The raw terror of the inevitability of death without comfort of distraction or mental illusion — "fleshing," as Puchner describes it — was brilliantly captured here in a way I've never before heard or read expressed by another person.
It's relieving, in a way, to know that I'm not the only human to chronically go through it.
I especially enjoyed his comment on the difficulties of erecting a comforting fantasy of an afterlife:
> I’ve endeavored, in my weakest moments, to believe in heaven — or at least some vague, harpless afterlife my brain won’t snicker at. But I’m still pretty much paralyzed with fear.
It's a curse, in a way, to have (be?) a brain trained to recognize and solve problems, optimize expected outcome, and see through bullshit when the popular solution to existential debilitating dread — religion — crumbles at the slightest analysis. Ignorance is bliss, to add to Puchner's ostensibly empty bromides.
That said, I've personally found that two core ideas can consistently keep me grounded (even in fits of hypercritical 4 a.m. breathless terrors):
1. I'm conscious, which is fundamentally the only thing I can really be sure of. For consciousness to arise in a completely material universe is so outside of any scientific understanding (at least currently) that there may very well be room for a kind of immortality. If consciousness is the universe experiencing itself (to borrow from Alan Watts), perhaps life is just a temporary segmentation of a tiny piece of eternal consciousness that will later be rejoined.
2. If you're reading this (ie: enjoying the temporary luxury of life), you've got a fair chance of living considerably longer than any human that has ever existed (Kurzweil et al.). It's possible that unbounded mortality could be achieved within your lifetime. This presents a new problem: the inevitable heat death of the universe (I realize the irony of immediately complaining about a lifespan that has reached eons, but it would still be a finite existence), but it's possible that there are areas of physics that have yet to be discovered that would permit hopping to a new one.
I write this precisely three weeks before getting married to the most wonderful, caring, talented, driven, intelligent, and just generally enjoyable companions I could have imagined spending my life with. I think this event has resurfaced these previously successfully buried distresses: when you have more, you have more to lose.
I'm reminded of the "4EVER YOURS" story from this year's Valentines Day Google Doodle[1] that really hits me hard:
> "This will end someday...someday, one of us will die, then the other will die, but we have now."
The mental tricks are nice for when I'm in a moment of weakness, but there is something starkly beautiful and painfully focusing about the possibility that this could be it. That every time I hold her hand, every adventure we take together, and every late night goofy conversation is limited. It's a clear and constant reminder to really make these cherished moments count, though I wish with every fiber of my existence that I could make them last forever.
It's a curse, in a way, to have (be?) a brain trained to recognize and solve problems, optimize expected outcome, and see through bullshit when the popular solution to existential debilitating dread — religion — crumbles at the slightest analysis. Ignorance is bliss, to add to Puchner's ostensibly empty bromides.
There are a lot of very intelligent people who believe in an afterlife. They aren't ignorant about the reality of death, nor are they practicing "bullshit". They honestly and earnestly believe in what they advocate.
The disagreement is fundamental in nature. The afterlife was never demonstrated to be false. It was rejected because it contradicts naturalism. Believers didn't make some mistake in logic along the way, they started from a different set of assumptions.
To rephrase your original statement:
It's a curse, in a way, to have (be?) a brain trained in logical positivism, to only accept scientific answers, and reject out-of-hand any other possible answers which might provide hope rather than existential debilitating dread
They may earnestly believe in it, but they cannot provide a shred of evidence that it exists and all authority that claims that it does is inevitably found to be either a) mistaken or b) fraudulent.
Very intelligent, otherwise rational people believe in false propositions that make them feel happy, relieved or secure all the time. Unless there's evidence, that belief is as unfounded as the belief of most people that their husband is noble, their wife is beautiful, their child is special, that they deserve what they have, etc. It's a very human, completely fine thing to believe all of these things (even necessary for a healthy life), but when you look at them rationally, you cannot suppose that they are true.
An afterlife doesn't need to be proven false. There just has to be some evidence, (not even proof, just any evidence beyond 'I feel it') to make it a proposition worth considering. Until then, since so many have looked for evidence and failed to find it, the only rational view of the situation is to suppose (and behave) like it doesn't. You're made of meat, death is final, there is no do-over. Make this life count, try to bring about the change that you want to see, because there is no higher authority, there is no second chance.
If you only ever look at the fraction of the universe for which we have a plausible explanation that is passing scientific criteria, you're missing out on a lot of what is part of human existence all around the globe.
Science is a good tool for positive filtering (as in "hey, because of these observations I think how this works, and I think that by doing the following tests I can get some further confirmation of that") but as soon as you use it as a negative filter (as in "hey, there's no proof of it so for all practical purposes it doesn't exist, sorry"), you're just rejecting things based on a technicality.
Human testimony is evidence, especially if corroborated by multiple unrelated sources (i.e. countless mystics from many different backgrounds and eras, many of which are completely absolved of having a material interest). A collective conscience, i.e. the fact that practically all ancient peoples believed in God and an afterlife can be considered atleast a "shred" of evidence.
I think it's wrong to say that there isn't a "shred" of evidence.
Practically all ancient people believed in nature spirits, and several disconnected tribes have worshiped the sun. The majority of ancient peoples enjoyed slavery and showed overt racism, sexism and caste systems that caused unnecessary suffering and hardship.
It is said that Aristotle believed that women had fewer teeth than men. He never thought to check by counting them.
If this is your standard of evidence, then your standard of evidence as a way of differentiating any objective truth is useless.
Also, alternative explanation: we're all the same species, and all have the same mental "bug" which causes us to think it's plausible that there's a dude (obviously a dude) in the sky who knows our name. Human testimony is one of the single most fallible sources of information. I can't even remember what my doctor told me to do this morning, while that would actually run the risk of concretely improving my quality of life.
I have been visited by deceased relatives a few times in my dreams and for me these experiences were convincing enough to serve as evidence that death is not the end of things. Of course this is just personal, but it's good enough for me.
> Very intelligent, otherwise rational people believe in false propositions that make them feel happy, relieved or secure all the time.
Exactly. I too have found that many people like to have their "ears tickled". It feels like people don't want to put up with sound reason and instead believe in doctrines and beliefs that suit their own personal tastes.
>An afterlife doesn't need to be proven false. There just has to be some evidence,
Very true, many belief systems over the millenia have taught an afterlife scenario (commonly following a 'Good Afterlife' vs. 'Bad Afterlife' theme). This comes from many belief systems carrying the notion of a "part" of the human that carries on immortally beyond the physical body (believed to be an immortal soul by Christian groups -- interestingly, the bible carries no support of this notion).
Even people who believe in this immortality notion cannot provide evidence of it's existence, yet work on the assumption that it can't be proven false. (Although, depending on your authoritative scriptures, it sometimes can be.)
A political Jewish group in the days of Jesus were known for strongly believing in the Torah, but not in this immortality notion [0].
>You're made of meat, death is final, there is no do-over.
I agree. Humans cannot stop death on their own, if they were to ever have a hope of overcoming death it would have to be via some external force that was vastly more powerful and smarter than they. Many ancient belief systems attribute this power to either a God, multiple gods working in unison, or to 'The Universe' (as in: that is simply the ways thing are).
In summation, it's NOT okay to say: GOD EXISTS! or GOD DOES NOT EXIST! or whatever oversimplified nonsense you can angrily yell in under 5 seconds and proceed to use as the foundation of the ideals for your entire life.
It's hard to admit in scientific company, but I have a Masters degree in science, excellent academic results, IQ well above average and still believe in God, in spite of the supposed contradictions that should apparently entail. And I'm also a relatively firm believer in rationality (including the parts of science that occasionally gets me in trouble with other religious people), with the caveat that I sometimes criticize atheists of believing in the non-existence of God or any other extra-universal entities with a fervor that comes from the same place which religious zeal does.
christiangenco does not speak for everyone when he (apparently) claims that existential dread is an unavoidable curse of intelligence and rationality.
Great - I'm the same in the first 3 properties, but I don't believe in god (I'm agnostic). I'd like to ask you a few questions that I have wanted to ask intelligent self-proclaimed rationalist for a long time, regarding belief.
What kind of God do you believe in? Is it more of an omni-potent being (like the Abrahamic God), or just a being with supernatural properties (like a Roman god), or just "something out there" (like a "first mover" of the universe)? Do you believe in any single god, such as Alah/Jahveh/Christian God, or Vishna (Indian God), or any of the Roman, Greek, Pagan or other gods? If yes, how do you rationalize your belief in this particular god, and the exclusion of some/all other gods? Do you consider your belief to be the ultimate "truth" (i.e. the people who don't believe or believe in something else are wrong)? If not, then I assume it's a personal belief - is it not just a "good feeling" belief, not a rational and universal "fact"? Edit: are you open to renegotiating your belief (i.e. stop believing or believing something else)?
Sorry for the onslaught of questions, but I just can't see how one could rationalize an belief of some unsubstantiated "truth" no matter how hard I think about it, so I'm looking for someone to change my view - hopefully a rational person (as you claim to be) that presents rational, well-thought-out arguments.
> but I have a Masters degree in science, excellent academic results, IQ well above average and still believe in God
Academic results and IQ are mostly about solving puzzles quickly, though. That's what most exams are about after all [0]. But the problem we are talking about is different, since you have as much time to reason about it as you want and IQ and grades probably don't affect what you finally arrive at very much. What matters is thinking deeply and honestly.
[0] Depending on your field of study, memorization may also play a role.
If this is an invitation to debate whether there is a god (or even if the observable universe is all that exists), I'm not taking the bait. My point was about personal faith not being incompatible with most definitions of rationality.
You could of course define rationality to be only caring about what is observable, measurable and understandable with the currently accepted models, but the history of science would have been very boring if everyone always took that stance. You're free to do whatever you want with this, of course, my point is that it's a personal choice which is not directly related to whether you are a rational being. ("Thinking deeply and honestly" sounds like intellectual hand-waving to me, but I suppose a lot of people would agree with it).
What you are suggesting is a false dichotomy. The Romans had dozens of Gods as did the Greeks, not to mention the Gods of the Sumerians, the Phoenicians and the Celts among others too numerous to mention.
Thinking deeply and honestly starts with considering all the Gods and then considering their existence.
If you find that you can blithely dismiss the existence of all of these Gods except for the Christian (Jewish, Islamic) God and not be stunned by that hypocrisy then you have not yet begun the journey of understanding.
In regards to Greek Mythology (adopted by the Romans), the majority of people I know have learned about this in their public school curriculum (multiple years). So "blithely" is a fallacious argument.
>Considering all the Gods and then considering their existence
Many people do study multiple religions. I happen to be one of them. Everything from modern day Jewish, Mormon, and Scientology beliefs, to more Ancient Hindu, Buddhist, Mayan, Nordic, and Egyptian beliefs, etc., etc. There are a lot of similarities between these belief systems (too many to discuss here -- and probably more than most people who have never studied these belief systems would be comfortable admitting too).
It takes a lot of courage to call other people hypocritical, when dismissing ALL gods without sufficient study of various belief systems, no?
This was not an invitation to debate whether there is a god - a topic which I avoided on purpose - but a comment that also applies outside this context. The point is that good grades or IQ are not the same as being able and _willing_ to reason correctly and neither indicates that your beliefs or arguments are reasonable or likely to be true.
Yossarian was cold, too, and shivering uncontrollable. He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.
"I’m cold," Snowden said. "I’m cold."
"There, there," said Yossarian. "There, there," He pulled the rip cord of Snowden’s parachute and covered his body with the white nylon sheets.
This is the basic fear that the repent-of-your-sins-and-give-money-to-my-church crowd preys on.... as much as a majority of them are honest, and genuinely don't want their infinitely loving god to send you to hell.
I told one once, in venice beach, that if there is a judgement in the afterlife, i'll be sure to make my judgement on his god kinder than his god's on me. He blew up on me -- enough that the cops had to tell him to calm down, which as one of said cops explained, is unusual because street preachers there get a lot of training on what's borderline acceptable legally.
At least that one was sincere in his beliefs, I guess!
Consciousness is an evolutionary adaptation that enhances survival, partly through the ability to think about one's death. That may be the only "purpose" of consciousness. So it's not a curse any more than your small, weak, cooking-dependent jaw is. Perhaps religion is the buffer that prevents conscious beings from despairing more than is evolutionarily optimal.
It's quite interesting to me that people (you, Puchner, some others here) would experience literal "breathless terrors" at the thought of one's own death. It's never come close to that for me. I've seen both my parents as well as several friends die rather unpleasant deaths (cancer) and I myself have been robbed at gunpoint but I have never felt terror contemplating my own death. It just seems to me to be the natural end of things, and it will come when it comes.
I certainly don't want to die any sooner than I have to; I'd like to see my own kids grow up, be sure they are given the opportunities I had (education, etc.) but I don't really fear dying. I'm not sure why anyone would, it's inevitable after all.
For me, the fear is not of dying, but of permanently losing the potential to ever experience any aspect of life again. It's an unsettling thought that I will never be able to experience fun, laughter, love, or success again. I won't have ideas, I won't hope, I won't dream. My conscious mind will simply join the eternal void and cease to exist.
I really dislike the idea of not only having no experiences, but never even having a chance of having any experiences again. I'd like to believe there could be some kind of afterlife, but I think it's overwhelmingly likely that there isn't one.
That's the only thing that frightens me.
There's also the aspect that I'll never be able to experience the undoubtedly amazing inventions and innovations in technology, food, entertainment, etc. that will sweep the world in the next few centuries and millennia. Many future humans will lead lives we could never even begin to dream of, and I won't even be able to observe that from afar, let alone actually participate in it.
Another fear of mine is that I will have just barely undershot the window of biological immortality. It's very possible I've missed it by 200-300 years, maybe even 100 years, which on the grand scale of human history and the universe's history is exceedingly small. So close, and yet so far.
Interesting how most people fear death but for different reasons. I fear death as much as the next guy and yet it's not about "missing out". I don't get much pleasure out of life or everyday experiences anyway so the prospect of this ending sooner or later is a non-issue, or even a good thing. It's the idea of nonexistence, nothingness, void that I can't conceive and keeps or wakes me up in the middle of the night.
> I don't get much pleasure out of life or everyday experiences anyway
That's a very existentially depressing statement. I tend not to experience "true" happiness on a daily basis, but at least in the course of a year I can accrue many experiences which make me very happy.
I sincerely hope you eventually come to find general pleasure with life.
> For me, the fear is not of dying, but of permanently losing the potential to ever experience any aspect of life again. It's an unsettling thought that I will never be able to experience fun, laughter, love, or success again. I won't have ideas, I won't hope, I won't dream. My conscious mind will simply join the eternal void and cease to exist.
Sure, but that's no different than before you were born, and that wasn't so bad.
When you first get a taste of something you don't want to let it go. It wasn't so bad because there was no other possible state; it is bad, from an objective perspective, in comparison to the alternative (consciousness). I'd much rather be alive and who I am now than be an unborn "baby".
Interesting. Do you believe in life after death? This is not something eagerly brought up on Hacker News but when discussing one's fear of death or lack thereof it is probably the most important bit of context to establish.
Fear of non-being, whether through death, losing one's mind, dementia etc is one aspect of the problem of living. I have found in my own case that the purely rational, aspiritual approach in life leaves me with a pretty anemic and empty philosophy on how to live, composed of a few cliches and self-aggrandized 'staring into the abyss'. Eventually I found this rather unsatisfying. I was hoping for something more than a constant reminder to make good use of my short and brutish life, which I don't do anyway. On the other hand, spiritual belief systems spend all their time addressing the question of how live in expansive and well packaged detail - and there doesn't seem to be a competitive secular equivalent. That could just be my own intellectual frailty... maybe others have found such a thing, or don't think it is necessary.
The logic of atheism is inescapable, but then what? What is the point of an axiom that leads to not only nothing, but actual nothingness?
>The logic of atheism is inescapable, but then what?
Is it? I find that when people refer to atheism, they implicitly add to it things it does not mean. The broad definition of atheism would be the absence of belief that any deities exist, but in practice, most people who define themselves as atheists lump it up with a set of false beliefs that, although being far better than believing in a "bearded old guy in the sky who cares what I do", are still very far from being solid truths.
For example, atheism usually comes bundled with the belief that consciousness is some unreal emergent property of real stuff that is "out there" or the belief that there exists a separate material world "out there" which is different than my subjective experience "in here" (while any honest introspection into where is it that "you" leave off and the rest of the world begins would start to show the cracks in this belief).
Personally, I find the various nondual teachings far more advanced in understanding these truths than atheist-materialist philosophies and definitely far more than childish religious beliefs, and therefore better at dealing with suffering, change or acceptance of the end of a personal existence.
Of course these are deep questions and while I admit to not having clear answers, I do think answers are achievable (though not at an intellectual level) and there are enough hints to follow for who really wants to find them or (to paraphrase from an old Hassidic story), at least learn where not to look for them.
I think Existenitalism offers one way out of this. The idea is that the universe lacks intrinsic meaning, yet we can choose to construct meaning within it.
Also, I would point out that atheism is sort of silly. Who cares about what you don't believe in? Instead focus on what you do believe - for me, that the physical universe exists in some sort of substantial way and the other humans I meet are similar to myself (not automatons or figments of my imagination). I take it on faith that I'm not actually completely alone.
Then we stop telling ourselves comforting fairy tales, and start treating aging and death as the catastrophes that they are. For me, that means regular donations to sens.org.
I first experienced anxiety about the inevitability of death (or non-existing ever again) when I was sixteen. Grew up on atheist family so I never had the comfort from religion.
These are some of the ideas that have helped me along, in case is useful for anyone. Take what works for you, ignore the rest.
1- Don't spend too much time thinking about it. Your time is short, it is silly to waste it worrying. You cannot do much about it anyway.
2- Death is the price you pay for living. Be grateful that you had the chance. It is truly a miracle that you are even alive.
3- Enjoy life and leave a legacy. It can be as simple and as important as the way you lived your life. Your example.
4- All the evidence tells me that there is not an afterlife. But I still save a little hope. There may be things that are unknowable. May be on the form of your 1) area. So, who knows.
>Death is the price you pay for
living. Be grateful that you had the
chance. It is truly a miracle that you
are even alive.
Of course, the price you pay for living is not just death at the end of your life but also suffering throughout. Just how much suffering you will experience depends on many random factors the effects of some of which (like genetics and early childhood environment) are either very difficult or impossible to mitigate.
The hardest question to confront is whether the price of living is one worth paying. The antinatalists among us think that the answer to that question is generally a "no".
As much as we ask ourselves whether the price of living is one worth paying, more than often we would prefer to pay down due to the inherent nature of survival in us all. Even for those who experience a lot of suffering that possibly brings one to prefer death, whether one thinks that life is worth living is subjective. It not only depends on how much suffering you experience, but how much you value everything else relative to suffering.
Sure, you can make that judgement for yourself, if under the pressure from your self-preservation instinct. The antianalist argument of the kind summarized in [1] concerns not your continued living but whether you should bring new beings into the world. One can't ask one's unborn children to consent to be born and hence to suffer.
Your comment reads like something I might have written myself, down to the concern about the heat death of the universe. However, I have had one additional thought. Have you considered a scenario in which our universe may be virtualised?
“Being saved” could quite literally mean having the pattern of our existence stored outside the universe. “Omniscience” is simplified when you can pause a virtual machine to inspect its memory. And maybe, just maybe, there could be a way to escape the VM.
It's interesting to me how differently people feel about death.
I've never been frightened of it even when I've had serious health scares, I actually find my atheism comforting in that regard, you live your life and then you die and that's it.
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” - Mark Twain
It's relieving, in a way, to know that I'm not the only human to chronically go through it.
I especially enjoyed his comment on the difficulties of erecting a comforting fantasy of an afterlife:
> I’ve endeavored, in my weakest moments, to believe in heaven — or at least some vague, harpless afterlife my brain won’t snicker at. But I’m still pretty much paralyzed with fear.
It's a curse, in a way, to have (be?) a brain trained to recognize and solve problems, optimize expected outcome, and see through bullshit when the popular solution to existential debilitating dread — religion — crumbles at the slightest analysis. Ignorance is bliss, to add to Puchner's ostensibly empty bromides.
That said, I've personally found that two core ideas can consistently keep me grounded (even in fits of hypercritical 4 a.m. breathless terrors):
1. I'm conscious, which is fundamentally the only thing I can really be sure of. For consciousness to arise in a completely material universe is so outside of any scientific understanding (at least currently) that there may very well be room for a kind of immortality. If consciousness is the universe experiencing itself (to borrow from Alan Watts), perhaps life is just a temporary segmentation of a tiny piece of eternal consciousness that will later be rejoined.
2. If you're reading this (ie: enjoying the temporary luxury of life), you've got a fair chance of living considerably longer than any human that has ever existed (Kurzweil et al.). It's possible that unbounded mortality could be achieved within your lifetime. This presents a new problem: the inevitable heat death of the universe (I realize the irony of immediately complaining about a lifespan that has reached eons, but it would still be a finite existence), but it's possible that there are areas of physics that have yet to be discovered that would permit hopping to a new one.
I write this precisely three weeks before getting married to the most wonderful, caring, talented, driven, intelligent, and just generally enjoyable companions I could have imagined spending my life with. I think this event has resurfaced these previously successfully buried distresses: when you have more, you have more to lose.
I'm reminded of the "4EVER YOURS" story from this year's Valentines Day Google Doodle[1] that really hits me hard:
> "This will end someday...someday, one of us will die, then the other will die, but we have now."
The mental tricks are nice for when I'm in a moment of weakness, but there is something starkly beautiful and painfully focusing about the possibility that this could be it. That every time I hold her hand, every adventure we take together, and every late night goofy conversation is limited. It's a clear and constant reminder to really make these cherished moments count, though I wish with every fiber of my existence that I could make them last forever.
1. http://www.google.com/doodles/valentines-day-2014-us