How do you cope with your mortality?

[The Grimmus]

i put it out of my head by pretending that nanotechnology will you know keep me alive for ever until soem christain extreamist assassinates me.

 

[Vosh]

Hence the serenity prayer; wise words if you're religious or not (I'm not). There are some things you can do something about and some things you cannot. You have to let go of angsting over the things you have no control over (in other words, just live with the fact that some answers just aren't forth coming - Is there an after life? etc.). In short, waddya going to do?

 

[Another God]

Originally posted by Canute
Quite. It baffles me why people are so keen to conjecture that death is the end of everything. Is it just because that's what science conjectures?

No. It's because there is no reason to conjecture otherwise. It is the null hypothesis, and there is no evidence yet contradictive of it.

 

[Iacchus32]

Originally posted by Another God
No. It's because there is no reason to conjecture otherwise. It is the null hypothesis, and there is no evidence yet contradictive of it.

Then why is it so commonplace for "other" people to do so?

 

[TheDream]

Originally posted by plum
How do you deal with the realization that after your death, you will be absolutely nothing for billions-trillions of years until the end of time? How do you cope with the prospect of absolute non-being, such that the entire universe itself may as well become non-existent at the moment you die? Death is analogous to the region outside our Milky Way/corner of the universe of which our species may be eternally unaware-it entails the profundity of an existence so much greater than oneself and the paltriness of one's human life. Myself, I find it rather difficult to cope with this thought. I'd rather religious people not reply here; I am an atheist and so would prefer to hear from other atheists.

I live the dream.

 

[Adam]

Originally posted by plum
How do you deal with the realization that after your death, you will be absolutely nothing for billions-trillions of years until the end of time? How do you cope with the prospect of absolute non-being, such that the entire universe itself may as well become non-existent at the moment you die? Death is analogous to the region outside our Milky Way/corner of the universe of which our species may be eternally unaware-it entails the profundity of an existence so much greater than oneself and the paltriness of one's human life. Myself, I find it rather difficult to cope with this thought. I'd rather religious people not reply here; I am an atheist and so would prefer to hear from other atheists.

How do I "cope with it"? I don't. It's not something which requires coping. Since it is inevitable, and entirely outside my control, it is basically irrelevent. Much like the colour of your socks today. Neither require "coping". It just is.

 

[Zantra]

Originally posted by plum
Life is a raw deal.

70-100 years and only 30 or so of them are any good.

70-100 years out of an infinite number.

Now that is one raw deal.

When I chose a human life, somebody was selling me down the river.

Tell that to a fly- he lives 2 days, and then usually gets squished by a huge plastic thing.

I'll stick with what I got, thanks!

 

[Zantra]

Originally posted by Vosh
If we are brought back to life by some higher power then a trillion years won't even be noticed. Even in a very deep sleep, you awake feeling like you've only been asleep for a minute. So from a personal point of view, it won't be so bad. But if you ignore all speculations about what is going on in the universe; my view is that I cope because I don't have any choice. If you work yourself into a "state" over it then you have some kind of problem with your brain chemistry or something like this (you'd be worked up for some other reason if not this one). Also, the notion of being "nothing" for the rest of eternity is also just speculation. No one really knows what's going to happen, right.

Sometimes (all the time, some argue) fear is caused by self consciousness; the ego thinking of itself. Make something outside of yourself more important. When I die I'll be too busy thinking about how I can continue to right some wrong with my last breath to worry about that fact that it's my last breath. We live in a society, an era, where ppl. learn to take things personally (it's something we learn in school, primarily). So death isn't something that happens; it's something that happens to MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! When the WTC buildings were demolished my very first impulse was to call up the President and say, "where do you want me to stand? (and I've never been prone to national feeling!)" But then I started looking around and noticed that Americans weren't angry because it happened; they were angry because it happened to *them*. My sympathy evaporated like morning fog. I wanted to say to all parties; like an exasperated parent, "I don't want to hear who started it; everyone go to your rooms and don't come out 'til you can play nice"

Though it sounds despairing that many people should seem self absorbed at such a profound moment in time, I recall that there was a mixture of feelings and emotions during 9/11. I think most people(myself included) went through several states during the time following the tragedy. Many people felt a deep sense of shock. And during that shock, the first instict is self-preservation and concern. After the shock had worn off, and things started to sink in, then people reacted with support that I've never seen before in my lifetiem. It's unfortunate that it takes a national horror such as this to bring that kind of compassion to the surface, but it was inspiring at the same time. Sorry to side track there...

Anyhow, people's first natural instict will always be self-preservation. It is the nature of the mind. But I agree with your message, which is donk't forget to stop and smell the roses. Too much people spend so much time worrying about death, they forget to enjoy life. I won't be one of those people.

 

[Canute]

Originally posted by Another God
No. It's because there is no reason to conjecture otherwise. It is the null hypothesis, and there is no evidence yet contradictive of it.

What makes it the null hypothesis? Oh yes, some scientist say it is.

A recent survey of US scientists found 40% believed in a God of some kind. Terrifying thought. I don't have a lot of confidence in the reasoning abilities of scientists when to comes to metaphysics. These days, unlike previous times, they don't seem to think about it much.

 

[Another God]

Scientists aren't supposed to be great reasoners by default. Most scientists are the workers. Science is a combination of good, solid, meticulous work (most of science is this), the rest, the other small fraction, is made up of people figuring out what the hell the results are supposed to mean.

I say it is the null hypothesis, because it is a perfect example of what a null hypothesis is. Something, where nothing needs to be invented to explain it. It is the way things appear to be without imagination. There is no hypothesis.

God, is a hypothesis. Lack of God is not. If you want to believe that God exists, then you should have a good reason for doing so.

 

[Canute]

Originally posted by Another God
I say it is the null hypothesis, because it is a perfect example of what a null hypothesis is. Something, where nothing needs to be invented to explain it. It is the way things appear to be without imagination. There is no hypothesis.

Your hypothesis is that there is no continuation of consciousness after death. You may be right, but it is a hypothesis in just the same sense as the hypothesis that there is some sort of continuation. As far as I can see on the evidence it is no better or worse as a hypothesis, and no different in kind.

God, is a hypothesis. Lack of God is not.

I don't find that at all logical.

If you want to believe that God exists, then you should have a good reason for doing so. [/B]

Quite agree, and the reverse.

 

[Iacchus32]

Originally posted by Another God
God, is a hypothesis. Lack of God is not.

Isn't that the same thing as saying God doesn't exist?

 

[Another God]

lack of god = god does not exist = nothing being said at all on the matter

 

[Canute]

Originally posted by Another God
lack of god = god does not exist = nothing being said at all on the matter

Hmm. Are you saying that if you say that God doesn't exist you haven't said anything? Seems a strange point of view.

 

[Thallium]

Whether God exists or not is somehting you must choose to believe in. If he exists, he does so whether you believe it or not.

When it comes to eternal life after the life here on Earth I suggest that you read the final chapter in "Morgoth's Ring" by J.R.R.Tolkien, edited by his son Christopher Tolkien. The chapter is called "Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth" which is Elvish(Tolkien's invented language) and means "The Discussion of Finrod and Andreth", an Elf King and a wise mortal woman of the race of Men. The suggestion may sound very childish and little appealing in a professional discussion on life and death, but I finished reading this part of the book one day ago and it really gave me something to think about. It is a philosophicall cenversation about human mortality and why the Elves were granted immortal mortal life.

As I would like to say it, it elucidates the advantages and disadvantages(burdens) of being mortal and immortal. A highly recommended read to include in this discussion.

As for my feelings towards eternal life, I much believe that there is one. I believe in God, as I doubt many others here do. It is hard comparing the physical world to the existence of God of course, but I also spend much time pondering over this as well.

However, read the chapter named above and the subsequent texts which also touch the same subject.

 

[Zantra]

actually I read the simarrillion and the entire existence of man is replete with jealousy/contempt from the elves, and wonderment from the humans as to why they have such a short lifespan. It's perspective. We have our place in the natural order of things. We may question why we are only given less than 100 years to live, but we would question it no matter what the timeframe. Human nature leads us to that question. If humans lived an average of 500 years, we would instead be asking why not 1000, or 100,000. Abd think about how tedious it would grow after a few thousand years, when we've yet to even land on jupiter. The other is a wonderous place for 100 years, but after 1000, I'd be bored. "Ours is not to reason how or why, our sis but to do and die". So sayeth he who accepts his fate, and even embraces it.

On a separate note, What about this life we lead? We grow up in a world where we are taught all these things in order to be educated and learn a trade or skill. Once we do that, we then have to spend 40 or 50 years applying that knowledge over and over again to tedium, all in the name of aquiring "stuff". We worker harder to get more "stuff". So then we get that stuff and it's not enough, so we work harder still, learn more, educate ourselves more, to get more stuff, to pay more money, to work harder...on and on until at last we give up and die. We don't get to "take it with us" and if we're lucky, we'll be famous or remembered in history-none of which will benefit us because we'll be dead. Is that the true purpose of man? to get "stuff"? This endless boring cycle of bartering never brings true fullfillment, but we have to convince ourselves that we're wasting our live away performing a usually "useless skill(especially lawyers) in order to the get the cherished "stuff", and htat somehow makes it worthwhile. But n the end, we're only fooling ourselves into thinking that this is a justificaiton, when it's actually just an excuse to keep the order of things. If people were to suddenly realize that "stuff" just doesn't bring them happiness, then society would crumble. No one would work, and chaos would ensue. There has to be more to life then "stuff". When I'm dying and on my last few breathes, I don't want to look back and say "well I worked my butt off, I existed, maybe helped some people, and got my fullfillment from all the "stuff" I acquired, but that's all useless now because I spent so much time working to get the stuff that I never got to enjoy it anyhow, and gee thanks for this existence, now it's time to die :P

 

[Bubonic Plague]

I tell myself since I'm going to die one day, i might as well live for the moment and make each day count. So i won't be able to say, "Damn, i didn't try skydiving!" on my deathbed.

 

[Vosh]

Whether or not you greet the news from your M.D. that you have 3 weeks to live with horror or not seems to me to depend on how oriented you are toward abject self pity. It's a pre 7 year old (on average, humans know right from wrong by age 7, are "adults") state of mind; but if you take ppl. when they're only 5 years old and keep them busy with school work most of the day and for all of their childhood until they're 18 years old (think about that; 5 years old! You were just a toddler yesterday. Any ill effects caused by being raised this way will seem *normal* to you because why would a person know better having known nothing else?) then ofcourse there isn't much time to grow, develop and mature. The 20th century experiment with factory schooling has as its consequence a citizenry with just about all of their childhood time pre-empted. Result: extended childhoods, so called adolescense, psychicly weak ppl. addicted and needing, petty, immature, unimaginative, indifferent, gullible, mean spirited, neurotic... Pretty much all the qualities you need for something like Nazi Germany to happen (the first part of the world to institute what we call "school"; the first part of the world to experience the phenomenon of teen suicide...). Look around. Most ppl. are "good Germans". Pray for your socially unacceptable kids/grand kids that the liberties we do have today don't continue on the path of erosion.

 

[Canute]

Well said. Education is the key to it all, and we've scrapped it in favour of vocational training.

PS. Just out of interest - most philosophers would disgree with your Tery Pratchett tagline.

 

[Vosh]

Originally posted by Canute
Well said. Education is the key to it all, and we've scrapped it in favour of vocational training.

PS. Just out of interest - most philosophers would disgree with your Tery Pratchett tagline.

How so?

I'm a Socrates man, myself.

 

[Canute]

I think 'seeing', and perception of all kinds, is generally considered to be theory-laden, not as providing certain knowledge. As Eintein said somewhere "The human mind has first to construct forms, independently, before we can find them in things."

 

[Another God]

It's the difference between seeing, for example, A whale as opposed to 'something big', or a toilet versus 'something strange'...

 

[AscensionX]

The original question and some other crap...

I'll have you know I always keep an open mind and if someone is willing to challenge what i have to say and can back their argument up then I'm willing to change my view on the subject.

I'm going to explore some mental truths with you.

To state that 'There is no ultimate truth' is plainly false. By its own parametres the statement cannot be true - because nothing is completely true! Thats what the statement is saying, it is saying that 1+1 does not equal 2.

Mathematics as a model defies mistruth, because it is the truth of pure logic.

Therefore, there is truth. This may be in the form that the universe is bound by some simple fundamental truths, like the behaviour of quarks, and that everything produced by that behaviour could be engineered or pure accident- it doesn't really matter.

The main point I am making here is that truth exists, and our reality is quite stable.

This point brings up many other paths of speculation - How did the universe come into being? Is there a reason the universe exists?

Lets let these pass for now.

Another problem with our own scientific system is that it incorporates that which reason defies - belief.

Most scienctists Believe in the void (space or an outer void)- But how I ask you, how do you prove nothing exists with something. You can't say 'that is empty space, nothing exists there at all' because you are able to percieve that space even based on our own limited senses - vision. The scientist believes nothing is there, but how can it be possible to prove nothing?! I measured X with Y and concluded X did not exist- then how Did you measure it einstein?!

Scientist are victims of belief amongst us all, believing in something (the void -dark matter if you know what it is) without being able to prove it is there.

At this point it could be reasonable to argue that space as we know it is alive and filled with light. Light can only illuminate what is there however- darkness is simply where there is light but nothing else - no air molecules to colour the sky blue etc.

What I am saying is that for something to not exist it cannot be there, if you catch my drift ;P

That which does not exist, you can't see, detect, move through etc. because it is completley void - not even gravity affects it.

This concept has been explored briefly with Dark matter, but what I saying with this increasingly confusing example is...

It is pure conjecture and guesswork to talk about things which are beyond measurement. Our own system of reason traps us in a world bound by the truths within that world. Quiet simply, you cannot use rules against themselves.

What is required to move beyond this world and its limitations, is belief, faith, inspiration, hope, and perhaps ignorance.

The reason I accept death? Everyone else dies and there is fairness in that. Death is the great equilizer of men.

 

[Canute]

Originally posted by AscensionX
I'll have you know I always keep an open mind and if someone is willing to challenge what i have to say and can back their argument up then I'm willing to change my view on the subject.

I'm going to explore some mental truths with you.

To state that 'There is no ultimate truth' is plainly false. By its own parametres the statement cannot be true - because nothing is completely true! Thats what the statement is saying, it is saying that 1+1 does not equal 2.

Mathematics as a model defies mistruth, because it is the truth of pure logic.

Therefore, there is truth. This may be in the form that the universe is bound by some simple fundamental truths, like the behaviour of quarks, and that everything produced by that behaviour could be engineered or pure accident- it doesn't really matter.

The main point I am making here is that truth exists, and our reality is quite stable.

But the situation is not this simple. There is a difference between contingent truths and ultimate truths. 2+2=4 within certain given systems. However if you're going to talk about reality itself, what lies beyond such systems, then things are more complicated.

“ So far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. And so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality”. Albert Einstein

Another problem with our own scientific system is that it incorporates that which reason defies - belief.

Of course. All scientific theories are axiomatic, i.e. take something on faith. As Hawking says:

What is the relation between Goedels theorem and whether we can formulate the theory of the universe in terms of a finite number of principles? One connection is obvious. According to the positivist philosophy of science a physical theory is a mathematical model. So if there are mathematical results that can not be proved, there are physical problems that can not be predicted….( )

In the standard positivist approach to the philosophy of science, physical theories live rent free in a Platonic heaven of ideal mathematical models. That is, a model can be arbitrarily detailed, and can contain an arbitrary amount of information, without affecting the universes they describe. But we are not angels, who view the universe from the outside. Instead we and our models are both part of the universe we are describing. Thus a physical theory is self referencing, like in Goedels theorem. One might therefore expect it to be either inconsistent, or incomplete. The theories we have so far, are ~both inconsistent, and incomplete.

(Stephen Hawking – Goedel and The End of Physics – net article (http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/strtst/dirac/hawking/ )

Most scienctists Believe in the void (space or an outer void)- But how I ask you, how do you prove nothing exists with something. etc...

Just for interest...

when we encounter the Void, we feel that it is primordial emptiness of cosmic proportions and relevance. We become pure consciousness aware of this absolute nothingness; however, at the same time, we have a strange paradoxical sense of its essential fullness. This cosmic vacuum is also a plenum, since nothing seems to be missing in it. While it does not contain in a concrete manifest form, it seems to comprise all of existence in a potential form. In this paradoxical way , we can transcend the usual dichotomy between emptiness and form, or existence and non-existence. However, the possibility of such a resolution cannot be adequately conveyed in words; it has to be experienced to be understood.”

Staislav Grof – The Cosmic Game – 1998 State University of New York

“The view of the new physics suggests: ‘The vacuum is all of physics.’ Everything that ever existed or can exist is already there in the nothingness of space…that nothingness contains all being’

Heinz Pagels – 1990 'The Cosmic Code' New York-Bantam Books

While the attempts to describe the materialisation of the universe from nothing remain highly speculative, they represent an exciting enlargement of the boundaries of science. If someday this program can be completed, it would mean that the existence and history of the universe could be explained by the underlying laws of nature. That is the laws of physics would imply the existence of the universe. We would have accomplished the spectacular goal of understanding why there is something rather than nothing – because, if the approach is right, perpetual “nothing” is impossible. If the creation of the universe can be described as a quantum process, we would be left with one deep mystery of existence: What is it that determined the laws of physics?

Alan Guth ‘The Inflationary Universe’. P 276

It is pure conjecture and guesswork to talk about things which are beyond measurement.

“Pragmatically, physicists understand measurement just as lawyers understand pornography and philistines understand art: they can’t define it, but they know what it is.”

David Lindley 'Where does the Weirdness Go?' p 72 Vintage 1996 London

Our own system of reason traps us in a world bound by the truths within that world. Quiet simply, you cannot use rules against themselves.

I agree. So did Plato, Goedel, Popper, Aristotle etc.

What is required to move beyond this world and its limitations, is belief, faith, inspiration, hope, and perhaps ignorance.

Don't agree with that though. You missed out direct knowledge through experience.

 

[AscensionX]

Thx for the reply Canute I thought I'd be ripped up on these forums, and a well backed up argument too :P

In response to my last statement I was saying that aside from knowledge other responses and states of mind are necessary to learn. That simple idea that you can't learn new things unless you have something driving you to require more than the status quo (curiosity, accident & mishap, passion, confusion, a teacher who enforces an education etc).

Knowledge & experience are the primary functions for learning, knowledge sometimes coming after experience, sometimes before - Of course I agree with you there, what I was saying is that we cannot rely on this system alone, it leaves no space for what we

* Do not know (or do not have a teacher for)
* Cannot experience (we are sadly, limited.)

My initial example using mathematics as a model for truth definitely has its problems, but in terms of physicality of course there is truth - otherwise all would be chaos - and our perception of truth is what is limited. Perhaps life itself it just a quest for the highest truth we can attain - how close we can get to pure reality...

 

[Canute]

Hmm. Can knowledge preceed experience? I'm not so sure. Probably depends on how you define the terms.

 

[AscensionX]

True but what about instinctive knowledge, like pain. Most babies will cry when they experience pain.

Most intellectual knowledge has to be gained by experience.

 

[Canute]

Yes I agree. In fact I'd say all knowledge must be grounded in experience.

 

[Vosh]

Nothing is in mind that wasn't previously in sense.