If the notion of non-existence as implied by materialist death is fundamentally inconceivable to the human mind, does that explain why we gravitate toward beliefs like heaven/hell or reincarnation?
>>18095088
>>18095088It's not inconceivable, you do it every night. It's just difficult to emulate within the mind. No, what makes death philosophically incomprehensible and repellant to our instincts is the dissonance between individuality and lineage or broader humanity. Logically there's no you without others, which is why the idea of dying doesn't make any sense. Something does live on.
>>18095847>Something does live on.What does?
>>18095847so is life just a dream
>>18095847>you do it every nightNTA but I think sleep is curious because its a very strong case for eternal nature of the soul. Think about it, if we crudely define sleep as the conscious mind "turning off", it becomes clear that non-existance is impossible. You never perceive sleep in any way, your conscious self wakes up, having skipped 6-8 hours like a videogame cutscene. Our brain, so finely attuned to the organization of timespace as a linear flow of events, simply gives up and stops perceiving time altogether, or, in case of dreaming, becomes highly chaotic. In other words, a soul can only be. It could be an hour long nap, or death stretching a trillion years, it wont matter.
>>18095904almost the same thing that existed before you were born
>>18095912The perception of the moment is existence as defined by itself. Lots of philosophers and religious figures have pointed out we were part of the world before birth and will be part of it again after, in a great symphony of creation far larger than one person at one time, but you won't feel like you. Those are all such limiting concepts.
>>18095911If death is INconceivable because we CAN'T perceive higher unity, then no. Life would be a fundamental reality. If we try to understand death in light of unity, then maybe part of the way you think about self and separateness is an illusion. There's a strong moral reason for that though, people were given a belief in free will (incidentally correct, but used as a shallow political narrative) to protect them from oppressors who would otherwise "know best" with the benefit of long experience. Talent and experience must always be balanced for optimal results, no matter whose political theory has to take a spill.
>>18095912It's only a strong case if sleep actually does involve the turning off of the mind, which it doesn't.
>>18095953he specified conscious
maybe to help explain, I should whip up some cobs and troonjaks. First the smug leaf says "I am an individual. My soul will live o-ACKK!!" becoming a brown ackjak hanging from a smug tree with "nigga that's NUTS" squirrel looking on. Then the smug tree says "look at me I'm immort-AACK!" and turns into an ackjak hanging from a DNA strand which is flexing over the earth until it acks into pieces while the smug earth and moon look on.
>>18096023forgot to mention the leaf hanging from the tree is hanging next to countless others like in Brerserk. Your generation is invisible among the others like one tree in many, but they all die out in the same season like the leaves of the same tree.
>>18095912I've had dreams where I've experienced the actual terror of catastrophic events like nukes and plane crashes and the earth spinning off the axis, tectonic plates falling into the Earth. The feeling of panic and awe of the actual event. My thought is collective trauma like that on a massive scale reverberates through others or is passed on somehow through some channel. Sounds New Age but it is one way I can explain it. If I don't wake up I don't die after the event and everything continues, like passing through a mirror. I have never 'experienced' nothingness.
>>18095945Outrageously wise of you to come to understand this anon.
>>18096023This but unironically.
>>18096461nooooooo I don't want to be wise, I want to find my people. I don't want to teach noooooooo where have my people gone, they were here once
>>18096023Damn I really need to get off this site before this happens to my brain
>>18096023very interesting indeed
>>18096826you waited one thread too long
>>18095088Existing is really weird when you think about it.
>>18096023I cant even read this without my brain blanking
>>18098507it's kickass. It's like almost blowing up all the time
>>18098536>it's kickassNah I would have preferred not to, but now I'm here and don't want to die. Yeah there is some good stuff about existing like sex, sweet foods, hamburgers, and alcohol but it's mostly just a hassle.
>>18098601Meant for >>18098588
>>18096377My theory is there's a field of causal interactions on people like in Donnie Darko. Causality exists, the universe is continuous, so in a sense nothing we perceive is real. It's one big stream of infinitesimal reactions . . . but that doesn't explain why anything appears to exist. You can call it an illusion or lie but that doesn't explain what "it" is. The truth is neither determinism nor nominalism (human conceit - free will) but a spectrum between the two. Visible phenomena, like humans, represent a current in reality that, despite not contradicting causality, runs much deeper than the phenomena itself -- structure and layers beyond just 'time go forward' and 'cause to effect.' Literal structures like planets and black holes are representations of underlying physics. We use eyes to look at both planets and people, although they're in completely different media, so scientists are defensive toward the idea of both sharing a system of interactions. Planets are actually physically far removed from people (their humanoid characterization isn't helping) so it's very possible for life to host undiscovered branches of physics that are concealed by the movement of much larger, impassive cosmic forces. To wit: my proposed field of causal interactions between complexes (like humans) that may hang like a cloud around our hive of activity. Suppose an intense situation where 10 zillion minds are all simulating the world, trying to predict the future. The exact sequence of the future is formed ahead of time (in a basic causal sense) but this part of the universe is so energetic that millions of different possibilities are a hair from occurring and they start to bleed through, a configuration of particles comes through. That would explain why psychic powers and supernatural phenomena are hard to harness, they don't represent real alternate timelines. They're fragments of what might have been, interpreted by the mind in the process of receiving the real future.
>>18098601bruh... are we really that different because of racism and a few mm of bone? because my instinct is to say you're being controlled and deceived by abstract entities.
>>18095912>Think about it, if we crudely define sleep as the conscious mind "turning off", it becomes clear that non-existance is impossible.But by that definition, it would also be impossible to be awoken by loud noises or the need to pee/poo or the smell/heat of smoke/fire, so its obviously much too crude of a definition to reflect reality since none of that is impossible.
>>18095976You are still conscious of your environment when you sleep or it would be impossible to wake you until your predetermined sleep cycle concluded, but its pretty easy to wake you will a bit of noise or a splash of water among many other ways.
>>18096377>I have never 'experienced' nothingness.Sure you have, we all have, you see it all the time with your own two ears.
>>18098868>you = the body>consciousness = sensation entering the bodytough but fair
>>18098692Null hypothesis:The visible world and classical mechanics are illusory, random patterns arising from a fundament of quantum mechanics that underlies all spacetime, no matter how seemingly empty or full, like a barrier of white noise independent of anything perceivable. Human ideas about the world appear to be the product of circumstances, especially personhood and human importance in the cosmos. There's no actual evidence that we are important or that importance is a relevant metric, or that anything means anything. Any discussion of qualia or complexity needs to be built on strong internal logic from the human origin of those terms to the phenomenon under discussion. Therefore, it's unlikely that visible human actions are part of any structure of reality beneath the surface. The energy difference between the quantum fabric of reality and visible phenomena is just too great.
>>18098692>psychic powers and supernatural phenomena are hard to harness, they don't represent real alternate timelinesin other words, you can't alter a timeline or enter another timeline using information gleaned psychically. You can act on it, but only within the constraints of what would've been possible already.
