Okay yeah, not really following most of that last post but:
Could you explain this to me, please?
What, precisely, is scary about not existing? It sounds like sleep to me.
Why does the fact my life’s duration is finite eliminate the value of the life that I have? I’d think that would make the time I have more valuable.
How does the finiteness of life force one’s mission in life to be to do whatever they want? And what would the mission be instead if life was infinite, and why? Are you assuming a specific god or something?
You eventually wake up from sleep. Whereas with ceasing to exist, speaking strictly for myself I must reconcile 1.) the fact that I am here now experiencing the world through my sensory inputs and experiencing my own thoughts internally, moment after moment, with 2.) the notion that someday I will have a final moment and there won’t be a “what happens next”.
Again speaking only for myself - it does; this is my one chance to do all the things I want to do. When I’m 80 if I’ve never, say, traveled to Greece and will never be able to then all I can say is “well F, I really wanted to do that and since there’s no coming back then I won’t get a second chance.” On the other hand, if someday I will wink out of existence anyway then what will it matter if I visited Greece; once my life is over I won’t be able to look back on it.
Edit: forgot to add, back when I believed that we get to come back and this life isn’t all there is, I didn’t fear the concept of dying at all.
You don’t always wake up from sleep. So, is going to bed terrifying then?
And I don’t see anything difficult to reconcile between experiencing the world through sensory organs, and the fact that later, you won’t. Of course, I have used computer programs before. A computer program listens to input from the keyboard, remembers what you type, communicates across the internet - all that. And then you close it, it’s threads of execution stop, the memory that stored its identity is released and stops being modified, and gradually all vestiges of the program’s execution are replaced in the cache and overwritten in the memory as other programs claim the space.
So it is with us; someday the parts of the universe devoted to executing your consciousness will cease to do so, your brain will stop recording memories, and gradually your body will decompose and your matter will become parts of other things. An unpleasant thought, perhaps, but I don’t see how you could possibly find it irreconcileable with reality.
Do you remember what you had for breakfast on March 16th? Do you look back on the experience fondly? Do you remember the experience of many of your breakfasts? (I don’t.)
If not, why don’t you eat cardboard? You’ll forget soon either way.
I’ll add, I have a pretty poor memory; I forget most things later, especially the experience of doing them. As in, I literally don’t have a first person memory of any experience I had over two weeks ago. Any such experience. Due to this I find the argument that you’re making, that the only thing worthwhile about life is the memories, not to be very compelling. I mean, if I agreed with you I should obviously kill myself immediately.
Fair enough. One expects to wake up from sleep, based on past experience. You go to bed, hopefully get comfy, become unconscious, and then some time later become conscious again. Even though each time this happens you have one last moment of wakefulness, so far there have always been still more moments that came.
I write computer programs so the concept on the whole of ceasing to receive input and disintegrating is not what’s difficult. Rather, it’s the thought that this ongoing stretch of time will end and then there will be nothing. That nothingness is awful hard to imagine! And so it’s a little scary.
Chocolate rice crispies in milk with a side of either orange juice or guava juice.
To be fair, I don’t know that I actually had this on that exact day. Maybe that was the day I went & had donuts. But I do know that in March of this year I was in Thailand and yes I look back fondly on the trip. To think that someday it will be as if I had never gone, well that’s a hard thing to face, and it can cause one to feel like what’s the point of it all.
I don’t disagree with this. I could have eaten cardboard on March 16, 1995 and it wouldn’t matter now but you’re right it would have mattered then.
I should have been clearer. It’s not that the fact that the memory will be gone makes it worthless to enjoy life - I did say that life should be enjoyed! - rather, the knowing that the memory isn’t permanent is a disturbing piece of information.
Right - but it’s not the future moments to come that make sleeping itself tolerable. I know this because you’re not capable of having intolerant feelings while unconscious. (We’re presuming dreamless sleep here, of course.)
The main point of the analogy with sleep is to remind you that the actual state of being nonexistent is not itself something to fear. After all, you’ve already experienced it (so to speak), and actively pursue it again each night. Which makes it odd that the idea of entering that state after you die is scary. I mean, when you go to sleep you don’t remember what you had for breakfast or your trip to Thailand either, right? Is that bad?
Heh, I’m a programmer too.
And there won’t be nothing - there just won’t be any you. Millions of babies are being booted up as we speak.
How will it be as if you’ve never gone?
To backtrack a bit - presumably, you don’t think about Thailand all the time. Presumably sometimes you’re thinking about work, or lunch, or bowel movements, or what you’re watching on the TV. (Or nothing at all, while you dreamlessly sleep.) During those periods, what happens to your trip to Thailand? If it had any practical consequences those will still be in effect after you’re dead, so those can’t be what you’re worried about. So what’s left of the trip while you’re busy pondering your navel?
If I follow this line of thinking to its conclusion, it sounds like if we ever spend a minute neglecting to think about our trips to Thailand, then at that point it’s as though we never went and this is somehow a bad thing. And thus we’d be morally obligated to be constantly recalling and concentrating on every prior point of our lives simultaneously. This would seem difficult to carry off.
Heh, I don’t expect my memories to be permanent. And in some cases I’m glad it isn’t; there are some periods I’m tangentially aware I went through in high school (among others, long tests) that I’m not at all sad I’m not constantly reliving. Permanence of memory sounds like it could be a curse.
Unless, of course, the only purpose of memory is so that when we feel like it, we can entertain and/or edify ourselves by dipping into it and reliving the past or whatever. Which is to say, if the value a memory has is in its utility to our minds. In which case it becomes valueless during periods of disuse, and if a memory is never needed again (like my old testing experiences) it is not a bad thing if it’s lost.
And after we die we’ll never need our memories again, so their loss is no bad thing.
Guess it’s not a very rational fear then. Although the thought of one’s identity & personality being lost forever, destroyed, is another aspect that’s pretty scary.
This is the sort of thing that it’s difficult to see from an unbiased perspective. For example, we have a strong bias that the destruction of things is bad for all concerned - because the destuction of something is (usually) a loss to the things that survive it, and we have countless reports of how partial destruction is a terrible state. After all, prior to the point of death, it’s pretty consistent that the more damage you experience, the greater the pain and the longer the recovery period/greater chance of never completely recovering. Extrapolating from that leads one to very naturally conclude that if getting bumped is a little bad, and getting punched is worse, and getting your bones broken is awful, and getting your legs comletely crushed is agonizing, then clearly getting your entire body pulped must be the worst thing ever.
Similarly, when wise old grandpa dies, we all keenly feel the loss of his stories and related memories. It is natural to extrapolate from there to the conclusion that when we die we will feel the loss of our own memories to be an even more terrible loss, as they’re the memories most valuable to us.
So I wouldn’t say that it’s irrational to have these concerns, any more than it’s irrational to think that the higher something drops from, the harder it will hit the ground. However, as in the falling case there are exceptional conditions that modify the result: go high enough and you get beyond the reach of gravity and it never falls at all. Similarly, when you get damaged enough to die all the rules change: being nonexistent isn’t like being really, really badly injured; there would be no pain, or regret, or anything like that, because your ability to suffer or regret vanishes when you do.
