Asklemmy

The same nagging notion sometimes claws at my brain as well.

The notion of consciousness not existing is especially troublesome for me to wrap my mind around. Logic says that no consciousness means nothing to perceive said lack of consciousness, therefore no loss there (for the subject, of course). That somehow... does not make it any better.

First time I've been through general anaesthesia I was wondering what it'd be like and a bit fearful of it. Happened in an instant, and I woke up what felt like immediately. Afterwards my conscious mind fixed that with perhaps artificially introducing passage of time to make everything fit. If I think back now, I certainly know some time had passed. But had it? And how much? No idea. Clock said around 3 hours, so I'll go by that.

Shortly thereafter I had a massive bleed and lost about 1/3 of my blood (by looking at amount of hemoglobin before and after the event). The more I lost, the less coherent I was and the less anything mattered. By the time I got to the ER, I had tunnel vision and survival mode on. But I wasn't scared for some odd reason... nothing mattered much. Not sure how close I came to actual death then, but it felt pretty close.

What I can advise... enjoy what you can, and don't waste your hate on anything. It's pretty much not worth it. Unless your life or the life of loved ones is in immediate danger, screw it. Guy cut you off in traffic? Fuck'em. It's not worth shortening your life for some rando with not enough respect for himself or others as to break the social contract. Just choose your preferred intensity of sustainable (for you) hedonism and go from there.

I also hope it gets easier with age, but the prospect of becoming more jaded that I am now is not appealing. Though if it makes everything easier...

I will say this, though. Not existing was (probably?) fine. But being brought into existence just for it to be taken away after a blink of an eye (in terms of billions of years of non-existence vs the average lifespan) seems like cruel and unusual punishment.

I researched the heck out of it.

Key moments along the way was reading Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis and realizing that the idea of The Matrix wasn't just a neat idea but actually somewhat probable.

That led into a few years of intense reading of physics papers and forums to better understand physical underpinnings.

Eventually I realized that physics - while oddly overlapping with emerging trends in virtual world building - was inherently ambiguous enough I wasn't going to get a clear answer.

Around 2019 it struck me that physical underpinnings weren't the only place there might be an indication as to what was up, and reflected on the fact that the vast majority of virtual worlds I've seen have had 4th wall breaking acknowledgements of their creation buried in their lore.

So I revisited our collective theology through that lens and in only a few weeks found something that seemed to fit the bill, which I've researched quite a bit over the years since.

At this point, I'd wager continued existence after death at around 90%.

I have a very hard time seeing an original spontaneous reality that has quantum mechanics exhibiting everything from sync conflicts to lazy evaluation with a 2,000 year old text/tradition claiming we're a recreation of a long dead spontaneous humanity inside a non-physical replica of the earlier universe created by an intelligence eventually brought forth by that original humanity within light, and that the proof for this was in the study of motion and rest - specifically the ability to detect an indivisible point within things.

In the time since first stumbling across that text/tradition in 2019 a number of my concerns have managed to be addressed, from doubting sufficiently advanced AI was plausible to my objection that neural networks of electricity aren't literally light.

While it's possible that such a specific tradition buried into our lore in a document rediscovered after millennia the same time as when the world's first Turing complete computer was finished in Dec 1945 is a coincidence just as the fundamentals of our universe behaving similar to how we design virtual worlds for state tracking around free agent interactions could also be a coincidence - I find this to be diminishingly probable with each passing week.

That said, while it resolves the existential dread around death (the whole promise of the ancient text is that understanding what it says means knowing you won't taste death), it brings up a whole host of additional existential crises in its place (the text also promises that understanding it will lead to being disturbed).

TL;DR Maybe juggling existential crises is a necessary component of indulging in the self-awareness of one's own existence.

A bit of clarification about the quantum might help calm your nerves: to observe something means something such as light must interact with the particle you try to observe, and that very interaction changes the result of the observation. It collapses the wave function, and what you observe is just one of the possible outcomes. It's not as crazy as you may think, but it's very understandable that it may at first seem magical.

Mushrooms and/or LSD.

I do Shrooms, LSD, or DMT if I don't want to commit to all those hours.

"Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name."

As long as i am remembered, i exist. While my physical form may be rotting, i will hope that i made as much of an impact in this world as i did to me, and hope that my memory will never fade. It is for that reason that i keep soldiering on, never looking back, and trying to contribute to a better world.

I had a conversation with my girlfriend a few days ago about this. We are fine, everything is good, but if an asteroid would come in a few days, we would both be OK with it.

I guess that's weird to most people.

Honestly not well.

I've come to terms with the fact that I will one day die, and it could happen at any moment. The hard part is knowing that's true for everyone I love too.

You keep on existing (at least for now)

I think it's a positive thing because you've found another perspective.

I take comfort from the Good Book. And by that, I mean Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. The Tralfamadorean take is comforting. My conscious experience may its reach endpoint, but my existence will still have been, so to speak, embedded in the mountain range of time. The calypsos of Bokononism in Cat’s Cradle are good, too. Think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.

Furthermore, there’s a parable about the mountain, the one that a little bird comes along once every 100 years and scrapes its beak upon. When that mountain is worn away, only the first instant of eternity will have passed. Do we ever stop to think about what it would actually mean to exist forever? If it were infinite life, then once you’ve done everything that you enjoy for the billionth time and gotten so thoroughly bored of it, hey, you still have infinite time to go! After the Sun goes supernova and consumes the Earth, what will you do while floating in space for a few trillion years? If it’s existence after death, then a century or so of life will be as nothing compared to the vast sweep of eternity in the afterlife. Any number divided by infinity, and all.

Honestly, I figure that the urge to “live forever” is in actuality a desire to put off the existential crises to an indefinite time in the future. Cosmic procrastination. But living literally forever has its own (probably worse) existential horror. Everything has to end, especially in a universe that will end or at least cease being interesting, and that’s the only way that life can have any meaning.

The existential crisis comes no matter how long the Fates trim your strand, eventually you stare down the end. It’s just the price of admission.

Swipe ⬅️

Watch some near death experience videos on YouTube. It's comforting.

I don't have a crisis, problem solved.