3mo ago

Fear not, and enjoy this mere interlude to its fullest!

179 comments

Because I forgot what it was like
- Can't forget something that doesn't exist.
  
  It did but you wasn’t aware of it at the time

I have never experienced unending nothingness, only noted the nothingness after it was over
- That's a good point, though I think it's also fair to say that you won't experience unending nothingness after death from that perspective, either. I can see how coming to accept that the world existed before our experience began could help one confront the world will continue to exist after our experience has ended.

I'm looking forward to the nothingness, the first 14billion years was nice enough. It's the time between everyday life and nothingness that worries me.
- Just had a friend die of a heart attack while working in construction with his friends. Didn't make it to the hospital.
  That's how I want to go. Just times up one day.
  
  So sorry for your loss. You're right - your friend is "fine" now. It's the people we leave behind that can have a hard time with it.

Idk, sounds kinda scary. Idk what it was like before, because I lacked consciousness to experience it. And the idea that it all ends, back to nothingness forever. We live a few years. Pretty much nothing, if we consider the forever before, and the forever after our existence.
It's something I recall fearing as a kid, due to the scary unknown. Glad to have enjoyed a decade of bliss. Too bad the fear has come back to haunt me. It's not constant, though. Sometimes it comes, outta nowhere. Real strong. Not fun. But I don't live day to day in fear.
- The thing is, once youre dead, there won't be consciousness, you will not have any perception of a void, you won't know anything because you will not be.
  Marc Maron put it into good perspective. He was hiking in the hills and passed out. He noted that he could very well have been dead, and that would have been that. He wasnt scared because he wasnt conscious.
  You can't be afraid when you dont exist and you will not be aware of anything.
  
  I don't believe in God nor am I religious, but consciousness just feels so fucking weird man. Everything in the world can be explained through science and physics, cause and effect, hell even our brains and actions are just a chain of atoms interacting. But consciousness just feels so out of place. Why am I? Why am I even aware of my own existence? Why has a set of atoms resulted in my non-material consciousness? It feels so out of place. Why isn't it just a bunch of atoms bumping into eachother, why am I capable of feeling and thinking?
  
  The thing is, once youre dead, there won't be consciousness, you will not have any perception of a void, you won't know anything because you will not be
  Do we really know this though?
  What if upon death we exit the simulation?
  Sometimes I think non-sim me decided to play life on hard mode. I’d kind of like to kick his ass for that. But then I realize he is me.
  
  That's precisely the scary part. A nothingness, for all of eternity. It ends, never to continue. I do not know what it is like. Just… not seeing. Not hearing. None of the senses, and no thoughts either. No consciousness.
  I wouldn't be scared after dead, cuz I'dn't have the consciousness for that. However, being alive, I can. I can fear the eternal nothingness of inexistence
  I think this may or may not have some connection to a post from that monkey in the brain guy who also has a TED Talk (Tim Something?). I recall seeing a post of his about life or something. Talked about how short our lives are in the grand scheme of things. Had even an image with days or weeks or months of life, like a progress bar
  On the other hand, reading that people actually close to death don't worry as much as people imagining being close to death, iirc, may have had a positive impact in my fear. Though I recalln't well

Because there is no coming back.
- We only get one ride in this rollercoaster and half of us want to make the ride living hell for the rest of us.
  
  Half? Try an alarmingly small number and they are damn good at it.
- Cannot step in the same river twice. Nor with the same feet.
- Why are you so sure about this? Believing there is no reincarnation is just a religious dogma of Christianity or rather all abrahamitic religions and therefore deeply engraved in our culture so we don't even consider other possibilities. Similar to how in buddhist and hinduistic cultures reincarnation is the default way of imagining life before birth and after death.
  
  Believing there is no reincarnation is just a religious dogma of Christianity
  I don't know that that's true.
  We as a society don't know what happens when we die, conscious-wise. To state "we definitely do come back" or "we definitely don't" would be incorrect, just like saying "there's definitely aliens" vs "there definitely are not".
  However, we can use evidence we've gathered over thousands of years of existence and make assumptions. Unless I'm mistaken, there's little evidence that has been accepted by the scientific community (Western or Eastern) to support reincarnation, so to say that "we don't come back" is a Christian dogma is a little unfair.
  To be clear I don't have a strong opinion on reincarnation. I've heard compelling stories that are hard to explain otherwise, but I feel like we'd have been able to gather at least some concrete data on it over the span of our existence.
  
  So where do the „extra“ humans come from in these religions? What I mean is the increasing number of people being alive at the same time.
  
  I don't believe in a soul. That is definitely not religious dogma.
  The idea that reincarnation is the default and one would have to be indoctrinated against it is... I would say, a very interesting position to take, if I'm being polite.
  
  Believing there is no reincarnation is just a religious dogma of Christianity
  No, it is pretty much the default position until you can prove that it happens.
  
  Sure? Christianity? Nah, atheism. I just don't walk around believing stuff just because other people believe it. And if reincarnation is real I don't see it as coming back, you're a different person after all.

Because, now that i aquired conciusness, i dont want to lose it. i dont want to re experience nothingness. ffs id rather suffer for eternity than not live at all.
if religion wasnt so unbelievable id probably be religious. but alas i just have to hope that i am wrong in my understanding that there is no afterlife
- Eternity is a loooooong time
  
  Without a brain and no small amount of power (20% of your calorie count at rest on average, less when jogging, more when doing the calculus) the age of the universe goes by instantly. You don't track time.
  You also don't track heat or pain, or memories good or bad. You don't contemplate your trials and tribulations. You could be in the core of the sun at over a million degrees Celsius and not feel a thing or care how you got there.
  The universe has been around for thirteen billion years, and will be around for even longer, and we only get this moment. And then it's gone.
- You didn't acquire consciousness, you acquired a human life.

About 22 years ago or so, after not taking psilocybe mushrooms for a couple years, fasting for 24 hours, I took an uncounted tens of grams of dried, fine-powdered, strong psilocybe semilanceata, hot, in just lemon juice, and chugged that pint of thick mushroom super-lemony brew down as fast as i could. It started coming on FAST and STRONG. Ran the 3 strides to the bathroom sink with need to purge, which didn't last long nor purge much of it... clinging to the sink as I slumped down, with the trip immensity roaring at the doors bursting in at all the seams, I tried to steady myself, I meditatively focused on a drop of water, empathising with it likewise clinging to the underside of the sink. I empathised my way instantly to know where every molecule, and every atom, of the water in there, had ever been, and it was a short jump from there to realise I could do that with everything. My experience is that every atom, every subatomic particle, have omnidirectional infinite sense of the entire cosmos.... and this was only in the beginning seconds of the hours long trip, the ability to see behind things, to know from every perspective, everybody, all time, all times, all dimensions, all realms, all places, all interacting potentials... I cant speak to it really, only to say I remember I did experience it. Cannot take it all back with you.
First exchange with other people after I came out of the toilet, friends had come around, one asked "how was it?", and with it all still being fresh, the immensity of having experienced omniscience, sought to offer what I thought was the most beautiful thing of it all... I said, with all glowing reverie "I know death". The look of horror on the poor dear's face though. Ho ho ho.
But yeah, get that... we mere mortals, many, all around, can experience omniscience.
And many are, and ever have. Say hi.
- If you know you know
- Basically you

Because now I know what I'd be missing.
Times like that, we experience it in one direction only

apparently I literally tried to strangle myself on my umbilical cord in the womb but my take on that was that I knew what was coming.
- Just like The Butterfly Effect ending we watched in class!
  
  yeah my husband brought this up a few days ago actually and was talking about the movie and I was like do you remember me mentioning that I literally actually did that? 4 times around apparently!
- Bought the ticket. Take the ride. Came here with purpose, despite the trepidation.

I'm not afraid, I'm annoyed. I'll never get to finish my unfinished books. >:(
- Or my Steam library.

The After is not what we fear. It is the pain of the transition
- Having grown up with the concept of an eternal hell hammered into my head since day 1, I spent many years fearing the after much more than the transition.
  
  Ah well, Religion does that for you.

Afraid? Hardly. More like

Nothingless void is as believable as afterlife. From scientific point of view neither make sense, it's like we're giving ourseleves some metaphysical distinctiveness from the rest of universe but are merely physical bodies inside of it according to our scientific knowledge. And according to that we precisely know what's after death: we rot in grave, and that's it. But that answer is not satisfying for us, because what we call our consciousness will stop existing at some point, and we try to find logical state of us, when there is no longer us. I don't really think it's possible to describe how's that like at all.
- Nothingness void is just another phrase for "irreversible loss of consciousness. Which is orders of magnitudes more believable than afterlife.
  
  But why call it void if there's no void at all? Or nothingness. There's only void and nothingness when universe ends (according to facts about our universe). Yet people still think about it as a state of our consciousness, when there is no really any 'state' after we die. It's like NULL vs UNDEFINED or uninitialized variable in programming, or at least I see this that way.
- The first part of your comment is contradicting the last part of it.
  
  How exactly? I don't see it.

I wasn't burdened by the curse that is awareness before I was born, and hence now as a result of this awareness, I am scared.
- We are not cursed to know, we are blessed! We are a fantastic arrangement of atoms that so happen to be arranged into people instead of rocks!
  We are, at the end of the day, infinitely small chunks of the Universe able to see, experince, know, and look back into ourselves!
  I may be hammered, and the world is in an especially frightening place at the moment, but damn is it good to have my atoms arranged into a person instead of a tree
  
  I did not choose to be here and I resent that there are expectations put upon me when I wasn't the reason I am here now.
  I also resent that I was born just to die one day.
  It is also fundamentally horrifying that so many people are born into painful awful experiences and then die, with that being more or less mostly all they knew while alive. And that some people live happy lives on its own doesn't justify the horror in my eyes at all.
  That said, I wish I could be drunk right now but I'm at work.

This strangely made me feel a better about the concept of death.
Sometimes I think about it and fall in a few seconds of existential dread. But this kinda...makes it make sense?
- It brought me some comfort too.

The key is to accept that the end of consciousness is a feature of existence, and not a bug.
- Cope harder meatbag

We live and we die, but we don't start or stop existing. Everything that is us is still here. And in time, what was us becomes something new and different.
The miracle of life is a rare and magical opportunity for a bit of our grand panoply of matter to direct its own future. And, I believe, the horror of death is in that return to idleness and loss of control. We don't want to return to the sidelines, to be put back on the shelf. We don't want to become mere stuff again. We want to keep playing the game.

It's not the death part that scares me. It's the transition between living and dead that's going to suck.
But then I had a really terrible November 2024 and am still suffering a high-suicidality psychotic break, so my opinion might be biased.
- Well for what it's worth I'm glad you're still around to contribute to the conversation :)

Tbf nobody has ever experienced either because experience is exclusive to being alive and conscious
- That's not my experience.
  https://lemmy.wtf/post/29561303/17363745
  
  If you had an experience at all then you weren't dead

I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of dying
- Came to say the same thing. Dying sounds painful, even in most of the best case scenarios
- If I knew for a fact that I was going to die instantly, without even knowing it happened, I'd be worried about how my loved ones would feel, but okay with it as far as I'm concerned.

This is a very deep and true post for a shitpost. It’s basically when you go to sleep and don’t dream, but you don’t wake up. It’s just a black void of nothingness.

Fact's
- nothingless
- 🤯 😭

It’s just that I kinda like being conscious…
- Sleep is good too
  
  You're still conscious during sleep you just don't remember most of it.

I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of the part before that.
- Same, let's try and make that bit before that less shit, hey?

We are genetically configured to survive at all costs. That fear is simply the wiring in your head ensuring you do what you can to survive.
You can safely compartmentalize it. store it up there with your irrational fear of clowns.
- That's not true. It doesn't explain noble sacrifices. The teacher in the US who is willing to put themselves between their students and the mass shooter is one example.
  
  Yeah, the teacher wasn't afraid at all. Nope, no genetics causing that teacher to be afraid. /s

Unless the universe is truly infinite, then from the point of view of your continuity of consciousness, you will never die, because they will always be somewhere in infinity where you're exact current consciousness picks right up after you die without a blip.
- I don't think that's how infinity works
  Edit: thinking about it some more, there's nothing to say that's how consciousness works either lol
  
  Something about "there's an infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1, but none of them is 2" idk
  
  In an infinite universe every configuration of matter that can possibly exist will just due to the laws of statistics. Meaning in an infinite universe there's are infinite identical copies of this solar system exactly as it is, isn't, and everything in-between. Since you obviously can't observe your life if you're dead, in such a universe you will always experience your point of view from the position of a living copy somewhere else that was identical up until that point. Now of course its not the other you physically. But if the mind is exactly the same it is you mentally.
  Its more or less the star trek transporter problem taken to a logical extreme. If you step into a star trek transpoter and are reassembled with identical memories elsewhere, are you still you? If its yes, it must also be yes for the universal thought experiment.
- I keep having this recurring dream...
  I'm sitting...I don't know..."outside" of time? Observing it all as if you would a timeline while scrolling through a video... I get to a point where the character on screen, which is also me, dies and I pause the video, slap in another stream from another reality where I don't die and I keep going...
  Your statement sounds almost identical to my dream....
- Your comment reminds me of a video, might have been Tyson, that said something like 'if you look in any direction far enough, you will find another solar system with the exact same properties as ours'. That's infinity. There are infinity possibilities. In that solar system, is there an exact copy of you, and are they reading this comment right now?

The previous billions of years of void was a grandiose buildup to the world's largest nothing-burger, followed by an eternity of void again.

I'm not
- Lucky. I think about my own mortality literally every single night, it's become a pattern that I have to just stop thinking about, like, block that thought, think about something else otherwise panic.
  I hate hate hate that I'm going to die, I will rage against it for as long as I live (hopefully forever as CRISPR will allow... Right?)
  
  Ah, death anxiety. Check out Heartworm, it's a survival horror game about a girl with death anxiety who goes to a spooky house which lets her pass over to the other side to find the answers she's been searching for her whole life. It's a really beautiful game.

undefined

And I am not frightened of dying, any time will do, I don't mind Why should I be frightened of dying? There's no reason for it, you've gotta go sometime
- DarkSide

what about the cool bug fact?
fucking apostrophe abuse
- The shitpost's will continue until morale improves'
  
  look here you little 'shit...

Now I know something to compare it to.

What I really don't understand is bringing more people into temporarily existing without the ability to get their consent and calling it a "gift" that now they get to face the lovecraftian horror of future non-existence.
Pre-birth is not like post death. The arrow of time doesn't reverse.
- I dont get it either. Guess we are wired different.

You can't "experience" nothingness. Even if you could, you can fear things you've experienced before...

ngl i plan to be a digital being by 2060
- Art become reality, ye are the 21st century digital boy

So like the universe is expanding and shit in every direction. Eventually the universe will hit its maximum point of expanse and start shrinking in every direction until it has shrunk down to its point of maximum density. Then boom a big bang and the universe starts again. We'll be back eventually. Maybe not in this universe or the next but eventually over the course of forever we'll be back.
- But would a rearrangement of our atoms into identical beings be the same person as us? Maybe it would be just different consciousnesses having the same experiences, and we would never be back.

I used to think I didn't dream, eventually I realized that the blissful nothingness I (don't) experience between sleeping and waking up was the dream.
- Keep a dream journal, eventually you'll start remembering them.
  
  Oh boy, sleep! That’s where I’m a Viking!
  
  Ah, I don't believe it's a case of not remembering.
  Many nights I simply do not dream of anything at all, or at least when I wake up I have absolutely no recollection of dreaming about something.
  I do also have dreams that fade after awhile as you'd expect, and have occasionally written down things I found interesting about them, but overall my dreams are an infrequent occurrence.

what i'm scared of is not getting to experience things, the fact that i missed out on history isn't much better but at least that was rather difficult to do anything about..
it's like finding an amazing book and thinking about when you'll have read it all, it just fucking sucks
- Living in recent times, there's a lot of historic events happening I'd rather not be around for. Just wait until the climate collapse stops playing around with foreshadowing and the dildo of consequences arrives

Memes like this just make me get anxious thinking about the past
- Hey, remember when Hitler invaded Poland?
  Hey, remember when Trump invaded Greenland? Oh. Right. That's called foreshadowing.

Because it was terrifying to be in a state of nonexistence. Thinking about not having what i currently have or even the fact that I'm very much likely not even going to have a state of being where i can even remember the things i had done in my life is truly fucking terrifying to me.

You know. This oddly actually makes me feel a bit better about this.
- Me too!

Cool bug Fact is

I had nothing to lose before I was born. There is the difference.
- And there's nothing that you can do to keep from losing what you have.
  Acceptance is the way to a happy life.
  
  I'm happy. I'm just pointing out that there is a difference.

Fear not, the dark, my friend. And let the feast begin.
- A feast in the dark? Ehhh... :/
  
  Put a light on. Less messy.

I remember what it was like, that's why I am afraid of it.

My current self wants to look at more cute bees and sniff more sunflowers. It doesn't matter if my future self wouldn't care (on account of not existing), my current self still really wants to do more of that.

It's not the nothingness, it's how you get to the nothingness that sucks.

Let me go back to my eternal slumber

Amen

And came out screaming, so I'm on the fence on this one

Because if I die I'll miss the rest of the Kingkiller Chronicles.
They will surely release any day now.
- And the next Boards of Canada album.
- Any day now, just like winds of winter. Just hold on....

My thoughts immediately go there on abortion: before birth, I never had the consciousness to experience & want life, so I'm incapable of caring about missing out before that capacity to care could even start. The "loss" is absolutely meaningless to me. Even under the golden rule, abortion seems okay: I wouldn't care about being aborted. So why are others caring more than I would?

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