What are your views on death?
Recently I've been reading some of the discussions here regarding death and afterlife, and been finding it very interesting. For me personally, death has always been a difficult topic to take in, especially as I believe that once you pass away you are gone for good. But I do often wonder whether there is some other dimension, or place for the dead. I feel like I need to do some further thinking on this topic.
What are your views on death, and why?
What are your views on death, and why?
Comments (50)
Boo!
It matters not what you may think may happen, the process will do as it will.
Do not be worried about it , enjoy it as you only get to do its once. (this life!)
Our components have been recycled many times, death is just another rotation.
What your bits were before have remnant energy of its previous state's, that's why if you are aware, you seem to know things from the past !!
Its recycling at it's best.
best case scenario we rest dreamlessly. it'd be hell going on without the prospect of death to look forward to
Are we supposed to be surprised that you can't name a single good reason to believe it?
You've been up since dawn, running around all day doing all kinds of things. You've had some fun, some hassles, some victories, and some regrets. And now it's 11pm, the end of a long day, and what you really want to do next with your life is turn the light out, pull the covers up, and drift off in to nothing.
Those that know don't talk. Those that talk don't know.
I think I'll practice a bit of that!
Again, big surprise.
Eventually the sleep at death is final (...at the end of this life, if you don't believe in reincarnation, or at the end-of-lives if you believe in reincarnation.)
It's final, but, for one thing, what's wrong with that?
You said that you've been looking at other discussions here, on this topic. Maybe you've seen some my posts about it. Let me just briefly repeat a few quotes:
Barbara Ehrenreich said that death doesn't interrupt life; life interrupts sleep.
...which is the natural, normal and usual state-of-affairs. A life can be likened to being awakened by an alarm-clock because there are things that you wanted to do. As Jake pointed out, then at the end of the day, you welcome some rest from it.
Mark Twain said:
"Before I was born, I was dead for millions of years, and it didn't inconvenience me a bit."
Yes, there's more to it than you're assuming.
For one thing, from your own point of view (as opposed to that of your survivors), you don't cease to be. Though the sleep at the end-of-lives is increasingly deep, you never experience Nothing. There's no such thing as "oblivion".
I'm not saying that your perception continues forever in the same way. Obviously, in the ever deepening sleep, there will be relief from the concerns and hassles, the needs, wants, lacks and incompletion of worldly-life.
Other dimension? Well timelessness could be called dimensionally-different from your worldly-experience. As I've mentioned in other threads, you eventually won't know that there is such a thing as time or events, or even that there ever was or could be such things.
Aside from that, I suggest that, if you're in this life for a reason (and I say that you are--your subconscious needs, wants, proclivities, predispositions, inclinations), then if, at the end of this life, that reason still remains, then you'll again be in a life, for the same reason as you're in this life.
So death might not be as simple as you think. Shakespeare said, "To sleep, perchance to dream."
and then:
"Aye, there's the rub." ...for suicides and life-rejecting nihilists.
Michael Ossipoff
...simplistic confusion between your own experience and that of your survivors.
From the point of view of your survivors, your body will entirely shut down, and you soon will genuinely no longer be, and will be dead, and your body will decay.
That's your survivors' experience, not yours.
So, what's your experience at the end-of-lives? Ever-deepening sleep. As I said in my previous post (and elsewhere too), you never reach a time when you aren't. You'll never experience that, though your sleep will become ever deeper.
Of course it's well-known that dogmatic Science-Worshippers firmly believe that they know all about how things are, as they apply their pseudoscience to everything ...but I suggest that others have no reason to take their word for it (...however assertively it's expressed.).
Michael Ossipoff
That's what I answered. Your consciousness ceases and you have no experience any longer.
So Mr. Station believes that he'll have the experience of no experience. :D
Michael Ossipoff
Mr. Ossipoff can't read apparently.
Mr. Station is describing the experience of his survivors...their experience of the eventual already-shut-down condition of his body, and its eventual decay.
No one denies that experience by your survivors.
What the OP was asking about was one's own experience.
Can't Mr. Station read?
Michael Ossipoff
No, I'm describing what happens to you. Your consciousness ceases. No more experiences.
"No more experiences" certainly isn't what happens to your survivors. And their consciousness doesn't cease. And they never were able to experience your consciousness in the first place.
No more waking experience. Eventually no more experience or knowledge about worldly waking-life, with all its concerns, or time or events, or even that there could be such things. Ever-deepening sleep.
In what sense does Mr. Station believe that there will be "no more experience", from his point-of-view, if he won't experience it? What would unexperienced absence of experience even mean? It's a nonsense phrase.
Michael Ossipoff
No more experience period. Your brain function ceases. Your brain decays. That's what experience is. It's a particular subset of brain functions. You have no point of view when you're dead. And yeah, "unexperienced absence of experience" is pretty word-salady. So why come up with more word salad?
That's the eventual final outcome and state-of-affairs.
Michael Ossipoff
When don't reply to Terrapin Station, it won't mean that he's said something irrefutable. It will just mean that he doesn't merit a reply, and I won't continue wasting time replying to him..
Michael Ossipoff
I flagged Terrapin Station's recent post in this thread because it consists entirely of namecalling, with no discussion-content, in clear and transparently-flagrant violation of these forums' guidelines for conduct.
I mean, if that doesn't violate guidelines, then what would?
Michael Ossipoff
The discussion intent is to get you to stop playing dumb if you are. My suspicion is that you are, because it's difficult to believe that you'd have that much problem with understanding conventional English otherwise. How are you supposed to have sophisticated discussions on philosophy if you have so little reading comprehension for something so simple?
Even if you're not playing dumb, by the way, you have zero concern for understanding what someone else is saying rather than "scoring points." That sucks for having discussions, too. Simply spamming the board with a repost of stuff you just posted and that was responded to doesn't count as wanting to have a discussion, so maybe give the self-righteous victim b.s. a break.
This isn't a reply to anything since posted by Station. It's just a correction of a word-omission in this recent post of mine:
Quoting Terrapin Station
"...have no...any longer" unmistakably refers to a not-having that is ongoing during a passage of time.
In other words, you experience passage-of-time in which there' s no experience? That's what Mr. Station seems to be saying.
...reminding that this discussion, and the OP's question, are about the experience of the dying person, and NOT of his survivors (...who of course experience the complete shutdown of the dead person's body, and could experience its eventual decay.)
I'll repeat here that I won't be replying to Terrapin again.
Michael Ossipoff
English. How does it work?
"I follow the Church Without Christ where the lame don't walk, the blind don't see, and the dead stay dead." (From Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor)
As Roger Scruton himself points out, death has happened to everyone and everything for millions of years. Therefore one should simply accept it.
1) science has found no evidence of consciousness occurring without brain activity, and at death brain activity ceases
2) science has not found evidence of anyone surviving death.
Unless and until science finds evidence that overturns either or both of these, the rational thing to believe is that death is the end of us.
there is no philosophic difference between this
Quoting Terrapin Station
and this
if you lived your life according to ( fill in your blank ) you will find everlasting life
Guessing, hoping, imagining what is after death is a waste of time. Spend some time in refection, read some, find a world view, a reason, a meaning, a basis on how to live your life, that you, in your most honest with yourself spot, believes is true. In that process, the what happens when I die questions is answered, at least for you.
I expect annihilation, for the usual reasons which I therefore won't go into (unless they come up.)
What is death good for? It scares us away from that in us which dies. It scares us into that in us which does not die, which is to say that in us which is also in those who survive and the children not yet born.
What is this part of us that lives in others too? It's what we bring alive when we read books. It's what our own ears and brains bring alive when we here a piano sonata. Somehow 'consciousness' can 'capture' its highest, brightest, and sweetness states of being in material reality, which is to say in the shape of public objects.
What is it in us that dies? Millions of specific memories involving specific faces and specific proper names. Obviously the skin and the face we wear. And surely to some degree we really are 'snowflakes' in our perception of this mysteriously shared reality. So maybe even that which is highest in us is never perfectly captured. I can't hear Mozart just as Mozart heard Mozart. I can't feel exactly what Hegel felt as he finally grasped the skeleton of his entire philosophy with what I expect was a profound joy.
In less glamorous terms (beyond artistic genius and world-historical personality), this sense that true virtue is distributed opens us up to others. We don't have time to be petty. Or rather we find ourselves not wanting to spend our limited time among others in small-hearted ways, cowardly ways. Death opens up the space around economic life. Money is good, very good. But our fear of poverty and the loss of respectability can also enslave and stifle us. Death pokes a hole in the certainty and dominance of all this so that it can breath.
Philosophy considers the metaphysics of death and the ultimate fate of the mind after death.
Philosophy gives us the understanding and wisdom to face death with courage. Death is something we accept.
Even more puzzling is the metaphysical question of what were be before we were born? And the most logical response is that our minds existed before birth as well. This creates the least contradictions and dilemmas. We are already immortal. We simply dispose of our bodies when they grow too old to function anymore. We most likely have no beginning, even as the God of Aquinas (the First Cause, etc.) and the God of Aristotle (the Prime Mover) has no beginning.
You'd have to explain that a bit more. For one, there seems to be an ontological difference between those two, no?
I would propose that it is neither position can be stated as a fact. I would further propose that reasoned arguments can be made both for and against both positions. So there is no overriding philosophic reason to prefer one or the other. One is free to chose either and not be in conflict with fact or reason.
Ah. Obviously I don't agree with that. What I stated is what the facts are, There are plenty of reasons to believe it, no good reasons to doubt it, and no good reasons at all to believe otherwise.
Yes I know that for a matter of fact, without the slightest doubt at all. It's not at all a "scientific discovery." No science has ever suggested otherwise. The other beliefs are simply absurd.
Sure, it's understandable you'd feel that way.