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Thinking about your own death (pg. 2)
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
How often do you think of your own death? |
Normally I think about it every day.
| 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. |
Most people tend to think their life is reasonably good, if not ideal, so they want to hold onto it as long as they can. When they see that the good stuff apparently ends with death, they just deny that life ever really ends so that they can imagine themselves continuing on and having good experiences.
The other motivation for believing in the afterlife is probably a desire to believe that evil people who seem to get away with stuff now will get their just deserts eventually, and good people who suffer disproportionately will be recompensed. |
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| dj_alfi |
Thinking of how many unrelated religions there are that believe in some sort of afterlife, I would think they might be onto something.
Especially seeing all the small tribes in the jungle, and the indians - the american ones, not the ones with the holy cows - where they would speak with the spirits of their ancestors.
Its hard for me to believe that so many unrelated civilisations just have grasped the thought of an afterlife out of thin air.
yeah yeah |
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| PETRAN |
| I don't care a lot about what will happen after death, but sometimes i find myself scared about death itself-will it be painful? Is there going to be a terrible choking sensation or something? Ofcourse it will all depend on the cause...but for all situations it seems scary. I guess that in the case of-no-life-after-death you'll loose consciousness, time will stop (for you) and hence you will stop to exist (so it will not matter!). In the case of after-life it depends whether it is heaven or...hell lol :nervous: |
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| kadomony |
| i dont think about it at all really. it's in the future, not now, and cannot happen any other way from the way it will. no use resisting, fearing, or thinking about it. |
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| inconspicuous |
| quote: | Originally posted by Barbino
Good Question!!
I was thinking about this last night when I was sucking cock, since I'm gay. |
:stongue: |
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| squirrelly |
I think about it, but more of a "there's nothing I can do about it, if it's my time it's my time" kind of way. But I also don't think I'll live to be 85. I just think you never know what can happen... especially recently. So I try to live every day like it's my last day (as lame as that sounds)... always tell people I care about I love them and I've been doing things I've always wanted to (white water rafting, fishing, tubing, sky diving lol).
I worry more about if anything happened to my bf. It wouldn't be right to finally be happy and have it taken from me. :( |
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| Clovis |
| The more I think about death, the more I want to live NOW. |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by Clovis
The more I think about death, the more I want to live NOW. |
"Memento mori." |
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| Arbiter |
| 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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| Krypton |
| I had a dream last night that I was riding my bike in a "ghetto" area. All of a sudden a gang of youths surround me, take my bike, and try to stab me. Death always comes to me in my dreams. |
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| Project-K |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
He correctly identifies the difficulty created by attempting to imagine one's own non-existence from a first-person perspective only. |
I think that sums up why us non-believers find it so mind-boggling to think of death. There isn't much sense in trying to imagine something you won't be around to perceive. When we imagine things we tend to base ourselves on our experiences and memories, but in this case we have no point of reference. It's like being AustraliaCQ and wondering what it's like to have sex. |
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| blacknoizybox |
it's impossible for the mind to imagine it's self non-existence.. i can hardly think of anything but a global and eternal "blank screen"
I'd better be in a jacuzzi with 10 jailbaits though:D |
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