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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?
This is a depressing answer, but as the hardest of hard materialist/physicalist atheists, I don't have anything to soften the blow. I can't convince myself of there being any observable meaning or purpose to human life, some metaphysical telos behind everything that would impart order onto it all. I think life is pure, unadulterated chaos, a blur of noise and fury that mindlessly hammers away at you until it all finally stops. My death will have meant nothing at all when it happens, and the world will go on without me.
How I find comfort in my inevitable death is the fact that I already feel tired, even at the age of 23. Somehow I have become ridiculously jaded, and I don't particularly find a lot of value in things that make other people happy. I've become deeply cynical of the idea of effecting any meaningful change on the world, which is part of the reason for my slow withdrawal from political discussion on TheMotte and elsewhere. So much is out of your control, and things that once were cause for joy begin to lose meaning as you go on. Celebrations, for example. Birthdays feel... annoying, frankly. Christmas and New Year and every other holiday custom are chores to participate in. Days repeat, over and over and over again, you're anchored down by a million life obligations that keep you in some mildly uncomfortable local minima that requires a lot of activation energy to escape, and regardless of how much you try to take comfort in the small things you can't avoid the fact that your life is running on an endless loop.
It's not that there's absolutely nothing to feel grateful about. But the longer you live, the more fed up you get with the entire thing. Sometimes I look at photos of myself as a kid, running down a hill or feeding koi in a pond, and that doesn’t even feel like me anymore. It almost feels like a memory from another life, one where the days were longer and the sun was brighter. These days already seem impossibly distant and out of reach, and I wonder what would happen if I added 1000 years on to that. Every finite physical system has information-storage limits (see: Bekenstein bounds), and the limits of memory exist far below that. How long would it take for me to forget my childhood completely? How tired and jaded would I get seeing empires rise and fall, people slipping into the same failure-modes over and over again; what happens when I experience everything there is to experience?
This isn't to say that death is a desirable condition - for most people, it's unwanted and it comes far too soon. But at the same time endless life would be an interminable, inescapable hell, and I can't think of any condition where that wouldn't be the case unless I, myself, changed via genetic modification or augmentation sometime far in the hypothetical future - at which point, I would have been thoroughly ship-of-theuseused, and I wouldn't be me anymore. Somehow, that makes me feel better about eventually not existing someday.
I'm going to be presumptuous and intrusive, but this sounds a lot like depression to me. Especially coming from someone who's 23. I get where you're coming from, of course: I feel that way sometimes and I think that everyone does, but if you're feeling that way the majority of the time I think this is a problem which can and should be fixed.
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