KARBYTES_JOURNAL_2023_ENTRY_320
S: “It is hypothesized that, when a person dies, that person does not cease to be conscious even while its body ceases to sustain neural activity, respiration, and metabolism of food. Instead of ceasing to be conscious, that person’s continuity of consciousness ‘goes to sleep’ in the universe its physical body died inside of and then ‘wakes up’ inside of a new body in a new universe. (What helps to support this hypothesis is a more general hypothesis which posits that all phenomena are merely figments of a dream world conjured up by exactly one ubiquitous and immortal field of consciousness).”
T: “I do not believe any of what you suggested is true. Instead, I believe that consciousness is ephemeral and an emergent property of sufficiently complex matter rather than vice versa. I believe that, once a person’s central nervous system shuts down, that person ceases to be conscious forever.”
R: “I find T’s purported worldview to be more personally appealing than S’s purported worldview especially because I am a hedonist (which means that my fundamental notion of ethics is that the ultimate goal of my existence is to maximize how much pleasure I experience and to minimize how much suffering I experience). If I believe that my future experiences will not be pleasurable enough for me to justify as being worthwhile and/or if I believe that my future experiences will be too painful for me to justify as being worthwhile, then I will attempt to commit suicide (and assume that I will cease to be conscious after I implement my suicide attempt instead assume that I will be transported to potentially worse circumstances than the situation I commit suicide inside of). As a hedonist, I prioritize feeling good more than I do having an accurate understanding of reality. Hence, even if S’s purported worldview is more factually accurate than is T’s purported worldview, I would most likely choose to assume that T’s purported worldview is most factually accurate because that worldview is the least painful of the two for me to believe in. I think it is more comforting to believe that I will eventually reach a point where I never have to be conscious again than to believe that my conscious experience never ends because, as long as I am not conscious, I cannot experience any suffering (and I think the experience of suffering is worse than the experience of no pleasure and that the experience of suffering is worse than no experience at all).”
karbytes: “S’s purported worldview aligns most closely with my own purported worldview. I figure that, if I get to experience a continuity of consciousness which goes on forever into the future, I will have plenty of time to solve all of the problems which cause me suffering.”
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