Science does not give any answer, satisfying or not, to those questions (and one could argue it probably can't).

Really? Cause I think most of this we have some pretty definitive answers.

What happens after we die? You stop being. The conscious experience of it is the same as before you were born, i.e. nothing.

Does my pain have meaning? Not to the universe, yes to the people that care about you?

Am I special? Live is special, it's the most amazing phenomenon we appear to have in the universe. But at the same time, the "universe" doesn't care about you.

What is consciousness? A physical process happening in your brain.

Will I ever be able to talk to my dead grandmother again? No.

You might not like these answers, but that doesn't have any bearing on them being true or not.

I wish I was so sure of all that as yourself.

> What happens after we die? You stop being.

You don't know that of course, and have no way of knowing that. Although I'll agree that from a modern, rationalist point of view that's the default reasonable assumption.

> What is consciousness? A physical process happening in your brain.

And same goes for that one; the brain clearly relates to consciousness, but you can't be sure it produces it. Maybe it receives it somehow; maybe it's even more complex than that. I'd even go as far to say that if we were to create a black box AGI tomorrow, the question would still not be solved: the only thing you'd have proven is that a specific arrangement of matter appears to result in consciousness, nothing more.

Moreover, reality itself happens - in a very concrete way - in your head, not outside of it. Plato's cave and all that (or for a more technically oriented one, the brain-in-a-jar idea). Your point of view is rational in the extreme, but also extremely reductive. I don't think one should be so quick to reject deeper - and, dare I say, spiritual - ways of considering our universe.

> > What happens after we die? You stop being.

> You don't know that of course, and have no way of knowing that.

I'm a little surprised how many threads here "OMG YOU CAN'T KNOW FOR SURE SO HERE'S THIS OTHER STUFF YOU SHOULD CONSIDER LIKE SPIRITUALITY!!!".

When you turn off your computer, does its essence float away to computer heaven? When your car breaks down, does its soul get sent to automotive hell? I accidentally stepped on and broke my HP Calculator a few years ago, it won't turn on anymore, so is it in computation limbo? These questions are (purposefully) absurd, but where do you draw the line in "attributing spiritual crap to machinations?"

>What happens after we die? You stop being. The conscious experience of it is the same as before you were born, i.e. nothing.

You simply began existing once. What's to say that you won't just as easily begin existing again, or that you haven't already existed many times?

Define 'you'. If 'you' is your memories and personality, then those things are physical. You can take a knife to a brain and cut out memories, you can cut out love. These are tied to your physical meat. If the meat is destroyed, or the currents stop running, then your memories and personality are destroyed. If 'you' is something other than your memories and personality, then sure, that might go on.

> Science does not give any answer, satisfying or not, to those questions

Of course it does, as its very basis is that there are no supernatural forces influencing anything that the science observes. Or to formulate even simpler: there are no "miracles": if something happened, it was possible to happen. You can't postulate "and then the deity came and intervened" if you are doing scientific inquiry about some event. If you could everything could be simply explained by deities playing around.

Therefore, the scientific approach to human history is also very simple: it's the people who invented the gods, and not vice versa.

So you can personally believe in deities somehow, but if you try to explain your scientific work with their involvement, your work would immediately not be scientific anymore.

To give again a simple example, Newton didn't try to explain the movement of the planets with angels pushing them around, but with the plain physical laws. And it worked. Newton believed in god(s) somehow, but he hasn't let that interfere with the laws. Then he did some other works which involved gods, but these aren't science.

It's that simple.

Newton fit models to data that reliably predict outcomes. What makes his work scientific is its method and reliability, not the nature of the explanation.

Most of these questions can be replied with a "No" or "Nothing", without contradicting the scientific view of the world.

Agreeing to such answers at the emotional level is an entirely different enterprise, quite hard for many people. Many people would rather feel content than learn a bit of uncomfortable truth, and I'm not going to judge them.

Okay, but I'll happily judge the people who exploit that desire to feel content by lying to people for money.