Venting Consciousness, and a (grim) reason to stay

[Dissolving Figment]

I used to be a lot more suicidal in my teens.
Back then I was an atheist, and troubled by determinism.
If the laws of physics held true, how could my conscious experience possibly affect reality in any way?
The state of the universe one day from now could be precisely calculated from the state of the universe one day before.
How could anything I do affect that?

Quantum physics wasn't of much help either.
Sure, if you add a dice roll to the movement of every particle, it's no longer deterministic.
But again, what mechanism does my conscious experience have to affect the movement of these particles?
If it did have one, then there would be a way to statistically skew the odds of particle interactions—breaking the laws of physics.
Or if it was in some very subtle, physically immeasurable way, then what kind of free will is moving a couple electrons here and there?
The butterfly effect would make the outcome of moving an electron over a couple nanometers completely opaque.
No better than random chance.

Then in my late teens, I tried psychedelics.
My first shroom trip was so intense I blacked out and awoke with no memory of it.
It was only through subsequent acid and shroom trips that I slowly remembered what I experienced that day.
I'm omitting the full details because it's technical, but for the nerds, I experienced something like a Fourier transform of the conscious experience.

The short of it is, I experienced living lives after lives, faster and faster, with each life flowing from one to the next.
I was living more and more lives in shorter and shorter amounts of times. Millions of lives in a millisecond.
Too much to remember. Too much to experience. That's why I imagine I blacked out.
But through my future trips I remembered the dreadful conclusion of that experience.
I had lived every single life there was to live. Each and every possible combination of place, time, beings, events, all of it.
And then the final life came. And it was my life. It was the place I left from.

That brought upon me a terror so intense I can't even begin to describe it.
Every single life, flowing from one to the next in a pattern that felt truer than anything I've ever known, what felt like a mathematical necessity?
It felt too perfect, too rational, it was the most intense feeling of certainty I'd ever felt.
And it had one hellish conclusion.
It was a cycle. After this life would come another, and another, and another. Until eventually I'd end up right back here.
How many times had I been here before? How many times had I experienced this loop?
The one thing I knew for sure is that there was no escape. For suicide would just lead to the next life. And the next. And I'd end up right where I came from.

I spent the next years traumatized, tormented by that experience nightly. I couldn't sleep unless I stayed up so long I instantly passed out.
I was terrified of death. I was terrified of having a heart attack and dying. Because it would lead to reliving the cycle.
It would lead to another eternity of suffering.

So, in a way, psychedelics did help with my suicidal thoughts! I had no more desire to kill myself after that :P

It's been almost a decade now, and I'm no longer bothered by that memory anymore.
However, it's part of the reason why I'm not in too much of a hurry to end my life.
Logically, it's batshit insane, but emotionally I still believe that I'd just relive the cycle again and there's no real escape.
It's hard to argue myself out of direct experience.

I still go through intense bouts of depressions. During those, it does start feeling like the pain of living through this life isn't worth it, and I'd rather just end things right away even if it means living the cycle once again. Maybe next life's better.
But it does make it hard to be excited about suicide.
It no longer feels like the comforting safety net it once was.
It's no longer the easy way out.
It's the hard, excruciating way out.

 

[gonnaAbstract]

Thanks, I'm terrified. I've had existential crises about determinism and the possibility of a cyclic universe, but lately I've been more depressed about this possibility. It means that those of us who exist only to suffer will never be able to escape it. It means we are all destined to make the same mistakes, trapped in our cosmically assigned roles whether we like them or not. All I can say at this point is that if we do get to live other lives, I hope the next life will be better than this one.

 

[PersonBeforeLife]

Very interesting. If reincarnation does exist then this is the safety coping mechanism that's essential for people not to remember their past lives.

So this life in your opinion repeats itself or this specific life never repeats?

Reminds me of this song

 

[FoolClimax]

I like to believe just like I don't remember past 13.7 billion years of universe history or any history of previous humans or smart and conscious animals, after this life there will be nothing to remember. Everything that makes me originated out of the experiences this body had during its course of existence. After everything this unique consciousness will not exist unless you get stuck or some boltzmann brain shit happens which continues where you left off. Even in that case I hope its brief.

 

[Dissolving Figment]

So this life in your opinion repeats itself or this specific life never repeats?

The feeling from the trip was that it did repeat, but only after living every other possible life.
This is an unfathomably large number, because even for just my own particular life, there's millions and millions of different variants of it that just have one extra event or one tiny detail being slightly different. Now imagine that multiplied by every human life, and then all the other possible forms of non-human consciousness in this universe or another.

But one thing that felt distinctly true was that all these potential lives were ordered in a sequence that made sense. As in, after the current life I'm experiencing, I'd experience a shifting of conscious sensations (colors, feelings, thoughts, visuals, etc.) and these things would shift, in a way that feels "perfect", into the beginning of another conscious experience. That is, death is a shifting away from my current life into the one that always comes after it in the cycle.

This is something I've wondered about before, though. I couldn't tell you if there's a infinite number of lives, or a finite but just very large number of lives. If it's finite then it would just repeat eventually. If it's infinite, it wouldn't. You might after a very, very long time (similarly long to how a full cycle through a finite number of lives would take) experience a life almost identical to this current one, but with one infinitesimally small detail changed. I guess for all intents and purposes that doesn't really change anything.

Anyways, that's just my feelings. There's also some similar descriptions of the afterlife but with a happy ending, such as nirvana in eastern religions or this one (very cool) short story from Andy Weir animated by Kurzgesagt:



Those are probably worth more consideration than my pessimistic ramblings. (Especially if that one other person on here is right and we choose our afterlife through our beliefs.)

 

[SoLowHollow48]

I know I'm going to get flamed for this but this is why I don't like sobriety. I support people staying sober and clean but holy shit, I'd be lying if I say that I'd do the same thing for myself.

I haven't tried narcotics yet but I do drink. I smoke occasionally and the nicotine high does feel nice. I'd imagine feeling that way ALL the time. Maybe I won't be so bitter.

 

[PersonBeforeLife]

The feeling from the trip was that it did repeat, but only after living every other possible life.
This is an unfathomably large number, because even for just my own particular life, there's millions and millions of different variants of it that just have one extra event or one tiny detail being slightly different. Now imagine that multiplied by every human life, and then all the other possible forms of non-human consciousness in this universe or another.

But one thing that felt distinctly true was that all these potential lives were ordered in a sequence that made sense. As in, after the current life I'm experiencing, I'd experience a shifting of conscious sensations (colors, feelings, thoughts, visuals, etc.) and these things would shift, in a way that feels "perfect", into the beginning of another conscious experience. That is, death is a shifting away from my current life into the one that always comes after it in the cycle.

This is something I've wondered about before, though. I couldn't tell you if there's a infinite number of lives, or a finite but just very large number of lives. If it's finite then it would just repeat eventually. If it's infinite, it wouldn't. You might after a very, very long time (similarly long to how a full cycle through a finite number of lives would take) experience a life almost identical to this current one, but with one infinitesimally small detail changed. I guess for all intents and purposes that doesn't really change anything.

Anyways, that's just my feelings. There's also some similar descriptions of the afterlife but with a happy ending, such as nirvana in eastern religions or this one (very cool) short story from Andy Weir animated by Kurzgesagt:



Those are probably worth more consideration than my pessimistic ramblings. (Especially if that one other person on here is right and we choose our afterlife through our beliefs.)

This is a massive amount of speculation but I guess that's the point.

I'm curious what you think of this 4 minute article:



All I think is the laws of physics of our reality violate themselves. Who created the creator?... It's an infinite paradox so I suspect there has to be something outside of this reality with different laws of reality where time cannot exist that created our reality.

 

[Dissolving Figment]

This is a massive amount of speculation but I guess that's the point.

Yeah, it's just what I felt during my trip. Doesn't make logical sense.

I'm curious what you think of this 4 minute article

In my "logical" opinion, we are inside of the universe, and we can analyze its laws, but we can't tell anything about what's outside the universe. A knight on c3 sees the pawn on d5 and knows it can capture it, but it doesn't have the scientific apparatus to determine whether the board is made of wood, marble, or simulated on a computer. Similarly, we can determine the laws of physics and name the subatomic particles, but we can't know if those particles are simulated, part of a Boltzmann brain, part of some cosmic cycle, or heck, even that one guy pushing rocks from that one XKCD comic.

But yes I do agree that eternal nothingness would be weird, if we got here from nothingness then by definition there's a way to get from nothingness to here.