[BLKNSLVR]

I'm going to say it will be similar to the experience prior to birth / conception, ie. we were nothing, and to nothing we shall return.

It's a scary feeling if you can grasp it. Grasping non-existence from within existence is difficult, I've consciously tried to do it and succeeded a couple of times, but it's fleeting and both times it affected my breathing and heart rate in a similar way to fear or panic or pain.

[whatshisface]

As someone who was born, I can attest that the experience of not being born consisted of billions of years passing by in an imperceptibly short instant, followed by being five.

[canyp]

I go through that exercise of visualizing the void and it is fascinating and terrifying at the same time, especially if you do it before going to sleep.

That being said, you can't just assume that existence is bounded by your living memories. You might as well have been everything instead of nothing prior to being spawned and you just don't remember it.

[BLKNSLVR]

> you can't just assume that existence is bounded by your living memories

I was going to raise that, but couldn't find a short enough way to describe it properly. Something like:

Existence beyond what you can actually remember doesn't matter because it's outside any bounds of practical discussion; it should be excluded from consideration. The same way it's impossible to predict anything 'before the big bang' because we only have 'after the big bang' as useful evidence. There is no way to verify any continuity if you can't remember it or if there is no evidence of it. There's no guarantee you can even comprehend what it could be, 'you' as a concept may not even exist and it's unlikely to be relate-able to anything in this living world. Maybe you return to being 0.00001% of the collective consciousness of the universe, or any other crackpot thing anyone wants to suggest. Flying Spaghetti Monster.".

[canyp]

It may as well be outside our bounds and unverifiable, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter or that it shouldn't be part of "practical" discussion, whatever you consider "practical" there. You still have a brain to think about these things.

I do personally believe the latter part. I did not mean to suggest the before/after experience was going to look anything like your current one.

[Hammershaft]

If you're a materialist and you think there is no afterlife then I don't believe there would be a void. There's no mechanism for "you" to perceive a void or perceive time.

Its the difference between:

"I see nothing when I close my eyes" (actually you 'see' darkness over time)

and...

"I see nothing through my elbow" (You really don't see anything through your elbow because the capacity for it just doesn't exist.)

Even our basic perception of time is mediated by the structure of our brains... and without that there's no difference between one second and a trillion^trillion years.

[canyp]

Being a materialist and claiming that everything is the consequence of physical phenomena is great, but then you have a lot of homework to do. So I see no more strength in its claims than in the contrarian ones.

[ed_mercer]

I've always wondered why doing it before sleep amplifies the anxiety

[canyp]

I believe the fact that it is night time does a lot to it, since we're just wired for a healthy fear of the dark. Coupled with consciousness fading into sleep, it seems to open up a lot of dread.

[skissane]

Do you know whether we live in a computer simulation?

If we do, well it would seem trivially possible for our simulators to provide us with an afterlife if they wished–and we honestly could have no idea what they might wish.

If you claim to know we don't live in a computer simulation, or that if we do, our simulators would be unlikely to grant us an afterlife–how do you know that?

P(we live in a computer simulation) ~= 0.5

P(there is an afterlife|we live in a computer simulation) ~= 0.5

Therefore, P(there is an afterlife) >= 0.25 even if we assume P(there is an afterlife|we don't live in a computer simulation) = 0.0 (which is itself highly debatable)

[BLKNSLVR]

I don't know and it makes literally no difference (to me, it may make a difference to people with more patience to dig into deep unverifiable theoreticals).

In the movie The Thirteenth Floor, the main character breaks out of his simulation (which also contained a simulation) into 'the real world', which changes almost exactly nothing about the presence or otherwise of an afterlife because the simulation was a simulation of the real world; the rules are the same. The boundaries of that real world are also applicable to all recursive simulations.

If you're in a simulation maybe you get reset to a prior state. You wouldn't know, so it doesn't matter. The simulation may run on stolen time slices of a processor, and seconds or minutes may pass in between milliseconds of progress of your simulated world, but it seems continuous to you because the entirety of your experience is within the simulation.

"You" as a coherent entity cannot exist outside the bounds.

If there is an afterlife it is most likely a rebirth of a new entity.

There is no you there is only me.

[skissane]

> In the movie The Thirteenth Floor, the main character breaks out of his simulation (which also contained a simulation) into 'the real world', which changes almost exactly nothing about the presence or otherwise of an afterlife because the simulation was a simulation of the real world; the rules are the same. The boundaries of that real world are also applicable to all recursive simulations.

But this isn’t true - if universe A simulates universe B, there is no requirement that they have the same laws of physics.

If we are living in a computer simulation, then the “real” laws of physics might be radically different from the apparent ones, and we might never know what the “real” laws are

[smnplk]

So you will experience something then, if you say that you experienced this nothingness before you were born :D ;)

What I was aluding to is that people have profound consciouss experience when they are dying. Even clinicaly dead people with zero brain activity. But even if EEGs can't detect extremely low brain activity, it's still weird to have such rich experiences.

I would have never found metaphysics in my life, if i didn't have a few unnatural experiences. I would not find the big explanatory gap between experience and matter, which is so obvious to me now. I would still be a materialist while not even knowing I was one, like many here in these comments.

Before I was a materialist like you and I was not afraid of dying, because like you, I thought it's just lights out and I am no more, so I can not suffer. But now I am more afraid od death, because of the unknown that follows.

[piva00]

> What I was aluding to is that people have profound consciouss experience when they are dying. Even clinicaly dead people with zero brain activity. But even if EEGs can't detect extremely low brain activity, it's still weird to have such rich experiences.

This is an extraordinary claim, any sources for it? Specially the point about "profound conscious experiences" in "clinically dead people with zero brain activity".

[BLKNSLVR]

The one thing that makes me not afraid of death is the number of people, good and bad, rich and poor, who have succeeded at it before me.

[mrguyorama]

>Grasping non-existence from within existence is difficult, I've consciously tried to do it and succeeded a couple of times

How can you possibly assert you have succeeded at this?

[albatross79]

It's very easy to grasp, do you remember what it was like before your first memory? No? That's what it's like.

[BLKNSLVR]

Nope. That's a long way from grasping it. That's seeing it from a distance and understanding the general shape.

I may just be defining 'grasp' differently to you though.

[albatross79]

There's no grasping it, you can't grasp not existing. There will be no grasping when you're not around.