About "wishful thinking", many people really want there to be an afterlife, but conversely at least some people really want there to not be one. Some people fear hell, or that everlasting existence might become boring (apeirophobia). Others find the idea of oblivion and infinite nothingness as reassuring. see e.g. Swinburne's Garden of Proserpine – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45288/the-garden-of-p...
At the risk of sounding all "woo-woo", this statement bears some qualification.
How do you define existence, here? Are you equating it with consciousness? Surely your constituent parts (atoms, molecules, particles, etc) existed before your consciousness, and continue to do so afterwards.
I think you'll also agree that the arrangement of matter and energy you call "your life" is regulated by natural processes.
In principle, it's possible for the thing you call "your life" to be a brief window within some larger process (a meta-life, if you will) of which you have no recollection.
I don't know if I believe any of this to be true, but metaphysically speaking, it's not at all obvious that we "didn't exist before birth".
Yeah, I, for one, equate it with consciousness. I could not give less fucks if my "atoms, molecules, particles" existed before me or will exist after me.
I want the whole conscious being, able to kiss, hug, think, love, hurt, eat a steak, and so on to extend.
>I think you'll also agree that the arrangement of matter and energy you call "your life" is regulated by natural processes. In principle, it's possible for the thing you call "your life" to be a brief window within some larger process (a meta-life, if you will) of which you have no recollection.
If I don't have "recollection", then I still don't care.
The whole point being made was that "metaphysically speaking, it's not at all obvious that we "didn't exist before birth".
Which I say is irrelevant, if we need to distort "exist" so much as to mean some "larger processes" or our "atoms and molecules" existing.
Metaphysically speaking it might not be obvious, but the way the grandparent, me, and almost everybody else uses the term existence (i.e. regarding the conscious person, or at least their soul) it's obvious that we very much do not exist.