I did get messed up by some anxiety and have these thoughts rolling through my head so I’ll leave it at cosmic horror warning.
spoiler
I’m not religious but I have thoughts about experiencing consciousness and what it is. I say that consciousness is independent of memory because we forget, clearly dependent on our physical body, etc. generally I do say that we don’t know consciousness so maybe it can be reconstructed (in the can’t rule out the possibility way)
So I can see scenarios were my conscious could pop into existence without my memories after I die (as I’m writing this I realized that’s nothing to fear).
I am trying to adopt healthier mindset of looking at everything in life as a quest, new things are a call to action, and that it’s okay if everything I do amounts to little in x number of years (worked out okay for ozymandias, right?).
Im probably just rambling because my life has got boring and monotonous along with actual fear of American politics.
It doesn’t fucking matter. Sometimes it feel that the void is actually the best place to be.
I hope not.
No but I wonder if hell is being made an insect over and over.
I don’t think insects have a notion of being happy or sad so it wouldn’t be too bad
Eh… No, but its nice to think about it.
As stated by many others, evidence is required to prove something. However, the stories we tell ourselves are comforting, so I wont fault anyone who does. Up until the point where people start going “My sky-dad could totally beat up your sky-dad”, that can Belgium right off…
Nope. I have never seen any evidence of reincarnation, so have no reason to believe in it.
Nope. When I die, there is no longer a me of any sort; just any media and memory that captures some moment of when I still was until those too fade.
The fact that your particular molecules will reconstruct into something else is 100% certain
Will you keep your particular consciousness in this process - unlikely
However if you drop off the definition of You as your current limited body and mind, then reincarnation is exactly what happens.
No.
Enjoy the ride.
I do believe in reincarnation, in that we are all physical manifestations of what you could call “God”. That means that everyone you meet, every dog you pet, every ant you accidentally squish, is synonymous with the divine. We are all constantly reincarnating throughout the universe, and this should be looked at no more acutely than the cells in your body constantly dying and being reborn.
I guess you could call it pantheism, though I tend to follow philosophies like Zen Buddhism and the Tao and it still seems to work.
Looking at existence in this way can form a new understanding, nay, a new reverence towards your life and the universe. Then you will understand who you really are and why you’re here. The real power of God is in manifesting everywhere, all the time, all at once. After all…
And that is, of course, why the images of the Hindu gods are shown with many arms or many faces: because it is saying that all arms are the arms of the divinity, all faces are its masks.
-Alan Watts, Out Of Your Mind
Not in the traditional sense, but I have a pet theory about the continuation of consciousness.
You can only experience being, not not-being, so even if your consciousness went dark for a million years before being “reincarnated,” there would be no gap from the perspective of your subjective experience. You can only go from having one experience to having another. Nothingness can’t be experienced.
Sort of, not in a religious way.
Like I don’t think there will be anything special that you get to keep with you, the “soul” is just a vessel to experience things, nothing special about it. As in: There aren’t any hero stories, no "dragon reborn"s, no Karma. Just randomness. This moment, you are a human, when you die, your next moments could be a bug crawling next to you when you died, or newborn kitten to a pregnant cat in your backyard, or a cockroach about to get stepped on. Then some time again, you will be another human. Or perhaps proximity doesn’t matter and you could be born on some alien planet far away. There is no concious god, its just pure randomness.
As if you are an immortal camera and your body is the microSD card adaptor, your memories are the microSD card, your experiences are just what the camera sees.
Sorry if my beliefs are silly, but I think there is some part of living beings that current level of technology cant quite measure yet. I think it has something to do with mass energy equivalence, maybe when we die, we become some energy that just bounces around until we become something else.
Its like people used to think the Earth orbited the sun. People used to not be able to see germs, or atoms, then we went from seeing atoms, to protons, electrons, then we say those even smaller parts.
Perhaps there is something that can’t be measured yet. Perhaps it may never be able to be measured.
The way I see it:
It’s either:
[1] Nonexistence --> I exist --> Nonexistence (and never exist again)
Or
[2] Nonexistence --> I exist --> Nonexistence --> I exist again (repeat for a long time, possibly forever)
Option one breaks my brain, so I just choose to go with option 2 to keep my sanity.
Maybe is just my monkey brain being silly, idk, but our minds have to invent these little stories to keep ourself sane. We as non-omniscient beings cannot objectively observe the universe, is all just biased subjective interpretations that are unique to us.
But regardless, this is the only chance I get to experience “this” life, “next” time I might be the bug the gets crushed by a neighbor that “this” life used to live with. So um… yea, thanks for coming to my ted talk
Take it sleezy 🤷♂️
🌌 (Your next life will be on a planet in a solar system with 3 suns, good luck with the chaotic eras lol)
(I must sound so stupid right? Given that this is Lemmy and eveyone here is an Atheist. Its fine, just leave my monkey brain believe its weird theories 😅)
Yeeeeah, all due respect to believers, but we’re squishy wet computers riding squishy wet stilts and when we get turned off we just sort of fizzle out.
There’s some poetry to only having one go at it, but I’m not gonna stand here and say a sense of humanism makes your hardcoded fear of death subside. I get why humans come up with coping mechanisms where they get to live forever in some form that isn’t having their atoms repurposed as fertilizer and space dust.
Well, no, consciousness is not independent on brain. It’s not magic or stored anywhere. Pretty simple proof: people with brain damage very often have a huge personality shift.
Anyway, even if you forget stuff, the pathways between neurons have already been made. And sometimes you remember things randomly after many, many years.
Suppose reincarnation was real. But no one has any memory or awareness of a past life. So then what connection does said past life even have to you? How can any supposed past 'you’s really be considered the same you?
But no one has any memory or awareness of a past life.
Yes, that’s how the religion of reincarnation (sorry, I forgot which religion it is) has been taught in school to us westerners.
But with that condition the whole thing is not provable and not deniable, and makes no sense in general, because it remains purely a theory far away from all normal life.
In my scenario it would be “consciousness” whatever that is. I could imagine myself with different set of memories or alternate timeline where a different set of events happened. I don’t have any evidence that those scenarios exist, but it would paint a picture that I could be a different person or even a different living continue being.
But yeah if I did have a past life it’s totally lost to me.
But if this other consciousness has no continuity or connection to the consciousness that is currently ‘you’, how can it be said to be you?
Buddhist here. We have the teaching of “non-self”, that no self can be found anywhere in our experience. There is no “me” in the present moment, so there is no self whose continuity must be maintained. There are just the different elements of experience arising and falling away. There is just a causal connection between the past life and the present life, no enduring self dies or is born. Similar to the Ship of Theseus. This is the Buddhist understanding.
Hinduism and Jainism on the other hand assert that there is a self.
i too am a long time lay practictioner of tibetan buddhsm, That is the real answer.
And to add, The Buddhists themselves don’t really focus on the reincarnation aspect as much as one would think, its only ever really something that comes up incidentally like when enough connections about something come together in the right ways to warrant the question that maybe a past life is returning.
A reincarnated someone would be similar to someone who by their entirety of their atoms to their thoughts, seems to be like this other collection of thoughts and atoms.
Like the process of identifying the dalai lama is basically for the people searching to hone in on the schema of a dalai lama through any way they can and then when someone matches it they do their tests which are essentially to check if their actions are similar to that of the previous ones.
The way in which memory of psst lives works is much like lucid dreaming upon your death bed, you go to sleep with awareness of the changing reality and then the dream you end up in preferably made with an intentional choice becomes one solid line of remembrance which leads to kids who remember their past lives directly.
This may be a problem created by the vagueness of language. We don’t yet know how consciousness works out what it even is, so we can’t assume that it functions independently of your perceptions, memories, and thoughts. It’s a bit like that chestnut about Star Trek transporters, does it kill you and recreate you somewhere else?
Is consciousness merely a map of reality in a constant process of adjusting itself, or is there something there that exists separate from everything that makes us ourselves?
I spend some time thinking about it. I’ve always been by turns impressed with consciousness and very annoyed with its limitations.
If it was real and you could retain memories of past lives, I’m confident we’d have some evidence/proof.
If it exists without memory retention and its just some sort of “soul” concept then it really doesn’t matter since you won’t remember anything for it to be worth worrying about.
I have this little pet theory:
What if the memory is simply overwritten? A toddler, having not much experienced much in life may remember some stuff but as soon as new memories are formed the “old” memories are overwritten…
I mean, it at least would explain why my 2 year old has recently run an eerily convincing musket drill and bayonett charge with a stick while i am pretty sure he never has seen something like that on TV…
I was thinking you’d be “reincarnated” or reconstituted via Boltzmann’s brain scenario and you’d get your memories back after some crazy amount of time, but I get that could happen at an earlier stage in life. Sounds like the “universe was created 5 minutes ago along with all our memories” BS
It’s interesting having someone tell me to not worry about it.
Ever hear of Dr. Ian Stevenson?
