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Arbiter
Naked Power Organ

Registered: May 2002
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Re: Thinking about your own death
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
How often do you think of your own death? Most people, perhaps intuitively, think that something perceivable is going to happen to them after their own death (i.e. they will go to some other dimension/plane, they will reincarnate, they will hang out in a jacuzzi with the Big JHC drinking wine all night long, et cetera). So far, so good. |
I don't think about it much. It seems pretty straightforward, so what's there to think about?
| quote: | Thus, I think we could draw one of the following conclusions from this: either there is indeed an afterlife (life itself is already bizarre, why wouldn't there be another life just as absurd as ours?), or we're so important to ourselves that we can't even think of what it would be like not to exist. I tend to favour the latter due to my affinity with materialism and the impossibility of going anywhere my body isn't, but no matter how hard I think about it, death seems to be as puzzling as being thrown in a black hole: if you ceased to perceive time, wouldn't your mental activities cease as well? In that sense, you'd tend to imagine that you'd be stuck within your last memory, but that memory has to span for some time, and if you cannot perceive time, what are you going to retain in your perception? Moreover, reason why I thought about it in the first place, can you imagine something you can't talk about, like an absolute death?
This morning, I felt relief in knowing that I wasn't alone [pdf - Imagination and Immortality by Shaun Nichols] in most of my pondering, and I decided it would be a nice topic to discuss here with you guys. |
The idea seems pretty silly to me at first glance. I only skimmed Nichols' paper, but it seems to argue that belief in one's own immortality is facilitated by the difficulty of imagining one's own non-existence. He correctly identifies the difficulty created by attempting to imagine one's own non-existence from a first-person perspective only.
But he seems to tie the idea of belief into the ability to imagine something from a particular perspective in a way that at first glance strikes me as unreasonably restrictive -- I can imagine my car sitting in the garage, and believe that what I am seeing is roughly actual, I don't have to believe that I'm standing there looking at it.
In one of the footnotes, Nichols noted that the difficulty of imagining one's non-existence alone cannot fully explain the tendency of certain people to believe in their own immortality, since most of those same people don't believe in "retrograde immortality" as well. In fact, most people can easily imagine a past where they didn't exist. Moreover, they can actually believe in it. It doesn't seem to me that a similar imagination or belief regarding the future requires anything different cognitively, but the issue is largely brushed aside and ignored in the paper.
I don't have any problem realizing that there's (a whole lot of) time in the past during which I didn't exist, so I don't have a problem realizing that there's going to be a lot of time after I die where I won't exist either. I suppose that's what I mean when I say that it seems pretty straightforward. I've not existed in the past, so when I don't exist in the future, it will be just like that.
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Aug-19-2008 18:54
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