[reading-at-work]

This activates my existential dread pretty hard. The idea of never existing again after I die and there being no afterlife is pretty scary by itself, but the idea of this life repeating infinitely is somehow even worse. Though I guess each individual experience in the infinite continuum would be isolated so it's not like I'm remembering all of my past lives, in which case I guess it doesn't matter either way. It's a weird mental rabbit hole to go down.

[imtringued]

I've thought about these things a lot. There are so many logical problems with an afterlife. Heaven/Utopia doesn't make sense because it would have to be based on your current life. (do you arrive old or young in heaven etc) Reincarnation is problematic because you would have to stand in a queue while waiting for your soul to be assigned to a new body. My theory with the least amount of logical flaws is assuming that there is a global soul which is reading the "standard input" from all philosophical zombies simultaneously or it only selects one philosophical zombie.

None of this really matters because only depressed people worry about the "meaning" of life, primarily because they have been denied all other sources of "meaning" and therefore cling to the one thing everyone (including themselves) has: a life. It's only human to grow attached to things and our lives are our most priced possessions after all.

[sysbin]

> My theory with the least amount of logical flaws is assuming that there is a global soul which is reading the "standard input" from all philosophical zombies simultaneously or it only selects one philosophical zombie.

Can you expand on the only selects one philosophical zombie? I don't really understand what you're attempting to express.

I think all people "think" about existence at some point. Maybe sad people think about it more than others.

[Scarblac]

I have the opposite reaction. I find the idea that we could cause almost all life on Earth to die, while the planet may not have enough billions of years left to evolve something the current biosphere again to be deeply disturbing. We don't even know if other life exists.

If universes get reborn ad infinitum, nothing is that final.

[sysbin]

You would exist again and after you die from that theory for infinity. I'm confused how you associate existential dread with it?

[gremlinsinc]

Except this could be reincarnation to an extent.. Hell what if the Mandela effect isn't being zapped into a new parallel universe because our planet was destroyed in the early 90's. What if our planet was destroyed...somehow our 'data' was backed up, then billions of years passed, then the big bang happened, then earth came back and we basically came to being in a slightly altered timeline?

I'm an exmormon/agnostic that believes in afterlife just not deity. I don't believe 100% just that it's possible, but that there's no pre-requisites to get there and no conditions. Mainly energy that is our 'soul' lives on in some form, or maybe there is quantum imortality where you keep being reborn in 'yourself' in another parallel universe and you retain some memories/essence of your former self, but are always trying to become better.

You or someone else could have a child in one universe, not the next. So in some universes you're never even born, some you are, and some people may be born for the first time ever, thus the whole old-soul/new-soul thing. Who's to say though it's not the same universe just it swings back and forth like a pendulum and when it's in the low arc it's our small time here, when it's at the high mark it's sucked back into a dense ball, then it explodes again on the downward arc...

I just can't buy that an all-knowing all-powerful being created everything (if anything it was an idiot who blew up all space/time toying with technology they didn't fully understand). This same being is petty, manipulative, and narcissistic and demands our fealty, our faith, our worship else we be cast into a pit of fire. Sounds like something Donald Trump would say to pretty much any Democrat or anyone who doesn't think his shit is made of gold.

[sysbin]

I do toy with that idea of how our thoughts are somehow stored elsewhere and contrary of our memories just being gone at death. I'm trying to make the concept work with the idea of eternal reoccurrence but it's hard to think of a good idea. I'm agnostic as well but I don't rule out the concept of a deity. There could be heaven & hell and even when it's just double predestination. A deity doesn't have to please the whims of what we think of as fair. Anyhow, I could even see eternal reoccurrence working with a deity altering the simulation as it pleases. Btw, simulation is just a word and one I chose to express what we live.

[gremlinsinc]

If there's a creator, I don't think he's a deity....more like a bystandard of his creation. Maybe a programmer coding our 'simulation', or a scientist tinkering with anti-matter and dark matter accidently exploding himself out of existence and us into existence.

Though the entire universe could just be like a wave that spreads out, and then back in and back out and back in eternally. Whether each iteration is a mirror of itself or 100% different nobody will probably ever know.

I don't think we'll ever have answers even if we colonize the entire universe. There's a good Asimov short story on entropy where they keep asking a super computer if they can stop entropy and for eons it keeps saying unable to compute and just before entropy runs out it came up w/ a solution.

Mankind became immortal (or long-lived at least) and had populated the entire known universe. Damn, I'd love to live to see that.