Nobody knows for sure. However, what we do know for sure is that we're all going to die some day, and scientific analysis lends more credence to nothing than eternal terror. So why would you worry about it? Assume the more likely, and more desirable outcome, rather than spending your days fearing a remote possibility.
Okay, well, I'm not going to argue with you. Point is, you should believe whatever's most comforting for you to believe, especially in accordance with your statement that no outcome is more or less likely. Since all outcomes are equally likely, there's no use in worrying about it at all. Whatever happens, happens, and all worrying about it now does is make the time before you die less enjoyable.
Well no, I haven't experienced it. Experiencing something is only possible with some kind of sensory organ - of which I had none before I developed them in this life. Not to mention any data "I" may have gathered back then was thoroughly erased so it doesn't affect this life in any way. Which means the void might actually be endless torture and I'd have no way of knowing.
Edit: just to be clear, I'm an atheist, I don't believe in rebirth or afterlife or souls or any such things. Just arguing for argument's sake with the "you've experienced it" part that I find unconvincing :)
We have near analogies that are close enough for us to have an idea. Anesthesia, being knocked out, dreamless sleep are closest to what we would consider "experiencing" oblivion. We can correlate the lack of experience or consiousness to the what we "experienced" prior to existing.
I get what you mean though, we can experience a transition out of and into non-experience, but cannot, as a matter of course, experience non-experience. There is no good reason (by my measure) to believe that there is anything other than just non-experience in the before and after phase of life. To the individual consciousness there is no discernable difference either. The matter/energy you are made of existed prior to and will continue to exist after you are gone, all that will be left is your memetic and causal imprint on our small bubble of reality.
Reminds me of the Mark Twain quote: "Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes."
Or as I explained to the head of my church when I was 19 and he asked me how I could not fear death if I did not believe in an afterlife: "I'm not scared of the idea of eternal nothingness after I die. Nothing can't be scary, because that's something, and then it wouldn't be nothing."
The void is fine, its actually preferable to the other stated alternatives. I fear the pain on my way there, and the pain my absence may bring to those I care for
But if you only can think about yourself as your 'current you' because that's all you can remember, then that's the only 'you' there is. A soul or whatever that transfers between subsequent lives but retains no memory, is effectively non existent.
How can you have infinite time to do something and never, ever do it?
There's no such thing as a perfectly zero percent chance of anything. Roll enough times, roll 52! times or Googolplex times and you'll see the most crazy shit happen
Because infinite possibilities does not include impossible events.
Imagine an infinitely long track. We will pretend, for the moment, that this represents whatever makes you "you" and that the track doesnt end like literally everything in creation.
You were placed on it by a unique set of circumstances including time, place, and genetics, but you will never be able to leave the track. That would, metaphorically, represent a life event like you flapping your arms hard enough to fly. It simply will not happen, no matter how long you travel down the track, because you are bound by the limits of the track (physical reality)
You still have an infinite amount of area to explore. Just not outside of what is possible.
You talking about the inevitable heat death of the universe?
Yeah there's a 100% chance that it won't stay like that. Just a matter of time until whatever caused the atoms and energies to become clumpy and imperfect is going to do it again in some big or small way. There's no beginning and end to the universe, which means that it has existed for an infinite amount of time, which also means that heat deaths have happened before
Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Everything has already happened and will always happen, over and over again in incomprehensible stretches of time that the human brain is not capable of quantifying
One day you will be a green pigeon with legs made of beans, who is the president of basketball planet. Everything has happened before and will happen again, just like anything ever
cosmology is an interesting subject, and what you're describing is a cyclic model of cosmology like is typical in hinduistic literature. however, physics points in a different direction, indicating that the universe is in fact continuously expanding, which is a non-reversible process.
the exact long-term fate of the universe is not 100% guaranteed. surely "heat death" is a possibility, but renewable energy exists on cosmological scales, so an intelligent species could utilize this possibility to build energy-harvesting machines that keep civilization running indefinitely.
We get it. You have infinity as your denominator and that takes you literally everywhere. However I must point out that if everything must happen “everything” includes an infinite unending static state to the universe. This is not a contradiction as we know some infinites are larger than others. Right after I am a green goose with a candy whistle for a dick, a permanent heat death of the universe will be the next thing to occur.
Because I don't remember experiencing the nothingless void... But if I go by the feelings I have when I think about it which is dread it must have been awful
A survival instinct is of immense evolutionary value. Nearly all creatures that have survived danger well enough to reproduce and pass forward their characteristics have done so by possessing a mechanism that causes them to respond to danger and try to avoid death. This is often communicated by strong emotional and physiological responses. Humans are advanced in this regard, in that we can conceptualize danger in our minds and experience the reactions in our body as though they were the same thing.
Working in hospice and working with people as they approach their transition and end of their experience here, there's a touch of comfort and anxiety watching the many ways people can go. There are definitely preferred ways to go, and some that are heartbreaking, and some that I would personally find terrifying. Don't fear comfort meds. They're there for a reason.
I'm an infantry combat veteran and my experiences with death lean more towards the violent. My only real goal is to live long enough to die naturally as the other ways all seem rather unpleasant, but if assuming I don't make it to a ripe old age, then I just hope it's quick.
The fear of death is more than the fear of experiencing death. Its also about the fears of not accomplishing enough, the fear of leaving loved ones alone and many more things.
That's the name of the pub owned by Cool Bug Fact. It's where a drunk person wearing red boxing gloves (as depicted in OP's picture) is talking your ear off about what comes or doesn't come after death, trying to convince themselves more than you that there's nothing to fear.
As someone who's lived with DPDR (depersonalisation derealisation disorder) my whole life this was genuinely how I felt about death for a long while.
My first experience in life was a void where I couldn't sense anything and didn't know I was a person but was still fully aware. Then I somehow appeared in 4 year old me's body as though I was used to animate a body.
Funnily enough, I also grew up in a family of orthodox faith, but I never really believed in it, instead I used to basically be a closeted Buddhist in a sense of believing reincarnation, but have since become atheist but still follow practices from both religions.
Being “part of the whole“ is such a beautiful concept. Mind, process of thought, is a prison in a sense.
After death, what once was you, will become a small part of a universe - a timeless, infinite creature. I don’t believe there’s God as a separate person - but I believe that universe itself is a God. Everchanging, everlasting chaos where everything and nothing makes sense.
But you're not annihilated in a material sense. You're rendered agentless - incapable of expression or engagement - as the machinery of your form fails you.
You're not gone, anymore than a spoon full of sugar dissolved in a glass of water. You are decomposed. Overwhelmed at last by all the other organisms trying to devour you. Then reincorporated into the next generation of stuff.
Water: 35 liters, carbon: 20 kilograms, ammonia: 4 liters, lime: 1.5 kilograms, phosphorus: 800 grams, salt: 250 grams, saltpeter: 100 grams, sulfur: 80 grams, fluorine: 7.5 grams, iron: 5 grams, silicon: 3 grams, and trace amounts of fifteen other elements... That's the total chemical makeup of the average adult body. For that matter, the elements found in a human being is all junk that you can buy in any market with a child's allowance. Humans are pretty cheaply made."
I missed SO much and I’m bummed about it. Aren’t you? I wish I could see the San Francisco Bay before a single European settler set foot on it. I would have loved to have been at Woodstock. And I want to see everything else that happens in the next 1000 years and beyond. We get a snapshot. It’s amazing but not nearly enough.
That makes sense in materialist metaphysics, but in recent decades materialism has become increasingly contested in philosophical circles. Philosophers like Bernardo Kastrup, Phillip Goff and David Chalmers being among the most prominent of its critics.
Personally, I would respect them, but not if they go against basic science. You can't just declare some sort of metaphysics and completely ignore actual physics.
96 replies
I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of dying. Once you're dead it's easy.
Once u’r dead its eas’y
Fixed it for you
Just the fact’s
You don't know it. Maybe it's eternally terrifying after.
Nobody knows for sure. However, what we do know for sure is that we're all going to die some day, and scientific analysis lends more credence to nothing than eternal terror. So why would you worry about it? Assume the more likely, and more desirable outcome, rather than spending your days fearing a remote possibility.
We don't know that either. Maybe one day science will discover eternal life.
There's absolutely no knowledge about what is on the other side. So there's no more or less likely outcomes.
Okay, well, I'm not going to argue with you. Point is, you should believe whatever's most comforting for you to believe, especially in accordance with your statement that no outcome is more or less likely. Since all outcomes are equally likely, there's no use in worrying about it at all. Whatever happens, happens, and all worrying about it now does is make the time before you die less enjoyable.
I'm not afraid of death, I'm in love with life.
I wasn't aware of the abyss before being born. Now that I'm alive, I can feel a certain way about it.
No.
Well no, I haven't experienced it. Experiencing something is only possible with some kind of sensory organ - of which I had none before I developed them in this life. Not to mention any data "I" may have gathered back then was thoroughly erased so it doesn't affect this life in any way. Which means the void might actually be endless torture and I'd have no way of knowing.
Edit: just to be clear, I'm an atheist, I don't believe in rebirth or afterlife or souls or any such things. Just arguing for argument's sake with the "you've experienced it" part that I find unconvincing :)
We have near analogies that are close enough for us to have an idea. Anesthesia, being knocked out, dreamless sleep are closest to what we would consider "experiencing" oblivion. We can correlate the lack of experience or consiousness to the what we "experienced" prior to existing.
I get what you mean though, we can experience a transition out of and into non-experience, but cannot, as a matter of course, experience non-experience. There is no good reason (by my measure) to believe that there is anything other than just non-experience in the before and after phase of life. To the individual consciousness there is no discernable difference either. The matter/energy you are made of existed prior to and will continue to exist after you are gone, all that will be left is your memetic and causal imprint on our small bubble of reality.
So my memes will live on?
Memes, the DNA of the soul!
It depends, are they fire?
Pretty mid, really.
Reminds me of the Mark Twain quote: "Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes."
Or as I explained to the head of my church when I was 19 and he asked me how I could not fear death if I did not believe in an afterlife: "I'm not scared of the idea of eternal nothingness after I die. Nothing can't be scary, because that's something, and then it wouldn't be nothing."
Live is a drug, once you try it, you cant have enough
I prefer to say it's habit forming. Better captures the battle with with the parts of you that want to quit
The void is fine, its actually preferable to the other stated alternatives. I fear the pain on my way there, and the pain my absence may bring to those I care for
I'm afraid I'll have to go through all this shit again.
Fun fact, according to other beliefs, you've already been through this shit infinitely. Only the YOU in this moment realizes this one.
There isn't really an effective 'you' then is there?
I think, the therefore I am.
I'm pink, therefore I'm spam.
Yeah but so does everybody so this doesn’t help delineate “you.”
But if you only can think about yourself as your 'current you' because that's all you can remember, then that's the only 'you' there is. A soul or whatever that transfers between subsequent lives but retains no memory, is effectively non existent.
I mean, is there anyway?
being dead is fine
it's the dying part that'll kill ya
A common saying on Roman tombs/graves:
Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo; often abbreviated as NFFSNNC.
It means, ‘I was not, I was, I am not, I care not.’
"IDKIDGAF"
If nonexistence was temporary before birth, surely it won't be temporary after birth
Yeah it'll be a hella long time before your mind molecules come together again, sure
But you won't feel how long it was. You'll just be born again with a new and different existence
Time goes to infinity, which means that there is a 100% chance of it happening again in any given amount of time
Not what infinite time means or implies.
How can you have infinite time to do something and never, ever do it?
There's no such thing as a perfectly zero percent chance of anything. Roll enough times, roll 52! times or Googolplex times and you'll see the most crazy shit happen
Because infinite possibilities does not include impossible events.
Imagine an infinitely long track. We will pretend, for the moment, that this represents whatever makes you "you" and that the track doesnt end like literally everything in creation.
You were placed on it by a unique set of circumstances including time, place, and genetics, but you will never be able to leave the track. That would, metaphorically, represent a life event like you flapping your arms hard enough to fly. It simply will not happen, no matter how long you travel down the track, because you are bound by the limits of the track (physical reality)
You still have an infinite amount of area to explore. Just not outside of what is possible.
Infinite possibilities, not infinite impossibilities.
Assumes the universe can’t reach a static state that it remains in forever. Final shape, if you will.
You talking about the inevitable heat death of the universe?
Yeah there's a 100% chance that it won't stay like that. Just a matter of time until whatever caused the atoms and energies to become clumpy and imperfect is going to do it again in some big or small way. There's no beginning and end to the universe, which means that it has existed for an infinite amount of time, which also means that heat deaths have happened before
Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Everything has already happened and will always happen, over and over again in incomprehensible stretches of time that the human brain is not capable of quantifying
One day you will be a green pigeon with legs made of beans, who is the president of basketball planet. Everything has happened before and will happen again, just like anything ever
cosmology is an interesting subject, and what you're describing is a cyclic model of cosmology like is typical in hinduistic literature. however, physics points in a different direction, indicating that the universe is in fact continuously expanding, which is a non-reversible process.
the exact long-term fate of the universe is not 100% guaranteed. surely "heat death" is a possibility, but renewable energy exists on cosmological scales, so an intelligent species could utilize this possibility to build energy-harvesting machines that keep civilization running indefinitely.
We get it. You have infinity as your denominator and that takes you literally everywhere. However I must point out that if everything must happen “everything” includes an infinite unending static state to the universe. This is not a contradiction as we know some infinites are larger than others. Right after I am a green goose with a candy whistle for a dick, a permanent heat death of the universe will be the next thing to occur.
Because now I know the difference and... I don't want to go.
Oof. Right through the heart.
Cool bug fact’s what? What does the cool bug fact own?? YOU CANT LEAVE US HANGING!
Cool bug fact's bad grammar
cool bug fact's
Because I don't remember experiencing the nothingless void... But if I go by the feelings I have when I think about it which is dread it must have been awful
A survival instinct is of immense evolutionary value. Nearly all creatures that have survived danger well enough to reproduce and pass forward their characteristics have done so by possessing a mechanism that causes them to respond to danger and try to avoid death. This is often communicated by strong emotional and physiological responses. Humans are advanced in this regard, in that we can conceptualize danger in our minds and experience the reactions in our body as though they were the same thing.
Its not the fear. Its the lack of gooning.
I'm not afraid of being dead, it's the actual dying that's terrifying.
Working in hospice and working with people as they approach their transition and end of their experience here, there's a touch of comfort and anxiety watching the many ways people can go. There are definitely preferred ways to go, and some that are heartbreaking, and some that I would personally find terrifying. Don't fear comfort meds. They're there for a reason.
I'm an infantry combat veteran and my experiences with death lean more towards the violent. My only real goal is to live long enough to die naturally as the other ways all seem rather unpleasant, but if assuming I don't make it to a ripe old age, then I just hope it's quick.
The fear of death is more than the fear of experiencing death. Its also about the fears of not accomplishing enough, the fear of leaving loved ones alone and many more things.
Facts does not need an apostrophe as it is neither possessing anything nor contracting with anything
That's the name of the pub owned by Cool Bug Fact. It's where a drunk person wearing red boxing gloves (as depicted in OP's picture) is talking your ear off about what comes or doesn't come after death, trying to convince themselves more than you that there's nothing to fear.
oh
Fact's is a contraction for "Cool Bug Fact's"
Another reason not to fear death: pedant's dont comment on shitpost formatting!
The void is not frightening, it's comfy and warm. I go there every night.
Death is not frightening, it is only a moment.
What is truly terrifying, Cool bug, is eternity.
its called a "nothingness void" for a reason
What happens if I don't achieve all my goals? I'm a completionist this will be devastating if I have like 97 out of 100 things done
99% gamer purgatory
Afraid? On the contrary, it takes everything I've got to not get their early.
After bug is the same as before bug.
You have already experienced the loss of bug. Do not fear the absence of bug.
directions unclear, bug now lodged in rectum.
no you got it right
Bug where bug belongs
I love this about bugs.
I have big FOMO. Its something Im working on
Alan Watts made a few points like this. Very interesting.
I'm going to save this and send it to a friend or family member who trusts me dearly, while they're having a bad trip.
Its funnier when they trust you 😂
I'm afraid of the psychopath who used an apostrophe there
Thanks bug. Im always saying this
As someone who's lived with DPDR (depersonalisation derealisation disorder) my whole life this was genuinely how I felt about death for a long while.
My first experience in life was a void where I couldn't sense anything and didn't know I was a person but was still fully aware. Then I somehow appeared in 4 year old me's body as though I was used to animate a body.
Funnily enough, I also grew up in a family of orthodox faith, but I never really believed in it, instead I used to basically be a closeted Buddhist in a sense of believing reincarnation, but have since become atheist but still follow practices from both religions.
To quote (or more likely paraphrase, it's been a while) Dan from the Game Grumps ... I'm not afraid of being dead. I'm afraid of dying.
A very good and well soothed explanation of what happens in the process of dying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZDDByT0Vr0
If you are afraid this video may help.
I’m not afraid of it, I just don’t have it in me to try again.
The grammatically incorrect apostrophe in the title is really rustling my jimmies.
The process of getting from one to the other is pretty awful.
I'm not afraid, in fact, I desire it. But there's a couple people who'd be pretty upset if I left, and I don't want to hurt them, so I'm stuck here.
same. also i’d lose the ability to learn more and more. which is a love of mine.
also: hugs.
J.O.S.S can tell you
Being “part of the whole“ is such a beautiful concept. Mind, process of thought, is a prison in a sense.
After death, what once was you, will become a small part of a universe - a timeless, infinite creature. I don’t believe there’s God as a separate person - but I believe that universe itself is a God. Everchanging, everlasting chaos where everything and nothing makes sense.
But you're not annihilated in a material sense. You're rendered agentless - incapable of expression or engagement - as the machinery of your form fails you.
You're not gone, anymore than a spoon full of sugar dissolved in a glass of water. You are decomposed. Overwhelmed at last by all the other organisms trying to devour you. Then reincorporated into the next generation of stuff.
I am more then just my atoms.
Water: 35 liters, carbon: 20 kilograms, ammonia: 4 liters, lime: 1.5 kilograms, phosphorus: 800 grams, salt: 250 grams, saltpeter: 100 grams, sulfur: 80 grams, fluorine: 7.5 grams, iron: 5 grams, silicon: 3 grams, and trace amounts of fifteen other elements... That's the total chemical makeup of the average adult body. For that matter, the elements found in a human being is all junk that you can buy in any market with a child's allowance. Humans are pretty cheaply made."
Sure, and Micro$oft and Linux are exactly the same because they run on the same hardware.
I missed SO much and I’m bummed about it. Aren’t you? I wish I could see the San Francisco Bay before a single European settler set foot on it. I would have loved to have been at Woodstock. And I want to see everything else that happens in the next 1000 years and beyond. We get a snapshot. It’s amazing but not nearly enough.
How do you know the beginning/end location is a void of nothingness?
Because non-conciousness with no brain activity is pretty simply "nothing". Nothing is going on in you, so what you must be experiencing is nothing.
That makes sense in materialist metaphysics, but in recent decades materialism has become increasingly contested in philosophical circles. Philosophers like Bernardo Kastrup, Phillip Goff and David Chalmers being among the most prominent of its critics.
as a relatively new philosophy nerd, please maybe show me some good reads by those folk? currently working through some Beaudrillard..
Absolutely!
Bernardo Kastrup: Materialism is Boloney
Phillip Goff: Galileo's Error
David Chalmers: Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (This is his famous essay in which he coined the term "the hard problem of consciousness.")
I find Bernardo Kastrup's case for analytic idealism to be the most compelling.
thanks!
I don't respect people whose job title is "Sit in a room, and think about stuff"
Personally, I would respect them, but not if they go against basic science. You can't just declare some sort of metaphysics and completely ignore actual physics.