[HN Gopher] Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity (1994) ___________________________________________________________________ Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity (1994) Author : demomi Score : 12 points Date : 2022-07-10 21:28 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.naturalism.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.naturalism.org) | tarun_anand wrote: | Could someone explain to a layman what this article is trying to | say? | coldtea wrote: | Something akin to: "When you die you're dead, so you can't | "experience" nothingmess, hence death can't be nothingess". | | In other words, he just means "death is not an experienced | nothingness". | | Well, big deal. It's still nothingness, as far as we're | concerned as living beings now (when we consider our death). | teekert wrote: | What an enormous amount of words just to say: When you die you | are not there anymore to experience the nothingness that you | often picture death to be like. | | I kept thinking that something profound was coming but no. | | Edit: Perhaps it is interesting that so many non-theistic | historical figures do reference death as a nothingness and | suggest that that nothingness is somehow experienced by some | remainder of one's being, which is of course bit of a spiritual | stance. A paradox in their worldview perhaps? Or just a sign that | to drop a believe in god does not mean to drop believe in a soul, | for some at least? | AQuantized wrote: | I actually don't think it's arguing for that typical stance, | but rather for conscious experience to always 'be' in some | sense regardless of specific physical instantiation. It seems | purposefully vague, but it's almost more like Hinduism than the | typical atheistic interpretation. | tgflynn wrote: | I think it is quite profound since many people seem to fear | death because they imagine it is nothingness. But nothingness | contains neither things to be feared nor a perceiver to fear | them if they did. | | On the other hand I highly doubt that nothingness actually | exists. Why should we expect the arising of experience to be a | one off occurrence ? | | If the void exists it has a major bug because experience (ie. | non-void) somehow arose from it and every programmer knows that | bugs always repeat. | simonh wrote: | >Why should we expect the arising of experience to be a one | off occurrence ? | | Given 7.9 billion people alive right now, give or take, I'm | not quite sure where the idea it might be a one-off | occurrence comes from. | | But even if you mean our individual personal experience, I'm | not sure what that would mean. A copy of me would think and | experience in ways similar to me to a point, but we would | still have different and distinct actual individual | experiences of being. | tgflynn wrote: | Well, I think that most people don't believe in | reincarnation. | teekert wrote: | Hmm I guess after attaining my current worldview and dropping | religion, I stopped worrying about death as a "state". | Because I was not uncomfortable before I was born I always | reasoned. I tell my kids the same if they ask what is after | death? I ask them back, what was it like before being born? | It will be like that. Of course I still don't want to die. | tgflynn wrote: | I think that reasoning makes sense up to a point. But how | do you know you weren't uncomfortable before you were born | ? There were likely times you were uncomfortable when you | were a baby but you don't remember them. | coldtea wrote: | > _The same is true of the time after death. There will be no | future personal state of non-experience to which we can compare | our present state of being conscious. All we have, as subjects, | is this block of experience. We know, of course, that it is a | finite block, but since that 's all we have, we cannot experience | its finitude._ | | Yeah, you just re-invented nothingness after death, just with | more words... | scoot wrote: | So. Many. Words. What was the point of this article? I'd rather | die than read it. | layer8 wrote: | The reification of the nothingness after death is warranted | insofar as we compare it to the alternative of not dying. The | continued life is certainly a real thing, so there is (negative?) | reality to its absence. Otherwise murder wouldn't be a felony. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-07-10 23:00 UTC)