If reincarnation exists, suicide could make things much much worse.
5mon 23d ago by sh.itjust.works/u/DeathByBigSad in showerthoughts
There are a lot of bad countries to be born into, I mean just look up the countries with the top number of births.
Also, reincarnation might not be limited to humans... lots of factory farm animals out there for you to be reincarnated as... 👀
Honestly its one of the reasons I wanna live this life as long as I can, I wanna delay being in Afganistan, or North Korea, or a mouse that gets killed by the housecat, or being a damn cockroach.
The problem is you're seeing it as punishment, when instead it's a necessary journey on the path of enlightenment.
"Being born into North Korea your next life is part of your path to Enlightenment"
💀
I mean sure, maybe I lead the revolution against Kim fatty boi
Or you know, you could get lucky and be the fat kid they station in front of the fake grocery store for American journalists
The good news is you are born in to the ruling Kim dynasty in North Korea. You are raised in privilege and luxury. The bad news is your patron's successor deems you a threat and you are purged at age 18.
Next up ....
You are a sea scallop off the coast of N.K.
I am pretty sure you can only get enlightened as a human being, so being reborn as something else definitely won't help.
The Egg by Andy Weir
A short horror story:
You die.
You meet "god".
God says: "Next life, you're born as one of the victims of Epstein Island"
💀
So in other words, you're a pretty girl with a rough home life so you end up getting trafficked.
Not to sound like a dick, but most endings to that story wind up far, far worse than winding up on a Caribbean (or wherever TF it is) island with a bunch of rich dudes. I think most wind up strung out, OD'd, battered, on their own with a couple kids and no real means to support themselves and no skills to speak of, aside from turning tricks nobody wants because they're so messed up. Except for more messed up dudes.
Not to minimise anyone's suffering, but I'd say the far more likely outcome of winding up in a crack house is far worse. Most of those women and girls would probably kill to wind up on a billionaire's island. A slave in luxury lives a bit better than a slave in poverty.
Make it the Middle East and it gets far worse. Some time in second or third grade, a bunch of older women grab you, drag you into an abandoned building, strip you, and maim you so you can't ever really experience pleasure, because pleasure is reserved for males. You get an infection and die without ever having really lived, or you don't and you're a sex slave but you don't get anything out of it. Or you get something out of it but it's so hard to reach climax that you do more and more depraved stuff (and with more partners) to get there and some of these people like it rough, so you go through hell chasing that dragon. And most of these guys know it so they're actively working to keep you from getting there.
...
Generally speaking, if you're reading this, if you're online, with an electronic device from this decade, and you own it, you're in the 1%, at least worldwide. You're one of the lucky ones. Whatever human you get reincarnated as is likely to be much worse regardless of whether you're a girl, or a Muslim, or in the Middle East, or trafficked by billionaires. You could be starving and malnourished — in Africa, or in Detroit.
If you liked that blurp and want more, Exurb1a wrote several (vaguely connected) books on the matter. I cannot tell you anything more without spoiling it.
The Fifth Science, The Prince of Milk, Geometry for Ocelots, Logic Beach: Part I
Awesome. These days I had this thought about what if after we die we experience everything we did to other people out of their perspective. But this is much better.
Very good story. Actually better than either 'The Martian' or 'Project Hail Mary.'
Thankfully there's absolutely no evidence of reincarnation and even if it did exist, we clearly don't remember past lives so I consider that not the same person anyways.
Lucky bastard didn't wake up with their entire life's worth of existential dread when they were six sm mf h, "We" might not be the best word here bud, whether or not you actually care inclusively about other people's experiences or go on whatever tangent about mental health
Was that supposed to be coherent? Yes, "we" you have no evidence.
taps called it
Religion isn't doing you any favors, clearly. Blocking you so enjoy raging into the void on a showerthoughts thread. Hopefully your next life is a pin worm in a 90 year old man's sphincter.
shrugs happened way before I had religion bud, also continuing to red flag ain't doing you much either, if you wanted coherence, it might be nice for you to give evidence that we don't, or you know, work on your idea of 'Relateable Evidence' instead of 'Innate experience' and go give your evidential quandary on how this hotdog is gross to everyone? Because you don't want to eat it.
To all these nice shower thoughts people who read this, a 90 year old man's asshole is the preferred niche of the pinworm, the pinworm is having the best life and parties in this old man's butt, should worry more about being the 90 year old man
'Dignified Laddy didn't wake up in coal and knowing the trauma of the spirit mines, I envy his sure will and expressionary relation to the measure of everyone's experience as their own in lue of taking anyone's word on it, instead relying on emperical evidence for his focus and happenstance in a time that is obviously made of platonic spheres' is the only thing Google translate says about that and it's equally discoherent to people, I'm well aware
nods and shrugs you asked~
[off topic]
In 'The Sandman' stories by Neil Gaiman there's a scene where a 12,000 year old wizard is finally killed.
When he meets Death, he boasts that he had a pretty great run.
Death tells him that he got what everyone gets, a single lifetime.
Since no one can remember their past lives, I would say that it wouldn't much matter what we are next, or what we were before. All those things, what if you were those before? You could have been someone horrifically tortured to death in the Middle Ages/Dark Ages, but you wouldn't remember it now. So, it wouldn't much matter what you are in the next life.
Since there's no tracking from life to life, there's no purpose to it. Nothing is gained. Like if you were mean to a specific kind of person in one life, and you became one of those people (say, a Muslim, or an overweight person) in your next life. I mean so what? It's not like you learn your lesson, having gone from a bigot of privilege to the victim of said biogtry. Everyone has it rough somewhere. And no one gets out alive.
I used to know a guy in middle school who at one point, believed that there was a kind of active memory reincarnation. You don't remember while alive, but between lives you remember it all, so you choose or you are assigned a future life depending on what you need to learn to reach enlightenment. In that future life, your memory is wiped, but when you're done living that life, you have all the previous life memories and you keep doing that until you figure out what you need to in order to reach enlightenment. I don't think it was Buddhism or Taoism or any of those Eastern religions. It sounded made up. I don't recall the name. And he never really got involved with it, he was just telling me about it and I never quite forgot.
Somebody else already posted Andy Weir's "The Egg" in this comment section so I'll just pull this excerpt from it instead of linking the whole thing again.
“Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.
“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”
suicide reroll
FTFY
What do you mean? I could just kill myself until I'm born into a rich family, that would be awesome!
That would depend on reincarnation rules. if rerolling isint pure rng and its based in your karma level killing yourself self would lower your score.
Someone will come up with a strat to reroll into something obscure like a wood louse and farm so much positive karma with an exploit that it won't matter how negative you were.
Love this mindset. Break the game! break the game!
Monkey's paw - you are now Elon's umpteenth child who's only purpose is to serve as a bullet shield.
Problem is you'd forget your plan the next life
Universe is trolling us
Well, if I forget everything in the next life, that won't be me any more. In a sense, I would be permanently gone regardless of whether it's technically the same soul.
How do explain this.
Say you had a trumatic childhood experience and repress all your memories before age 12. Did you "die" at age 12? Were your "reborn" at age 12?
"You" is like this camera that records things. If you swap out the SD card, is it still the same camera?
Your "soul" is the camera, the SD card is your brain.
Get what I'm saying?
Repressed memories from trauma still leave subconscious changes in behaviour, though.
If I lost all my memories until the age of 12 and no trace of any habit or thought remained, then yes. Whoever I used to be died.
I am my brain and the memories it contains. I am the SD card.
I don't like the idea that "memory = identity"
Memory is part of you, but doen't solely define you.
If someone made an identical clone of you, like every atom and molecule, even the neurons. Is that "you"? Did you split into 2?
If we then destroy the original, are "you" still "alive". I mean someone has the exact same memories, same atoms.
That's just Ship of Theseus and can't be defined.
I'm not made of the same atoms and molecules as I was a decade ago. Some of them might be still around, but it's mostly completely new particles. Am I still the same person I was a decade ago? If not, how come I can claim ownership of stuff some other guy with the same name bought back then?
I think I've read that on the quantum level you actually can't make the exact same configuration of particles and energy levels in two places at the same time. Trying to create a copy of an object (or, in general, any configuration of particles) would inevitably cause the original to cease to exist. But it's also mostly a thought experiment, as we can't do that with more than a few quantum particles at a time.
So far, as best as humanity is able to tell, your memories are you. If we ever get to Star Trek style teleportation, maybe we can define that more rigourously.
Quick edit: I am quite enjoying this debate, though - interesting to hear other people's takes on identity, soul and all that stuff.
I tend to agree with people like Wittgenstein, Bohm, Engels, and Benoist, that identities are ultimately socially constructed. Aristotle believed identifies are physically real, so that a tree or a ship physically has an identity of "tree" or a "ship." But then naturally you run into the Ship of Theseus paradox, but many other kinds of paradoxes of the same sort like Water-H2O paradox or the teletransportation paradox, where it becomes ambiguous as to when this physical identity would actually come into existence and when it goes away.
The authors that I cited basically argue that identities are all socially constructed. "Things" don't actually have physical existence. They are human creations.
One analogy I like to make is that they're kind of like a trend line on a graph. Technically, the trend line doesn't add any new information, it just provides a simplified visual representation of the overall data trend of the data, but all that information is already held within the original dataset.
Human brains have limited processing capacity. We cannot hold all of nature in our head at once, so we simplify it down to simplified representations of overall patterns that are relevant and important to us. We might call that rough collection of stuff over there a "tree" or a "ship." The label "tree" or "ship" represents an overly simplified concept of some relevant properties of interest about that stuff over there, but if you go analyze that stuff very closely, you may find that the label actually is rather ambiguous and doesn't capture the fully complexities of that stuff.
Indeed, if we could somehow hold all of nature in our heads simultaneously, we would not need to divide the world into "things" at all. We would just fully comprehend how it all interacts as a single woven unified whole, and the introduction of any "thing," any identity, would just be redundant information.
Indeed, to some extent, it has always been both necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions; for evidently, if in our practical technical work we tried to deal with the whole of reality all at once, we would be swamped…However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly…then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments…fragmentation is continually being brought about by the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.
— David Bohm, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”
You aren’t your brain, your brain and body are completely apart from you and don’t care what you’d like. If you were your brain you could stop beating your heart at will, stop digesting, stop or start functions that you are in control of. You’re not in control of anything; not even what you are seeing. Just your perspective and what you make of those experiences. Also, the change in behavior is also mostly up to your body and brain; not you. If you’re hungry, your judgement is clouded and skews towards the negative, not because that is your want.
If I was completely in control of my identity, I could stop being bisexual at will. Not a very compelling argument.
Sorry, where did I say you were?
Actually, you and I are saying the same thing. There isn’t a lot you control about yourself. Did you even read the argument in question?
Your argument - if I understood it correctly - was that I'm not my brain because I'm not in complete control of my brain. But then I'm not in complete control over what most people would agree is part of my identity.
Well, you aren’t. You didn’t chose most things about yourself, you just think you did as to not cause existential crisis. Your favorite foods, your sexuality, what you think is funny, what smells like perfume and what smells like poop; all has very little to do with anything you consciously chose. Most of the things I mentioned are decided before you’re born.
That is true. But it also doesn't prove that I'm not defined by my brain and memories. I didn't chose to have most of my memories either.
I agree with you, but the memories you keep at the forefront aren’t your choice either. You tend to remember the negative moments more vividly because your brain is trying to protect you from experiencing it again. A useful tactic in times past, but not so much anymore. I’m not saying you’re not you- you are. There is a you apart from your body and mind, but it is much much less than people would like to realize. It’s more like you’re a ghost in the machine. You think you’re the driver but you’re really just the passenger that gets to say where to stop every so often, but not consistently.
Ah, that is a take I can understand. I can't say I completely agree, but thanks for clarifying!
Ultimately the difference between our arguments is just vibe-based, I think. I don't feel like there's a "ghost in the machine" outside of my brain, but, again, it's just a personal subjective feeling.
The way I see it, it’s a reason to be kinder to yourself for things you are prone to do, or behaviors you’re not fond of. Maybe you can “train” yourself to be different, but you aren’t who put it there and shouldn’t judge yourself for the person you are.
I’m glad I was able to clear it up! I actually love talking philosophy; so thank you for giving me a chance to do that today.
Shelly Kagan has the best reasoning about souls I've seen so far, he makes a pretty compelling case that we have no soul. I recommend this playlist to everyone, it's so good :
What if reincarnation was just a religious misinterpretation of the concept that all your matter will be recycled infinitely into the environment as compost, then grass, trees, salmon, bears, beetles, mushrooms and bacteria etc, all at the same time.
Under the principle that you are the universe experiencing itself subjectively, recycling yourself now or later makes little difference on your endless journey other than being a wasted opportunity for experienceing it all. A human has an amazing opportunity to experience thought, music, wine, chocolate, love and all the other things in the way a mushroom likely doesn't.
Who says you get reincarnated right away? It could be a 1000 years between your death and rebirth!
That's how I set it up in my silly comedy Isekai, Maizy's Tails (it's free to read on the web if you care... Just search it, it'll be the first link): After death souls need to be "aged" at least 1000 years before they can be put in a new body. The gods think it's a multiversal rule but the MC figures out a workaround 😁
It actually opens with the gods bidding on souls from Earth... A world that ended about a million years prior to the auction (because that's how long it took to sort and categorize them all) 🤣
Buddhism states that you're reborn based on what you helped create in your last life. So if you were an asshole and caused a lot of suffering, then you're going to experience that suffering as the other side.
I must've accidentally kicked a puppy or something... what did I do my past life do deserve this suffering?
Depends on what kinda reincarnation your talking about and how it works/memory of past life's etc.
I like the thought that I get reincarnated into everyone ever existed and live those life's to learn as much as possible.
Some teachings say that being born as a human is as random as a blind sea turtle swimming from the ocean bottom to the top and hitting his head against a floating cork.
Why the fuck is my life so weird.
Like what are the odds I'm a second child born during One Child Policy... and managed to survive till birth? (cuz forced abortions were a thing)
So bizzare... so unreal...
What are the chance to having been emigrated?
60 Million Chinese moved overseas out of 1.4 Billion... 4.28% chance?
Having legal status is another subsection of that population, a lot of people allegedly migrate without official permission and is undocumented, I know a lot of classmates that supposedly have parents that migrated without permission.
Okay maybe it's not that rare, the "good" parts is isbalanced out by the fact that I'm a pleb... with shitty parents... yay god trolled me. Can't have too many good thing in life. Think you're safe?
bad thing happens
Citizenship Status? Think you have freedom now?
Heheheh 2024 US election happens
what the fuck
this universe is just trolling me
haha heres a good thing...
SIKE
mom: "Hey I love you very much do you know that?"
5 minutes later
mother: "YOU LITTLE SHIT"
... 🙃 what the fuck...
I wonder where my sould would be if CCP just aborted me...
fuck this shit... GIMME NORWAY PLS
Even if reincarnation is real, it really wouldn't be you living as a cockcroach.
Oh?
Please tell us what it IS then, since maybe you’ve gone to the other side and made it back in any significant way like exactly no one in this world has.
Let's assume it's real. Do you identify yourself with any of your past lives?
How should I know that I had any, and how can you tell? It’s not like there are symptoms; or even a thermometer to gauge if one has had one. Some must be doing it for the first time.
Seems like you just proved my point.
I don’t know how I did, but not everyone here is playing with a full deck of cards. So, Cheers.
You could have just asked and then you wouldn't have to go hide behind a transparent facade.
Why should I ask anything if there is nothing I want to know? I think you’re projecting.
Do you always pretend you don't wanna take part in conversations you started after realising you're wrong?
I’m so very confused; what conversation, wrong about what? I don’t remember ever engaging in a conversation with someone who speaks in riddles. Do you always press those who don’t want anything to do with you for interaction? You should watch that- it’s a very caustic trait. When someone no longer wishes to talk to you; you should respect that.
You quoted me challenging my comment, you were proven wrong and then decided the conversation was beneath you instead of just admitting you fucked up. Best part is that this is literally an irrelevant topic. Stop being so childish and your life will improve.
You are a deeply unpleasant person to talk to, I don’t believe you’re right about anything that “we talked about” because the only real conversation we had was me telling you I have no interest in talking with you. Is this clear enough for you?
Then why did you reply to my comment in the first place if you didn't wanna talk to me? You don't get to butt in with a comment and then pretend you never wanted to engage especially after being proven wrong. It makes you look childish.
I haven’t been on here for weeks so I have no idea what you’re talking about. But this; this is literally why I don’t come on here anymore. I’m sick of self important people having a personal problem with everything said on here. If you’re going to be butthurt about everything, why not just go back to Reddit? There are whole communities dedicated to being butthurt there. I also don’t understand why comment now when I know I wasn’t on here four days ago. If you were so offended by it, why did you wait until I literally had no idea what you are referencing to? I think this is less about me and more that you wanted someone to take your anger out on. Grow up.
Do you even realize how hilariously pathetic you're being right now? You legitimately, unironically and with a straight face just said "go back to reddit". Jesuschrist, you're such a baby.
Can confirm, have had interactions with that baby before. Absolutely insufferable.
It doesn't matter, because you don't remember your past lives anyway.
Ok.
unironically, the only reason i havent killed myself by now is the fact that all afterlife nonsense is clearly copium-bullshit. this is the only life we get so shit has to get really bad before existence is worse than non-existence
Oh, I watched a Korean dorama about that, the name is Death’s Game (2023). Wasn’t very good to my taste, but the idea is quite interesting.
Suicidal people usually can't make a rational decision. Being suicidal already feels like hell, and as if suicide was the only way to stop the suffering.
It might make things better too. 5 aeons in dreamland followed by incarnation into a fresh body.
Yes and no. Statistically you're must likely to be poor, oppressed, and/or badly ill. If you reroll enough times though, you'll end up with a good start eventually.