Although I was more or less a materialist, I used to engage in huge debates with my father who also was a strong votary of dialectical materialism. I used to argue that dialectical materialism failed to take into account the human factors. Still I continued to be a materialist. But ironically, the day my father died on my arms, a question arose "Where did that 'I' go?" Is not a similar 'I' awareness running through all? What was that?
I get a lot of glib answers and also ridicule in response to this question. But I get no satisfactory materialistic answer. For a materialist, nature is equivalent of God. Nothing more. Nature, through evolution has given birth to the 'I'.
But then, if my awareness was a result of a mechanistic process then the awareness was pre-determined by that process and was actually pretty much useless.
Sorry, I have no questions for you. My intention was to share my view.
If I said that that question was the one that kept coming back, I think you'd understand. The essential problem is that man is psychologically predisposed to pleasure and hedonism, and yet death- and the pain and suffering it causes- are inevitable. We have some degree of control over "when" we die, but the ultimate reality is that we do not choose
if we die. With that in mind, it is understandable why people would want to believe in an afterlife.
The question that can be asked of course is how do we "know" what it is like to die? We can describe it perhaps, but we don't know what it means to die and how it "feels". So the fear of death, in this respect is partly irrational because it is a fear that is built on our ignorance. the fear of death is related to the belief that man has a soul or consciousness and that with physical death, the "I" dies with them. It is a sense that the self has utterly ceased to exist. But the problem is that our response to death is not based on reality but is ideological. If you think about how someone who
believes in the afterlife has the courage to face their own death, it is clear that the fear of death is not inevitable or necessarily a feature of "the human condition". it is a response to specific beliefs
about death regardless of the actual experience of death itself.
Death can be hard to deal with because of egotism and individualism; when we place such a high value on ourselves, death means the negation of all values. It leads to a sense of nihilism, in which the death of individual consciousness means the end of pleasure as a source for right and wrong or the meaning of life. Religions have te advtange of appealing to a higher power which "transcends" our own mortality and individual suffering. A "materialist" alternative is seeking transcendence of our individual mortality and suffering through collectivism and humanism. it is by treating "humanity" as a higher power which transcends our individual suffering that we can find comfort and achieve a physical eqivilent to immortality. we can't live forever, but by working for the benifit of humanity, the consequences of our own individual existence can be connected to the great stream of human history and feel rooted in the knowledge that we are both the product of countless generations before us and that will follow. I still get "the fear" but it's not so much for my own individual demise but for the existential threats against mankind such as nuclear war or climate change. Those things still scare me because it would "kill" the higher power I "belong" to so its necessary to struggle against those existential risks for mankind, to preserve human life and ensure that each generation inherits a world better than when we inherited it.
If I sought personal immortality by imprinting myself on people's memories, the intresting thing is that in perhaps 100 years or even 1000 years, nobody will remember my name. There probably won't even be a picture of me left. Even the "great" figures in history are only half-remembered. the further away they are in time, the less evidence there is about them, the more inaccurate our understanding. We are still debating Jesus after 2000 years but only because he was a major religious figure. even then we can't say we "know" that much about him in the same way we would experience meeting him in person or whether the bible is a historically accurate record of his thoughts and actions.
It strikes me that even in that very "short" space of historical time all trace of who I was will have dissapeared, but "my" humanity will remain as long as "humanity" remains as the consequences of my lifetime- even in obscurity and anonmyity- continue to have an effect through each generation. My understanding is that this is a materialist view as you can find hints of it in Ludwig Fuerebach's Atheism and Humanism, and in the "God-builders" in Marxism who- believing that you cannot simply "abolish" religion- must necessarily find answers to the big existential questions. Religion doesn't have a monopoly on answers to the afterlife, but that sort of humanism is very difficult, if only because self-awareness kicks in and you know that collectivism can give you meaning and purpose but not immortality.
