Much of our mass is comprised of microorganisms that are always dying. It's a bit crazy that we have memory at all considering how much death happens within us. Our cells, the small portion of our mass which makes us who we are, is always dying as well. We're pretty much a big bag of death moving through the unknown categorizing its dying and long-dead contents. What is it, every 7 days we have completely new skin? It's also crazy that we're able to recognize each other.

We're a mysterious side-effect of the success/failure of microorganisms. Our consciousness, the only thing we can't seem to identify as material, is just something that happens when microorganisms run computer programs they've encoded in organic material. It's kind of an enigma. I don't think we'll ever fully understand ourselves because we aren't ourselves.

I think this is where belief stems from, the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, that there's always some greater thing until it's everything, or gods, or whatever. If there were gods, they'd believe the same and would know little about themselves or their origins, and they'd be microbes in some larger microcosm, and so on, and so on, forever and ever, amen.

Effectively, nothing can be greater if infinite things are lesser/greater. It's all just mush. Consciousness is an intangible side-effect of an infinitely infinitesimal speck of mush that doesn't exist. The leaf doesn't exist, and leafness doesn't exist.

In response to the original post, the afterlife is something someone made up because yay religion. Now we can pretend the meaning of life isn't the repetitive tasks we're commanded to do by people who have more power than us. God has more power than them so we win. Now let's get back to work.

Repeating some of what others said, but want to take a stab at it. I think about this a lot and can never quite satisfactorily say what I want to so here’s another go:


The only way to make sense of ‘absolute death’ is to set up a soul/matter distinction where you blipped into the material world and so can blip out.

If you don’t accept a soul, you’re more like a part of the world (a contortion of the material world) that felt separate for a time.

What dies is the contortion of matter that felt separate, and over time built up a structure of self-sense around that, but everything else continues.

Matter contorted itself into a sense of self, and can do so again.

What allows the boundless to feel bounded and separate is a mystery, but if it happened before, it can happen again.

(I think panpsychism, but that’s controversial and not needed for the above)