About "wishful thinking", many people really want there to be an afterlife, but conversely at least some people really want there to not be one. Some people fear hell, or that everlasting existence might become boring (apeirophobia). Others find the idea of oblivion and infinite nothingness as reassuring. see e.g. Swinburne's Garden of Proserpine – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45288/the-garden-of-p...
At the risk of sounding all "woo-woo", this statement bears some qualification.
How do you define existence, here? Are you equating it with consciousness? Surely your constituent parts (atoms, molecules, particles, etc) existed before your consciousness, and continue to do so afterwards.
I think you'll also agree that the arrangement of matter and energy you call "your life" is regulated by natural processes.
In principle, it's possible for the thing you call "your life" to be a brief window within some larger process (a meta-life, if you will) of which you have no recollection.
I don't know if I believe any of this to be true, but metaphysically speaking, it's not at all obvious that we "didn't exist before birth".
Yeah, I, for one, equate it with consciousness. I could not give less fucks if my "atoms, molecules, particles" existed before me or will exist after me.
I want the whole conscious being, able to kiss, hug, think, love, hurt, eat a steak, and so on to extend.
>I think you'll also agree that the arrangement of matter and energy you call "your life" is regulated by natural processes. In principle, it's possible for the thing you call "your life" to be a brief window within some larger process (a meta-life, if you will) of which you have no recollection.
If I don't have "recollection", then I still don't care.
The whole point being made was that "metaphysically speaking, it's not at all obvious that we "didn't exist before birth".
Which I say is irrelevant, if we need to distort "exist" so much as to mean some "larger processes" or our "atoms and molecules" existing.
Metaphysically speaking it might not be obvious, but the way the grandparent, me, and almost everybody else uses the term existence (i.e. regarding the conscious person, or at least their soul) it's obvious that we very much do not exist.
Yes, you've caught on to this notion, and that's really the best we can ever do in our present state. Funny how we imagine our little 3 pound mass might someday fathom the secrets of the cosmos. Could a fruit fly trapped in a jet airliner ever comprehend the turbo jet mechanics keeping its carrier aloft?
I would argue that it's fairly safe to conjecture a continued progression of "higher" dimensions beyond time and space; beyond our human imagining. Might as well think of the progression itself as infinite.
From this, entire books could be written about the imagined implications, such as every possible timeline "emanating" from every point in time. Relatively rudimentary approximations of what we can not fully imagine.
So, how does this relate to the afterlife. Well, once it's established that at least everything our puny brains could ever imagine does cosmically exist, then our continuation is certainly included in that. So is choice / free will, simply put. Of course, there would exist many individual continuations and wills, even variations of individuality. It's interesting to consider and one inevitably encounters a thickening cloud of paradoxes, indicating that our mental models are laughably incomplete.
Immortality in the Carl Sagan sense that we came from stars, and one day will be there again, or even within a cycle of nature on mother earth, sure that seems reasonable. Particle immortality. Remarkably complex tales of hades, meeting everyone who has ever lived in paradise or cute red guys with a pitchfork require remarkable evidence.
On impending nonexistence, I've never quite understood why this is a struggle for so many to contemplate - maybe that's something lacking in me, who knows. I always just figure it like the tungsten filament after you flick the switch; fade then off. Why's that difficult? Why must it matter more? Can't it just be? It just is. I am perfectly chill with that, and always have been. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The earth actually is (roughly speaking) the centre of the observable universe, which quite possibly is all the universe we can ever know.
If this is a computer simulation, you'd expect some parts of the simulation to be much more accurate then others. Our psychology would be simulated to a great degree of accuracy, distant galaxies would be simulated at only a very coarse level. So, the centre of the simulated universe, the area with the highest degree of simulation accuracy, would be this planet. So, if we are in a computer simulation–and if we don't know, let's say the probability is 50%–then the earth is the centre of the universe after all.
If philosophical idealism is true, and esse is percipi, then the area around the earth (which is highly observed by minds) exists in more detail, has a greater degree of existence, than distant galaxies. So, philosophical idealism can lead to a similar conclusion as the simulation thesis, that the earth actually is the approximate centre of the universe.
If the universe is infinite then we are always likely to be at the centre of whatever range our instruments manage. In a universe where there is no such thing as centre. If it's simulation, it seems reasonable for the edge of observable to be the limit of simulation - the rest being under the galactic equivalent of fog of war.
Of course we don't know if it actually is centred, or just appears so from being in a local hotspot. Without knowing the extent of simulation that may be unknowable. There could just as easily be countless other species in other parts of the sim, or earth as an insignificant backwater with all the real activity outside our range. Unless it's encoded in an easter egg we may one day find, I suspect it will always be unknowable. And that's without considering multiverses. :)
Have you seen just how weird people are? I think the psych simulation is loaded with bugs.
No sense wasting glucose on thinking about things that are beyond our probing.
Death might not be non-existence. Many religions, philosophies, spiritual teachings, say that it isn't. Of course, maybe they are all baloney–and a lot of them have to be mostly that–but there is at least a chance there is some truth in one or more of them.
Maybe quantum immortality is true, and all of us live forever, but it is a lonely existence, cut off seemingly forever from family and friends. (I hope that isn't true, it sounds rather hellish.)
Could we be living in a computer simulation? If we have no idea, shouldn't we assign a 50% probability? But, if we are in a computer simulation, our simulators might decide to provide an afterlife for us. And if we have no idea whether they would or not, shouldn't we assign a 50% probability to that? Which gives us 25% chance of a simulated afterlife – not the best odds, but far from the worst either.
We could be physically resurrected into some paradise by various random processes (quantum tunnelling, quantum fluctuations, thermal fluctuations). The probability of that happening is immensely small but non-zero. No matter how small it is, if the future is infinite, then almost surely it will happen eventually.
Most people who think death is non-existence accept a materialist position in the philosophy of mind, but often without giving any great thought to the alternative positions. If idealism is true–and we have no hard evidence it isn't–then death being the cessation of existence is far less likely. If idealism is true, then quite possibly minds are inherently immortal, in which case an afterlife would be metaphysically necessary.