And then she died and we're still here; dealing with a bunch of assholes not caring about what happens to the world after they die.
I think Matt Christman said that it's this type of mindset that leaves people so miserable and fearful when they have to come to terms with their mortality. It's also why there's a big transhumanist immortality fascination in Silicon Valley. If you believe that there's no such thing as a society, only autonomous individuals, and the only thing you prioritize is maximizing your pleasure through buying commodities, then it does feel that the world will end when you can't experience it anymore
I really like something Matt said on his stream probably over a year ago. He was talking about "will you go to heaven or hell when you die?" Of course he didn't mean it literally like Christians do. He meant "will you go to heaven" as being in a state a happiness, contentment, and overall satisfaction with how you lived your life at the very end of it. Or will you "go to hell", meaning you experience your last moments in bitterness, regret, and fear.
I think about that every so often, and idk I think it's kinda nice. As someone who still deals with a bit of trauma over the doctrine of eternal torment, I think it's really great to turn something horrible into kind of nice view of the end of your life.
I used to worry vaguely "What if god is real and I'm going to hell?" But then I took some classes on the history and context of the bible and it turns out hell isn't actually in the bible, doesn't involve fire, and in the most textual sense probably just means dying and ceasing to exist, while the faithful get ressurected and live forever.
Made me feel a lot better.
Millenarianism taught that humans are reborn again and again until they finally detach themselves from material want, and then can finally proceed to Heaven.
They also believed that the human soul has no sex or gender, and that your soul would inevitably be reborn under different sexes over time.
I don't know if I'd blame a fear of mortality or desire to escape death on egoist thought or capitalism. Silicon valley transhumanism may be what that desire looks like through the filter of hyper-atomized neoliberalism, but like the Epic of Gilgamesh for example is a lamentation on the inevitability of death and it predates both capitalism and modern conceptions of the individual. The cosmist movement, which took on an explicitly socialist character after the establishment of the USSR, also often extolled the idea of eventual freedom from physical decay and death.
Growing old sucks. Dying sucks. We should find out how to not do those things.
boo, no. Accept your nature as a mortal and see growing old and dying as privileges.
Death as an idea is fucking paralyzingly terrifying. I have no idea how people live while recognizing it.
I really like the lyric "But I'm chilled by the redundancy of Thoughts collected, but not kept". What the fuck is the point of all this if we cease to exist uncertain day? Why deal with this bullshit at all? I honestly look around me sometimes and have to wonder: "What the fuck?"
Like what even is the true nature of reality? Why did we suddenly just blip into being to have this experience? I don't remember being born or there ever being a time I didn't exist, so the idea that one day it just stops is beyond surreal. It's maddening. I have to avoid thinking about it because I start freaking out. I was raised Catholic but it wasn't the torment that freaked me out, it's the idea of eternity. I can't even conceive of that. Even from a hardcore materialist standpoint, eternal non existence after having only known existence is like, what the fuck.
Maybe this isn't all there is? I was freaking out really badly about this once and I was in my living room and I felt myself almost detach from this world and my mom and brother were talking and it suddenly felt really alien and unfamiliar but also like I knew what it was but just didn't really have a connection to it anymore...like there was a tether being cut.
I've heard a lot of NDE's tend to be like that, a feeling of bliss and confusion as you leave something familiar behind to go somewhere incomprehensible.
I should try DMT
I don’t remember being born or there ever being a time I didn’t exist, so the idea that one day it just stops is beyond surreal.
Well that's the great paradox of death innit? If death destroys your memories (or at least the memory centers of your brain) then it doesn't just erase your present or future but your past as well.
Yet here we are, existing in the past of a future where this past has been, from our perspective, destroyed. So how's that work?
the past is not defined by your idea of it. The hours I slept during still passed and are part of my past yet I can in no way recall them. You're just a function of the universe, and not a permanent one. Some rocks collected, in such a way as to move and think, and eventually lost one of those abilities and then the other. If there is a soul, then it goes somewhere or gets turned into something. If there is not, then the rocks just lay down and stop occupying the form they once did.
Oh I don't believe in a personal soul or a static, essentialized "self." I just think it's strange that we can experience anything when the organ responsible for recording our experiences will inevitably decay. Everything we experience is essentially a memory after all. It's like if you made a home movie, but then showed no one, burned the tape, scattered the ashes across three states and drank yourself into forgetting you ever made it. Sure, if you had an ominscient viewpoint you can say the movie technically existed, but can you say the same from your own perspective that no longer remembers ever making it?
depends on whether or not we are saying there is an objective reality. If there is, then the film did exist. If there is not, then the film does not exist, as it did not significantly change any observer's experience and left no record. I believe in a soul which will arrive in an afterlife, but an also sometimes alarmed at the prospect the library of my knowledge and experiences will disappear, and, if my faith is wrong, there is no other form of it except what I impart to others. I hope to do things which will be remembered for many generations, but know this too will eventually erode into oblivion. I think of my life as a good meal, which is just as good if one person eats it as it is when eaten by a great party.
I hope some plants are using her components as nutrition right now.
I hope they dont die from all the heavy metals she had in her body from smoking as much as she did.
Basically plants are socialists, and I’m just gonna link this whole article that’s rad as fuck
:gigachad:
https://youtube.com/shorts/YkhkxOBjOZw?feature=share
Plants are so much stranger and more alien than you'd think if you didn't study them. I have a pet theory that if you studied the behavior of a clonal forest over a couple of hundred years you'd find evidence of problem solving and intelligence. Life on a slower time scale.
Literally every plant uses its radiation for energy. Everything you eat is grown from its energy.
Edit: lol thought you were talking about the Sun. I have another thread about that.
I mean, she's making some absurdly epistemological point. If all I know is my experiences, then all I know ends when my experiences end. Its asanine to take that as some sort of sage wisdom though when its verifiably false.
Ayns basic viewpoint on everything was that ego centrism was good actually. When she says the world here she’s basically saying “as I experience it” in parenthesis.
Of course she knows the world will continue to exist after she dies but being that she held her own experience and self above all else, since she couldn’t experience the world any more for all intents and purpose, it may as well be the world that ceases to exist. For her anyway.
Yknow… dumb right libertarian shit :ancap-good:
that's what i was thought, was hoping i was wrong lol. thanks tho 🙂
Our book is fifty thousand pages long and such a pain in the ass to read that we have to constantly shout "Read theory" at each other.
Their book you can read in an afternoon, has bad sex scenes, and misses everything that is cool about trains.
Their book you can read in an afternoon
Lies! I couldn't get through that slug after weeks. It is worse written than AnCap fanfics on literotica.
Truth, even when I was a Rand fangirl (embarassing 😔) I really had to grit my teeth to get through Fountainhead and pretend I liked the writing style.
Well now you know the objective truth of the eternal science of historical materialism instead and are not "Objectivist" anymore, good for you :meow-bounce:
I looked into rand a bit in 2008 bc of (apparently) missing the point of bio shock like a typical gamer. luckily it bored me or something and I never got too heavily into it
I had a teacher in high school that made us read Atlas Shrugged, that was horrible.
It's Individualism brought to its conclusion: "I am literally the only person, all other 'people' are here to be used by me or destroyed by me. There is no reason for the universe to exist if I'm not in it."
