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Comment by ipnon | Hacker News Reader

Everyone has been dead before: Do you have any trepidations about the times before you were born? It's trite to say this, yes, but it gives some comfort to know we are born with the experience of not being alive. Of course Your Metaphysics may apply.

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Yeah, personally, I feel tons of anxiety about the effectively-infinite void of time before my existence, and that which will come after it. They are the same to me. Even though physically we are "born", I find it really upsetting that our experience and sense of selves is just an emergent organic process, a millisecond of a dream padded by infinite nothingness.

Far more horrifying to me is the thought that this millisecond of a dream is actually a process occurring in great abundance throughout the universe, with oscillating arrangements of particles facilitating whatever property of matter it is that embodies the phenomena of subjective experience. If it happened to "me" once, I don't see any reason why it should not happen again, or be happening everywhere at once in parallel, yet simply lacking awareness of this fact because the individual nodes don't share memory.

Exactly - I think this is the actual answer. At some point "I" am going to be a Holocaust victim, or a drug cartel's victim, etc etc. It's horrifying. I think when I die, "I" am just going to be somebody else. Nothing else really makes sense to me.

This is how I think of it. The experience of being “me” is the same for all life. An emergent process, but still real.

I think some Buddhist concepts, like reincarnation and duality, can be interpreted as perspectives on this.

It does increase my sense of compassion for life in general, and I try to lean into that.

it's not nothingness. think of all the people that're dead right now, and all the people yet to live. would you characterize right now as nothingness?

I think some culture deep sense of tradition is a way to cope. You inherit the past, you give it to your kids. It's no more a void on both ends if you carry the past along. Does it make sense?

Have you considered an alternative world view? While it's true that we experience nothing while we die, there are good reasons to believe that that this life we have on Earth isn't accurately explained by purely materialistic means.

On the flip side of that, the first time we were dead, when and how did we become conscious? Obviously the biological processes have a fairly well-defined start point (i.e. conception), but obviously consciousness does not start at conception as there is no brain yet. So when does it start?

I have wrestled with this after my first kid was born - there was nothing and now there is this person with their own mind and wants. Perhaps it was just the lack of sleep that got me thinking. But - When did their consciousness start? What was that first moment of awareness? Was there that initial "spark" and something started happening? Or was it a slow, slow clearing of fog before some sort of concerted thought began? What was that first thought? is a baby in the womb aware of self? Maybe not - but if not, when does that begin? When is that first moment when a baby looks in a mirror and sees themselves? What goes through their mind that first time they realise the thing in the mirror is them?

I'm not even convinced that we're self-aware at the moment of birth. I think self-awareness requires the brain to develop further. Around the time that we pass the mirror test is the when the self-awareness kicks in.

Can I ask you something? How come the Russians never smile? I’ve never seen them smiling.”
“They’re at work. They're Russians.”
"Is it normal for them to eat without talking to one another?”
“This is their job. They get 20 minutes to eat.”
“Yeah, but they never smile. Are they happy?”
Are the Russians happy? Is anyone happy? Can one ever truly be said to be happy?
I am tempted to go full Slav on Conor, to explain to him how we are all just grains of dust suspended in the howling void, searching for meaning in the fleeting moments before we are yanked back to the oblivion from whence we emerged, naked and screaming. But for all his faults he's just a kid stuck spending his summer microwaving Yorkshire puddings for difficult people. I take pity.

“Russians are formal. It would be weird of them to act relaxed on duty. They are all smiling on the inside.”

-- https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm

> to eat without talking to one another

In Russian culture eating is a process not to be distracted from. Historically, this could be seen as a sign of respect on the part of a poor peasant for the food and all the hard labor that went into producing it.

Our perception of time is very subjective: it is affected by our age, by what we are doing, and it is known that it can be significantly altered by consuming certain substances. We learned from others that there was time before we were born, but do we feel that? In my own subjective perception of time the moment of my birth seems to be infinitely far in the past, and I can't be sure that the final moment of death will be a finite point approachable by consciousness.

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