Comment by 748 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 748 | Hacker News Reader

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I would strongly assume that a big chunk is made using generative AI with the purpose of spreading one particular religion, or just making the population more spiritual and therefore less opposed to certain changes. With all due respect, we don't know everything, but know enough about our brain to be fairly certain that there is nothing even close to any afterlife, with all respect to people's own beliefs that they are entitled to. It is wishful thinking, it makes humans feel good, gives them hope and is a pretty significant psychological relief, especially given the current mental health situation on earth, but what happens after life is fairly certain - nothing. I suspect the letters were written with the exact goal I have listed above - to give hope, to make happy and to give psychological relief. After all, you want people you interact with to be happy. If you will tell them the truth in cold blood, well, that won't be a very pleasant moment and it will lead to sadness. I do the same to be honest. Small lies that make people that I care about happy. It makes me happy in return. Is it bad? What even is bad? Everyone defines bad for themselves. Making other people happy is definitely not bad in a system of values where bad is on the opposite side of happy. But what do I know.

You very clearly haven't seen a single one, much less a bunch of them as I have. There's no generative AI going on with people on video telling their stories going back years ago. I'm a skeptic and I am pretty convinced at this point that something real is going on, here. They also actually are mostly ANTI-religion (in fact, the ones that seem very religion-slanted also seem false or fail to maintain internal consistency, so I've easily dismissed the vast majority of those). The testimonies in the playlist I put together almost entirely push the notion that most if not all religions are false in small or large part.

> but know enough about our brain to be fairly certain that there is nothing even close to any afterlife

You can't say that for sure. The brain might be a consciousness conduit and not a consciousness generator (which is pretty much what these testimonies are saying). If I step on a garden hose (assuming I can't see beyond it) and the water stops, and I stop stepping on it and the water resumes, you're basically saying the garden hose must be the source of the water, when we know that isn't true (but only because we can see beyond the garden hose). A naïve individual from, say, 10,000 years ago who has never seen seemingly unlimited pressurized water on tap who encounters a garden hose might initially conclude that the hose produces the water...

> it makes humans feel good

There's a large set of things that are broadly agreed to be true which do not make people feel good and a large set of things that are broadly agreed to be true that do. "Feeling good" is therefore orthogonal to veracity so this is a non-argument.

I'm disappointed that you're responding as a person who literally hasn't watched a single one of the videos (because the very things you said prove that). You're just yet another human who prefers to bury their head in the sand than confront evidence against their pre-existing worldviews, like most people. And "with all due respect," that's not rational at all.

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