16 years old

[The Silent One]

Quote Originally Posted by Malone

TSO, you wrote: I simply did not—rather, do not—understand why the issue of meaning is important here, in this debate. It's due to the fact that RN begun this debate seeking an explanation of a bereaved mother's grief and started talking about the existence of consciousness in other dimensions. I pointed out that this quest is motivated by an ethical judgement that suffering needs to be 'redeemed', 'overcome' etc. The basic idea is that it's suffering that sets people off looking for evidence that consciousness possesses an existence independent of our physical existence, ie we seek to attribute a 'meaning' to suffering instead of being able to accept it as a sad and unfortunate fact of our existence.

I do not think that the desire to know whether or not consciousness continues is always the product of a need for justification; that being said, this makes that particular aspect of the debate much clearer to me.

So, how to address this...

For the most part, I agree with you that using considerations of an afterlife to justify the suffering of this life is an extremely bad road to go down. The implicit potential for ethical laziness and outright cruelty is staggering. Yet it does not assuage the problem of telling someone who is suffering greatly what amounts to "your suffering has no greater reason."

I will definitely need to think on this one.

[Malone]

Yet it does not assuage the problem of telling someone who is suffering greatly what amounts to "your suffering has no greater reason."

The truth of our existence is under no obligation to be amenable to human hopes and wishes. It seems many, many people have difficulty swallowing this fact. Hence Religion and all of its ersatz substitutes: Progress, The Future, Art, Multiverses, Other Dimensions etc etc.