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 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.
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
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
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."
Because now I know the difference and… I don’t want to go.
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.
being dead is fine
it’s the dying part that’ll kill ya
Alan Watts made a few points like this. Very interesting.
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.
I love this about bugs.
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 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 not afraid of death, I’m in love with life.
deleted by creator
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 reaponses. 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.
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?
