*quality thought provoking stuff

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*quality

The single hardest aspect of accepting the reality of the world wasn't a lack of god, it was the realisation of my own impermanence.

When I was younger and things went bad, I would sometimes resign myself to the outcome and think that things would go better "in another life", be that an afterlife, reincarnation, whatever.

Letting go of that was hard, but it forced me to confront the issues in my life and realise that if things were bad, I needed to change them, and if I didn't I would waste the short time I have.

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I have always been comforted by my impermanence.
The idea of immortality always seemed like an inescapable prison of existence.
Only the idea that, at some point, I would no longer be forced to exist made my existence bearable without a constant claustrophobic panic.

I think it was Kyle on Southpark that answered the question 'what's it like when you die?' the best with his answer 'I think it's pretty much like it was before you were born.'. That works for me.

I think this guy lost his way somewhere.. I'm not smart enough to know exactly where, but i can comfortably say this: time isn't running out, when you say that you're not understanding time.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

People who don't entertain this delusion suffer from depressive realism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
It's a burden.

I think he misses the point that the rest of us already thought all of this through when we were twelve, and realized that our most perfect existence, our highest quality of life, would be attained by living drab, ordinary, miserable and lonely lives, clinging to convention and constantly complaining about it but doing nothing. We're already living the dream, and he's late to this party!

Memento Mori

I'll say one thing about "nothingness"... It's that it may not "exist" (like it's a tangible object, heh) or have ever existed, except as an idea within our minds.

The reason I say this, is that for now it looks like the closest we get to "nothingness" is a Universe (or even before the Universe came into being) there was/is something called the Quantum Foam. In fact this may have been the way the Universe was created (there is a great video on here that talks about this topic). If I find that video I'll link it here.

Wow. Thanks for that. You just, ah, linked me to a page about myself that I wasn't previously aware of.

Labels annoy me but in this case it gives me hope to know that somewhere, someone has been able to identify and put into words a state of mind that I have always felt I share with no one else. That's a strange source of hope but I'm happy to have it.

I went through that and suffered under a depression of knowing it, but then i underwent a brand new realisation when i was studying physics. The realisation that in actual fact, nobody on Earth has ever had a better idea about what happens when you die than anybody else. There's no experienced or authoritative perspective on that. It occurred to me because i asked the smartest man i know where he thought existence came from and he said "ask a philosopher".

Everyone's thoughts on it are either an imaginative guess (with no view point being better than the other) or a so-called educated guess based on the laws of physical reality. Well, the laws of physical reality only explain what we can observe (by definition) and furthermore at least some laws have been broken in unusual situations (where did everything appear from/happen from if there is energy conservation in the universe?). Not necessarily an educated guess in other words.

I recognise the way you talk about your 'realisation' with an air of finality, as though you have truly found the final answer. But i ask you, because i have spent my life wondering and years studying - what do you really know about what happens or why we are here?

I think it is equally likely to be a non-existence as it is to be an obscure, impossible to understand, trans-humanist wet dream. Literally anything is possible, and the only reason we limit ourselves to "god" or "nothingness" is because we're so used to waking up and seeing this undeniably weird and wonderful reality that we one day found ourselves existing in. I put it to you that it would be no more remarkable or unlikely to find ourselves in a second, entirely different kind of reality afterwards.

This rocks!

Ah, this young Jedi is so sure of his ideas. Like Alan Watts said, "When you receive the message hang up the phone." But, our young Jedi does not yet have the correct receiver. Have courage young padawan, the truth is out there, the force be with you.

Yeah...I find the nihilism bit more debilitating than the delusion bit. I find it too overwhelming to make a choice about where to invest my precious time when I am quite so aware that it is so utterly finite. It might help to have a glimpse of the your future (or lack thereof) rushing up to meet you occasionally, but truthfully I am happier person when it is not dominating my thoughts and I have space in my head to laugh and love and other words beginning with l (or not).

First of all, those are two completely different questions. What happens (presumably you mean after death?) doesn't necessarily have anything to do with why we are here.

It could be that nothing happens after death, but there is still some grand purpose to existence. Or it could be that there's an afterlife, but the universe itself is meaningless.

As to what do I really know? The answer is, of course, nothing. No-one can really know anything about what happens outside of our existence and anyone who tells you they do is either lying or delusional.

However we can make an educated guess (and not even a "so called" one, a real one based on centuries learning about the universe we inhabit) Every time we make a new discovery, it has turned out to have a natural explanation. As we learn more, the "god of the gaps" has grown smaller and smaller, to the point where we know that even if there is some mystical force underlying the universe, it has no measurable effect on it.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Physicist-Sean-Carroll-refutes-supernatural-beliefs

If our consciousness really does continue after our physical bodies die, there has to be a mechanism for it, and there is zero evidence of any such mechanism.

It could be that we simply lack the tools or the understanding to detect this, but there isn't even anything leading us to ask the question (e.g. an unexplained phenomena that would prompt us to investigate a hypothesis that might lead to a theory).

As to why we are here? From a scientific point of view, there's no evidence to suggest there is a reason to anything. The universe just is. From a philosophical point of view, I've always liked Carl Sagan's idea that "we are a way for the cosmos to know itself".

TL;DR We really know nothing, but it's pretty unlikely that anything happens after death or that there is a reason we are here.

Physicist Sean Carroll refutes supernatural beliefs has been added as a related post - related requested by ChaosEngine.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/The-Truth-about-Atheism

Invocations (related=http://videosift.com/video/The-Truth-about-Atheism) cannot be called by shinyblurry because shinyblurry is not privileged - sorry.

*related because you should be allowed the invocation

The Truth about Atheism has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

Thanks eric!

I don't think i've done a very good job of explaining my point, because:
1) I do not believe in the god of the gaps in any sense, i reject the notion.
2) I didn't ask for a "reason"; this is a subtle point that i'll try to make clearer.
3) I don't hold any "supernatural" beliefs in the sense you mean - not a single one.
4) I believe firmly in things that i can prove to myself, and am uncertain about things that i cannot supply any proof or reason for.

Why are we here? When i ask that question, i am not asking for a reason for our existence; a goal that humanity collectively must achieve. I am asking why do we find ourselves and our reality as we find it? We use science to describe it and become nonplussed by these amazing things but fundamentally, what is charge? Why do opposites attract? Why does mass attract mass, etc.? Isn't it all a bit weird and wonderful?

There is no answer to that question in physics. To use the term "supernatural" to describe a discussion of why/how (which lies beyond the jurisdiction of physics) is either naive or derogatory because the term is philosophy.

You reject the notion that you could go from not existing to existing, finding yourself in a world of things you don't understand. Yet you seem to find it unremarkable that at one point you went from not existing to existing, finding yourself in a world of things you didn't understand. If i put you in a fully immersive Skyrim game, unconscious and without memory, you'd play that game and think it was real. You may even believe that, once you died, you'd cease to exist. But one day, you die in Skyrim and everything ceases to be, before you're transported to a world of things you don't understand. Yet there were no mechanisms within the Skyrim universe to allow for that! In other words, what about things that exist or take place outside of our 3 spatial and 1 temporal dimensions, or perhaps beyond even our understanding of dimensions?

"There has to be a mechanism" is idle speculation on your part, and demonstrates your closedness to anything that might exist beyond our perspective of 3 dimensional space (which might be behind the "why?" and god of the gaps misunderstanding) - for which there is evidence and on which there is active and significant research. Besides, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This is not the god of the gaps, this is acknowledging our limitations and constraining our certainty accordingly.

It's odd that you quote Sagan, because he often spoke about the spiritual and the unknowable/ineffable. I think he would be more aligned with my assessment than yours, as he was an agnostic and rejected the label atheist.

Possibly we continue to exist, perhaps we don't. Perhaps 'exist' and 'not exist' are human concepts that don't mean anything in the bigger picture, and the parts of us that exist outside of 3 dimensions bathe forever in rivers of custard (or something really weird that can't be explained in english). Nobody knows and no guess is less likely or less educated, in my opinion, which is based on my lack of certainty and absolute bewilderment that we did the not-exist->exist cycle in the first place - but i welcome any argument or evidence you can provide counter to this, and my mind is open to them.

If you want some reading material that delves into this quite extensively check out:

• Denial of Death


• Existential Psychotherapy