One reason I love mystery so much, is that rooted in the human experience is the ultimate mystery, one we will all get to know for sure - what happens when you die. Even if we extend life by thousands of years with technology, eventually we will all experience this mystery.
What happens upon death is unprovable, and one of faith or logic or whatever. It’s really about gut feeling. But we will all find out, one day.
We are heavily fascinated by the concept of psychedelics. We took a small dose of LSD around two weeks ago—100μg, our very first time—and we plan to take 200μg next time.
We want to explore our mind, our identities, and... our inner world. We know we have one; we each have our own bodies within it. We just... normally find it difficult to focus on it enough to do anything with it. We want to do something useful with it; make it into a place of comfort, or a place of entertainment, or an escape from stressful situations.
Psychedelics put us into a unique state of mind where we can admire anything. Where we can be fascinated by every detail, appreciate every quality of something. Where we aren't afraid to accept things as they are, as they should be.
We are still discovering things about ourselves that we seem to have accepted despite never particularly focusing on them during our trip. Insights that we made about ourselves both on and off LSD. Our impostor syndrome significantly reduced itself, for one.
I have pondered this too and lately I think a certain way about it. It may not really answer the question but I dunno.
You say "But we will all find out, one day."
I think... maybe we already know? Before I was born, I did not exist. When I die, I will again no longer exist.
If Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, what was it like waiting for all the things to happen before I could be born to crawl upon its surface with a diaper on, grow up and ponder life, eventually find this comment on HN and reply to it?
By not existing before we were born, do we already know what it's like to not exist after we die?
It's as if we never experienced those ~4B years. Or the ~13B years for the supposed age of the universe. Neither do we experience the ~8 hours of unconsciousness we have every night. We only know how much time has passed based on memory of previous sleeps, how groggy we feel, and how sunny it is behind the curtain.
The status quo belief today seems to be as you said: the nothingness that awaits us after death is also what came before our birth. But what came after the supposed nothingness of pre-birth was your birth, so why wouldn't there be another birthing which becomes you after the nothingness that comes after your death? To believe otherwise is tending towards solipsism. It would be thinking there is something special about "you" and why "you" were born into and inhabit "your" particular region of spacetime. When our feeling of personal identity, the feeling of "you"ness is really mostly an illusion of memory.
Imagine what it was like to be patient HM, with your memory being wiped every ~30 seconds. But imagine even further that you had no long term memories at all. It would be almost as if you were being reborn every time you have a memory lapse.
Have you considered that you might have existed for a long time before your birth, just that your memories were erased at that point in time (or you simply were not equipped with a brain to store them)?
If there is no afterlife then by definition none of us will experience what it's like to be dead. Or even what the final moments of life are given that there is going to be nothing to recollect those.
I might or might not but you can’t possibly imagine that a TV show or anything else would convert me from my deeply held faith, or the billions of people around the world. I think saying “the exact opposite is true actually. None of us will ever experience that” is extremely arrogant and know-nothing. I’m not saying I’m right, I’m just saying you can’t say I’m wrong. Nothing is proven.
What happens upon death is unprovable, and one of faith or logic or whatever. It’s really about gut feeling. But we will all find out, one day.