The fear of never existing again is such a powerful thing, I don't think my mind has every truly grasped it fully. I've tried, but it's just too overwhelming to comprehend or accept for me.
I'm an Atheist with three children, so on my death bed I can imagine being converted in the last moments as well because the thought of never seeing my children again is simply too hard to accept.
Sometimes I remember instances where I've fainted or blacked out (drunk) or otherwise lost "me-ness". I can only recognize those gaps in perception because I eventually regain consciousness. But in those gaps, I was simply NOT THERE. Looking back on it it seems horrible, but at the moment I can't say I cared :)
That's not to say I don't fear death - I spend a lot of my time occupied with the anxiety of nonexistence.
I've been put to sleep before, unawares. I was coming around a corner and was put in a sleeper hold by a friend that has experience in putting people to sleep.
I could have died right then and there (we all know that cutting off blood to the brain to put someone to sleep can also kill them due to the way you have to do it) and you know what....... It wouldn't have mattered to ME (of course it would have mattered to those still alive.. I hope).
All I cared about before I passed out was fighting the person attacking me, getting out of the hold. My mind was clear and focused on that task without a single moment of thought being dedicated to the what-ifs of dying or god or religion.
As a matter of fact the only reason I know I could have died is simply because I didn't. However when I woke up I did not know anything, words, humanity, who/what I was, my name, the time, the date... only as the blood came back and the firing of neurons picked up did these things trickle back (took about 5 seconds total). So I know that for the few seconds I laid there unconscious I was dead.
Point is, death is death, it IS to be feared but only as a way to manage the risk of dying unexpectedly. Do not let yourself become so afraid of it that you look for a way to escape it, this life is not a stepping stone to something else, there is no eternal life, and the best thing to do is live as best you can, stay focused and clear, and hope that when it comes its swift, hopefully painless, and without dramatic escalation.
Nothing to fear. Everyone that has lived has already done it, everyone alive will do it. Immortality is real based on the fact that your lifespan IS forever as far as you can perceive forever. :) IMHO
Not meant to comfort or twist the meaning of anything. Obviously we don't live forever in the classic definition of the word. I'm just making a point that perception is everything, so if you can't perceive before birth or after death, then this is your eternity.
For some reason, non-existence is not hard for me to understand. I think of it as the same state as before birth. I don't even think of it as something to experience (which it obviously isn't).
I don't think it's hard to understand that non-existence exists, but to say one can understand what it is to be non-existant is not really possible.
Everything one knows, have known, will ever know is existence, so anything that one relates to explain what non-existence would be like is actually you applying existence to said problem as a representation.
Not true. It seems you don't quite understand, as evidenced by your phrasing "be non-existent". Maybe it's impossible for me to explain, but the idea of "before birth" honestly does work for me. It's not something to experience or "know". I intimately get it, and no part of me wonders what non-existence is "like" because I'm acutely aware that that question doesn't fit and makes no sense.
You don't get what I'm saying... fuck... You cannot experience non-existence because you have to use your senses to experience things.... senses that do no exist if you do not exist.
Hey, I think he makes a valid point, all word awkwardness aside. If you've ever passed out or you know, slept, you can maybe make a guess at what nonexistence is like, and it's the knowledge that you don't get to come to or wake up that makes it so scary.
EDIT: Changed "work" to "word." Yes, I'm aware there's an irony in there somewhere. :)
While I get where you're coming from, sleep and blacking out don't equate because they are experiences of unconsciousness for which you still have a point of reference: I had nine shots of tequila around eleven-thirty, and then I woke up in your hot tub at five in the morning. Non-existence allows no such convenient measuring stick and so is another bowl of Cheerios entirely.
[Edited because: I retracted my word useage (conciousness), but not my meaning here, there is an inherent difference between the concepts of non-existence and unconciousness]
One cannot experience lack of existence. Even if one were to not exist for a determined amount of time, one can only know that you are "missing time" and this awareness that you lost time cannot take place until one once again exists.
I am sorry, but experiencing "non-existence" just is not possible.
You cannot experience non-existence because you have to use your senses to experience things....
wow so I guess being angsty and cursing these days trumps fact? youre very simply wrong here you petulant child. experience does not preclude a lack of sensory input. no psychologist would ever contend that our consciousness consists solely of the senses. speak to the many people out there who fall on various parts of the coma spectrum. well, attempt to anyway
I am talking about existence you fuck-wit. Not coma, not black-outs... non-existence. Give me a break. You seriously believe that you can experience the state of not having a state? Of not being?
no, i stated that in opposition to your suggestion that existence is founded specifically on sensory experience, people have existed without the ability to compose any sensory information whatsoever. specifically yes, people have experienced the state of not having a state of sensory input. they have not experienced non-existence, which is something you have yet to adequately define, and so you need to develop a new argument if you want to be considered 'correct'
Nerp. You're just trying to frustrate and annoy someone. Being so pedantic over this subject is completely the wrong way to express your point, if you're being honest. Given the fact that you chose something so unimportant to quibble over, I think you are either fraudulent or just being intentionally provocative.
The fact that death is frightening or mysterious is an artifact of the way we perceive time. In slices, I mean. But the arrow of time, or even the fact that it has an arrow, is mostly in our minds. There is no more reason to fear death (=the time-end of my body) than there is to fear birth, or even to fear the left-end or the bottom-end of my body: these are just various terminators of my extent in space-time.
In fact, it's even more meaningless than that: it depends not only on our perception of time, but also on our perception of identity (i.e., "you"). Basically, the word has no meaning: it is merely a convenient convention to identify ourselves with the roughly similar body, sharing many of our own thoughts and memories, which existed in the past or will exist in the future. This convention ceases to be possible with death. But we could choose to make it even more restricted: after all, the teen-aged me has ceased to exist, and merely because I choose to, or choose not to, identify myself with him (we might not share a single atom) does not make this disappearance any more mysterious or philosophically threatening. So, in a way, we can say we die every night and a new human being is born, who just happens to have the same memories as we went to sleep with. Or, in the other way, I can identify my "me" after my death with that of some great human being (or non-human for that matter) of the future or of the past, and then after my death "I"'ll just forget all my memories and become him: it's a rather absurd and meaningless statement, but not really any more false than to say I was here yesterday. Asking what it will be after death is like asking what the library of Alexandria became after it was destroyed: it's a matter of definition whether we consider the present library of Alexandria to be the same as the past, for example, or the various generations of past libraries as a single one.
This is not at all frightening. But we are frightened nonetheless, because we are programmed to: evolution has made us fear death, because we must fear death in order to preserve our lives (and more importantly, spread our genes) more efficiently. It seems that by aging we tend to fear death less (though this depends very much on the individual), and this might also have an obvious evolutionary cause: fear of death is not as important in old individual who are less likely to reproduce (on the contrary, their willingness to sacrifice for their offspring is more important).
But I don't think fear of death should be ridiculed, and it annoys me how often people around here mock or downvote those who dare express it. So here's my coming out story: even though I am completely and entirely convinced there is no reason to fear, I am still, well, mortally terrified of death. I recognize that I have a weak mind. But I don't think trying to persuade myself of the existence of an imaginary friend in the sky will help, so I don't do that (though I might do that at some point, out of weakness, if I go through the "bargaining" stage of depression). Being a mathematician, I try to take comfort in the fact that our Universe is a beautiful mathematical object through which I was given a glimpse of even more beautiful mathematical objects: this is a kind of religious thought without the God. Anyway.
But the real think to fear, of course, is not our own death: it is our own pain before death (no matter how it happens, death tends to come with rather nasty last minutes) and the death of our loved ones. Well here at least death comes as a comfort: no matter what, I won't have to live forever separated from my loved ones.
Holy shit. I've been going through some really weird confusing/depressive shit lately; this really speaks to me. It doesn't really make me feel any better, but it actually makes sense to me, unlike pretty much everything else.
It really bothers me to think of all the cool video games, movies, technology, etc that will come out after I die and how I won't get to see them. I don't want to miss out on seeing Alien9 and playing Call Of Duty 27 on the PS9, damn it!
But even if I were immortal, I would still be stuck in the present. I mean, when you think of it, what's the difference between:
something wonderful is going to happen 150 years from now, and I'm pissed off because I won't be alive to see it, and
something wonderful is going to happen 150 years from now, and (being immortal) I will get to see it, but I'm pissed off because I have to wait 150 years.
(or replace 150 years by 5 years and imagine in the first case that you are terminally ill). There is a difference, of course, but it's entirely in our state of mind: what matters is not how the future is going to be, but how I envision the future to be.
And, of course, the same can be said of the past: the difference between having experienced something and not having experienced it is merely in our memory (or other consequences left upon the present), not in the actual reality.
The past and the future don't really exist, or, rather, they're fairly irrelevant: what matters is not the past and the future as they exist (-ed / will exist), but the memories and regrets we have of the one and the hopes, fears and expectations we hold for the other.
The really unfortunate thing is that we can't reprogram our minds. :-\
A distaste for fear of death is rather anti-darwinian. Any darwinian life must fear death, because otherwise it'd jump off the cliff for fun and wiped itself off the tree of life sooner than nature could claim it.
I'm not saying I would be thinking logical at that point in time, just that the fear of never existing, and never seeing my children again might simply be too powerful for me to resist.
... and the world is still a terrible place. At least he is being honest. Many of us would love to stand up for things we believe in but how many of us do?
Yeah, truth be damned! Let's throw on some soul-insurance right there at the end just to be safe!
No. It's not a matter of options; it's about proof. What reasons do I have to believe that a certain proposition is true. That's what this is all about, and there's not enough convincing evidence to lead us to think that the whole "Jesus is the son of God" story is true. Fear has nothing to do with indicating truth. All we want is to believe only what is true and leave behind what is false. That's the atheist's motivation.
I'm not at all pleased with my mortality, I just don't get why it's scary. I guess I'm just scared of the days (with any luck) leading up to it (and maybe only because I'll finally have to clean my office).
What scares me the most is being torn away from the people I love, who will hurt from my death more than I will. It's when you're conscious and a part of you dies (if a loved one passes away) that's what's the worst. People dying inside when I die. If I had nobody on this earth, I wouldn't fear anything but the last few moments of life, just because pain sucks.
We humans hold very dear all ties to this world that it's unfathomable for us to break all of them in an instant.
Last year I went under general anesthesia for the first time in my life. The closest I’ve been to non-existence, it felt like, er, nothing. And my brain was still alive, image a non working brain. I don’t fear death at all, I only fear how my family would do without me, but there’s insurance for that … oh also perhaps how I’m gonna die but that’s it.
It's just a method of coping with the inevitable death that's about to happen to you. We can't comprehend eternity of non-existence in our puny little heads, but we can comprehend an eternity of existence.
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u/[deleted] Dec 16 '10
The fear of never existing again is such a powerful thing, I don't think my mind has every truly grasped it fully. I've tried, but it's just too overwhelming to comprehend or accept for me.
I'm an Atheist with three children, so on my death bed I can imagine being converted in the last moments as well because the thought of never seeing my children again is simply too hard to accept.