I had a craniotomy in 1996. Similar thing. The back of my head looked a bit like his, except the scar looked more like a Blue Oyster Cult symbol (backwards question mark). I know they left a piece of the skull out, so I do have a hole in the head.
Took me a couple months to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time, but I ended up making a full recovery.
I remember being wheeled into the OR. It was odd, because there was a damn good chance I wouldn’t wake up. Or I’d spend my life in a wheelchair. The cerebellum is a bad place to have problems. I was actually pretty chill. Maybe they gave me Valium.
The recovery sucked. I spent a week in ICU (basically no sleep).
Glad for him and without a doubt the support network and relationships he had in place significantly contributed to his positive outcome. I recently went through a similar trial and tribulation but as an inmate and by receiving sub-standard care. That's how I was able to turn inward and finally crack into real enlightenment and it's the solid kind because comparatively speaking, I had fuck-all to live for. No family. No future. No nothing but more suffering. And yet I found the release into accepting the beauty of futility. I commit to the program, I give. Let Go and Hang On. IYKYK.
I'd shared this article last week with the meditation group I'm part of, describing the author's state of mind on the eve of surgery as a state of samadhi. It's a great description of the state I end up in during almost every meditation session (practicing in the 'open awareness' style) and sometimes also in the middle of the day, unprompted.
I'd shared it with the group because it was interesting that the author had spontaneously landed in the state due to catastrophic circumstances, but now reading it a second time I recall this had also happened to me years ago, on the sudden death of a close family member. I consider myself lucky to be able to access it outside circumstances of personal tragedy or medical emergency. It's a great reason to learn to meditate; unfortunately you can't give people a quick preview of it or a lot more people would take meditation more seriously.
What a great piece. I’m so glad not only that his daughter will get to know her dad, but that her dad is going to appreciate every moment he has with her.
This is a great article. I've been in for surgery a few times, and I always cry before it because I never know what could happen. I could wind up dead, paralyzed, in chronic pain, a vegetable. Then I think to myself how unspecial I am. Millions of people die every day and yet we deny death, and lose sight of the stuff that actually matters that much. The billionaire and the homeless person still just fertilize worms after they die. That reality keeps me humble and in daily gratitude to the miracle of life, though my confidence does waver during the periods of ill health I've had.
I learned a new term: Survivor's Euphoria. Only having had relatively minor procedures, I have only had relatively minor instances. But I have had a feeling of "I came back" which I have solely after waking up from anasthaesia. As if the interrupted mental processes carry some flow state forward, which I re-attach to.
There's a longer baseline term which might go with this: Survivor's Depression. I have found after successful surgery, diagnostics, any kind of procedure after the initial elation, I have a very strong down-mood. It's not unlike coming back from holiday and feeling exhausted.
"There is a kind of consciousness that lives not in thought but in presence."
Yes, and I believe the strong association we often make between the most advanced cognitive functions and consciousness are misleading us into believing that consciousness is somehow the result of those functions, while I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside". It's of course the most amazing part of the show, but should not be confused for it. Consciousness is not made of thinking but of observing, we just spend a lot of time observing how we think.
> I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside"
Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?
That can not be the case, because the "actor" can catch the "observer" in the "act" of "observing". You can introspect, and you can speak about your introspections, or write them down, which means there is a feedback loop between the acting part and the observing part.
Hmm but that sounds pretty much like how I currently understand how our brains work. Not sure how factual this is, but I remember watching a video about how our brains essentially lie to us.
I think there was a ping pong example in the video. It said something like you think you watch the ball come towards you and you think that you are making a decision and action to move the paddle on the ball's trajectory, but what really happens is that most of that is pre-observed, pre-decided and pre- acted upon subconsciously.
So the subconscious part does most of the work and then when your conscious part catches up and you feel like you are doing the reacting, it's actually your subconsciousness lying to you that this was your observation and your decided reaction.
Again, not sure how factual any of that is, but it made sense to me when I thought about how complex the task of observing+deciding+acting is in e.g. ping pong and how very little time there is to actually do all of that. Is it really possible to consciously observe, decide and act to a ping pong ball with so very little time there is to do all of that?
So based on that it does seem like we are the observer and our subconscious is the actor which also lies to us to make us feel like that the actor is us.
I can introspect, but that could just be my subconsciousness doing it and lying to me that it was by own conscious introspection.
> Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?
Not exaclty, because I bieleve this distinction between the material world and the "world of experience" is nothing but a simple model that's not helpful most of the time.
But I can surely imagine a world with all the actors, all the action, and no observers, yes. Isn't that what's called "the zombie" though experiment? But that's a though experiment that does not lead very far; soon you end up with a world of philosophical zombies who write and talk about their introspections and write whole books about consciousness, yet this imaginary world is supposed to be devoid of consciousness ; feels like a bunch of autonomous language models in a loop talking to each others add nauseam pretending to be humans, after the end of all life.
That's why in my mental model the biological phenomenon and the subjective experience are two sides of the very same coin unlike in the zombie though experiment. In practice you can't have one without the other.
I am unconvinced by your argument for the reason I gave initialy and that is nicely illustrated in that article: Your argument posits that introspection and thoughs belong firmly into the realm of consciousness. I actually believe, at the contrary, that if we wanted to have an actionable definition of conscousness we would have to free this concept from all particular biological processes such as thinking or introspecting, which certainly "color" it but do not define it. Of course we then end up with a concept of consciousness that is restricted to the immediate personal experience we have of experiencing something; the tiny tiny bit of unknown that's outside the reach of our senses and sciences, the only thing we can't observe. And the task is to articulate this mysterious bit with everything else we know.
I'm not sure if I'm making my view clearer or if I'm confusing everyone; to be fair we don't have a good vocabulary to describe what we cannot observe :)
The piece was deeply thought-provoking, but I struggled to get through it sensing how much AI was used to write it.
I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help.
I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5.
It loves to describe things “hum” that don’t usually hum, like the author wrote in the beginning. Plenty more descriptions match the cadence and rhythm and word choices I’ve seen writing my manuscript.
I feel like there’s a meta discussion the author was prompting here about consciousness.
Reading the writing of a real human feels more intimate. Reading the auto-tune version of writing makes me feel noticeably less connected to the reader. I know the author still input something to get this output. But there’s something blocking a deeper connection when I just “know” I’m not reading the author’s words.
You're being fooled by the humans. They're not writing intimately any more than TFA is. They've learned and practiced to write in a way that conveys whatever emotion they choose to show, whether they really feel it or not. LLMs just bring a professional writer's abilities to normal people.
Just like with music, random amatures may have just the same or deeper feelings than superstars, but they don't have the technical skills to put that into their music. We still prefer to listen to the technically competent music to get feelings from it despite it being less personal.
TBH I've struggled to get through long-form writing - and this isn't even that long - for years, mostly because they're so full of filler. A compelling headline, but every time it starts to get close to an answer to the compelling headline, it diverts into telling the backstory of one of the people in it. Loads of filler. AI just seems to make it cheaper or faster to generate filler.
Powerful story. But let's be real: after the "survivor's euphoria" fades, how do you actually keep that level of consciousness? I feel like the daily grind would inevitably pull me back to my old self. Has anyone here had a life-changing moment and actually managed to stay changed?
Surviving something like that (a much less serious adenoma near the brain) is neat because I can mentally use the memory to alter my current state of mind.
I can't recreate the exact feeling, obviously. Just remembering waking up in the world of the living is still powerful enough to improve my mood and put problems into perspective, even after more than a decade. The old me has a new mental tool, forever.
At the same time, I'm not walking around like an enlightened monk either. Whether something counts as life-changing must depend on perspective and personality.
In Happiness Hypothesis Jonathan Haidt talks about how we all have a basic setting for these kind of things.
We can move the bar around but it always tends back toward that default.
He uses the example of this being why people who read self help book always seem to be reading a new self help book.
That little euphoric moment of clarity and fresh outlook only last a few months or so until you’re back at your regular old self and need a new epiphany.
What a beautiful, thought provoking article! When I saw the title , I thought it was a book summary of “My stroke of insight” [0]. This book is by a neuro-anatomist who had a rare stroke resulting in the left hemisphere of her brain being incapacitated. That led her to experiences similar to that of the article’s author. Do check out the book and pair it with the article
You gotta appreciate how this lovely story, (which to me has too many Is to have "enlightenment" close to it), is sitting on /business/, even though Bigthink has Neuropsych, Thinking, The Present, The Future, Life, Health and Special Issues. I guess it wasn't a conscious decision to have it there, or so I hope. ;)
My experience with several surgeries and going under full anesthesia every time hasn't been anything that dramatic. Sure, I could write a lot about the feelings I had and the thoughts about whether I'd actually wake up afterward and see my loved ones, but honestly, I find that unnecessary.
In my view, consciousness is completely an emergent phenomenon. What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I don't like this article because, like so many others, it tries to tell us how life should be lived, instead of facing the blunt truth: any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time, sad attempts to justify our existence. The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Let me finish with this: I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
> All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time
My observation is that whatever story people believe will happen after their death will deeply influence their current life in this reality, so I disagree that it is “just wasted time“. For most, it’s not simply a mind exercise but defines their values and existence.
It’s arrogance and ignorance of the “West“ to assume everyone wants to “live a long life“. You very distinctively have other priorities if you believe in reincarnation and karma. Belief in rebirth strengthens dynasties and collectivism in very real ways, the belief in no afterlife or one that is not influenced by your current behavior strengthens individualism.
When I was put under anesthesia they told me it would be like no time had passed when I woke up, but this wasn't true for me. It felt like time had passed the same way as sleeping.
Odd. I not only feel time has passed, but I often have vague memories of it, and usually a very good estimate of what time it is if awaken at any moment.
I've had various forms of anaesthesia, uh, five times in the year or so.
> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up.
My experience is that this depends on the med. With propofol, indeed it's like an editor took a razor, cut a few inches of memory tape out, and spliced the remains back together. I'm signing a consent form, and then a second later I have teleported to the recovery room where I'm having apple juice.
What's wild about propofol is that lost time does not mean you were unconscious the whole time. With twilight anaesthesia, you are often semi-lucid and able to respond to commands from the doctors. You are aware and having an experience. It just gets erased afterwards.
With midazolam, it was a much stranger experience. After the procedure, I can remember telling my wife that I remembered everything. She said I seemed totally lucid. But I no longer remember what I did remember then. Throughout the day after the procedure, memories faded out. Now it's almost all gone, including much of the time after the procedure was done.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
It's the drugs. Specifically, it's fentanyl.
For my second surgery, the anaesthesiologist pushed the fentanyl before the propofol, and told me he was doing so. When he said we was going to, I remember telling him. "OK. Oh! OK." It feels like every worry in the world has disappeared. Everything is cozy. Everything is fine. It's like being in the womb again.
The crazy thing is that fentanyl doesn’t even have that much euphoria, heroin and oxycodone have a much, much stronger feeling of euphoria than fentanyl does. Fentanyl is very sedating in comparison.
> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I have been under general anesthesia three times, and this is the thing that sticks with me too: it’s a dress-rehearsal for death. The conclusions you come to by going through it are obvious in retrospect but nonetheless interesting:
You have no conscious experience or memory of the moment when you go under and your consciousness is severed. There is only the lead-up, usually the anesthesiologist saying they’re about to start putting the drugs into your arm, or asking you to count down. The next conscious event in your life is waking up in the recovery room. It’s obvious to say, but you could die while under anesthesia and you would never know. Your conscious life up to the moment you went under would be the same. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that Death is not an event in life, and after experiencing anesthesia I suppose I get what he meant.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia.
Same, but I don’t place a lot of stock in it - like you say, it’s the drugs. I asked my anesthesiologist what he’d be giving me to relax me before I went under and he said fentanyl.
Replies like these are a clear symptom of how terribly sick our culture is. Nietzsche truly saw it coming.
> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. [...] The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Such a self-centered and cynical way of looking at life. The world does not go on without "us". We are the utmost expression of nature and, quite literally, the legacy of those who came before.
I hope we can figure out a way to stop this self-indulging materialism. I understand that believing that nothing truly matters is quite freeing for the selfish hedonist, but it's about time we regain a sense of transcendence.
> but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
Truly, this is a load of non-sense. You have no way of knowing. Why be so deliberately obtuse on that we don't have answers for? Why have we stopped asking the important questions?
> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive.
What do you mean by this? It is obviously possible to have an impact that lasts after you die and that people view as meaningful long after you die.
If the meaning of your life is to raise your kids well, that still matters after you die. Or if you invented calculus, or general relativity, or conquered Egypt and Persia, or wrote an epic poem read for thousands of years.
The world will go on without you, but it will be different, and maybe meaningfully so to those left.
I had quite a number of procedures starting in early childhood and through my teen years.
Pretty much my first memory was going into surgery. It'll probably be my last as well, being born with multiple heart defects doesn't really go away.
You start looking forward to going under and start being disappointed when you wake back up.
It's odd confronting mortality from your first conscious memory but it's also odd being afraid of death.
It's so clear that we are evolved beings, we have self doubt and existential doubt and all these things that are clearly just evolved processes to keep us out of local maximums.
It's sad to see people latch on to convoluted views, tortured logic, force themselves to justify strongly held but unevidenced beliefs just because they are afraid.
It's such a waste of time, people can use their imaginations to believe whatever they like, they can theorize or speculate, but the absolute waste of time trying to ground what can't be grounded, the tortured logic, the semantic games is a tragedy.
We use our brains to generate unique meaning, each one of us is a generating node in an uncomputable casual chain that stretches into the unknown future, and we are part of our collective planets random meaning walk... and then we get to stop.
This isn't really relevant to this site nor is it noteworthy. There was nothing revelatory about consciousness. I'm happy that the author survived their brain surgery though.
45 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 58.7 ms ] threadTook me a couple months to learn to walk and chew gum at the same time, but I ended up making a full recovery.
I remember being wheeled into the OR. It was odd, because there was a damn good chance I wouldn’t wake up. Or I’d spend my life in a wheelchair. The cerebellum is a bad place to have problems. I was actually pretty chill. Maybe they gave me Valium.
The recovery sucked. I spent a week in ICU (basically no sleep).
I'd shared it with the group because it was interesting that the author had spontaneously landed in the state due to catastrophic circumstances, but now reading it a second time I recall this had also happened to me years ago, on the sudden death of a close family member. I consider myself lucky to be able to access it outside circumstances of personal tragedy or medical emergency. It's a great reason to learn to meditate; unfortunately you can't give people a quick preview of it or a lot more people would take meditation more seriously.
There's a longer baseline term which might go with this: Survivor's Depression. I have found after successful surgery, diagnostics, any kind of procedure after the initial elation, I have a very strong down-mood. It's not unlike coming back from holiday and feeling exhausted.
Yes, and I believe the strong association we often make between the most advanced cognitive functions and consciousness are misleading us into believing that consciousness is somehow the result of those functions, while I suspect we (conscious selves) are just witnessing those functions like we are witnessing anything, "from the outside". It's of course the most amazing part of the show, but should not be confused for it. Consciousness is not made of thinking but of observing, we just spend a lot of time observing how we think.
Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?
That can not be the case, because the "actor" can catch the "observer" in the "act" of "observing". You can introspect, and you can speak about your introspections, or write them down, which means there is a feedback loop between the acting part and the observing part.
We're not simply observing "from the outside".
I think there was a ping pong example in the video. It said something like you think you watch the ball come towards you and you think that you are making a decision and action to move the paddle on the ball's trajectory, but what really happens is that most of that is pre-observed, pre-decided and pre- acted upon subconsciously.
So the subconscious part does most of the work and then when your conscious part catches up and you feel like you are doing the reacting, it's actually your subconsciousness lying to you that this was your observation and your decided reaction.
Again, not sure how factual any of that is, but it made sense to me when I thought about how complex the task of observing+deciding+acting is in e.g. ping pong and how very little time there is to actually do all of that. Is it really possible to consciously observe, decide and act to a ping pong ball with so very little time there is to do all of that?
So based on that it does seem like we are the observer and our subconscious is the actor which also lies to us to make us feel like that the actor is us.
I can introspect, but that could just be my subconsciousness doing it and lying to me that it was by own conscious introspection.
Not exaclty, because I bieleve this distinction between the material world and the "world of experience" is nothing but a simple model that's not helpful most of the time.
But I can surely imagine a world with all the actors, all the action, and no observers, yes. Isn't that what's called "the zombie" though experiment? But that's a though experiment that does not lead very far; soon you end up with a world of philosophical zombies who write and talk about their introspections and write whole books about consciousness, yet this imaginary world is supposed to be devoid of consciousness ; feels like a bunch of autonomous language models in a loop talking to each others add nauseam pretending to be humans, after the end of all life.
That's why in my mental model the biological phenomenon and the subjective experience are two sides of the very same coin unlike in the zombie though experiment. In practice you can't have one without the other.
I am unconvinced by your argument for the reason I gave initialy and that is nicely illustrated in that article: Your argument posits that introspection and thoughs belong firmly into the realm of consciousness. I actually believe, at the contrary, that if we wanted to have an actionable definition of conscousness we would have to free this concept from all particular biological processes such as thinking or introspecting, which certainly "color" it but do not define it. Of course we then end up with a concept of consciousness that is restricted to the immediate personal experience we have of experiencing something; the tiny tiny bit of unknown that's outside the reach of our senses and sciences, the only thing we can't observe. And the task is to articulate this mysterious bit with everything else we know.
I'm not sure if I'm making my view clearer or if I'm confusing everyone; to be fair we don't have a good vocabulary to describe what we cannot observe :)
I’ve been drafting a manuscript for a novel lately, trying to see how well llms can help.
I recognize this prose immediately as OpenAI gpt 5.
It loves to describe things “hum” that don’t usually hum, like the author wrote in the beginning. Plenty more descriptions match the cadence and rhythm and word choices I’ve seen writing my manuscript.
I feel like there’s a meta discussion the author was prompting here about consciousness.
Reading the writing of a real human feels more intimate. Reading the auto-tune version of writing makes me feel noticeably less connected to the reader. I know the author still input something to get this output. But there’s something blocking a deeper connection when I just “know” I’m not reading the author’s words.
Edit: llamas > llms
Just like with music, random amatures may have just the same or deeper feelings than superstars, but they don't have the technical skills to put that into their music. We still prefer to listen to the technically competent music to get feelings from it despite it being less personal.
This made me slightly nauseous. What's ahead is going to suck so, so bad. We shouldn't have left the ocean...
https://www.graceguts.com/quotations/zen-story-tigers-and-a-...
I can't recreate the exact feeling, obviously. Just remembering waking up in the world of the living is still powerful enough to improve my mood and put problems into perspective, even after more than a decade. The old me has a new mental tool, forever.
At the same time, I'm not walking around like an enlightened monk either. Whether something counts as life-changing must depend on perspective and personality.
We can move the bar around but it always tends back toward that default.
He uses the example of this being why people who read self help book always seem to be reading a new self help book.
That little euphoric moment of clarity and fresh outlook only last a few months or so until you’re back at your regular old self and need a new epiphany.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142292.My_Stroke_of_Insi...
In my view, consciousness is completely an emergent phenomenon. What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up. For me, general anesthesia is probably the closest thing to experiencing death, except with the difference that you get the chance to resume your existence again.
I don't like this article because, like so many others, it tries to tell us how life should be lived, instead of facing the blunt truth: any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. All those hypothetical stories we build in our heads about what might happen after we die are just wasted time, sad attempts to justify our existence. The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Let me finish with this: I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
edit: paragraphs
My observation is that whatever story people believe will happen after their death will deeply influence their current life in this reality, so I disagree that it is “just wasted time“. For most, it’s not simply a mind exercise but defines their values and existence.
It’s arrogance and ignorance of the “West“ to assume everyone wants to “live a long life“. You very distinctively have other priorities if you believe in reincarnation and karma. Belief in rebirth strengthens dynasties and collectivism in very real ways, the belief in no afterlife or one that is not influenced by your current behavior strengthens individualism.
> What always amazes me is how there’s absolutely no sense of time having passed once I wake up.
My experience is that this depends on the med. With propofol, indeed it's like an editor took a razor, cut a few inches of memory tape out, and spliced the remains back together. I'm signing a consent form, and then a second later I have teleported to the recovery room where I'm having apple juice.
What's wild about propofol is that lost time does not mean you were unconscious the whole time. With twilight anaesthesia, you are often semi-lucid and able to respond to commands from the doctors. You are aware and having an experience. It just gets erased afterwards.
With midazolam, it was a much stranger experience. After the procedure, I can remember telling my wife that I remembered everything. She said I seemed totally lucid. But I no longer remember what I did remember then. Throughout the day after the procedure, memories faded out. Now it's almost all gone, including much of the time after the procedure was done.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia. It’s probably just the drugs, but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
It's the drugs. Specifically, it's fentanyl.
For my second surgery, the anaesthesiologist pushed the fentanyl before the propofol, and told me he was doing so. When he said we was going to, I remember telling him. "OK. Oh! OK." It feels like every worry in the world has disappeared. Everything is cozy. Everything is fine. It's like being in the womb again.
I understand how people can get addicted to it.
I have been under general anesthesia three times, and this is the thing that sticks with me too: it’s a dress-rehearsal for death. The conclusions you come to by going through it are obvious in retrospect but nonetheless interesting:
You have no conscious experience or memory of the moment when you go under and your consciousness is severed. There is only the lead-up, usually the anesthesiologist saying they’re about to start putting the drugs into your arm, or asking you to count down. The next conscious event in your life is waking up in the recovery room. It’s obvious to say, but you could die while under anesthesia and you would never know. Your conscious life up to the moment you went under would be the same. I think it was Wittgenstein who said that Death is not an event in life, and after experiencing anesthesia I suppose I get what he meant.
> I've never felt as much peace as I do right before going under anesthesia.
Same, but I don’t place a lot of stock in it - like you say, it’s the drugs. I asked my anesthesiologist what he’d be giving me to relax me before I went under and he said fentanyl.
> Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_Menoeceus
They started to lube me up for a colonoscopy before I was completely under. I 100% remember that and told them to give me a few more seconds.
> any assumed meaning of our existence only matters while we're alive. [...] The world can and will go on without us, and that includes the people closest to us at our final hour.
Such a self-centered and cynical way of looking at life. The world does not go on without "us". We are the utmost expression of nature and, quite literally, the legacy of those who came before.
I hope we can figure out a way to stop this self-indulging materialism. I understand that believing that nothing truly matters is quite freeing for the selfish hedonist, but it's about time we regain a sense of transcendence.
> but honestly it felt like coming home, even though no such home exists, and no one is there to return to it.
Truly, this is a load of non-sense. You have no way of knowing. Why be so deliberately obtuse on that we don't have answers for? Why have we stopped asking the important questions?
What do you mean by this? It is obviously possible to have an impact that lasts after you die and that people view as meaningful long after you die.
If the meaning of your life is to raise your kids well, that still matters after you die. Or if you invented calculus, or general relativity, or conquered Egypt and Persia, or wrote an epic poem read for thousands of years.
The world will go on without you, but it will be different, and maybe meaningfully so to those left.
Pretty much my first memory was going into surgery. It'll probably be my last as well, being born with multiple heart defects doesn't really go away.
You start looking forward to going under and start being disappointed when you wake back up.
It's odd confronting mortality from your first conscious memory but it's also odd being afraid of death.
It's so clear that we are evolved beings, we have self doubt and existential doubt and all these things that are clearly just evolved processes to keep us out of local maximums.
It's sad to see people latch on to convoluted views, tortured logic, force themselves to justify strongly held but unevidenced beliefs just because they are afraid.
It's such a waste of time, people can use their imaginations to believe whatever they like, they can theorize or speculate, but the absolute waste of time trying to ground what can't be grounded, the tortured logic, the semantic games is a tragedy.
We use our brains to generate unique meaning, each one of us is a generating node in an uncomputable casual chain that stretches into the unknown future, and we are part of our collective planets random meaning walk... and then we get to stop.