[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.