Fear of death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9--C6Hy3-4

LOL @ "desperate hope". Nice condescending post, there.

I don't think losing your personality or emotions or thoughts is a big deal. Those things change all the time anyways. Similar with losing your perception. Maybe your mind is so convinced of the perfection of the human machine that it can't see any other way of existing, not even some low-rate split-second energy cluster swirling through space trying to cling to whatever it just spent the last 80-or-so-years inhabiting.

Personally, it doesn't matter if this consciousness survives as 100% intact, 50% intact, 0% intact, whatever. I see myself as part in the grand scheme of things. The materialist will invoke logic but there is always all this focus on the important of the human ego and the personal experience and it seems....unnecessary? evangelical even?

Didn't mean to sound condescending, I just am not satisfied calling it ordinary hope. I just know when I reach into my imagination and stretch as hard as I can toward conceptualization of nothingness, the truest sense of it can only be the absolute end of all brain activity since existence is relevant only through your own experiences, thoughts and dreams.

what do you guys mean by ego? like a personal running commentary inside your head? I was kind of shocked to hear more than one person say this is their default mental state, and i'm wondering if that's what they mean by sense of self, and if this is what people are afraid of losing -- some pundit in their head with no volume control.

From my self-taught pseudo-buddhist pov, the key to losing this fear of death is to learn how to see your own mind at work, which seems very circular, like a tongue tasting itself, but must be attempted. soon you realize not just how your mind busily and self-importantly constructs a kind of reality for itself, but at some point something clicks and you realize that your mind's reality is amazingly silly compared to what is behind and beyond it. from there on it becomes a matter of letting your mind do its work (you can't really stop it), but at the same time retaining that larger sense of what is really happening.

humans have no free will anyway so you can't control if you are going to feel gloomy abotu death or not

There is a Hand to turn the time

Though thy Glass today be run

Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low

Find the last poor Pret'rite one...

Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,

All through our crippl'd Zone,

With a face on ev'ry mountainside,

And a Soul in ev'ry stone....

seriously though, there's no reason to think that a stone doesn't have a soul or experiences, or a rock, or a tree, or a cloud

i mean, i know i'll have a soul

I feel like if I ask for details you'll define a soul as something so abstract that it doesn't really apply anymore, like when my friend said God is merely the name he gives to the forces that govern the universe in such neat mathematical ways. Then why even call it God at that point? You're spreading it so thin.

it doesn't feel thin sitting on a mountaintop

i didn't learn a whole lot in my short-lived scientific career and i was a terrible scientist but i did learn that you don't need to explain everything to believe in it

anyway they used to call scientists natural philosophers which helps me make more sense of the feelings i feel when i confront the sublime

The God Evan's friend describes sounds more to me like science. If it can accurately and objectively be described in any overt language, it's not true religion. This is why symbolism is so important and how literally reading the Bible only drives people to act like insane assholes. Pure religion is an abstract, subjective experience, the eye seeing the eye, that 3rd person out-of-body self-observation.

Funny thing is, it's a lot like a science, and at least in the East, it's been explored as such. Sit and observe, take notes, compare observations with peers. And if there's no spirit and no mysticism and it's all fooling yourself then the experience is occurring in your mind anyways and it's just as valid as anything else.

The problem with that comparison is that religion skews observations to validate something they already believe. Science draws the conclusion purely from the findings as they are.

And my point is that spiritual belief suggests some kind of preservation of the being that can at least observe or dream after death. Helps with the fear of death part but the reality is crushing in its incomprehensibility.

what if when you die you go to magic anus?

you seem to have given this more thought than anyone else atm, so you probably have more expertise there than we do

Helps with the fear of death part but the reality is crushing in its incomprehensibility.

I've never understood how that helps with the fear. Eternity sounds like its own special kind of hell to me, neither too hot nor too cold but interminable.

Everyone has their own version of afterlife, but at least eternity is something imaginable. Not even having the back of my mind saying "it's all over; there is nothing now," or the defining silence/imagine of darkness is beyond by comprehension and that puts me in a panic. Every version of nothing that we can possibly imagine is from some sort of a perspective, remove that and everything else.

deafening*** not defining...

damn evan dropped the hammer itt :-(

yeah evan is otm. albeit no less depressing than my contributions.

humans have no free will anyway so you can't control if you are going to feel gloomy abotu death or not
― The Cheerfull Turtle (Latham Green), Monday, July 9, 2012 1:06 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i actually do believe this is true but there's no real way to exist or act in a social world without maintaining the idea of free will. it's central to our idea of self, which sustains us in the world for the most part.

boy i'm a gloomy gus.

It's like trying to imagine four dimensions. It's scary because it's inevitable, but a good way to get to the root of how people view existence.

Oops, wording was off there- didn't mean four dimensions are scary/inevitable.

but at least eternity is something imaginable.

I feel just the opposite

Can you witness eternity? If you can be tortured it isn't even comparable to not existing.

if you've ever zoned out and lost track of time, i think you can extrapolate that to forever and see how eternity wouldn't be so awful.

what is all this about not existing? pretty sure people keep existing after they die, else we wouldn't need to concrete blocks and vats of acid

anyway evan you have an awful lot of faith in this so called "science"

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."

http://www.ywconnection.com/New%20Era/PP/Good%20Works/Eternity%20is%20a%20Long%20Time%20-%20Friend.jpg

what if when you die you go to magic anus?

― The Cheerfull Turtle (Latham Green), Tuesday, July 10, 2012 11:29 AM (7 hours ago)

tbh this is weirdly comforting to me but maybe I've listened to too much Coil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP7BhDjB2WI

what is all this about not existing? pretty sure people keep existing after they die, else we wouldn't need to concrete blocks and vats of acid

― the late great, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 7:28 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

?????

anyway evan you have an awful lot of faith in this so called "science"

― the late great, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 7:28 PM (3 hours ago)

Again:

The world's balance made humans possible, but the way we've dominated it and the conveniences of living in a society have trained us to view it as relative to us, as opposed to us being relative to it. If we accept that yes our design is intricate and amazing but our physical matter is no more significant than that of a tree or a rock then we realize there isn't a reason our spectacular thoughts or feelings should be attributed to anything more than the mechanical workings of the mind they reside in.
What reason should they continue without it?

And Michael to revise my response we could imagine all sorts of scenarios of what it would be like to witness some sort of endless existence, but we can't imagine not having a mind. That's the distinction.

it would require endless thinking to genuinely imagine an endless existence. otherwise you simply come to an end of your thoughts and insert an ellipses...

hey evan how can you talk about us as something separate from the world? and when two things are relative, are they not relative to each other?

sounds like you've fallen into the dualist trap my friend

ok hold on a second evan

i will accept that i'm not any more significant than a rock but you still haven't proven to me that a rock doesn't have thoughts, a soul or an afterlife

Aimless, I'm not talking about imagining all of the time, just the scenario.

hey evan how can you talk about us as something separate from the world? and when two things are relative, are they not relative to each other?

sounds like you've fallen into the dualist trap my friend

― the late great, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 11:41 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean we and everything in the world was created because of the situation the world is in, how it is perfect to create life, etc. The world wasn't created to serve us. If it was created as a place to put us, then maybe I'd believe that we are owed something after we die.

hmm i don't follow. surely you don't need to have been intelligently designed to have an afterlife or a soul anymore than you would a brain, or emotions or dreams?

i mean sure, there's no *reason* i should have an afterlife ... but there's also no reason i should have a life in the first place ... yet i'm here?

No but I'm saying the idea of an afterlife and soul exist because we want them to and for no other reason. Generally people don't think rocks and clouds have souls so my theory on the roots of spiritual perspective is more about the idea the human is special and deserves to have their being preserved in some thinking form.

You're here because your mind developed along with your body. How is that fall out of line with what I'm saying?

does*

well i think a lot of people thinks rocks and clouds have souls and i personally i have a thinking form and i don't think there's anything special about that - my dog does, too, i know - but to address your point i know that my body isn't going to end and go away when i die so i'm not sure why my thinking self or soul should end either

Your thinking self has no reason to exist after your brain is no longer active. The soul is the "how" fabricated from denial of the truth about the end.

AKA the soul is just a story.

oh come on though, that's what plato said about physical reality, everything is just a story