Fear of death.

I hate and fear it! (Most of the time). Sometimes I long for it. Cessation. But mainly I quite like the western propaganda of I and me. Don't find any sort of merging with the ever and the all at all soothing. In fact on Sunday afternoons the thought of it invades me with a sickening paralysis and terrifying emptiness and fear. Of course there's the self-loathing, longed-for-oblivion, sickness of the only you that comes with addiction to the self, and I've toyed with different types of religion pretty much as I toy with iphone. Put it down in the end after having an unsatisfactory flick around. Probably should read a book instead. Larkin to thread, obviously - as he said, the fact you won't be aware of anything after death is no consolation, it's exactly what's frightening. Also decline and pain before death. I find it as impossible to be sanguine about the immediate run-in, as I do about moment of death or as I do about the afterwards. If I get to 90 and I'm ready then I've won God's lottery imo.

There, that should set me up for a wet Wednesday at work. Time to make a cheese sandwich.

to aimless: i hope i'm not being too much of a dick here. on a philosophical level, i agree with you. the only problem is that my maintenance of philosophy's distancing abstraction sometimes falters, and the horror comes gibbering...

xp

the fact you won't be aware of anything after death is no consolation, it's exactly what's frightening

Seems to be a rather attenuated thing to fear. idgi.

It is a fine thing to value your present configuration, but you can be damn well sure it will be changing, over and over again, just between today's cheese sandwich and tomorrow's wetness. That is real. Your sense of self is little more than a thread running through the midst of a million sensations that slough off you like the skin from a snake. It is a hell of a thing to pin the universe on.

I fear attenuated things.

It is a hell of a thing to pin the universe on.

correct.

Your sense of self is little more than a thread running through the midst of a million sensations that slough off you like the skin from a snake. It is a hell of a thing to pin the universe on.

nevertheless, the only thing that's there to pin the universe on anything seems to be the self. that's maybe what's so scary: the perceiving self is such a fragile thing to begin with, a self-recognizing "pattern" (for want of a better term) sustained by the electrochemical sloshings of a three-pound wad of tissue. we can't comfortably imagine the eradication of the self, because the self is what "we" are and all we've ever known. it is, in a sense, the universe. each individual death is, in this relative sense, the utter annihilation of all that has ever been and might be. the end of the world.

^ death as the solipsist's apocalypse

sense of self seems more like a linguistic/legal construct rather than a biological one, so i'd wager this is a culturally-specific fear, like leprechauns.

so far as i can tell, the fear of death - in the moment when death seems both imminent and not a blessed relief from prolonged torment - is a human constant. since biology has been brought up, i suspect that this fear has deep biological roots, that it is the way we most immediately experience the true essence of life: the "will" to be and do.

the survival instinct engenders a fear of being immediately killed but i really don't think it cultivates an abstract fear of death. for example, people smoke and speed on the highway all the time, knowing full well these behaviors very much increase their chances of death.

i've noticed that many people, as they grow very old, seem to welcome death. other people are in the other group and seem very afraid of it (one grandfather). other people are oblivious to this shit because they're too senile waste thought on it (my other grandfather).

i figure my odds are 2/3 i won't give a fuck when i get there which iirc is better odds

It's the little things about death that get to you. The fact that when you're dead you can't get a drink of orange squash with ice cubes clinking in the glass. The fact that death has no decent motels where you can pull over for a few good hours of shut-eye on a freshly-plumped pillow. The fact that death smells of nothing at all, not even turpentine on particle-board. The fact that death has had no reviews on Metacritic, despite the fact that everyone's seen the trailer. And death's deafening silence, which has long slim fingers, but no fingers at all.

I'm not speaking from personal experience, you understand.

the fact you won't be aware of anything after death is no consolation

First of all, how is this a fact? Do we have first-hand reports from people that have died? No reviews on Metacritic.

The root of the fear of death is that it is truly unknown. You can tell yourself there is an afterlife, or that you instantly go to a state of non-being, but nobody really truly knows either way and that is terrifying.

I kinda hope that death is quick, painless and unexpected. No worries, no effort, no problem. Sure, loved ones will be beat up for a while, but lets face it, they'll get over it in a year or so.

Do we have first-hand reports from people that have died? No reviews on Metacritic.

reactions to the afterlife have been surprisingly mixed, its score is yellow atm

ok fin e everyone goes to eternal life in heaven

reactions to the afterlife have been surprisingly mixed, its score is yellow atm

iirc you either loved it or hated it

Well it does keep us coming back for more.

This conversation has been happening coincidentally alongside a series of discussions I've had recently with family members, some less receptive than others. So weird how close it is in subject specifically to this talk!

Anyway, I find any idea that suggests continuation after death the product of a perception of our world/ourselves that takes root at any early age and is hard for those who believe this to self-analyze, generally. I am comfortable in my certainty that some sort of continuation of ourselves after death is as likely as that of a post death continuation of a blade of grass or a car. Simply because humans are more complex than those two examples doesn't make it more likely that we are any different. The perception I think believers hold comes from a subconscious, passionate feeling that their deep thoughts and meaningful experiences are so intense and complex that there isn't a way it could end completely. That completeness equals absolute, meaning that there isn't any layer of thought saying "its so dark" and "I'm dead" and this is simply the most frighteningly painful thing to perceive. A lack of existence cannot be imagined, so we conceptualize alternatives to cope.
The world's balance made humans possible, but the way we've dominated it and the conveniences of living in a society have trained us to view it as relative to us, as opposed to us being relative to it. If we accept that yes our design is intricate and amazing but our physical matter is no more significant than that of a tree or a rock then we realize there isn't a reason our spectacular thoughts or feelings should be attributed to anything more than the mechanical workings of the mind they reside in.

loss of ego

"but i don't want to be a river! i'm a droplet!"

"but if i die, i'll only be a memory, a change arrangement of electromagnetic forces representing a decaying lump of matter"

all that it ever was son

so there's existential dread too

it helps to remember that we're just fleetingly brief fields of energy (99.99 plus nine more nines percent vacuum) in a big supercollider

i'm sorry i forgot the percentage shift, only seven more nines after 99.99

existence and non-existence are both pretty much the worst. existence has sandwiches, tho.

nm, grampsy said the same thing.

I'd like to be reincarnated. I assume it would be a promotion, which would be a sweet deal.

It's interesting to think about what suicidal people think will happen to them when they're gone, but I'm sure the consequences are clouded by many other stressful emotions.

the fact you won't be aware of anything after death is no consolation

First of all, how is this a fact? Do we have first-hand reports from people that have died?

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, July 4, 2012 9:46 AM (5 days ago)

Pretending there is a reason this is not a fact is just pitting desperate hope against logic. The physical workings of the universe don't owe us magical perseverance of our thoughts, emotions, personality or perspective just because we personally are unable to have any way of conceptualizing existence without them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9--C6Hy3-4

LOL @ "desperate hope". Nice condescending post, there.

I don't think losing your personality or emotions or thoughts is a big deal. Those things change all the time anyways. Similar with losing your perception. Maybe your mind is so convinced of the perfection of the human machine that it can't see any other way of existing, not even some low-rate split-second energy cluster swirling through space trying to cling to whatever it just spent the last 80-or-so-years inhabiting.

Personally, it doesn't matter if this consciousness survives as 100% intact, 50% intact, 0% intact, whatever. I see myself as part in the grand scheme of things. The materialist will invoke logic but there is always all this focus on the important of the human ego and the personal experience and it seems....unnecessary? evangelical even?

Didn't mean to sound condescending, I just am not satisfied calling it ordinary hope. I just know when I reach into my imagination and stretch as hard as I can toward conceptualization of nothingness, the truest sense of it can only be the absolute end of all brain activity since existence is relevant only through your own experiences, thoughts and dreams.

what do you guys mean by ego? like a personal running commentary inside your head? I was kind of shocked to hear more than one person say this is their default mental state, and i'm wondering if that's what they mean by sense of self, and if this is what people are afraid of losing -- some pundit in their head with no volume control.

From my self-taught pseudo-buddhist pov, the key to losing this fear of death is to learn how to see your own mind at work, which seems very circular, like a tongue tasting itself, but must be attempted. soon you realize not just how your mind busily and self-importantly constructs a kind of reality for itself, but at some point something clicks and you realize that your mind's reality is amazingly silly compared to what is behind and beyond it. from there on it becomes a matter of letting your mind do its work (you can't really stop it), but at the same time retaining that larger sense of what is really happening.

humans have no free will anyway so you can't control if you are going to feel gloomy abotu death or not

There is a Hand to turn the time

Though thy Glass today be run

Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low

Find the last poor Pret'rite one...

Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,

All through our crippl'd Zone,

With a face on ev'ry mountainside,

And a Soul in ev'ry stone....

seriously though, there's no reason to think that a stone doesn't have a soul or experiences, or a rock, or a tree, or a cloud

i mean, i know i'll have a soul

I feel like if I ask for details you'll define a soul as something so abstract that it doesn't really apply anymore, like when my friend said God is merely the name he gives to the forces that govern the universe in such neat mathematical ways. Then why even call it God at that point? You're spreading it so thin.

it doesn't feel thin sitting on a mountaintop

i didn't learn a whole lot in my short-lived scientific career and i was a terrible scientist but i did learn that you don't need to explain everything to believe in it

anyway they used to call scientists natural philosophers which helps me make more sense of the feelings i feel when i confront the sublime

The God Evan's friend describes sounds more to me like science. If it can accurately and objectively be described in any overt language, it's not true religion. This is why symbolism is so important and how literally reading the Bible only drives people to act like insane assholes. Pure religion is an abstract, subjective experience, the eye seeing the eye, that 3rd person out-of-body self-observation.

Funny thing is, it's a lot like a science, and at least in the East, it's been explored as such. Sit and observe, take notes, compare observations with peers. And if there's no spirit and no mysticism and it's all fooling yourself then the experience is occurring in your mind anyways and it's just as valid as anything else.

The problem with that comparison is that religion skews observations to validate something they already believe. Science draws the conclusion purely from the findings as they are.

And my point is that spiritual belief suggests some kind of preservation of the being that can at least observe or dream after death. Helps with the fear of death part but the reality is crushing in its incomprehensibility.

what if when you die you go to magic anus?

you seem to have given this more thought than anyone else atm, so you probably have more expertise there than we do

Helps with the fear of death part but the reality is crushing in its incomprehensibility.

I've never understood how that helps with the fear. Eternity sounds like its own special kind of hell to me, neither too hot nor too cold but interminable.

Everyone has their own version of afterlife, but at least eternity is something imaginable. Not even having the back of my mind saying "it's all over; there is nothing now," or the defining silence/imagine of darkness is beyond by comprehension and that puts me in a panic. Every version of nothing that we can possibly imagine is from some sort of a perspective, remove that and everything else.

deafening*** not defining...

damn evan dropped the hammer itt :-(

yeah evan is otm. albeit no less depressing than my contributions.

humans have no free will anyway so you can't control if you are going to feel gloomy abotu death or not
― The Cheerfull Turtle (Latham Green), Monday, July 9, 2012 1:06 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i actually do believe this is true but there's no real way to exist or act in a social world without maintaining the idea of free will. it's central to our idea of self, which sustains us in the world for the most part.

boy i'm a gloomy gus.