Our inexplicable existence in a cold dark Universe

What is this world that we inexplicably find ourselves in? Were we placed here by some unknown intelligence for some unfathomable reason? Or is it all just a huge joke, that it's all just meaningless fortuity and happenstance that we find ourselves in existence now and having such thoughts?

If that were not enough, this world, this reality we find ourselves in, is highly strange. Consider our situation. We exist, apparently, on the surface of a small sphere that is suspended in the midst of an effective eternal, cold, dark, nothingness. An effective nothingness, utterly inhospitable and even possibly entirely bereft of any complex life apart from on this one tiny planet. When we gaze up in wonder and forlorn hope seeking to understand why we're here, what it all means, what our role might be, whether there is other life out there, the stars merely gaze back down at us with cold pitiless indifference.

I find our situation to be highly peculiar. Certainly not something I thought about as a child, but the weirdness of our situation has slowly dawned on me the older and older I get. And even at my relatively advanced age, the feeling of weirdness continues to grow.

Perhaps we will eventually find out the answer to such questions in some unknown reality after we die, perhaps we won't. Personally, I feel that we will.

An article on near-death experiences

I read the following skeptical article on NDE's:

The Afterlife Is in Our Heads

These so-called scientific explanations of NDEs assume that it is entirely unproblematic that brains produce consciousness, and given this assumption, they advance speculative hypotheses about how the brain creates such experiences.



Incidentally, I wouldn't claim that NDEs give anything like proof of an afterlife. Clearly, one's mind and implicit expectations very much influences what one actually experiences. But this certainly doesn't mean that one isn't encountering some afterlife realm that one's implicit expectations and beliefs are moulding and shaping. Indeed, this to a certain extent even happens with our everyday embodied vision, as demonstrated by perceptual "illusions".

Just consider that dress.

Just a few comments on various quoted parts:

The idea that near-death experiences, also known as NDEs, offer proof of an afterlife for the soul has been remarkably persistent, despite an accumulation of scientific evidence to the contrary.

 …



NDEs are … explained by physiological processes, [neuroscientists] said, which have been pieced together over the past 50 years.

I’ve never come across any of this evidence. As I said above, at best, they are speculative hypotheses.

[A] wealth of neuroscience research describes how OBE-like experiences—a loss of the sense of self and disturbed body perception or ownership—can be triggered by brain damage, epilepsy, and migraine,7 as well as by stimulation of the part of the brain where the right temporal and parietal lobes meet.

Which, as I have continually explained on countless occasions e.g here, has no implications either way, since this would be precisely what we would expect regardless of whether NDEs are a glimpse of some external reality or not.

The “dissociative anesthetic ketamine can reproduce all aspects of the near-death experience,” Jansen wrote. That includes a sense of ineffability, timelessness, that what is experienced is “real,” that one is actually dead, a perception of separation from the body, vivid hallucination, rapid movement through a tunnel, and emerging “into the light.”

So this assumes that ketamine induced experiences are produced by the brain rather than modifying the brain to allow access to other realities. So this argument only works for those that draw a distinction between the ultimate origin of NDEs on the one hand, and psychedelic experiences on the other.

The article reports Anil Seth as saying:

“If somebody with no brain activity were able to experience something and remember it later, then pretty much everything we know about the brain, about science, about physics is wrong.”

This is just nonsense on stilts. Obviously, since the physical sciences wholly leave out consciousness in their description of reality, then necessarily they can have nothing to say about the abilities of consciousness.

Average per day I spend on food.

In my previous post I calculated that the price of food has increased very roughly by 26% over the previous 12 months (and contradicting the claimed 10.6%).  I decided to calculate the average daily cost of food for myself. Chart is below. It ends in mid-August as the average is calculated over a rolling 100 day average and mid-August is now 50 days ago.

 

The average per day I have spent on food over the previous 538 days is £4.88.  Incidentally, this is just food and exclusively bought from supermarkets -- namely Asda, Sainsbury's, Morrisons and Tesco. It doesn't include any non-food products such as cleaning products and whatever.

Looking at the chart, the steep decline in the price I
pay from the end of 2021 to the beginning of 2022 is accounted for by
my decision to try to decrease the amount I spend on food in the face of
the humongous increase in the price of energy.  But, since near the beginning of this year, despite continuing to buy cheaper food, the price I'm paying has steadily increased. This will be purely down to the fact that the price of food has steadily increased since that time. Indeed, I believe that most of the 26% inflation increase in the price of food has occurred since the beginning of this year (2022).

So, anyway, at the present time, it seems I'm spending about an average £5 per day on food. That will only continue to increase whilst food prices keep steeply increasing.