We don't know for certain that we didn't exist before birth/conception. It is common ground among materialists and the mainstream Christian tradition, but many people believe in a before-life – reincarnation/rebirth in Hinduism/Buddhism/etc, pre-mortal existence in LDS teaching, the 3rd century Christian theologian Origen, Islam.

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...

>We didn’t exist before birth

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".

>How do you define existence, here? Are you equating it with consciousness?

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.

I think you may have completely missed the point being made.

No, I've got the point being missed. I just don't find the distinction useful at all.

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.

My take is that that there is no way to prove conclusively the existence nor the nonexistence of an afterlife. So each person makes a decision (bet). At the end of this life, we each find out if we were right or not. Well, technically, if there is an after life, we would find that out. If not, we don't find anything out, do we?

Betting on an afterlife is a bet you can't lose. If you bet there is an afterlife and there is one, you win the sense of satisfaction of having been right. If you bet there is an afterlife and there isn't one, you never know you were wrong. So, when offered a bet you can't lose, why not take it?