5 ms·
Something I read that resonates: "Even if all that happens is that you vanish out of existence into eternal darkness, you'll also vanish from time. Hundreds of
by howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
Something I read that resonates:
"Even if all that happens is that you vanish out of existence into eternal darkness, you'll also vanish from time. Hundreds of billions of years will pass but for the dead it will be instantaneous, the universe can reach the end of its lifespan yet for those now outside of the linear passing of time, it will feel like less than a blink. The universe could begin and end hundreds of trillions of times, but this time scale is nothing to a dead man. Statistically, you're simply bound to pop back into existence no matter how long it takes. Besides, it can't even be that unlikely if you're here now, right?"
- whimsicalism 5y ago> Statistically, you're simply bound to pop back into existence no matter how long it takes. The implication of this argument is that innumerable terrible torturous things also happen to you "no matter how long it takes."
- phoe-krk 5y agoSo do countless aeons of immeasurably heavenly and pleasurable experiences. It's hard to try and pick just a chunk out of something that's, for all practical purposes, infinite; even harder to try to judge it out of that infinite context.
- whimsicalism 5y agoYes, I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I really am just recreated in infinite permutations, I become somewhat apathetic to whether this life is my last or not - the alternative doesn't seem all that better or reassuring.
- worldsayshi 5y agoWhy is apathy a more relevant feeling? Sure you may have countless experiences in the future or perhaps just a few but you're here now. The only relevant feelings about yourself ought to be about what's going on in your perceptible life?
- whimsicalism 5y agoYes, I mean apathy around the possibility of long term "immortality"
- int_19h 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
- nimbleal 5y agoIt would also seem to be a pretty obvious fallacy (although I’m very happy to hear the counter argument). It assumes the “game” is not only infinite in length but infinitely open in terms of the space it explores: a million monkeys on a million typewriters may produce Shakespeare but they’ll never produce a bowl of ice cream.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- recov 5y agoSee also, the book permutation city
- helloworld11 5y agoThat was possibly the most existentially depressing book I've ever read. Wonderful, but hard to digest emotionally.
- IngoBlechschmid 5y agoIndeed, this is the correct comment to make!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Koshkin 5y ago> you're simply bound to pop back But will it be "you" you (or just your copy)?
- trophycase 5y agoas someone who has subscribed to this belief for a very long time but have had difficulty explaining it and only recently seen it pop up amongst others (twice in a week now): we use "you" because there isn't language capable of describing it. You found yourself conscious, you don't remember anything before, won't remember anything after, your consciousness inhabits a vessel but is property-less, theoretically this consciousness is capable of "finding itself" in another vessel. In fact, it's guaranteed because you can't be conscious of not being conscious
- spidersouris 5y agoI've had a similar train of thoughts for a very long time now, since my childhood in fact, it being that, as one is born with a consciousness, it is likely that when one dies, one will gain a new consciousness, a new spirit in a new body, but while being unable to remember of what happened before. To be more precise, it would result in a new existence in the physical world, with a "normal" consciousness; yet, there'd be no connection at all with the past self. I however was never able to find literature on the subject (not scientific literature of course, but rather philosophical or esoteric), probably because I'm not using the right terms when searching for it, but there must be writings about such a theory. "Reincarnation" doesn't seem to be the appropriate term as it's mostly used in religious contexts and often implies the ability for one to remember one's past self. Drawing on your comment, perhaps you may know what terms could illustrate this idea?
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y agoIs the "you" who woke up in the morning the same "you" who fell asleep the night before?
- nine_k 5y agoThis makes a tacit assumption that the dead continue to somehow exist, that some "they" remain, and "for them" something may be one way or another. Assuming the absence of afterlife, when I die, I literally am no more. No more anyone to experience anything, including time. No one to experience a relief from pain which the death has ended, for example. No one to even not care about the world any more. This is very simple, if not subjectively intuitive: nobody has experience of not existing, because such experience is a contradiction in terms. But referring to whatever related to a dead person's alleged experience after death is a use-after-free error. (Dying, on the other hand, is a very real experience, but likely it's very hard to communicate, for a number of obvious reasons.)
- chalcolithic 5y ago>nobody has experience of not existing Don't we all have experience of not existing for 13.7 billion years? It'll be the same once we die.
- bagacrap 5y agoI think what it means is an arrangement of mass (particles, spins, charges, ...) exactly identical to your own must eventually reassemble, e.g a Boltzmann brain or a simulation or an actual human identical to you, by chance. It has nothing to do with some everlasting ethereal "soul".
- jlokier 5y agoIf you reject that tacit assumption, you may wish to examine the closely related tacit assumption that living persons that experience do exist. The relation between the two assumptions is informative. The thing called you is, in one model, just a collection of atoms, a particular solution to some equations, after all. Some complicated world-lines, that anyone with a sufficiently powerful computer and the right collection of seemingly random numbers could reproduce in principle - or is it? Maybe the dead don't experience anything. But until you can say what distinguishes "experience" (and "reality") for the living from the mere existence of solutions to equations, it's a missing-definition error to conclude anything sweeping and universal about experience. You can certainly define experience in various ways, for example particular kinds of electrochemical activity in the brain, or organised information processing in matter of a certain kind. If you do that, you can conclude that those processes cease. But those are limited definitions for convenience. We cannot say with certainty that's what actual living experience is "made of", so we cannot say with certainty the universal statement that all forms of actual experience cease. (We can, however, turn "certainty" in the above into a kind of variable, in order to understand what we mean more subtly.) The distinction is sometimes called "fire in the equations". Who knows what makes a living person actually experience - assuming you believe living persons do.