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?
Because now I know what I’d be missing.
Times like that, we experience it in one direction only
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.
Fear not, the dark, my friend. And let the feast begin.
Because I forgot what it was like
Can’t forget something that doesn’t exist.
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 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…
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
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 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.
I had nothing to lose before I was born. There is the difference.
And there’s nothing that you can do to keep from losing what you have.
Acceptance is the way to a happy life.
I’m happy. I’m just pointing out that there is a difference.
Because there is no coming back.
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
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.
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.
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:
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Gnostic theist: I know there’s a God, I’ve met Him, I feel it, I have faith, etc.
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Agnostic theist: I don’t know if there’s a god or not, but I prefer to believe there’s one
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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?
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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?
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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.
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.
I do not know what it is like. Just… not seeing. Not hearing. None of the senses, and no thoughts either. No consciousness.
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.
By the time I get there I’ll probably be begging for it.
