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?
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’m not afraid, I’m annoyed. I’ll never get to finish my unfinished books. >:(
Or my Steam library.
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
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.
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.
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’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.
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?
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.
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.
That’s not true. It doesn’t explain noble sacrifices. The teacher in the US who is willing to put themselves between their students and the mass shooter is one example.
Yeah, the teacher wasn’t afraid at all. Nope, no genetics causing that teacher to be afraid. /s
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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?
We already have 1 example of earth existing, so we know its part of the set.
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.
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.
what about the cool bug fact?
fucking apostrophe abuse
The shitpost’s will continue until morale improves’
look here you little 'shit…
It’s just that I kinda like being conscious…
Sleep is good too
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.
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.
