You know. This oddly actually makes me feel a bit better about this.
Me too!
Because now I know what I’d be missing.
Times like that, we experience it in one direction only
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.
You can’t “experience” nothingness. Even if you could, you can fear things you’ve experienced before…
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.
Fact’s
🤯 😭
nothingless
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
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?
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.
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 :)
Afraid? Hardly. More like
Fear not, the dark, my friend. And let the feast begin.
A feast in the dark? Ehhh… :/
Put a light on. Less messy.
wow so cool!
It’s not the nothingness, it’s how you get to the nothingness that sucks.
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.
Because if I die I’ll miss the rest of the Kingkiller Chronicles.
They will surely release any day now.
Any day now, just like winds of winter. Just hold on…
And the next Boards of Canada album.
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.
