This is a bizarre and unsettling condition. Just thinking about it gives me the shudders.
I tend to assume that if there's an afterlife, it will be a positive one or at least one with hope. The Buddhist concept of rebirth makes the most sense to me, but of course I know that I might be wrong. So I don't fret death because if there isn't an afterlife, I will not exist; if there is one, it will probably be at least as interesting as this life.
The idea of being tied to a corpse while it rots, though, and fading into nothing slowly rather than abruptly, is horrifying. Of course, no one believes that this actually occurs; people are generally divided between those who believe that consciousness leaves the brain at death and those who believe that it ends at death.
Oddly enough, this delusion explains something I've always found unusual about ancient religions. People often say that religions were founded to assuage existential fears. That doesn't make much sense, though, because many ancient religions had negative afterlives. The Babylonians believed in an afterlife, but it was a repulsive one. The ancient Greeks believed in the gloomy Hades (although they later introduced the Elysian Fields and the possibility of reincarnation). The Egyptians believed that a life of drudgery in service to the pharaoh would continue into the next existence. Hells seem to have evolved in religion before heavens, which came into mainstream religious thought around 1000 BC. Religions were founded to explain away uncertainty in general, and not specifically to assuage existential guilt because most ancient religions had gods that were total assholes (if you're using gods to explain smallpox and earthquakes and war, it makes sense) and afterlives that were undesirable.
It brings up an interesting question, though, which is why would anyone choose to believe in a negative afterlife as opposed to none at all? The Cotard delusion may explain it. Perhaps this horrible state of consciousness (which seems to be a subtype of severe, psychotic depression) was more common in a coarser time, and led people to the belief that to be dead was not nothingness, and not some desirable or blissful spiritual state, but one of constant and featureless despair.
Nothing changed. Bleak ideologies are still really common.
You must serve God even though he built you with sinful urges and generally behaves like a tyrant. If you deviate you will be tortured forever in hell. Serve or burn. Pretty miserable cosmology if you ask me.
Popular skeptical materialism is not much better. You are accidental meat. There is no afterlife. Consciousness itself is possibly an illusion. Your personality, intelligence, and general worth as a human being is genetically predetermined. We understand most of physics now, and we know mostly what is and isn't possible, so not much left to learn. Space flight is basically impossible beyond tiny capsules here and there, so there is nowhere to go either. Pretty soon we will all run out of resources and die out. The end. Boy does that suck. It's like dull puritanical Calvinism without heaven.
I suspect there are cognitive biases at work here. Perhaps paranoid pessimists tended to live longer in a violent, dangerous past, or made better warriors and so conquered more. Or maybe it's some weird side effect from other cognitive adaptations or some kind of runaway selection artifact.
But whatever the reason, we do seem to find it easier to be pessimistic and paranoid. Negative emotions seem easier to feel, easier to induce through art or rhetoric, and generally more accessible. Happy music is trite, while dark music (that is no more musically sophisticated) sounds deep and profound. Tall dark and handsome is sexy, while happy and carefree is not.
Take the recent spate of thought about AI that's been tossed around here. I have yet to see any discussion of how AI might turn out well. No, Skynet will kill us all. No other possibilities are on the table. So let's ban AI research or something.
I see it everywhere. It's enough to make you depressed, paranoid, and cynical.
I don't feel like writing an essay about it now (it's late and I have other stuff that needs writing) but I'm very optimistic about AI.
I think there's some selection pressure to be gloomy on the internet; optimistic people who turn out to be wrong look stupid, while pessimistic people who turn out to be wrong merely look cautious. And then remember the old proverb 'misery loves company' - people assuage their anxiety about things by kvetching. Everyone does this some of the time (it'd be a bit unnatural if one didn't) but some people interact on line like this almost all the time - I don't know if it's depression or some sort of dopamine rush from getting angry about things or what, but I've terminated my accounts in several online communities over in recent years because I just got so sick of the sarcasm, endless negativity, and obsession with insider coding (straining to always make hip references or recycle cool quotes). It's interesting from a sociological perspective - you can see very similar group dynamics in interest groups that would be horrified to be told they had anything in common with each other - but I think it's very corrosive to participate in.
Philosopher Rene Girard has built a whole theory about this; he thinks there's a fundamental tendency towards scapegoating in human society and that people are never happy unless they have someone to project their negative feelings onto. With the advent of AI, perhaps we're unwittingly trying to automate that too. If this is so then some sort of scary AI is inevitable because we'll invent in order to have a reliably hostile enemy that's guaranteed not to vex us with diplomatic initiatives or socioeconomic guilt trips. I have a suspicion that this is the basic plot of the new Avengers movie.
>It brings up an interesting question, though, which is why would anyone choose to believe in a negative afterlife as opposed to none at all
Survivorship bias.
If things got bad, and you believed death was an improvement, you'd choose death. But if you thought no matter how bad things got, the afterlife is going to be worse, you'd stick around as long as you could.
Your views on how religions were "designed" seems flawed. You're making it sound as if concepts were added or modified just like that, when in reality, a spiritual belief mutates as people's beliefs change (for whatever reason eg. it could be a priest telling them or a vision someone has through use of psychoactive substances) similar to how science iterates. For people who believe, their spiritual experiences are as real as gravity, as much science as an article in Nature.
You can see this mutation I speak of if you've ever been part of a newly-made religious group. Similarly, it can also be easily visualized if you're part of any subculture as it evolves.
> why would anyone choose to believe in a negative afterlife as opposed to none at all
I'd like to point out belief is not a "choice". You don't choose to believe in an afterlife, for example, you either believe in it or you don't. You can, obviously, modify your beliefs in many ways, but ultimately, it's not as simple as a choice.
Well, some beliefs are choices. "I will choose to believe you." seems like a sentence that can actually be true.
I'm not sure that with enough practice, one wouldn't be able to simply choose to believe whatever they wished to believe. To be able to believe, if they so chose, that the moon is truly, and not metaphorically, made of cheese.
I am fairly confidant than one can create emotions within oneself, which are simultaneously both sincere, yet also not the ones that they would have felt by default, had they not chosen them.
I don't see why the same would not be the case for beliefs as well.
That is not to say that most beliefs people have are by choice, only that some beliefs are, and probably any could be.
> People often say that religions were founded to assuage existential fears.
Well, that's one theory. Another theory is that religions evolved from scary stories used to keep people in line (or, more charitably, to make them cooperate in prisoner's dilemmas instead of defecting against each other). That way, introducing hells before heavens makes more sense.
It does. I guess that hells are for the true believers and heavens are for outreach and marketing. Since most religions start with an internal and tribal focus-- in one theory, to extend the will of powerful people (ancestors, who evolve into gods) after their deaths-- we'd not be surprised.
Most ancient religion's hells (that we know of) weren't punishment hells at first, though. Hades and the Babylonian afterlife weren't torture chambers (that came later, with the Greek Tartarus and the Christian hell). They were just undesirable, gloomy states.
I tend to assume that if there's an afterlife, it will be a positive one or at least one with hope. The Buddhist concept of rebirth makes the most sense to me, but of course I know that I might be wrong. So I don't fret death because if there isn't an afterlife, I will not exist; if there is one, it will probably be at least as interesting as this life.
The idea of being tied to a corpse while it rots, though, and fading into nothing slowly rather than abruptly, is horrifying. Of course, no one believes that this actually occurs; people are generally divided between those who believe that consciousness leaves the brain at death and those who believe that it ends at death.
Oddly enough, this delusion explains something I've always found unusual about ancient religions. People often say that religions were founded to assuage existential fears. That doesn't make much sense, though, because many ancient religions had negative afterlives. The Babylonians believed in an afterlife, but it was a repulsive one. The ancient Greeks believed in the gloomy Hades (although they later introduced the Elysian Fields and the possibility of reincarnation). The Egyptians believed that a life of drudgery in service to the pharaoh would continue into the next existence. Hells seem to have evolved in religion before heavens, which came into mainstream religious thought around 1000 BC. Religions were founded to explain away uncertainty in general, and not specifically to assuage existential guilt because most ancient religions had gods that were total assholes (if you're using gods to explain smallpox and earthquakes and war, it makes sense) and afterlives that were undesirable.
It brings up an interesting question, though, which is why would anyone choose to believe in a negative afterlife as opposed to none at all? The Cotard delusion may explain it. Perhaps this horrible state of consciousness (which seems to be a subtype of severe, psychotic depression) was more common in a coarser time, and led people to the belief that to be dead was not nothingness, and not some desirable or blissful spiritual state, but one of constant and featureless despair.