This story reads as if there should be a message or a point or at least a punchline at the end - but it just ends with nothing?
It's death
71–80 of 88 posts
Re: It's death
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Hebrew word used is Elohim. While the book ever explicitly uses the word, it stands to reason the author is speaking of YHWH, historically rendered as Jehovah or Yahweh. And as Jesus is the Son, the second person of the Trinity, it refers to him as well. The book is written by Solomon, the son of David, the king of Israel, and hence it comes smack dab in the middle of the covenant history of Israel. Solomon descr…
Did you know that Elohim and Yahweh originally come from different polytheistic pantheons?
No, they were from the same pantheon. Yahweh was originally a second-tier deity in it, a son of El, and one of the tribal deities that El granted dominion over each their particular tribe. Over time, that tribe elevated Yahweh to senior deity and merged his attributes with those of El, eventually demonizing all the other gods of the pantheon.
Re: It's death
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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, i…
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.
Re: It's death
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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)…
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.
Re: It's death
#75This style of writing feels like the Minecraft Parkour Civilization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pFwQiwRbcg There's a perfect balance of absurdity and casualness that makes almost perfect sense that you can follow the show, and yet bizarre enough that you stick to know more.
Thank you for sharing that video, I just watched the whole thing; such great storytelling. Its got a very similar aesthetic to mine with every action having an extremely small margin for error, with extremely grave consequences, and with a protagonist who is surprisingly accepting of that world.
Re: It's death
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've accomplished nothing of note ever. Most people don't. They just live their lives, trying to get by as best they can.
I don't know if that is true. For large swaths of the population, raising a child is their biggest accomplishment. Justifiably so. Other accomplishments of note might be: a single conversation that helped someone change. Little acts that made the world a tiny bit better. Having brought happiness to other people. I like to think that is the meaning of not wasting your time – not just measuring your life's worth with a…
I guess I interpreted "of note" differently. Raising a child is not noteworthy, it's just normal. Millions of people do it. Nobody will be remembered for raising a child, except by the child himself.
When I'm gone, I'll leave nothing "of note" behind. I haven't won any great prizes or set any records. I haven't authored any papers. I haven't invented anything that changed an industry. I haven't cured any diseases. My name won't be on any buildings or monuments. I haven't really left any kind of discernable mark on the world or civilization or even my home town.
Re: It's death
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)…
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 simulat…
> 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
Re: It's death
#78This story has a strong "life sucks then you die" vibe going for it. And the afterlife also sucks apparently (although I don't personally believe in an afterlife). Hopelessness and injustice seem to be the current zeitgeist - at least for anyone who spends a lot of time online. And I get it, there's plenty to be unhappy about. But my counter-argument is that it's possible to do things in life that you're proud of. An…
It’s not the lifestyle that makes some people unhappy, it’s the knowledge that there is suffering around the world they can do near nothing to stop. Not everyone frames their happiness solely on conditions within their own sphere. Knowledge comes with responsibility.
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
The above quote is from a character from one of JRR Tolkien’s books. (Gandalf from Return of the King.)
Tolkien fought in the Battle of the Somme which was one of the most destructive battles in human history. So I think his views have some weight here.
Bad things have always happened in the world. Despair is a useless emotion that just precludes action that can better the world or even better a single other’s person’s life. For each person belongs to the world and by improving one life you improve the world. This cannot be accomplished through despair but through joy.
If Mahatma Gandhi had lived in despair over the horrible things the British were doing to the Indians, would he have been able to help anyone? It was through joyous resistance that he managed to inspire a movement to defeat them.
Re: It's death
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.