thread: 2006-09-08 : Salvation, damnation, justification, a la Sydney
On 2006-09-18, joepub wrote:
It bothered me for a little while, that pretty soon I'll just be gone, with no more subjective experience of myself ever again. But then I realized that I've already been gone, with no subjective experience of myself at all, for billions of years, because I didn't exist yet, and I realized that that didn't bother me a bit. Why be bothered about my nonexistance in the future? It'll be just the same as my nonexistance in the past. And it stopped bothering me.
I share Vincent's view that when I die, I will become dirt.
But...
I don't particularily see myself as having "not existed" for billions of years. I see myself as having existed in little pieces -
All those individual molecules that make up Joe McDonald, they were individual molecules of a bunch of other stuff before me. And they will break down into individual molecules of other stuff after me.
Probably dirt, for the most part.
Personally, I don't believe in a soul. I believe that I'm just a large lump of stuff.
So, when that large lump of stuff disbands into smaller lumps of stuff (dirt and dry bones and such), it's not really me not existing... it's just me not existing in my current form.
I don't really have any fear of death, because death, to me, seems like an arbitrary line.
Does that make sense?
