Lipps is back home in Tennessee

she lost her home, her car and even her dog

At least there’ll be a lot of very relatable music…

Thanks, that makes more sense. I especially like the public toilet analogy. Afterlife beliefs really do bring the urinal home.

I don’t understand how this makes sense:

If you stop existing after death whatever you decide to do now doesn’t matter any more.

How does existing after death make the things you do matter? How does not existing make them not matter? I genuinely don’t understand what you mean.

Not trying to trivialize your position, just make sense of it, but I think the hidden assumption is something like: you are an algorithm for trying to create good experiences for your brain/human; the things you do matter only if they, ultimately result in better experiences for you; if, eventually, you have no experiences, there is no point striving for anything?

Is it something like that? That still doesn’t really make sense to me. Even if we accept the assumptions, why wouldn’t creating good experiences for your human temporarily, just until you die, matter?

These are excellent insights, well articulated. Thank you.

Genuine question. I agree with you. How many of us do you think there are?

To me it seems obvious that we can do better. We could have a fair, sustainable, non-hierarchical, global system, where the people making big collective decisions are genuinely prosocial and competent. Surely if enough of us coordinated our efforts, we could bring this about?

But the older I get, the more people I get to really know, the more I find this to be a very, very rare perspective. Most people seem to believe in the current system. We must be divided into competing regional factions (nations) and within those have a power hierarchy based on wealth, and individually be primarily motivated by greed.

Let’s be more specific. Which of these do you think is most likely:

1. folk like us—willing to sacrifice our immediate interests for a prosocial future—are common, but something is keeping us isolated (e.g., our communication networks—mass media, social media, etc—are being manipulated)

2. folk like us are currently rare, but most people just conform and imitate. If our position was sufficiently publicised/promoted, the majority of people could potentially get on board, we could change the world.

3. folk like us are rare, and most people are and will always be genuinely selfish. This system, where the strong exploit the weak economically, but in a way that leads to global economic growth, is the best we can do as a species, because most of us will always be selfish and short sighted.