A lot of atheist afterlife logic runs into the problem that if nothing follows death, then this would also mean the end of the universe, but this is in contradiction with the fact that we can experience the universe and that it exists. Lots of people die every day and yet that "nothing" has failed to arrive.
No.
Huh?!? How the heck do you get from one to the other??? I see absolutely no logic connection there. Care to explain?
Taking things to the far extreme, for all we know, there could actually be a heaven or a hell as described by one of the desert-dwelling hallucinogen-enjoying people whose book caught on. And I don't mean some ethereal concept, I mean the actual things with 72 virgins or angels with 100 eyes and 50 wings and wheels on their wheels. Despite feeling implausible, we have exactly as much evidence of nothingness after death as we do of a heaven or a hell.
Before you mention that this is absurd because there's no brain activity after death, we still don't know how the brain and "mind" work, we can't observe the vast majority of matter or energy in the universe, and there's a lot we don't know. Filling that unknown space in with "it's the end of everything I experience" is as irrational as filling that in with "72 virgins if I kill enough infidels."
People aren’t required to be rational for GP’s point to be correct. I don’t even think it is necessary that they hold a particular view on death. Plenty of Christians don’t fear death because they believe in heaven. Plenty of those who believe in nothingness fear the end of their experience.
Nothingness has evidence. Memory and consciousness both appear tied to the body. Suggesting that’s equivalent to anything else because technically anything is possible is at best a god of the gaps argument.
The rational take here is that we don’t know, we may never know, but that the evidence is suggestive of the same sort of nothingness we “experience” when unconscious or before we were born.
Regardless, all that is required for the GP’s point to be true is that people do not universally fear death.
The previous commenter didn't say the end of "the experience." They said the end of "experience" (no the). If you want to be pedantic about the semantics, that's a pretty big thing to add, don't you think? One is the end of all sensation and the end of a particular set of sensations.
And no, it doesn't require that people not universally fear death, it requires that people who see death as the end of all experience don't fear death, which appears to be tautologically false since they adopt an irrational and negative belief about what the post-death state is.
> Nothingness has evidence. Memory and consciousness both appear tied to the body. Suggesting that’s equivalent to anything else because technically anything is possible is at best a god of the gaps argument.
The wordplay is interesting here - I didn't mention memory, only consciousness. Memory does appear to be an embodied phenomenon in your brain. Regarding consciousness, I'm not filling the gaps with a god, I'm suggesting that denying the existence of the gaps is as bad as filling it with a god.
We know exactly what happens after death: nothing. You cease to be as a living being. What we don't know, and can't ever know, is what it's like to not be. But every investigation so far has failed to produce evidence of a soul separate from the body, so until that changes we can assume such souls don't exist, and neither will we when our body dies.
Don't handwave it away with "we don't know how the mind really works". For all intents and purposes we do know. The mind working at all depends on the body working; once the latter stops, so does the former. We can't accept this because our mind, from our mind's perspective, is everything, but it is limited in space and time because it too is composed of matter and energy and one day, it will stop. That fills us with horror and dread, the idea of (from our tiny perspective) everything stopping, so we fight it. We make up stories about heavens and hells. Even in this era we fight it with hopes of becoming transfinite and infinite through technology. It's all hopium and copium, and incredibly dangerous. People like Elon Musk are now shooting giant penises into the sky, and planning to send actual humans on one-way missions to interplanetary hellscapes which should inspire visions of an angry Hayao Miyazaki saying "what you have done is an insult to life itself." Meanwhile we're neglecting the care of the only hospitable home we know we have, Earth.
Accept your fate. Live, as the fictional gorilla Ishmael put it, in the hands of the gods. Doing otherwise will doom us all, and a lot of other living things too.
What does bum me out is losing a lifetime of knowledge and capability. You get old just when you’re starting to be good at things. The human lifespan could definitely be a few decades longer.
People fill the unknown with lots of things. I am simply suggesting that you should let the unknown remain unknown, especially if you're going to make major life choices around it.
