Theres a reason people living basically anywhere but first world environments post penicillin,. Almost entirely believe ING of. The alternative, that everyone you love and work so hard to protect can just be extinguished, for all eternity, for absolutely no good reason, at any moment, is not really compatible with just going about your life. It's highly demotivating, at the least.

We can manage without God because we've built such a. Technologically advanced environment that we can generally expect for us and our children and loved ones to live to a heap to h old age.

Don't worry, t's all part of the plan of the eight dimensional 12 year old playing this game of Sims instead of doing his homework.

Many studies show people don't really think this way by their sixties. These sort of ego driven thoughts are the purview of younger people, and on average, people mellow out and grow happier with age, regardless of life success.

Given that by definition, 99.9% of people just have to go to a mundane job every day for 50 years, to keep civlisation afloat, such a mindset of having to be in the 0.1% who make some major contribution to be happy, is going to leave 99.9% of people unhappy.

Intellectually this all tracks, but the emotional reactio to coming out of the oblivion of anaesthesia, and knowing I never wanted to go back to that oblivionz and how sweet life is, still haunts me. I still have nightmares about dying. The irony is, in my nightmares, I'm panicked because I'm about to die and lose consciousness, but I'm not even really conscious in the dream state. I'm unconsciously repeating my conscious dread.

How does this apply to any of our ancestors? Beyond some more intelligent and prosocial birds, and prosocial mammals, what possible context could there be to this for most animals? What does this mean for matter which has not been consumed by self replicating carbon chains?

I have not expressed disdain for anything. I'm trying to understand the context of such a mechanism outside of highly developed pro-social animal behavior. And why does the brain even exist, if it can apparently function without itself?

Are you suggesting all our inventions, which work, as far as we know, specifically because they were designed to work based upon our robust empirical knowledge of the physical reality upon which they work, are actually working by coincidence?

For example, genetic engineering doesn't work because our incredible, and entirely unfalsified library of empirical knowledge of chemistry and biology allows us to precisely manipulate genes to produce expected proteins, and expected results, but because by sheer coincidence all these observations happen to be entirely consistent with a completely different system, and all of our direct observations, include electron microscopy, are erroneous, while, again, being, by a coincidence in the order of quintillions to one, entirely consistent with actual reality?

Things we do not yet know about reality cannot negate what we do already know, and testably and consistently works. No matter what we learn about quantumn physics, time, space, etc, will stop chemistry from working the way we know it works. No discovery will magically change the structure or function of proteins, or the structures they form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

I'm not talking about my observations. Of course my personal observations are subject to bias. That's why empiricisms foundation is producing repeatable, testable, independent observations.

Although many things are not observed yet, because we lack the instrumentation capable of doing so, that does not negate that which we have already observed. Planes fly. Computers function. Medicines work. Chemical engineering is possible. The nuclear bomb works. And on, and on and on. Every single invention we have is the result of repeated, independent empirical observations. You can't just say maybe everything we know about chemistry or biology, or nuclear physics is incorrect, but by coincidence, everything will build with that knowledge, works. I mean, you can, but at that point you're just rejecting any common reality. Which is fine. maybe you are plugged into a simulation, and everything is an illusion. But, if that's the case, why bother with all the mysticism and god of the gaps, and just say that.

>upon which we build all of our technology and engineering

Not knowing what space or time "is" does not negate what we do understand. We can build stuff which works based upon it. There are known knowns, and they do prohibit alternatives. For example, no matter how mysterious space or time turns out to be, it will not ever negate the existence of the moon, or the golgi apparatus, or dna, or any other highly observed structure emerging from and existing within it. Human brains understanding of reality has nothing to do with anything. The point of observables is that they do not emerge from our mind, they are there before our minds even evolved, and will be there long after we've gone. That will be true no matter how detailed our observations have become.

I have no clue what you mean by

> Either we are special or we arent. It can't be both

My point was that it is an admission of insincerity of belief if someone claims to believe they are going to suffer for eternity as a result of transgressions in this life, and then willfully and persistently commits those transgressions.

Taking your point of a more abstract sense of an afterlife, why would there be a judgment mechanism? What would that even mean. In this context of everything being conscious and connected, why would there be a judgment mechanism? Judgment is an evolved trait of some tiny fraction of highly evolved biomass on one of quadrillions of quadrillions of planets. Literally a heuristic procedure for regulating interaction between social group members along lines of reproductive advantage for the group.

What would an amoebas, or a trees essential consciousness be judging itself for in the afterlife, for example? It has no context outside of regulating prosocial behavior among highly intelligent lifeforms.

> but it's not a logical necessity that it must always be that way.

I agree with this 100% in principle. Which is why I asked a specific question. One which you didn't even address. That is my point. You have to ignore specific observable facts of our reality, to hold the belief that molecules, and the structures they form are redundant constructs, and that although it is not a logical necessity they are not, it is an observable reality that they evolved into greater complexity over billions of years, without any phenomenological change in their nature.

Or you can construct a logically, or even empirically consistent theory of reality which is consistent with both your assertion and these observables. That's fine, but until you do that, or even acknowledge the observable nature of reality, you are actively ignoring it.

There's observables, upon which we build all of our technology and engineering, because they are not a product of our subjective beliefs or imagination. While it is absolutely possible that everything we know about chemistry and biology is completely wrong, and genetic engineering, all medicine, toxins, etc work by sheer coincidence between what we think we observe, and what actually is there, we can at least say, the more stuff works, and the more we can build upon what we think we see, the more likely that what we see is what's actually there. And, given the extraordinary body of observables, and derived technologies in medicine and biology, the likelihood we've made accurate observations is extraordinarily high, and grows every day we don't see any falsifying data.

How do you incorporate the idea of an afterlife with the reality we're part of an unbroken lineage of self assembling carbon chains? Have you constructed a theory of afterlife which is compatible with this basic fact, or are you ignoring it?

I've yet to meet any of these people. Also, the people who seem most sure the meaning of life is some sort of testing ground to see who gets to hang out with god, are the most arrogant, morally repugnant people I know. I get the strong impression they don't actually believe it, else they'd probably spend more time helping the needy, and less time policing other peoples sex lives.

I've felt both, but it still doesn't lead me to believe consciousness is a universal property of matter. I mean, maybe there is some fundamental aspect of reality that facilitates consciousness, but I don't think matter is conscious in the sense we are.

I feel like pansychism and adjacent ideas are really a way of coping with the abundance of evidence we've gathered over the last 100 years that we are entirely biological and nothing survives our death. That's hard to deal with. It's why we invented the idea of an afterlife. Being alive is often nice, and it's sad to think it ends forever.

But it does end, even if there is some unifying consciousness, or whatever. You still will cease to exist, cease to enjoy beautiful sunsets, views of earth from space, ice cream, sex, spiritual moments. You will be annihilated, just like if you've experienced anaethesia; you cease to exist. There is no conscious experience that we can relate to, on any level. All time and space are gone. It's not even blackness. You're just gone. It's horrifying. I've experienced it. The most traumatic moment of my life so far was waking up from anaesthesia. The feeling of complete oblivion. Of being born out of nothing. That indescribable feeling that a million universes could have been born and died, or a microsecond could have passed. You just weren't there. It's so hard to describe, so all consuming. I still have nightmares and ruminate often on that oblivion. It's waiting for us all. It's not like sleep. It's like before you were born. You wont know a thing about it, and that's what makes it so awful. And you will never return, for all infinity. This is it. You could die this minute, and that's it.

It's horrifying, I'm now having an existential crisis and flashbacks to the time I came out of anaesthesia, and I absolutely understand why people choose to ignore reality and believe in an afterlife, and I also understand why those who choose to, or are forced to acknowledge reality, look for new and elaborate ways in which we might actually not be staring down oblivion.

The future is predictable, the timing isn't.

As a weird, defective person, who has accomplished absolutely nothing, they're right. It's okay though, because they judge me for being weird and defective even when I do stuff, so why even try to prove otherwise.