[md224]

The most striking thing to me is that Ayer hopes there isn't life after death.

> My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. (italics mine)

I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife. (I think Thomas Nagel wrote something along those lines.) I sort of get it but regardless I think it's very interesting.

[birdsongs]

I'm just 40, and while I won't go into it, I've lived a very long life so far. An incredible amount of joy, but also grief and pain. Memory for me, when I'm drinking my coffee in the morning, is warm and cozy in a numbing sort of way, but I have to be careful where I walk in it.

I certainly don't wish for death, I still find so much beauty and joy in life, and I still find and experience love. But I don't wish for an afterlife, or prolonged life. If I'm fortunate to live until my natural death, I will welcome it.

Humanity will go on, there are billions of threads of consciousness right now, and I feel so much gratitude that I was and am one of those. I have a lot of comfort in being wrapped and surrounded by those threads, and that they will continue around me when mine frays and ends.

My cannon view is that we're just the universe experiencing itself, and that while my consciousness will end, that universe will go on, my atoms part of it.

[card_zero]

One thing I sometimes hope is true, in my materialistic atheistic way, is to do with the problem of sci-fi teleportation. See, if you go through a transporter on Star Trek, you're taken apart and reassembled. This makes people worry, ludicrously, that the reassembled version "isn't really me". You could after all refrain from taking the original apart, and simply duplicate people. Both copies of some guy called Bernard would claim "I am Bernard", and both would be right.

So this makes me think that from moment to moment, as we pass through time at one second per second, it's as if we're being sent through a transporter. That is to say, if in the far future after my death I am reassembled, or even if just a close imitation of me is assembled from whatever data they can get hold of, then that would be no different from me, or Bernard, being brought back to life. "I am Bernard", he would say, and he'd still be right. Of course other Bernard wouldn't get to share his experiences, but so what. My former self can't share my present experiences.

So, why hope for this to happen at all? It has to be that what we're emotionally invested in is not really "continuity of experience", which is a myth, but continuity of ideas. It's nice if those ideas can sit together in the coherent context of a mind. The Woody Allen quote is "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying." But perhaps in fact through your work is good enough, really? Like a close second.

What I mean to say is, I don't so much hope for an afterlife, as to discover that it philosophically doesn't matter anyway. Though I prefer people not dead.

[lapcat]

> I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife.

I feel that eternity in Heaven would actually be Hell, because nothing would matter. No danger, no failure, no challenge, no goals, no purpose. What gives life meaning are mortality, limitations, beginnings and endings, progress.

I recently watched the film "Eternity" on Apple TV, starring Elizabeth Olsen, in which everyone after they die has to choose their own form of afterlife and then stick with it forever. All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get. (The film itself was pretty good, not boring. That's because it had an ending!)

Fiction is ideal for playing out these scenarios. Think also of the film "Highlander", in which the ultimate "prize" of the immortals turns out to be mortality. MacLeod's life had become repetitive, and he couldn't fully invest in it, because he kept losing everyone he loved. They grew old and died, while he lived on and had to keep changing identities. For a while it's a grand adventure... until it isn't anymore.

I can certainly understand wanting to live longer, but eternity is unimaginably long, way too long. I don't think that's something to be desired.

[card_zero]

Problems, yes. "Biology is going to kill me soon" shouldn't have to be one of those problems, and in fact I think it makes us all slightly crazy in different ways, from not caring about the future to unscrupulously believing in afterlives.

[lapcat]

I suspect you indended to reply to the sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827905 which contains the word "problems" rather than my comment which does not?

[card_zero]

No, I was disputing "mortality" while agreeing with "challenges", which I've written as problems in the nice sense of "please let me finish my problem". That's some historical figure's alleged last words, I think.

(Edit: probably an embellishment of Archimedes, supposedly saying to the Roman soldier who killed him, "do not disturb my circles!" - not exactly a plaintive attitude about mortality, more just being a grumpy geometrist.)

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

The reference to eternity in afterlife doesn't mean "very long time"; it means "no time", a world that has no time. You can briefly feel the difference by being present in the current moment.

[ButlerianJihad]

No, this is a very bad misunderstanding of the term.

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05551b.htm

Eternity in its proper sense belongs to God alone; human beings sharing in "eternal life" will experience time differently. Even the angels experience "aeviternity" which is unique to their kind.

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1010.htm#article5

[Mikhail_Edoshin]

Could be; I'm not too literate on this, I'm only retelling what I understood directly and this could be very limited. I just wanted to point out that "eternal life" is not going to be the same life we have now, only endless. It is very different and, speaking of boredom, definitely not boring. Boredom is an invention of mind.

[lapcat]

> Boredom is an invention of mind.

Yes? Are you saying in the afterlife we'll be mindless?

[chubs]

"All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get" I used to wonder this. I read the religious answer to this relies on the concept of infinitude: what if an infinite god can invent an infinite number of exciting new... things to do?

[lapcat]

God as Mr. Roarke?

[mock-possum]

“Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens” for better or worse.

[pino999]

It is the safest and easiest solution. You die, nothing happens.

When there is an afterlife or perhaps even eternity, the problems begin.

[BobbyTables2]

Definitely!. Hence people must support religious institutions to guide them to the afterlife…

Imagine taking sports coaching from one who never played…

[kamaal]

>>perhaps even eternity

If there is an eternity, perhaps everybody that exists, or will exist is already a part of it, and is going through it.

[sdevonoes]

religious beliefs aside, there’s something pleasing about living a good life and facing a decent death: closure.

[claysmithr]

except without religious beliefs you cannot objectively define good and bad, it's all just moral relativism.

[varjag]

If you have respect for the unique chance of conscious experience of others you get your moral system rather trivially from the first principles. Certainly not worse than an arbitrary religious stick and carrot system.

[seanw444]

Unless you subscribe to moral objectivism.