[pclmulqdq]

Why do they see it as the "end of experience"? Because they don't know what comes after it? When I see people use that explanation, I also see a fear of the unknown. Nobody has any idea what comes after death: It could be the start of a brighter and better experience or it could be absolutely nothing.

Taking things to the far extreme, for all we know, there could actually be a heaven or a hell as described by one of the desert-dwelling hallucinogen-enjoying people whose book caught on. And I don't mean some ethereal concept, I mean the actual things with 72 virgins or angels with 100 eyes and 50 wings and wheels on their wheels. Despite feeling implausible, we have exactly as much evidence of nothingness after death as we do of a heaven or a hell.

Before you mention that this is absurd because there's no brain activity after death, we still don't know how the brain and "mind" work, we can't observe the vast majority of matter or energy in the universe, and there's a lot we don't know. Filling that unknown space in with "it's the end of everything I experience" is as irrational as filling that in with "72 virgins if I kill enough infidels."

[cgriswald]

You yourself seem to have internalized the idea that it is the end of the experience. The things you describe as possible are all different experiences to this one.

People aren’t required to be rational for GP’s point to be correct. I don’t even think it is necessary that they hold a particular view on death. Plenty of Christians don’t fear death because they believe in heaven. Plenty of those who believe in nothingness fear the end of their experience.

Nothingness has evidence. Memory and consciousness both appear tied to the body. Suggesting that’s equivalent to anything else because technically anything is possible is at best a god of the gaps argument.

The rational take here is that we don’t know, we may never know, but that the evidence is suggestive of the same sort of nothingness we “experience” when unconscious or before we were born.

Regardless, all that is required for the GP’s point to be true is that people do not universally fear death.

[pclmulqdq]

> You yourself seem to have internalized the idea that it is the end of the experience.

The previous commenter didn't say the end of "the experience." They said the end of "experience" (no the). If you want to be pedantic about the semantics, that's a pretty big thing to add, don't you think? One is the end of all sensation and the end of a particular set of sensations.

And no, it doesn't require that people not universally fear death, it requires that people who see death as the end of all experience don't fear death, which appears to be tautologically false since they adopt an irrational and negative belief about what the post-death state is.

> Nothingness has evidence. Memory and consciousness both appear tied to the body. Suggesting that’s equivalent to anything else because technically anything is possible is at best a god of the gaps argument.

The wordplay is interesting here - I didn't mention memory, only consciousness. Memory does appear to be an embodied phenomenon in your brain. Regarding consciousness, I'm not filling the gaps with a god, I'm suggesting that denying the existence of the gaps is as bad as filling it with a god.

[Dylan16807]

> which appears to be tautologically false since they adopt an irrational and negative belief about what the post-death state is.

"Probably nothing" is not an irrational belief. You don't need 100% certainty to want to avoid that.

> The wordplay is interesting here - I didn't mention memory, only consciousness. Memory does appear to be an embodied phenomenon in your brain.

If I don't have my memories, then the old me is effectively gone forever. Wanting to avoid such a drastic and disruptive change has nothing to do with "fear of the unknown".

[pclmulqdq]

> "Probably nothing" is not an irrational belief. You don't need 100% certainty to want to avoid that.

The words "probably nothing" imply that on something more than belief, you can assign a probability to nothingness. Can you provide an objective measure of probability as to whether nothingness is what awaits you after death? When you say "probably nothing," the belief in "probably nothing" is an emotionally nice but similarly irrational hedge on "nothing," because nobody can assign a probability to an unknown unknown like "what happens after you die."

> If I don't have my memories, then the old me is effectively gone forever. Wanting to avoid such a drastic and disruptive change has nothing to do with "fear of the unknown".

Wanting to avoid that change is almost definitionally due to a fear of the unknown. You are afraid that the new state you will be in will be worse for lack of those memories. Many people who lose their memories are happier for it, and it is in fact a common trauma response to block out old, bad memories.

[CRConrad]

> The words "probably nothing" imply that on something more than belief, you can assign a probability to nothingness.

Maybe not "probability", but likelihood. That's the way Ockham's razor cuts: In the total absence of evidence for any continuation, there is no sensible reason to assume the existence of it.

> Wanting to avoid that change is almost definitionally due to a fear of the unknown. You are afraid that the new state you will be in will be worse for lack of those memories.

No, you only need to know that that won't be you who is in whatever state that whoever-it-is will be in. Our memories is who we are. No need to feel fear on behalf of whoever that will be that you're talking about.

[Dylan16807]

> Can you provide an objective measure of probability as to whether nothingness is what awaits you after death?

Yes, with some effort, I can start at a default 50:50 and incorporate all the evidence we have access to. The resulting number will be pretty high and as objective as a person can reasonably be asked to be.

> nobody can assign a probability to an unknown unknown

Giving up like that is not a way to make rational decisions.

Also when you have a very precise scenario and question, doesn't that make it a known unknown?

> Wanting to avoid that change is almost definitionally due to a fear of the unknown. You are afraid that the new state you will be in will be worse for lack of those memories.

Wrong. Even with a guaranteed blissful existence, I'm still busy using my consciousness on my current life and don't want it to end.

> it is in fact a common trauma response to block out old, bad memories.

Yeah a few of them, that's not remotely the same as a clean slate.

[Livanskoy]

I'm sorry, but I don't understand how you could make an equality between "end of experience" and "fear of the unknown". The first is about valuing your life and not wanting for it to end. The second is about what comes after the end of life. I do not care about the second, but care about my current life a lot. If, for some unlikely but rhetorically valuable reason, my experience decides to NOT END after my body dies — great, more fun. I do not care about the political or religious debates, especially here, but it always seemed strange to me that people assume the fear of the unknown to be some universal factor.

[bitwize]

In one of the detective stories my wife watches, one of the suspects was a kooky spiritual medium. "Don't you wonder what happens after death?" she asks the detective. The skeptical detective responds: "I know exactly what will happen after I die: I will go back to being what I was for millions of years before I was born."

We know exactly what happens after death: nothing. You cease to be as a living being. What we don't know, and can't ever know, is what it's like to not be. But every investigation so far has failed to produce evidence of a soul separate from the body, so until that changes we can assume such souls don't exist, and neither will we when our body dies.

Don't handwave it away with "we don't know how the mind really works". For all intents and purposes we do know. The mind working at all depends on the body working; once the latter stops, so does the former. We can't accept this because our mind, from our mind's perspective, is everything, but it is limited in space and time because it too is composed of matter and energy and one day, it will stop. That fills us with horror and dread, the idea of (from our tiny perspective) everything stopping, so we fight it. We make up stories about heavens and hells. Even in this era we fight it with hopes of becoming transfinite and infinite through technology. It's all hopium and copium, and incredibly dangerous. People like Elon Musk are now shooting giant penises into the sky, and planning to send actual humans on one-way missions to interplanetary hellscapes which should inspire visions of an angry Hayao Miyazaki saying "what you have done is an insult to life itself." Meanwhile we're neglecting the care of the only hospitable home we know we have, Earth.

Accept your fate. Live, as the fictional gorilla Ishmael put it, in the hands of the gods. Doing otherwise will doom us all, and a lot of other living things too.

[matthewdgreen]

I don’t remember anything from before I was born, obviously. But I also don’t think my consciousness is particularly unique or special, and conscious human beings lived before me, so I assume it’s reasonable to imagine “I” was one of them. This is a pretty nonsensical way to define the word “I”, but not much more nonsensical than using the singular “I” to refer to the six year old and present versions of me.

What does bum me out is losing a lifetime of knowledge and capability. You get old just when you’re starting to be good at things. The human lifespan could definitely be a few decades longer.

[pclmulqdq]

Since you seem to know, can you tell me at what precise moment a person becomes conscious at birth? It would solve a lot of problems in the world if you could share that knowledge with us.

People fill the unknown with lots of things. I am simply suggesting that you should let the unknown remain unknown, especially if you're going to make major life choices around it.

[bitwize]

Fundamentalists are fond of responding to claims about evolution (dinosaurs, etc.) with, "Were you there? How could you know if you were not there?" This is even taught as a rhetorical tactic in fundamentalist elementary schools (which I'm embarrassed to be an American for admitting they exist here).

This seems to be an approach similar to what you're taking here, except you put an interesting twist on it by handwaving your appeal to spooks with stuff about "the unknown" and then claiming it is the more rational position. Once again: we know, as certainly as we can know anything, that the mind cannot function without the body functioning. Therefore, the idea that there is no experience after body death is a more rational position to take than anything involving 72 virgins, nirvana, reincarnation, or blah blah Bible Jesus magic.

[pclmulqdq]

The difference is that we know the fundamentalists are wrong because their beliefs solidly run up against known facts. I am suggesting that filling the gaps one way (even though it feels more rational) is as irrational as filling the gaps any other way.

And we know very little about the mind. We know a lot about the brain. As far as the exact links between mind and brain, that is still quite a bit up in the air.

[bitwize]

We know the mind exists as a phenomenon of the body's operation. No operating body... no mind. We have plenty of evidence to support this and zero evidence to the contrary, even if we may not have all the details, so your attempts to rescue a spook reality of disembodied minds by furiously waving your hands and going "it's all unknown!" is disingenuous.