I would like to thank you for addressing my responses in good faith so far. This conception of no escape from the inevitable pain brought about by subjective experience of being alive is still utterly terrifying to me, and I'm motivated to fully understand it from a grounded, scientific, materialist perspective.

Even when the universe dies and a googolplex years pass between its death and some random event that creates a new universe, those years cannot be experienced. They will only exist in hindsight for whatever beings arise afterwards.

Starting from the materialist premise that consciousness (or subjective perception of qualia) arises from the coincidental configuration of a specific set of physical matter, if that matter is completely annihilated by antimatter in the process of the birth of a new universe, or perhaps if that matter is disassembled down to the level of subatomic particles (quarks, bosons, etc.) and made to behave fundamentally differently in the new universe, then wouldn't at least the annihilation-by-inverse-antimatter scenario put a true end to subjective experience for any matter which existed and behaved according to the rules of the universe that exist now?

Any specific instance of some cluster of matter (and antimatter) generated by Hawking radiation wouldn't be the same instance of matter which had that same continuity of subjective experience. Continuing the cycle of reincarnation in the sense Clark lays out seems like it would be impossible; a Buddhist which asserts that reincarnation continues from the end of one universe to the next after an arbitrarily and unfathomably long timespan would have to have an alternate explanation for how reincarnation works, one that might rely on some form of idealism (and that contradicts the Buddhist conception of there being No Souls independent from the material world). Even if some perfect replica of our universe eventually spontaneously emerged (such that the structure of spacetime is identical throughout) from a big bang, it would consist of entirely new matter generated ex nihilo by Hawking radiation, and the existence of some identical configuration would still imply a break in the continuity of subjective experience through the reincarnation of either a unique persistent set of matter or an continuous Ship-of-Theseus cluster of matter. The only possible causal (and thus karmic) link would be the behavior of the black holes left over from the previous universe which generate the next one, iterated arbitrarily many times.

Seems like the original Latin root (revolvo,revolvere) may be shared between "revolt" and "revolve", but if it is, proximate roots might still be divergent:

Wiktionary: Borrowed from French révolter, from Italian rivoltare, itself either from ri- with the verb voltare, or possibly from a Vulgar Latin *revoltāre < *revolvitāre, for *revolūtāre, frequentative of Latin revolvō (“roll back”) (through its past participle revolūtus).

I thought the etymological root of "revolutionary" in the Marxian sense was "revolt", not "revolve".

UPDATE: It seems Clark himself has argued that consciousness and pain themselves are, as far as can be independently observed, completely subjective. The inevitable experience hellish qualia I fear exists inside my mind, it's the equivalent of thrashing in pain. In which case another option of escape might open up in the form of ensuring that a human's capacity to feel pain (or that of any other animal) is completely disabled...which unfortunately seems infeasible beyond the scope of a single human lifetime. But even if TC succeeds in disabling their ability to feel pain, the cosmic forces reassembling TC's components into rad/TC across geologic or astrological spans of time may play a cruel joke and allow the reincarnation to experience fear, pain, and all sorts of suffering perhaps even unfathomable to any human. So the problem is once again at best temporarily solved or mitigated.

This advice prompts a litany of questions.

Like how does a vegan hear this and not conclude that a revolution against carnivory itself (not just human carnism) is needed, that even liberation of all domesticated and livestock animals isn't enough? Wouldn't the next logical step for a fully vegan humanity to wage war against all other predator species in solidarity with other herbivore and prey animals? Wouldn't they, for example, have to become the mortal enemies of cetaceans to liberate the fish they prey on?

How does a suicidal or anti-natalist person hear this and not conclude that mass extinction or omnicide is the closest thing to a sure ticket out of the neverending hell that is existence?

How does an impatient Marxist hear this and control the impulse to shorten the lives of every billionaire in their Sims game with the goal of hastening the inevitable suffering of unfathomably evil and comfortable people?

Cosmically petty acts of compassion might be rewarded in the current life but there's no materialist argument for it being rewarded given the materialist reincarnation scenario laid out in Clark's article. Future generations aren't guaranteed to repay that compassion or to pay it forward to their descendants. Even if something like karma did exist (which I imagine isn't universal among Buddhists), its ideological purpose seems only to be justifying and excusing the suffering that comes from oppression (speciesism, sexism, caste system, etc.).

Even a united humanity (perhaps a global communist humanity) taking coordinated measures to improve each other's living conditions and those of all other conscious animals could only make a dent; ecological destruction is orders of magnitude easier to do, and collectively we've been doing that mostly by accident, as a corollary of entropic principles. The suffering resulting from chaos and destruction seems like it would be guaranteed to outlast one's subjective experience of order, peace, and pleasure for the same reason. For every relatively comfortable life as a megafauna species fearing no predation or famine, there may be an astronomically greater number of lives spent living in fear of predators, or starvation, or r*pists of the same species, with maybe a few hellish lives spent as helpless livestock thrown in for good measure. This is a raw fucking deal and we couldn't possibly do enough to change it.

If there is an intelligent creator who deliberately designed organic life doomed to experience this cycle until life is no longer possible and capable of attaining self-awareness like intelligent animals have, they're surely malevolent.

To suggest that winning at life according to objectives like the ones I laid out is impossible within the span of a human lifetime under current conditions (which is unfortunately, or fortunately, correct depending on your perspective), that extreme suffering and the experience of grisly death and injury is almost certainly unavoidable in the aforementioned reincarnation-as-a-randomly-chosen-animal scenario, so there's no point in caring about it, seems like the most doomer/sour-grapes take imaginable.

And Buddhists are fine with all of this somehow, with feeling less powerful than ants despite their heightened self-awareness. I'm clearly still missing something, because this conception of continued existence through potentially unavoidable reincarnation is driving me nuts. Something like a nirvana state (true escape from existence) sounds completely unattainable prior to the heat death of the universe.

Suppose a human believes it's not possible to do that in the short time they're guaranteed to live as a human on Earth in the present Holocene/Anthropocene era, or that what impact they could make is too insignificant or short-lived to matter. Even if every human went vegan overnight and resolved to treat all animals with dignity and respect, there's nothing preventing someone from being reborn as a helpless prey animal doomed to be swallowed up by some obligate carnivore (or worse still, trapped in some slaughterhouse run by an intelligent apex predator species) millions of years in the future where humans as we know them are long-extinct and any extant descendant species is barely recognizable.

So if I understood the article correctly: the only scenario where subjective experience truly ends is one in which the constituent matter which came together to form the chassis for an individual's continuity of subjective experience is outright annihilated by corresponding antimatter, or until the heat death of the universe.

Until then it's the uneasy but vague subjective experience of abject body horror every time a conscious being is reawakened in a completely unfamiliar body, surrounded by terrifying new stimuli. It's like the experience of dying as some sort of semi-intelligent dinosaur in the Jurassic only to be reborn as a small Holocene mammal millions of years later, and then perhaps billions of years later as some completely unrecognizable alien life-form in a different solar system long after the death of our Sun. Under this framework, every death tempts fate to roll the dice and put one's being in an even worse situation, in all likelihood where life is once again nasty, brutish, and short. It's almost certainly nowhere to go but down from here. The worst part is it kind of makes sense.

...fuck this is terrifying to think about. More than the subjective dilated-time/death-dream scenario, and much more than the subjective experience of pure darkness and silence. Reincarnation means the potential for endless thousands of hells.

What do you mean by "there is no escaping existence"? Do you mean that a suicidal individual can't change the fact that they did exist? Or that so long as sentient and sapient life exists, such beings will continue to exist to consciously experience life, making the escape's successes confined to that of the individual whose experience of life ended?

Yeah, that's not happening.

No objections if it's actually harmless. But holy shit is it unsettlingly weird and American in the most garish way possible.

https://twitter.com/AtlanticFyoo/status/1370778036187103236

A few Chicagoans have gotten quite defensive in response to this guy's question about the dye's environmental impact lol.

Supposedly it's vegetable dye.

https://twitter.com/Kathryn18132857/status/1371173477391171588

If this tweet is correct the stuff they used is vegetable dye (presumably biodegradable, therefore safe), and they've been doing this since the 1960s. This IS normal for Chicagoans. The fact that the news anchor felt no need to explain what the dye is and address concerns whether it's safe means their local Chicago-area audience is expected to be familiar with this ritual.

If this shit had been done to the Charles river I'd agree with you. Does Chicago even have any significant Irish diaspora living there or is this just the usual WASP/American-mutt appropriation of the sort of Irish diaspora culture more commonplace in New England/New York that happens around St. Patrick's Day?

The studio anchor at the end of the video: "this feels like a semblance of normalcy."

THIS IS A CORPORATE LOCAL MEDIA MOUTHPIECE'S IDEA OF NORMALCY WHAT THE FUCK

Matt Christman was right. These suburban white people would destroy the world to save fucking Applebee's.

UPDATE: Not that this isn't a fucking weird thing to do in line with the homogenization of all American culture, but apparently it is normal (annual even!) and assumed to be safe.

I'm watching the NBC news and the live on-site reporter is attributing this to "that sneaky, sneaky plumbers' union". Was this even their decision?? Did everyone involved assume this was just harmless food dye or something? That's the only scenario I can imagine in which this isn't utterly horrifying.

UPDATE: Yes, they do assume it's a harmless food dye.

Oh dear god. They are that impulsive. They are that short-sighted. This is consistent with ruling-class inaction on GHG emissions and plastic pollution, with the use of neonicotinoid pesticides which threaten bee populations.

Did they not put any thought into the long-term effects of this, or do they simply not give a shit? What is the dye made of? How do people not slowly go insane learning about this kind of shit?

Have these people just fucking given up on the pretense of long-term sustainability after Trump, Bolsonaro, etc. set the tone for future environment/climate (in)action?

UPDATE: the dye is reported to be vegetable dye. I and most of the rest of the thread may have overrreacted.

This has to be an Onion bit. No way the Chicago local government is that impulsive and short-sighted. I refuse to believe this is real.