I wasn’t aware of the abyss before being born. Now that I’m alive, I can feel a certain way about it.
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.
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."
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.
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.”
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.
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
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.
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.
Alan Watts made a few points like this. Very interesting.
Because now I know the difference and… I don’t want to go.
being dead is fine
it’s the dying part that’ll kill ya
I love this about bugs.
The grammatically incorrect apostrophe in the title is really rustling my jimmies.
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.
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.
