Fear of death.

boy i'm a gloomy gus.

It's like trying to imagine four dimensions. It's scary because it's inevitable, but a good way to get to the root of how people view existence.

Oops, wording was off there- didn't mean four dimensions are scary/inevitable.

but at least eternity is something imaginable.

I feel just the opposite

Can you witness eternity? If you can be tortured it isn't even comparable to not existing.

if you've ever zoned out and lost track of time, i think you can extrapolate that to forever and see how eternity wouldn't be so awful.

what is all this about not existing? pretty sure people keep existing after they die, else we wouldn't need to concrete blocks and vats of acid

anyway evan you have an awful lot of faith in this so called "science"

"To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."

http://www.ywconnection.com/New%20Era/PP/Good%20Works/Eternity%20is%20a%20Long%20Time%20-%20Friend.jpg

what if when you die you go to magic anus?

― The Cheerfull Turtle (Latham Green), Tuesday, July 10, 2012 11:29 AM (7 hours ago)

tbh this is weirdly comforting to me but maybe I've listened to too much Coil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP7BhDjB2WI

what is all this about not existing? pretty sure people keep existing after they die, else we wouldn't need to concrete blocks and vats of acid

― the late great, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 7:28 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

?????

anyway evan you have an awful lot of faith in this so called "science"

― the late great, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 7:28 PM (3 hours ago)

Again:

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.
What reason should they continue without it?

And Michael to revise my response we could imagine all sorts of scenarios of what it would be like to witness some sort of endless existence, but we can't imagine not having a mind. That's the distinction.

it would require endless thinking to genuinely imagine an endless existence. otherwise you simply come to an end of your thoughts and insert an ellipses...

hey evan how can you talk about us as something separate from the world? and when two things are relative, are they not relative to each other?

sounds like you've fallen into the dualist trap my friend

ok hold on a second evan

i will accept that i'm not any more significant than a rock but you still haven't proven to me that a rock doesn't have thoughts, a soul or an afterlife

Aimless, I'm not talking about imagining all of the time, just the scenario.

hey evan how can you talk about us as something separate from the world? and when two things are relative, are they not relative to each other?

sounds like you've fallen into the dualist trap my friend

― the late great, Tuesday, July 10, 2012 11:41 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean we and everything in the world was created because of the situation the world is in, how it is perfect to create life, etc. The world wasn't created to serve us. If it was created as a place to put us, then maybe I'd believe that we are owed something after we die.

hmm i don't follow. surely you don't need to have been intelligently designed to have an afterlife or a soul anymore than you would a brain, or emotions or dreams?

i mean sure, there's no *reason* i should have an afterlife ... but there's also no reason i should have a life in the first place ... yet i'm here?

No but I'm saying the idea of an afterlife and soul exist because we want them to and for no other reason. Generally people don't think rocks and clouds have souls so my theory on the roots of spiritual perspective is more about the idea the human is special and deserves to have their being preserved in some thinking form.

You're here because your mind developed along with your body. How is that fall out of line with what I'm saying?

does*

well i think a lot of people thinks rocks and clouds have souls and i personally i have a thinking form and i don't think there's anything special about that - my dog does, too, i know - but to address your point i know that my body isn't going to end and go away when i die so i'm not sure why my thinking self or soul should end either

Your thinking self has no reason to exist after your brain is no longer active. The soul is the "how" fabricated from denial of the truth about the end.

AKA the soul is just a story.

oh come on though, that's what plato said about physical reality, everything is just a story

I'm not into the made up ones.

The way I reconcile myself to death is by thinking about it in ways that de-abstract it from my mind and consciousness, where it will spiral endlessly into melancholy and conceptualization and desperate palliation. I think about in a biological sense, an animal body born to decay and die and thus united with nature, in the social sense, bonding with other people in a community over shared mortality and reality, and in the human sense, ie this is what has happened to everyone who has ever lived, and if it was good enough for them, it's good enough for me. What am I, an exception? I wished I was when I was a teenager, now I'm more happy to be an ordinary human. Immortality is a monster and desired by monsters, like Napoleon or Hitler. I want to identify with ordinary, good, loving people, and accepting death is one way to do that.
I don't think it makes sense to identify with trees and rocks and particles and energy, nice thought that it is. I think we can only fully and healthily identify with our human-ness. That definition can subtly over time I know, but there are constants that go back thousands of years. I am one of those dying humans, and though it is very painful for my brain to accept, my consciousness can deal with it, though it will never eliminate the fear.
Put bluntly and cornily, if it's good enough for Montaigne, for Schubert, For Ovid, for Bach, for Donne, for the other artists who have touched my consciousness deeply and made me wonder at life and death, it's good enough for me. I am not above them, I am not better than them.

Fuck it, post

Nice

I don't think I can intellectualise the fear of death away: there's something more visceral and underlying about it than just a conscious set of beliefs. I flinch or feel painful emotions when I hear about about other people's deaths, let alone facing the real imminent prospect myself, and the deaths of family/people close to me are upsetting and take time to reach acceptance.

So maybe the most I can hope for is to get less caught up by the fear of death and it interfering with my life now. I keep thinking back to Scott's proposed t-shirt motto on another thread: 'Treat every day like it's shark week - keep moving'.

And Michael to revise my response we could imagine all sorts of scenarios of what it would be like to witness some sort of endless existence, but we can't imagine not having a mind. That's the distinction.

every night, when i dreamlessly sleep, i am without a mind.

and it FUCKING RULES, MAN!

its crazy to me that anyone on this thread thinks 'eternity' is imaginable compared to whatever its opposite is

Eternity cannot come with a standard human consciousness, it's something you can experience only with God-like or Christ-like consciousness. Your experience of time and space transcended through death, you don't have time to worry about taxes, ponder corporeal drudgery, etc. Basically an eternal life is something that exists outside of time. It's not that time is a giant arrow that you just keep following in the same path and the same rate as living humans. You would experience time and space as....well.....there's really no way to describe it to us. Fourth dimension and all that.

If there is a post-death experience, then it is as different to pre-death experience as that is to the pre-birth experience.

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. What reason should they continue without it?

This is interesting because with the scientific view here the physical matter that creates our life is of the same stuff as the world around us. Yet we are convinced of our uniqueness, of the brilliance of our consciousness (ego) that there is no possible way anything post-human should be considered. If a tree or a rock can have some level of life, some existence, then why not the air around us? Why not the ground? Or the room we die in?

its crazy to me that anyone on this thread thinks 'eternity' is imaginable compared to whatever its opposite is

― funny-skrillex-bee_132455836669.gif (s1ocki), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 10:29 AM (45 minutes ago)

As I said obviously the endless length cannot be imagined but the setting can at least be conceptualized within the context of human sensors. You only hear this, or you see that, or you think/dream this. The void of nothingness after death cannot be put in that context. We have our brains to thank for sorting all of these stimulants, when it is shut off that's it. When an engine dies in a car I don't think it is floating through eternity dreaming of open roads and tasty oil. So what if it isn't biological or as complex as us? We're all mechanical as well.

This is interesting because with the scientific view here the physical matter that creates our life is of the same stuff as the world around us. Yet we are convinced of our uniqueness, of the brilliance of our consciousness (ego) that there is no possible way anything post-human should be considered. If a tree or a rock can have some level of life, some existence, then why not the air around us? Why not the ground? Or the room we die in?

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 10:46 AM (49 minutes ago)

I agree with the first two sentences.
Those things have existence, and if they had a story to somehow tell you could call it their life, but the existence I'm talking about is what can only possibly be relevant to us: the one we perceive.

True. I think you are right there.

But our perception changes even during our lifetime. But yes death is such a significant change that I think people that believe in the 'afterlife' don't really give it as much credit as it deserves. It's not like you would be floating through space with a ghost version of your body, hair, clothes, etc. It would be completely transformative, beyond all 3-d worldly comprehension. Eternal life in that sense is the belief that the real you is whatever part survives the transition, whatever part of you transcends life and death. It probably has very little to do with your worldly existence and in that sense, yeah, there is no 'life' after death.

Plants do react to external stimuli, there are even studies suggesting that they 'see' the world, to some degree. No doubt their perception of time is extremely different than ours, if they have one. Probably seems to go by much faster than ours.

I don't really agree when people say that eternal life would be a hell, that watching loved ones grow old and die and stuff would be horrible. To live an eternal existence would be transcending past time and space. You would be experience time at all levels, birth, death, and in between. It would be such an objective experience that attachment to one time or another would be impossible. Lest you be trapped in the cycle of birth and death.

As I said obviously the endless length cannot be imagined but the setting can at least be conceptualized within the context of human sensors. You only hear this, or you see that, or you think/dream this. The void of nothingness after death cannot be put in that context. We have our brains to thank for sorting all of these stimulants, when it is shut off that's it. When an engine dies in a car I don't think it is floating through eternity dreaming of open roads and tasty oil. So what if it isn't biological or as complex as us? We're all mechanical as well.

― Evan, Wednesday, July 11, 2012 11:36 AM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i disagree and the reason why is, as already mentioned on this thread, sleep. i 'experience' oblivion every night. i know what it's like to close my eyes and disappear, inasmuch as that's possible to 'know.' eternity is unimaginable to me - it's not just 'a lot more of this.'

But our perception changes even during our lifetime.

But this is like equating changing the channel with shutting off the television. And even that is not apt because a turned off TV is silence and black and that can't exist either.

Mechanical creations and biological creations cannot be currently equated. There is more complexity in a single blade of grass than the world's fastest computer.

i disagree and the reason why is, as already mentioned on this thread, sleep. i 'experience' oblivion every night. i know what it's like to close my eyes and disappear, inasmuch as that's possible to 'know.' eternity is unimaginable to me - it's not just 'a lot more of this.'

― funny-skrillex-bee_132455836669.gif (s1ocki), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 12:12 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Elaborate please.

Mechanical creations and biological creations cannot be currently equated. There is more complexity in a single blade of grass than the world's fastest computer.

― Emperor Cos Dashit (Adam Bruneau), Wednesday, July 11, 2012 12:19 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Complexity doesn't mean it should be governed differently. If a blade of grass was as complex as a billion fast computers the computers wouldn't then have a soul or other supernatural attribute. Same with a human.

Biological processes that we don't 100% understand ARE different than mechanical processes that we do. Maybe there is no "soul" but certainly consciousness and self-awareness seem to be a product of the former that we haven't yet approximated with the later. Life seems to take place within a context: genealogical heritage, environmental stimuli, ever-shifting DNA. Machines are more or less put together from disparate parts and do the same job regardless of environment or context, as long as they are functioning properly.

I'm going to stop this thought train before it derails into Kurzweilian futurist speculation.

Haha well the core of what I'm saying is that the workings of the body are attributed to the activities of the parts that manage them.

i don't think we understand mechanical processes. i don't even know how mayonaise works.

mayonaise, it's a bit like human conception, it start with an egg

Mechanical creations and biological creations cannot be currently equated. There is more complexity in a single blade of grass than the world's fastest computer.

this is one of those facts that cannot be emphasized enough these days.