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There is no perfect answer for this. Philosophers have been seeking to answer this since the beginning of time and we will all continue to do so until the end o

There is no perfect answer for this. Philosophers have been seeking to answer this since the beginning of time and we will all continue to do so until the end of time. Personally, I try to make a regular habit of thinking about my mortality. Visualizing my friends and family after I'm gone, and seeing how the world keeps on ticking. It helps me limit my own self-importance in the world but also helps free my mind to focus on the things I really care about. Like you, I would love to be able to many lifetimes where I get to try all those other paths in the road I didn't end up taking. And perhaps we will, maybe reincarnation is a thing. Or maybe the birth and death of the universe is cyclical and we get to try this all over and over. Sadly we can never know this. If you haven't seen the show "The Good Place", it has some interesting takes on mortality and what it would be like to live forever.

anonymouse71 6y ago
Thanks. Clearly this is a thing that has motivated at least some subset of our species to try to figure it out. Part of it is that I feel like there is no purpose. Each of us is an accident of one of a few hundred billion sperm produce on a given day meeting one of tens of thousands of eggs that was released near that day, multiplied by all our ancestor’s probabilities of having existed. Philosophy and religion seem to me to be the initial crude attempts to understand. And thinking about this lately I’ve been contemplating how we probably just don’t have the brain structures to contemplate a lot of these concepts in the first place and can only talk about them by analogy (god is like a man that lives in the sky; or an AI that is emergent behavior from machines we can build. That kind of thing.). Maybe that’s why imagining our own death is so terrifying: we can’t understand it. But it also seems so simple because we see it every day in one form or another. I can name a pencil Steve, break it in half and feel loss. I’ll maybe check out The Good Place when I feel less vulnerable and hope it brings me some measure of comfort.

anonymouse71 6y ago

Thanks. Clearly this is a thing that has motivated at least some subset of our species to try to figure it out. Part of it is that I feel like there is no purpose. Each of us is an accident of one of a few hundred billion sperm produce on a given day meeting one of tens of thousands of eggs that was released near that day, multiplied by all our ancestor’s probabilities of having existed. Philosophy and religion seem to me to be the initial crude attempts to understand. And thinking about this lately I’ve been contemplating how we probably just don’t have the brain structures to contemplate a lot of these concepts in the first place and can only talk about them by analogy (god is like a man that lives in the sky; or an AI that is emergent behavior from machines we can build. That kind of thing.). Maybe that’s why imagining our own death is so terrifying: we can’t understand it. But it also seems so simple because we see it every day in one form or another. I can name a pencil Steve, break it in half and feel loss. I’ll maybe check out The Good Place when I feel less vulnerable and hope it brings me some measure of comfort.