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Notes -
So this is the opposite of a small-scale question, but similar to what I posted below, I’ve been going through somewhat of an existential crisis about mortality and the purpose of human life.
I want to hear all of your beliefs about the big mysterious questions. For my entire life until now I have been the hardest of hard materialist/physicalist atheists. Surprise surprise that at 32 that doesn’t fill the god-shaped hole in my heart anymore.
I’m currently just thinking about how weird all of this is. Is the universe an eternal thing? Is it a simulation? How do you actually handle the hard problem of consciousness? The Fermi paradox?
Something that has been tempting me is Michael Huemer’s argument about infinite reincarnation, very similar to nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Essentially the bastardized argument is that if the universe is infinite in both temporal directions and you already were plucked from nothingness and given consciousness once, it will happen again even if the probability is infinitesimally small (because if time is infinite it’s bound to happen).
So what do you all think? What gives you comfort when pondering mortality?
I felt the same way at about 25. After thinking about things a bit, and reading some of the history of materialist thought and argument through the last couple of centuries, it became clearer to me that physicalism is limited. It doesn't explain where the universe came from, and it assumes away the possibility of non-material, super-natural entities or phenomena as an axiom rather than proving that such things don't exist. Likewise the behaviourists 'solved' the hard problem of consciousness fifty years ago by decreeing that consciousness didn't exist - since it was not scientifically measurable, it would be presumed not to exist by fiat.
The materialism that we grew up with is a set of assumptions, axioms. Occam's razor, Betrand Russel's teapot. As a belief system it's perfectly acceptable, it holds together, but it's one among many and cannot be proved to be true, nor disprove its rivals. Believing in physicalism, in materialism, is a choice not an inevitability. And once I realised that I had the ability to make that choice, I decided to use it. I cannot prove that Christianity is true, but I decided to hope that it was, and to act as if it was.
Now, I don't know if that gives me the comfort that you're looking for. It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to grow up a materialist, and live in a materialist society, and not have the tenets of materialism burned into you at a fundamental level. I know perfectly well that I can't prove my current beliefs any more than I can prove materialism, and they may well be wrong. But I choose to try and believe, and I find it helps a bit.
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