Free will/predestination (old school vs new school root cause) is derivative of it all too. Morality is moot if we don’t have free will, we just follow where we’re guided.
I believe the brain is a radio and we tap into different frequencies. But I don’t know, it’s just a thought I had no control over having.
Nothing matters is through my lens. I’m someone who has been preoccupied with my mortality and whether there was an afterlife the bulk of my life. Realizing that there’s harmony to everything and we have this consciousness as an opportunity that we can turn into either heaven or hell while here but that my sophomoric fear was unfounded and based on simplified concepts frees me up. I’ve been thinking everything mattered too much my whole life, I’m not flipping from one polarity to the other.
Nothing matters is on the hyperbolic side, what I meant was that I’m not afraid anymore; things only matter so much. It does read as god is dead but I’m literally saying god is alive and it’s all of us. He wasn’t wrong, he wasn’t right either tho. From there it’d be a waste to rush an inevitability, but that inevitability is coming and it’s not so bad after all.
Just watched this. It’s basically rephrasing everything I was just getting at, if it helps to make it anymore clear. He quibbled with my use of materialism and he’s obviously right but a rose by any other name.
Anyway,
Also, I asked for ggoreo to reinstate my old abilities so all of this stuff is going to be going into my blog shortly.
Rephrasing, again.
been re-reading a lot of Camus lately. He’s ultra depressing while you’re reading it but then when you think about it later, his stuff is some of the most uplifting material out there. Understanding the absurdity is a necessary condition for dealing with it effectively.
I have one crown already and the sensitivity in it was like 6 months or so if I remember correctly. I thought I needed a root canal in that tooth but apparently the tooth in front of it is starting to crack around a filling it has. Same for molar right under it but that one doesn’t cause any discomfort yet. If I have one thing close to a phobia, it is dentists.
ETA: I used to make crowns at a dental lab in the 90’s. A high school friend and I got someone high at lunch and he snitched us out. We both got fired but dude we got high didn’t lol. I had just got a $1/hr raise the week before.
Tbh I feel this way about most things I try to deeply understand. Like cooking.
https://twitter.com/FactsOfMath/status/1358781126857396225
I’m sorry to hear this. Your story was so painful to read that I skipped to the end to offer my sympathies.
What is mortality? What is immortality?
I believe our consciousness is a manifestation of everything that makes up us. Me is just the perception of a consistent self-derived identity. If you removed that identity, immortality would have no meaning to me. Who cares if my body is eternal if my identity starts over every ten years with no connection to who I was before?
And yet on the other end, think of if your identity as it is if your current form persisted for eternity. This is true immortality of the soul. I wouldn’t want this kind of immortality. Eventually–even if it took a long time–I would run out of new things to experience and new ways to experience them. I would long for a cessation of my existence. Immortality could in such circumstances be seen as an inevitable curse and terrible burden.
I don’t actually believe in a soul, but that doesn’t mean that this is the end of Me in the broader sense. Even if Heaven is real, I would not be delivered there in my current form. In the way I described death above, I would die even if my soul made the journey to paradise. That would be the end of Me. A new Me would be born in the afterlife.
My identity depends on the constraints I find myself in. Take those away–and I mean here in the cosmic manner in which Heaven would require for me to now live forever in complete euphoria and fulfillment–and I would be a new person.
But since I believe my very existence is a manifestation of everything beyond my control, I also believe that those pieces of what made unidentified but intrinsic contributions to manifesting this Me are just as inescapably present if you take away my physical body. After death, they manifest in new ways. Some that resemble what you’d know to identify as me you knew. Some that are just newborn stars awaiting their own transition.
Whether there is an afterlife, I was always going to die someday. Thinking of it this way gives me serenity for whatever is next. I hope to live a long life. And when I’m done, I welcome whatever form the things that made up this version of me take on next. I was stardust before this form. I will be stardust after.
And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
Its name is Galactus, devourer of worlds.
No, I don’t think you’re getting it.
I saw that they set you up! It was really unfair.
Levels of existential dread:
0: I will live forever
1: I will die but some signs of me will last forever (e.g., my tombstone)
2: The expansion of the sun will eventually destroy the Earth, but humanity will survive by migrating to other worlds
3: The heat death of the universe is inevitable. Even the fundamental particles that constitute all matter will eventually decay, leaving a sea of undifferentiated entropy in which no information can be preserved.
0+1+2+3=6
What particles are we talking about? If they decay, how fundamental can they be? Won’t particles continue to pop in and out of the vacuum? And are particles themselves “fundamental”?
Does increasing entropy necessarily imply loss of information? Do we even know whether or not information is conserved? Maybe there’s a distinction between kinds of information?
I read things now and then but it’s all so confusing. Words are so slippery. I’m not expecting an answer fwiw.
One of my favorite philosophers was explaining Compatibalism and said, “Who knows what we’ll discover in quantum mechanics???”
I was like okay sweet, that’s just vague enough for me to stop worrying about this.
6ix