam library.
Afraid? Hardly. More like
Nothingless void is as believable as afterlife. From scientific point of view neither make sense, it's like we're giving ourseleves some metaphysical distinctiveness from the rest of universe but are merely physical bodies inside of it according to our scientific knowledge. And according to that we precisely know what's after death: we rot in grave, and that's it. But that answer is not satisfying for us, because what we call our consciousness will stop existing at some point, and we try to find logical state of us, when there is no longer us. I don't really think it's possible to describe how's that like at all.
Nothingness void is just another phrase for "irreversible loss of consciousness. Which is orders of magnitudes more believable than afterlife.
But why call it void if there's no void at all? Or nothingness. There's only void and nothingness when universe ends (according to facts about our universe). Yet people still think about it as a state of our consciousness, when there is no really any 'state' after we die. It's like
NULLvsUNDEFINEDor uninitialized variable in programming, or at least I see this that way.The universe ending is not actually fact. It's just a theory.
The first part of your comment is contradicting the last part of it.
How exactly? I don't see it.
The key is to accept that the end of consciousness is a feature of existence, and not a bug.
Cope harder meatbag
This strangely made me feel a better about the concept of death.
Sometimes I think about it and fall in a few seconds of existential dread. But this kinda...makes it make sense?
It brought me some comfort too.
I wasn't burdened by the curse that is awareness before I was born, and hence now as a result of this awareness, I am scared.
We are not cursed to know, we are blessed! We are a fantastic arrangement of atoms that so happen to be arranged into people instead of rocks!
We are, at the end of the day, infinitely small chunks of the Universe able to see, experince, know, and look back into ourselves!
I may be hammered, and the world is in an especially frightening place at the moment, but damn is it good to have my atoms arranged into a person instead of a tree
I did not choose to be here and I resent that there are expectations put upon me when I wasn't the reason I am here now.
I also resent that I was born just to die one day.
It is also fundamentally horrifying that so many people are born into painful awful experiences and then die, with that being more or less mostly all they knew while alive. And that some people live happy lives on its own doesn't justify the horror in my eyes at all.
That said, I wish I could be drunk right now but I'm at work.
We live and we die, but we don't start or stop existing. Everything that is us is still here. And in time, what was us becomes something new and different.
The miracle of life is a rare and magical opportunity for a bit of our grand panoply of matter to direct its own future. And, I believe, the horror of death is in that return to idleness and loss of control. We don't want to return to the sidelines, to be put back on the shelf. We don't want to become mere stuff again. We want to keep playing the game.
Tbf nobody has ever experienced either because experience is exclusive to being alive and conscious
That's not my experience.
https://lemmy.wtf/post/29561303/17363745
If you had an experience at all then you weren't dead
... Yeah but... that experience... Never mind. If you're offering that, you missed the point.
Oh, and I've had OBE NDE too... the line's blurred.
"First thing they taught us in StarFleet medical school. Tricorders, good with living people, not so good with dead." -- Dr Bashir to Kira in DS9... or words close to that effect.
People come back from being dead all the time.
Or at least somewhere in that blurred line.
You do know Star Trek is fictional, right? If they "came back" then they weren't dead, simple as
It's not the death part that scares me. It's the transition between living and dead that's going to suck.
But then I had a really terrible November 2024 and am still suffering a high-suicidality psychotic break, so my opinion might be biased.
Well for what it's worth I'm glad you're still around to contribute to the conversation :)
I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of dying
Came to say the same thing. Dying sounds painful, even in most of the best case scenarios
If I knew for a fact that I was going to die instantly, without even knowing it happened, I'd be worried about how my loved ones would feel, but okay with it as far as I'm concerned.
This is a very deep and true post for a shitpost. It’s basically when you go to sleep and don’t dream, but you don’t wake up. It’s just a black void of nothingness.
It’s just that I kinda like being conscious…
You're still conscious during sleep you just don't remember most of it.
Only during REM sleep, and even then, it's not the same as alert-and-aware consciousness.
During non-REM sleep, during which your body does most of its growth, healing and cell replacement, death stops by for a visit. See also when under general anesthesia.
Unless the universe is truly infinite, then from the point of view of your continuity of consciousness, you will never die, because they will always be somewhere in infinity where you're exact current consciousness picks right up after you die without a blip.
I don't think that's how infinity works
Edit: thinking about it some more, there's nothing to say that's how consciousness works either lol
Something about "there's an infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1, but none of them is 2" idk
In an infinite universe every configuration of matter that can possibly exist will just due to the laws of statistics. Meaning in an infinite universe there's are infinite identical copies of this solar system exactly as it is, isn't, and everything in-between. Since you obviously can't observe your life if you're dead, in such a universe you will always experience your point of view from the position of a living copy somewhere else that was identical up until that point. Now of course its not the other you physically. But if the mind is exactly the same it is you mentally.
Its more or less the star trek transporter problem taken to a logical extreme. If you step into a star trek transpoter and are reassembled with identical memories elsewhere, are you still you? If its yes, it must also be yes for the universal thought experiment.
Neurodegenarative disorders poke holes in the infinite consciousness idea. Each day the brain slowly wears away, the consciousness of self is never the same.
Not to mention that the universe itself is pretty certain to end eventually. If there isn't a big crunch, then every single atomic partlcle has a half life, one day there will be near 0 protons left.
My take on consciousness is that you essentially 'die' each time you go into a deep sleep. When you wake, a new stream of consciousness starts in a brain ever so slightly different from the one that fell asleep the night before. Your new consciousness remembers everything you once did and is in a brain that handles stimuli and emotions almost exactly as the day before. But it isn't the same, it cant be as cells have died or been replaced during the down time that was a deep sleep.
Better to think there is an end after death, infinite consciousness would be terrible as you would eventually just be utterly sick of existence after a googleplex of years has passed by. I don't understand the concept of heaven, as good as it would be at first, it would eventually become torture of non stop existence.
Not necessarily. There is an infinite set of numbers containing the positive integers, but it still excludes the negative integers. Why should an infinite universe be any different?
We already have 1 example of earth existing, so we know its part of the set.
I mean yeah, sure, maybe. You're making some pretty lofty claims based on a philosophical thought experiment about a phenomenon we still don't really understand though.
I keep having this recurring dream...
I'm sitting...I don't know..."outside" of time? Observing it all as if you would a timeline while scrolling through a video... I get to a point where the character on screen, which is also me, dies and I pause the video, slap in another stream from another reality where I don't die and I keep going...
Your statement sounds almost identical to my dream....
Your comment reminds me of a video, might have been Tyson, that said something like 'if you look in any direction far enough, you will find another solar system with the exact same properties as ours'. That's infinity. There are infinity possibilities. In that solar system, is there an exact copy of you, and are they reading this comment right now?
🤯 😭
I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of the part before that.
Same, let's try and make that bit before that less shit, hey?
We are genetically configured to survive at all costs. That fear is simply the wiring in your head ensuring you do what you can to survive.
You can safely compartmentalize it. store it up there with your irrational fear of clowns.
Yeah, the teacher wasn't afraid at all. Nope, no genetics causing that teacher to be afraid. /s
The previous billions of years of void was a grandiose buildup to the world's largest nothing-burger, followed by an eternity of void again.
what about the cool bug fact?
fucking apostrophe abuse
The shitpost's will continue until morale improves'
look here you little 'shit...
I'm not
Lucky. I think about my own mortality literally every single night, it's become a pattern that I have to just stop thinking about, like, block that thought, think about something else otherwise panic.
I hate hate hate that I'm going to die, I will rage against it for as long as I live (hopefully forever as CRISPR will allow... Right?)
Ah, death anxiety. Check out Heartworm, it's a survival horror game about a girl with death anxiety who goes to a spooky house which lets her pass over to the other side to find the answers she's been searching for her whole life. It's a really beautiful game.
Now I know something to compare it to.
DarkSide
You can't "experience" nothingness. Even if you could, you can fear things you've experienced before...
what i'm scared of is not getting to experience things, the fact that i missed out on history isn't much better but at least that was rather difficult to do anything about..
it's like finding an amazing book and thinking about when you'll have read it all, it just fucking sucks
Living in recent times, there's a lot of historic events happening I'd rather not be around for. Just wait until the climate collapse stops playing around with foreshadowing and the dildo of consequences arrives
What I really don't understand is bringing more people into temporarily existing without the ability to get their consent and calling it a "gift" that now they get to face the lovecraftian horror of future non-existence.
Pre-birth is not like post death. The arrow of time doesn't reverse.
I dont get it either. Guess we are wired different.
Memes like this just make me get anxious thinking about the past
Hey, remember when Hitler invaded Poland?
Hey, remember when Trump invaded Greenland? Oh. Right. That's called foreshadowing.
I used to think I didn't dream, eventually I realized that the blissful nothingness I (don't) experience between sleeping and waking up was the dream.
Keep a dream journal, eventually you'll start remembering them.
Oh boy, sleep! That’s where I’m a Viking!
Ah, I don't believe it's a case of not remembering.
Many nights I simply do not dream of anything at all, or at least when I wake up I have absolutely no recollection of dreaming about something.
I do also have dreams that fade after awhile as you'd expect, and have occasionally written down things I found interesting about them, but overall my dreams are an infrequent occurrence.
You either do it diligently because you want to dream more, or you don't because you're fine "not dreaming".
I don't care either way, but intentionality and belief are a factor. Doesn't sound like it's a goal/intention of yours currently, and that's fine. Continue to not dream or not recall your dreams.
I'm sorry that sharing my personal choices and experiences has aggravated you so much 🙄
🔇
I literally said "I don't care either way".
So like the universe is expanding and shit in every direction. Eventually the universe will hit its maximum point of expanse and start shrinking in every direction until it has shrunk down to its point of maximum density. Then boom a big bang and the universe starts again. We'll be back eventually. Maybe not in this universe or the next but eventually over the course of forever we'll be back.
But would a rearrangement of our atoms into identical beings be the same person as us? Maybe it would be just different consciousnesses having the same experiences, and we would never be back.
ngl i plan to be a digital being by 2060
Art become reality, ye are the 21st century digital boy
Fear not, the dark, my friend. And let the feast begin.
A feast in the dark? Ehhh... :/
Put a light on. Less messy.
You know. This oddly actually makes me feel a bit better about this.
Me too!
Cool bug Fact is
Because it was terrifying to be in a state of nonexistence. Thinking about not having what i currently have or even the fact that I'm very much likely not even going to have a state of being where i can even remember the things i had done in my life is truly fucking terrifying to me.
I had nothing to lose before I was born. There is the difference.
I'm happy. I'm just pointing out that there is a difference.
I remember what it was like, that's why I am afraid of it.
And came out screaming, so I'm on the fence on this one
Let me go back to my eternal slumber
Amen
My current self wants to look at more cute bees and sniff more sunflowers. It doesn't matter if my future self wouldn't care (on account of not existing), my current self still really wants to do more of that.
It's not the nothingness, it's how you get to the nothingness that sucks.
Because if I die I'll miss the rest of the Kingkiller Chronicles.
They will surely release any day now.
And the next Boards of Canada album.
Any day now, just like winds of winter. Just hold on....
My thoughts immediately go there on abortion: before birth, I never had the consciousness to experience & want life, so I'm incapable of caring about missing out before that capacity to care could even start. The "loss" is absolutely meaningless to me. Even under the golden rule, abortion seems okay: I wouldn't care about being aborted. So why are others caring more than I would?
But will I wake back up before the sun destroys our universe?
seems much more likely that someone new will be born after I die and experience life.
Even these days?
I admire your optimism. ;D
What a great fact, I love it.
wow so cool!
By the time I get there I'll probably be begging for it.
Which judgement? Are we reincarnated into a form based upon our virtue? Are we trying to die a glorious warrior to feast with Wotan? Does "the god" demand blood sacrifice, killing all? Do we turn the other cheek to vibe with Yaweh? Do we simply sink into the potter's ground, destined to have our current atoms remade, even though we are a single drop of rain, or shall we remain?
Idk if I follow the logic.
"There may be something after death."
Religion is how we explained what we did not understand. Humans need a story, and an afterlife is a comforting narrative.
"It sounds plausable therefore it must be true."