Are some SS'ers just seeing what they want to see or am I missing something?

[Deleted member 1465]

So much I could say, but for once I find I can't. My thoughts on this are too confusing.

So I'll skip straight to the TL:DR...

Are some SS'ers just seeing what they want to see?
Yes, probably.

or am I missing something?
Yes, probably.

So are we all.

 

[terry_a_davis]

I'm not sure I understand all the philosophy in this thread (sorry).
I believe human consciousness is just biochemical reactions in the brain. Once these reactions stop when you die, your consciousness ends too and any perception of anything ends. The particles that made up your body, brain, and consciousness eventually turn into something else and everything about you ceases to exist
There's no evidence (afaik) to suggest otherwise.

 

[PhilosOfDoom]

I'm not sure I understand all the philosophy in this thread (sorry).
I believe human consciousness is just biochemical reactions in the brain. Once these reactions stop when you die, your consciousness ends too and any perception of anything ends. The particles that made up your body, brain, and consciousness eventually turn into something else and everything about you ceases to exist
There's no evidence (afaik) to suggest otherwise.

Yes, that is the current scientific view. Op's post mentioned heaven/hell, I commented on it because he said that it was unknowable, then it turned into a philosophical debate. In other words, your right afaik .

 

[Oyoy]

Yes we are seeing what we want to see. I presume its because we are only thinking about ourselves that makes us in hell. I am personally very selfish. I know lots of us are in legitimate pain but most people are in pain and the only common denominator to wanting to live is helping other people.
It's no coincidence that there is so many pictures of ourselves and a overall low quality of life. Maybe ancient culters were right and pictures steal our soul.

 

[Epsilon0]

Many folks on SS wrote that they don't believe in hell after death because the hot water they're in right now is already hell, that earth as we know it is already a living hell, that they're in a hell of their own making, that life is worse than any hell they could have imagined, etc. These reasons pop up again and again. Also, people post "you'll be in a better place soon" or something along that line on goodbye threads quite often.

Since nobody really knows what happens after death, nobody knows how CTB affects afterlife or the next life if there's one, and nobody has the whole picture of the objective reality, how do they make that leap of faith and believe they can't end up in a worse place than they're in right now?

There are "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns." Known unknowns are the questions we humans have raised but haven't found answers to. The unknown unknowns are the questions that nobody has even thought of asking yet - just like ants never wonder why quantum mechanics can't reconcile with general relativity. Due to the unknown unknowns, I'm forced to look at CTB from a risk management perspective. I've always been agnostic - I can't find enough empirical evidence to be 100% certain of anything but also can't discount any possibilities.

The situation that anybody is in seems can always get worse. Not to be pessimistic, but when my understanding of reality and the universe is limited, I'd have to consider the worst scenario and determine whether it's a state of existence I can bear. As a random example, what if "souls" do exist and can get stuck in a perpetual state of going through the agony of, say, being skinned alive if they died by CTB? That sounds worse than any form of disability, homelessness, poverty, losing loved ones.

So, do those folks romanticize or sugarcoat the unknown because such wishful thinking makes death more palatable? Or to strengthen the belief that CTB is a permanent solution to their problems? Or is it just a figure of speech for saying "my life sucks?"

Do they actually believe that the person who's about to CTB will be in a better place soon or is it like people saying "everything is gonna be fine" when they're in fact clueless and scared IRL? Or is it like saying a prayer?

Fear of the unknown is the hurdle I've been failing to jump over and deters me from "pulling the CTB trigger," so it baffles me how "the grass is greener on the other side" assumption caught on and became pervasive on SS. I wonder if it has to do with the manifestation of a common neurosis that dubious reasoning becomes more legitimate when more people with the same reasoning pile on, or if it's an example of people bias their interpretation of evidence and experience toward what they desire (which is a tendency that has been explored and confirmed by psychological science studies). Or maybe I'm really missing something. Feel free to enlighten me.

I think you answered your own question: one takes a leap of faith.

What else could one do when one talks about death?

 

[Sensei]

What if we have died already and this is paradise? That's quite a depressing thought.

 

[Epsilon0]

What if we have died already and this is paradise? That's quite a depressing thought.

Oh no... Now I most definitely won't get any sleep. Thanks for putting that idea into my head.

 

[nitrogen]

I've been busy fighting for toilet paper at Costco. It was madness. My hubby also insists our kid stops attending daycare as the coronavirus threat quickly mounts in California. So I've been super busy and haven't read most posts on this thread. I'll get to them later.

I'm not sure I get what you're saying and I haven't ever heard of these experiments. Could you provide a link to an article or something?

Besides the article I posted yesterday, here's some other stuff for you to look at.

Earth creature failed by heuristics example:

IgNobel Prize WINNER: The beetle and the beer bottle, a tragic love story.

blogs.scientificamerican.com

The male jewel beetles mate with brown, glossy, dimpled females, the bigger the better. They ditched females for beer bottles that are also brown, glossy and dimpled - almost went extinct.

Btw, here's a very interesting study that questions free will. When it comes to decision making, we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind, but it turns out that brain activity predates conscious awareness of choice in some cases by a full 7 seconds. Scientists are even able to predict what decisions a person is about to make based on brain activity before this person consciously makes the decision.

Unconscious decisions in the brain

A team of scientists has unravelled how the brain unconsciously prepares our decisions

www.mpg.de

"Seeing is believing" has been proven false by a myriad of optic illusion examples out there.

What I find repugnant in Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre is that they try to justify a cruel creation and solve the problem of evil with silly word games.

That entire post is very interesting. Since you mentioned Nietzsche, I wonder how his opinions that compassion or pity is a social illness and how such sentiments come with a certain amount of contempt sit with this SS crowd where compassion and pity are enshrined as a cardinal virtue.

We have to rely on our "subjective" experiences of reality, otherwise, we'd lose all productivity, worrying about insane "hypotheses".
from my knowledge, we haven't found any evidence of the supernatural.

Not conclusive on this subject indeed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Supernatural basically means the phenomena that are beyond our current understanding of science and laws of nature. Our understanding in those areas is very limited though. I actually think one way to expand our understanding of the objective reality is to investigate supernatural phenomena with a scientific approach.

Reincarnation has been and is being studied by the University Of Virginia School of Medicine Division of Perceptual Studies. The Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, Charles Richet, studied seances and ectoplasm. I think we're making some process there.

Btw, some insane hypotheses haven't been proven to be facts doesn't mean they should be negated. Stephen Hawking's work in theoretical physics couldn't be confirmed by observational data, that's why he didn't receive a Nobel Prize even as the living legend in the field of physics. His unproven theories and hypotheses revolutionized the ways we see and study the universe anyway.

I personally hold that there is a more justification for oblivion afterwords.

I think so, too. It's just that once I learn about those insane hypotheses, it's hard to unsee them.

 

[PhilosOfDoom]

Not conclusive on this subject indeed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Supernatural basically means the phenomena that are beyond our current understanding of science and laws of nature. Our understanding mosin those areas is very limited though. I actually think one way to expand our understanding of the objective reality is to investigate supernatural phenomena with a scientific approach.

Reincarnation has been and is being studied by the University Of Virginia School of Medicine Division of Perceptual Studies. The Nobel Prize-winning physiologist, Charles Richet, studied seances and ectoplasm. I think we're making some process there.

Btw, some insane hypotheses haven't been proven to be facts doesn't mean they should be negated. Stephen Hawking's work in theoretical physics couldn't be confirmed by observational data, that's why he didn't receive a Nobel Prize even as the living legend in the field of physics. His unproven theories and hypotheses revolutionized the ways we see and study the universe anyway.


I think so, too. It's just that once I learn about those insane hypotheses, it's hard to unsee them.

In some of my more recent replies, I've addressed most of these. However, from skimming an article by UVA, https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual...ploads/sites/360/2016/12/STE51stevenson-1.pdf, introduction and "memory aspect", I have to say, it isn't much different then what most people have said. I am not claiming they're lying, more so they're mistaken. In the situations, it often seems that reincarnation is unfalsifiable. I liken it to near death experiences, it doesn't prove a deity exists. There doesn't seem to be any conceivable way for it to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt without committing any logical fallacies. Some of them, like the mindfulness increasing mental well-being, I have no problem with. Some... "out there" hypotheses should of course be considered, but most that I've come across seem to be anecdotal. And, perhaps, there'll come evidence soon that will prove it beyond a doubt, we will have to see and/or wait.

 

[ArtsyDrawer]

I think I would be in an objectively better "place", as I will not be, and therefore not suffer.
I will not be in a good place because I will not experience pleasure either, but not experiencing pain (as I will not experience at all), which is an upstep up from suffering.