Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
> And the afterlife also sucks apparently (although I don't personally believe in an afterlife).

Why don't you believe in the experience after dying ?

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.

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.
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.

> 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.".

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.

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.

loading story #48485232
I've always wondered why doing it before sleep amplifies the anxiety
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.
loading story #48472468
loading story #48472419
loading story #48480224
It's very easy to grasp, do you remember what it was like before your first memory? No? That's what it's like.
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.

There's no grasping it, you can't grasp not existing. There will be no grasping when you're not around.
I think that once the power supply to my brain shuts down, that's likely the end of my conscious experience.
loading story #48471833