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Comment by greiskul | Hacker News Reader

Really? Cause I think most of this we have some pretty definitive answers.

What happens after we die? You stop being. The conscious experience of it is the same as before you were born, i.e. nothing.

Does my pain have meaning? Not to the universe, yes to the people that care about you?

Am I special? Live is special, it's the most amazing phenomenon we appear to have in the universe. But at the same time, the "universe" doesn't care about you.

What is consciousness? A physical process happening in your brain.

Will I ever be able to talk to my dead grandmother again? No.

You might not like these answers, but that doesn't have any bearing on them being true or not.

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I wish I was so sure of all that as yourself.

> What happens after we die? You stop being.

You don't know that of course, and have no way of knowing that. Although I'll agree that from a modern, rationalist point of view that's the default reasonable assumption.

> What is consciousness? A physical process happening in your brain.

And same goes for that one; the brain clearly relates to consciousness, but you can't be sure it produces it. Maybe it receives it somehow; maybe it's even more complex than that. I'd even go as far to say that if we were to create a black box AGI tomorrow, the question would still not be solved: the only thing you'd have proven is that a specific arrangement of matter appears to result in consciousness, nothing more.

Moreover, reality itself happens - in a very concrete way - in your head, not outside of it. Plato's cave and all that (or for a more technically oriented one, the brain-in-a-jar idea). Your point of view is rational in the extreme, but also extremely reductive. I don't think one should be so quick to reject deeper - and, dare I say, spiritual - ways of considering our universe.

> > What happens after we die? You stop being.

> You don't know that of course, and have no way of knowing that.

I'm a little surprised how many threads here "OMG YOU CAN'T KNOW FOR SURE SO HERE'S THIS OTHER STUFF YOU SHOULD CONSIDER LIKE SPIRITUALITY!!!".

When you turn off your computer, does its essence float away to computer heaven? When your car breaks down, does its soul get sent to automotive hell? I accidentally stepped on and broke my HP Calculator a few years ago, it won't turn on anymore, so is it in computation limbo? These questions are (purposefully) absurd, but where do you draw the line in "attributing spiritual crap to machinations?"

>What happens after we die? You stop being. The conscious experience of it is the same as before you were born, i.e. nothing.

You simply began existing once. What's to say that you won't just as easily begin existing again, or that you haven't already existed many times?

Define 'you'. If 'you' is your memories and personality, then those things are physical. You can take a knife to a brain and cut out memories, you can cut out love. These are tied to your physical meat. If the meat is destroyed, or the currents stop running, then your memories and personality are destroyed. If 'you' is something other than your memories and personality, then sure, that might go on.

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