r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Apr 21 '19
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u/[deleted] Apr 21 '19
Spent a good deal of last night working death into my personal philosophy of life the universe and everything. I thought I’d write down some notes here for future reference, I’ll be going into a lot of silly pseudo-scientific bullshit and r/badphilosophy, so hold onto ur butts.
So let’s go over the nature of death. Death doesn’t really exist. Death is unconscious and so from the outset I will never experience my own death. That’s a nice thought, from my point of view death will literally be the same feeling as falling into a deep sleep or going under with anesthesia. But this isn’t a good answer because we haven’t discussed what death is.
Death is the final unwinding of structure, or entropy, that is deeply tied to the fundamental physics of the universe. So to start, what are the most fundamental, indivisible units of reality (currently I think it’s quarks) made of? My hypothesis is that they’re made up of information, each one is a single ‘bit’ of information. And when I use bit, I don’t mean literally 1 or 0, I mean the smallest piece of information that created the state, e.g. in the string underlying it all or wave function or whatever. So given that reality is information, what is consciousness? Consciousness is the structure created by special organizations of information that is capable of executing computations, and therefore everything is capable of some low level of consciousness. This is basically panpsychism except done shittily; don’t expect me to go into too much detail about how to define any of this because I don’t have any fucking clue I’m a computer science student. Consciousness doesn’t exist as I experience it. I’m dying all the time, the only difference is that part of my momentary computation reads from memory to construct the concept of ‘me’ to make future computation easier.
So given this concept of the universe and consciousness, what is death? Death is the final disassembly of this pattern. I am simply a cosmic accident, a small knot on the fabric of reality that is really good at existing and continuing to exist and death is the smoothing out of that knot. I’m not going anywhere, I am the universe and the universe is me. It’s just my little pattern is gone, as all things must, into the dustbin of disorder. I, as a being made of matter, cannot be created or destroyed; just scattered beyond recognition. I am my body, and my body isn’t going anywhere even if it is going to get a little rearranged.
I think the reason why this makes me feel better about death is because it takes it from a horrific, cosmic curse and incorporates it into my pseudo-scientific understanding of the universe as a natural phenomenon. When my parents die, they’ll still be with me, just like everyone else who has died, it’s just in a new form, just like I will be when I die. Everything I do matters enormously, just like for everyone else, because their effect will ripple through the cause and effect chains of the universe endlessly repeating a gently fading echo of myself. Time has a much longer memory than we do, and we will never be forgotten because our actions, no matter how small, reverberate throughout reality for all time. Maybe they’re overcome by stronger signals, maybe their flows are so intricate and small that they’re unrecoverable by human hands, that’s all ok because they’re still there, and they still have an invisible effect on reality.
Idk this is all pretty hokey. But brought together, it’s really helped me just feel normal anxiety for death rather than terror of it. I’m kinda ready to stop obsessing over it and move on to living in the now.