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While the rational side of me thinks that death is probably oblivion, I just don't want to admit it. After a friend of mine passed away, I did a lot of soul sea

While the rational side of me thinks that death is probably oblivion, I just don't want to admit it. After a friend of mine passed away, I did a lot of soul searching and basically came to the conclusion that there's nothing after death. It was mentally destructive for me and sent me into a bout of depression. I'd hate to think that we're going through all this just to have your entire life multiplied by 0 at the end. People tell me life is about the journey, but the journey is fun because the memories are retained and can be reflected upon. I just hope that there is something more, if not then there isn't much point in continuing in my opinion.

thiagoharry 4y ago
Memories are retained. If not in your brain, then in the history, in other people's minds, in the humanity's development, and in the legacies that you created. Which is better, your memory can be destroyed by Alzheimer, but these other memories can be more resistant and could survive for a longer time. :-)
- alok-g 4y ago
  I placed a related comment + question here on the same OP. Would like to hear your views too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252250
jack_pp 4y ago
What's important is what we do with the time we have, the ripples we send out into the world. That I think is the true value of our lives
- alok-g 4y ago
  I would like to hear more on this. Am somewhat playing a devil's advocate, but am genuinely unclear too. What's the higher importance of the impact left on the world. As per the comment you replied to, it will ultimately be multiplied to zero for each one of us. That the impact may sustain in the 'living' world feels somewhat like a propagating wave, or may be even a Ponzi scheme. Looking from a grander scheme of things, life on earth is more like moss on a stone. If our solar system gets destroyed today, our nearest galaxy would not experience the slightest thing for over a million years, and an astronomically miniscule change even after. What's the true importance of the impact left over the world?
  - jack_pp 4y ago
    > If our solar system gets destroyed today That's a useless hypothetical in my book, we have no reason to believe it will be destroyed any time soon and at the rate we're going, assuming we don't destroy ourselves, in another 1000 years we'll have long escaped the potential destruction of our planet or even our solar system. And a thousand years is a very short time "in the grander scheme of things" I believe the vast majority of people can not really influence events like nuclear wars or any such extinction events so it's pointless to fear or even take into account. So focus on what you can do better, be kinder to your fellow colleagues, neighbours etc. and find problems and try to fix them in a sustainable way. Those things might seem small but they're important too
    - alok-g 4y ago
      Yes, I take it's a hypothetical scenario, at least practically, if not theoretically also. My point with that hypothetical scenario, which I should have more explicitly stated, is to counter points of views I often hear on importance of life to the universe, etc. In my understanding, it's not about the universe as a whole; only about the impact left predominantly on the lives on the earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
  - EarthLaunch 4y ago
    That is a great way of describing that situation. Thank you for that. The answer to a lot of these questions seems to be "we don't know". In our age, there's a cultural trend of pretending we know things, or that everything is knowable. Of course, a lot of things aren't knowable. In actual reality, we function while not knowing. Uncertainty is the nature of existence. Practically every decision and experience is loaded with uncertainty. Just as there's no absolute-reference-point (relativity), there's no absolute-knowledge-point, and that's normal. In this thread, we are making guesses about the purpose of...well, anything. But the reality is we will never know. Or more: We don't even know whether we will ever know. Not knowing, for me, is comforting. I like the mystery of the universe. There are so many unknowns; many unimaginable, even magical, things are possible. That's the experience a child has. It carries a sense of wonder.
- mncharity 4y ago
  FWIW, a framing I like is: Each person wields their taste, skills, character, communities, resources, etc, in the crafting of three great improv art projects: themselves, their life, and their ripples spreading through others and the world.
jck 4y ago
Some would argue the exact opposite - that the ephemeral nature of existence makes being alive that much more special. That our finite existence here is a gift to treasure and enjoy and not just something you tolerate while you wait for the "real thing"(eternal existence in heaven or whatever)
- ne0flex 4y ago
  I don't necessarily view life as a toleration of living and waiting until death, o hope for a "real thing" after death. I'm more hoping for something along of the lines of a "next phase" like transition from school life to working life. The idea the equation of experiences and knowledge if your life ends with an ...)*0 is just depressing. I'd like to continue to build on my life experiences and reconnect with loved ones, at least in some sense in relation to my individual experience, not a metaphorical one - if that makes sense.
  - EarthLaunch 4y ago
    It's not that life ends in a *0 - it's more that we don't get to know what effect our life has. The not-knowing is the hard part. But a little imagination is all it takes to see that life could have some undiscovered long term effect.
    - ne0flex 4y ago
      I mean 0 in terms of yourself. If nothing exists after death, the way I view it is that upon your death, from your perspective, time ceases to exist and everything essentially dies, sure the world may continue existing around you but, but from you're perspective, it has effectively ended thus 0. The "greater effect" thing is off less concern to me and just seems to sidestep the fact that the objective you ceases to exist.
      - altruios 4y ago
        which 'you' are you talking about? you exist as a entity in other's minds: which is arguably a larger pool of 'you' than the you in your mind. which explains the drive to influence others: when someone does something out of 'remembrance' or a tribute, metaphorically they are 'running your code'. extorting influence through these proxy 'you' in other's minds is the goal of some people... if you solidify yourself in other's minds you might survive as an idea throughout the years - that's the part of you that lives forever... so update and modify your image in other's minds while you still can.
stagger87 4y ago
You might enjoy reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. It changed my opinion on almost exactly this topic.
- ne0flex 4y ago
  Thank you for the recommendation! Seems like this is the exact problem I'm dealing with. Curious as to how it changed your perspective?
  - Jackpillar 4y ago
dsego 4y ago
Plenty of NDE reports to keep your hopes up. Unless the whole reincarnation trap and erasing memories is real, that would suck.
- pavlov 4y ago
  How are near-death experiences proof of anything else than brain activity when in a critical state but not yet dead? IMO it's like saying "exception handlers are proof that Unix processes can't be terminated."
  - alok-g 4y ago
    +1 The default assumption should be that NDEs are hallucinations in a brain moving towards dysfunction.
    - mitchdoogle 4y ago
      The interesting thing about them is similarity across time and cultures.
      - alok-g 4y ago
        Why is the similarity interesting? Isn't that rather expected, being about aspects of the brain, as opposed to that of the times or cultures?
  - dsego 4y ago
    I think you can find stories of patients who have had out of body experiences when there was no brain activity. Not sure how valid those are, but still gives me pause.
rolph 4y ago
endeavor to create somthing beyond your mortality, something that persists in peoples minds and exists in reality, something that proves you were more than just a story.
- alok-g 4y ago
  I placed a related comment + question here on the same OP. Would like to hear your views too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252250
foobarian 4y ago
I concluded that, with high probability, there is life after death. Simple: 1. Current life is clearly possible (cogito ergo sum etc). 2. When this one ends, statistically it's inevitable there will be another one. See e.g. Boltzmann brain [1]. The pickle is that the timespan between 1 and 2 could be very long. But since you're not aware of it that doesn't matter. Also, the other pickle is you won't remember it, and that one really burns. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
- simonh 4y ago
  That's just a copy of you though. It's not you. If I offered to teleport you to work every morning, super convenient and free, but the teleporter destroys your body and creates a new identical copy at the other end every time, would you use it? There's an SF story where someone invents a teleporter, and it becomes very popular, but then one of them goes wrong and doesn't destroy the original body.
  - foobarian 4y ago
    If I get to keep the qualia yes absolutely.
    - simonh 4y ago
      The copy would keep all your memories and would experience qualia, the question is, is it you? After all, your body was torn apart to extract the information to build the new one. Bear in mind qualia are instantaneous, you don't keep them, only memories of them. Sorry, I added the example of the SF story while you were replying to my post. In that story now there's two of the same person walking about, both of whom think they are 'him'. The really disturbing this is, this might be what our lives are actually like. After all, our brains frequently stop being conscious and then summon consciousness back into being. Is it really the same consciousness though? Or is it a fresh newly synthesised process that just has memories from the last time your were conscious? I still wouldn't use the teleporter though.
keymon-o 4y ago
Well, no matter how rational you are, it is still your conscious self that is perceiving the physical world and is just trying to makes sense of it. What happens to "you" after the death is really not related to understanding physical world, or at least not strictly dependant on the physical world. Which, at least for me, it means anything is more possible than just oblivion. The not-knowing factor (of what happens in your life) is what drives most people to live, so why wouldn't give one a positive drive to actually live life and find out the same thing about death. You just don't skip high school to find out things what life in 40s will be like. :) Edit: I hope I did't invoke illusion of being religious in any way. It's a purely philosophical way of questioning something you cannot possibly know. Edit2: Also, other repliers (that obviously read more books than me) explain some really great theories
d1sxeyes 4y ago
My take on this is that potentially this is true, but we don't understand the nature of consciousness yet. I prefer to think that there is something beyond a specific configuration of molecules that creates consciousness, but I am unable to understand how that would be able to exist within an individual. However, I can envision a 'plane' - not a plane of individual consciousnesses, but a field, similar to gravity and electromagnetism etc., and where it is concentrated densely, it creates an individual 'well' of consciousness. When an individual dies, it is my belief that the 'well' ceases to exist, and whatever made up that individual continues to exist as part of the field. I've got absolutely nothing to support this idea beyond speculation, but it brings me comfort to think that just as though the matter and energy that formed myself and my loved ones exists only as part of a much larger ecosystem of matter and energy, and once our bodies are nothing more than cold soil, our consciousness also becomes part of a much larger ecosystem. They say that a million atoms that are currently in my body today were also part of Jesus' body. Similarly, I imagine that in 2000 years, parts of my consciousness will also be part of others' consciousnesses.
- tlonny 4y ago
  I've thought the exact same thing!!! Consciousness is just the trapping of a pocket of some otherworldly field by certain configurations of matter and energy (i.e. a living human brain). Dying liberates our pocket of consciousness, allowing it to recombine with the free floating consciousness in the universe.
BossingAround 4y ago
I find solace in nothingness after death. We go to bed every night and wake up every morning yet we hate the thought of oblivion or nothingness. The desire for meaning seems like food for ego to me, personally.

thiagoharry 4y ago

Memories are retained. If not in your brain, then in the history, in other people's minds, in the humanity's development, and in the legacies that you created. Which is better, your memory can be destroyed by Alzheimer, but these other memories can be more resistant and could survive for a longer time. :-)

alok-g 4y ago
I placed a related comment + question here on the same OP. Would like to hear your views too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252250

jack_pp 4y ago

What's important is what we do with the time we have, the ripples we send out into the world. That I think is the true value of our lives

alok-g 4y ago
I would like to hear more on this. Am somewhat playing a devil's advocate, but am genuinely unclear too. What's the higher importance of the impact left on the world. As per the comment you replied to, it will ultimately be multiplied to zero for each one of us. That the impact may sustain in the 'living' world feels somewhat like a propagating wave, or may be even a Ponzi scheme. Looking from a grander scheme of things, life on earth is more like moss on a stone. If our solar system gets destroyed today, our nearest galaxy would not experience the slightest thing for over a million years, and an astronomically miniscule change even after. What's the true importance of the impact left over the world?
- jack_pp 4y ago
  > If our solar system gets destroyed today That's a useless hypothetical in my book, we have no reason to believe it will be destroyed any time soon and at the rate we're going, assuming we don't destroy ourselves, in another 1000 years we'll have long escaped the potential destruction of our planet or even our solar system. And a thousand years is a very short time "in the grander scheme of things" I believe the vast majority of people can not really influence events like nuclear wars or any such extinction events so it's pointless to fear or even take into account. So focus on what you can do better, be kinder to your fellow colleagues, neighbours etc. and find problems and try to fix them in a sustainable way. Those things might seem small but they're important too
  - alok-g 4y ago
    Yes, I take it's a hypothetical scenario, at least practically, if not theoretically also. My point with that hypothetical scenario, which I should have more explicitly stated, is to counter points of views I often hear on importance of life to the universe, etc. In my understanding, it's not about the universe as a whole; only about the impact left predominantly on the lives on the earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
- EarthLaunch 4y ago
  That is a great way of describing that situation. Thank you for that. The answer to a lot of these questions seems to be "we don't know". In our age, there's a cultural trend of pretending we know things, or that everything is knowable. Of course, a lot of things aren't knowable. In actual reality, we function while not knowing. Uncertainty is the nature of existence. Practically every decision and experience is loaded with uncertainty. Just as there's no absolute-reference-point (relativity), there's no absolute-knowledge-point, and that's normal. In this thread, we are making guesses about the purpose of...well, anything. But the reality is we will never know. Or more: We don't even know whether we will ever know. Not knowing, for me, is comforting. I like the mystery of the universe. There are so many unknowns; many unimaginable, even magical, things are possible. That's the experience a child has. It carries a sense of wonder.
mncharity 4y ago
FWIW, a framing I like is: Each person wields their taste, skills, character, communities, resources, etc, in the crafting of three great improv art projects: themselves, their life, and their ripples spreading through others and the world.

jck 4y ago

Some would argue the exact opposite - that the ephemeral nature of existence makes being alive that much more special. That our finite existence here is a gift to treasure and enjoy and not just something you tolerate while you wait for the "real thing"(eternal existence in heaven or whatever)

ne0flex 4y ago
I don't necessarily view life as a toleration of living and waiting until death, o hope for a "real thing" after death. I'm more hoping for something along of the lines of a "next phase" like transition from school life to working life. The idea the equation of experiences and knowledge if your life ends with an ...)*0 is just depressing. I'd like to continue to build on my life experiences and reconnect with loved ones, at least in some sense in relation to my individual experience, not a metaphorical one - if that makes sense.
- EarthLaunch 4y ago
  It's not that life ends in a *0 - it's more that we don't get to know what effect our life has. The not-knowing is the hard part. But a little imagination is all it takes to see that life could have some undiscovered long term effect.
  - ne0flex 4y ago
    I mean 0 in terms of yourself. If nothing exists after death, the way I view it is that upon your death, from your perspective, time ceases to exist and everything essentially dies, sure the world may continue existing around you but, but from you're perspective, it has effectively ended thus 0. The "greater effect" thing is off less concern to me and just seems to sidestep the fact that the objective you ceases to exist.
    - altruios 4y ago
      which 'you' are you talking about? you exist as a entity in other's minds: which is arguably a larger pool of 'you' than the you in your mind. which explains the drive to influence others: when someone does something out of 'remembrance' or a tribute, metaphorically they are 'running your code'. extorting influence through these proxy 'you' in other's minds is the goal of some people... if you solidify yourself in other's minds you might survive as an idea throughout the years - that's the part of you that lives forever... so update and modify your image in other's minds while you still can.

stagger87 4y ago

You might enjoy reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. It changed my opinion on almost exactly this topic.

ne0flex 4y ago
Thank you for the recommendation! Seems like this is the exact problem I'm dealing with. Curious as to how it changed your perspective?
- Jackpillar 4y ago

dsego 4y ago

Plenty of NDE reports to keep your hopes up. Unless the whole reincarnation trap and erasing memories is real, that would suck.

pavlov 4y ago
How are near-death experiences proof of anything else than brain activity when in a critical state but not yet dead? IMO it's like saying "exception handlers are proof that Unix processes can't be terminated."
- alok-g 4y ago
  +1 The default assumption should be that NDEs are hallucinations in a brain moving towards dysfunction.
  - mitchdoogle 4y ago
    The interesting thing about them is similarity across time and cultures.
    - alok-g 4y ago
      Why is the similarity interesting? Isn't that rather expected, being about aspects of the brain, as opposed to that of the times or cultures?
- dsego 4y ago
  I think you can find stories of patients who have had out of body experiences when there was no brain activity. Not sure how valid those are, but still gives me pause.

rolph 4y ago

endeavor to create somthing beyond your mortality, something that persists in peoples minds and exists in reality, something that proves you were more than just a story.

alok-g 4y ago
I placed a related comment + question here on the same OP. Would like to hear your views too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252250

foobarian 4y ago

I concluded that, with high probability, there is life after death. Simple: 1. Current life is clearly possible (cogito ergo sum etc). 2. When this one ends, statistically it's inevitable there will be another one. See e.g. Boltzmann brain [1]. The pickle is that the timespan between 1 and 2 could be very long. But since you're not aware of it that doesn't matter. Also, the other pickle is you won't remember it, and that one really burns. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

simonh 4y ago
That's just a copy of you though. It's not you. If I offered to teleport you to work every morning, super convenient and free, but the teleporter destroys your body and creates a new identical copy at the other end every time, would you use it? There's an SF story where someone invents a teleporter, and it becomes very popular, but then one of them goes wrong and doesn't destroy the original body.
- foobarian 4y ago
  If I get to keep the qualia yes absolutely.
  - simonh 4y ago
    The copy would keep all your memories and would experience qualia, the question is, is it you? After all, your body was torn apart to extract the information to build the new one. Bear in mind qualia are instantaneous, you don't keep them, only memories of them. Sorry, I added the example of the SF story while you were replying to my post. In that story now there's two of the same person walking about, both of whom think they are 'him'. The really disturbing this is, this might be what our lives are actually like. After all, our brains frequently stop being conscious and then summon consciousness back into being. Is it really the same consciousness though? Or is it a fresh newly synthesised process that just has memories from the last time your were conscious? I still wouldn't use the teleporter though.

keymon-o 4y ago

Well, no matter how rational you are, it is still your conscious self that is perceiving the physical world and is just trying to makes sense of it. What happens to "you" after the death is really not related to understanding physical world, or at least not strictly dependant on the physical world. Which, at least for me, it means anything is more possible than just oblivion. The not-knowing factor (of what happens in your life) is what drives most people to live, so why wouldn't give one a positive drive to actually live life and find out the same thing about death. You just don't skip high school to find out things what life in 40s will be like. :) Edit: I hope I did't invoke illusion of being religious in any way. It's a purely philosophical way of questioning something you cannot possibly know. Edit2: Also, other repliers (that obviously read more books than me) explain some really great theories

d1sxeyes 4y ago

My take on this is that potentially this is true, but we don't understand the nature of consciousness yet. I prefer to think that there is something beyond a specific configuration of molecules that creates consciousness, but I am unable to understand how that would be able to exist within an individual. However, I can envision a 'plane' - not a plane of individual consciousnesses, but a field, similar to gravity and electromagnetism etc., and where it is concentrated densely, it creates an individual 'well' of consciousness. When an individual dies, it is my belief that the 'well' ceases to exist, and whatever made up that individual continues to exist as part of the field. I've got absolutely nothing to support this idea beyond speculation, but it brings me comfort to think that just as though the matter and energy that formed myself and my loved ones exists only as part of a much larger ecosystem of matter and energy, and once our bodies are nothing more than cold soil, our consciousness also becomes part of a much larger ecosystem. They say that a million atoms that are currently in my body today were also part of Jesus' body. Similarly, I imagine that in 2000 years, parts of my consciousness will also be part of others' consciousnesses.

tlonny 4y ago
I've thought the exact same thing!!! Consciousness is just the trapping of a pocket of some otherworldly field by certain configurations of matter and energy (i.e. a living human brain). Dying liberates our pocket of consciousness, allowing it to recombine with the free floating consciousness in the universe.

BossingAround 4y ago

I find solace in nothingness after death. We go to bed every night and wake up every morning yet we hate the thought of oblivion or nothingness. The desire for meaning seems like food for ego to me, personally.