Is Acceptance of Death Okay?

Maybe we are using different semantics for "accept"?

The only way in which I can parse your statement is if "accepting death" stands for "recognizing the existence of death", which is something I certainly do too.

But if "accepting death" means "being OK with death existing", I do not see how this could not be in contradiction with the rest of your post.

edited 23rd Nov '11 1:33:08 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Well, this is more confusing than I had anticipated.

I guess I meant that I can accept the deaths of loved ones and my own death because death is inevitable for all living things. I'm not saying that's how it should be, but that's how life is.

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Wait, I still don't get it.

So if, let's say, getting a swift kick in the fork per day was inevitable for all fork-having living beings, would you "accept" that in the same sense in which you accept death now?

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Well, if it was inevitable, I guess I'd accept that, too. Not like I could do anything about it due to its inherent inevitability. That would suck mightily, though, as death does.

edited 23rd Nov '11 2:03:57 PM by Firebert

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All right, in that sense, I perhaps might be said that I "accept" death too. I know that I will eventually die, and I know that my loved ones will too. I hate it, but it's not like I can do much about it, and I am not going to spend time whining about it.

I don't wanna start talking about religion again (I do that much too often already), but I must say that my outlook on life would be very bleak if I did not have the hope that death will be eventually completely defeated*

edited 23rd Nov '11 2:10:36 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I have had a lot of experience with death. But that hasn't effected my moods about it. I know I would react the same way for one as I would one million. I'm not phased, even if it's someone I dearly love. But then again, I maintain this attitude for the majority of my life and encounters.

I think the important thing is self awareness. If you know yourself well, you know if your feelings are healthy or not. Don't let others tell you how you feel.

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

Yeah, my acceptance of death would really suck if I didn't believe in an afterlife.

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My instinctive reaction to death tends to be mostly wrath.

I mean, take for example my grandpa, who died a few years ago (I think I mentioned him already in this forum a couple of times). From an objective point of view, it could have been worse — he died quickly and painlessly, and he was getting old, and his life was not unpleasant for the most part. Many people have had it far, far worse than he did.

I liked him — he was perhaps my favorite relative — but that's not the point.

The point is that his death hurt my grandma. Badly.

And absolutely nothing, in Earth or in Heaven or in Hell, gets away with hurting a relative of mine like that. Nothing.

edited 23rd Nov '11 2:24:22 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

This post became a wall of text, so I won't blame anyone for skipping it. I think there's some poetry in there, and I hope there are some ideas that won't have occurred to all of you who do choose to read it. I enjoyed writing this, but I didn't actually make any new discoveries while thinking about this, so now I'm even more certain that on an intelligent level, I've settled this matter in a way that my current facilities cannot and don't need or wish to improve.

At the risk of sounding grim, I'm going to utter a statement that can be mightily misunderstood and then I'll try and dig a little deeper into it. Let's see how this goes:

Not only do I accept death as a fact of life, I embrace it.

Phew.

I like to dig myself deep before I climb back out again, because that way I can go with more elaboration through the whole journey that the train of thought must take to arrive at the position I'm trying to explain, so as not to just state my opinion or belief and have people trying to work their way around the possibly thick walls of ambiguity, controversy, or miscommunication that might come with the statement expressed in the form of a brief utterance.

What I mean by embracing death is not wishing for it or wishing for the death of anyone who wants to live, or anyone with obvious potential for future happiness and fulfillment despite a present lack of will to live (I am, of course, referring to people in unbearable states of anguish, especially those who are depressed; but with the distinction that I don't wish to impose life on those who have no likely hope of meaning or happiness again.)

Instead, I embrace death as a feature of life. The temporary nature of life is not only necessary, both by design and because life without death would over-reproduce and expand to cause conditions that would ultimately force an end to even an extremely long life; but also to be desired.

Can you imagine infinity? If you answered "yes," it means you didn't understand the question because you didn't understand one of the terms in it; that term being "infinity." If you were to live forever*

, you would experience everything you could care to imagine, first in the realm of the possible, and then, via virtual reality (access to which is trivially easy if you're to live forever and can thus wait for or indeed develop it for indefinite periods of time,) impossible.

(As a side note, what kinds of physically impossible experiences would feel meaningful to us is an interesting question. Spacial and temporal objects in whatever amount of dimensions or other conditions you can or cannot imagine might sound like a lot of fun, but most of it would be so incomprehensible as to not have any impact at all.)

So you experience everything you could ever hope to imagine, first the pleasant stuff over and over again, and then the unpleasant stuff just for the novelty. Then you would do all of that all over again. Say it takes 100 000 years to experience everything meaningful that is significantly distinct from everything else, so you're not just repeating the same experience with a little twist.

A 100 000 years is an unbearably short time. If you stretch your arm and imagine the history of life on Earth as a line from your shoulder to the ends of your fingernails, with just one stroke of the file, you could shave the entire history of civilisation off from your fingernail.

Compare that to infinity, which goes on forever. Can you imagine it now? Of course you can't.

So I hope I've established that meaningful experience is impossible to stretch over an infinity. (Unless you manage to develop a machine that cuts off a part of your personality from your memory and places you in a simulation, where you can experience things all over again without being bored with them.) If I haven't established it yet, don't worry; now that I'm amending parts of this post before posting it, I know that I'll come back to that soon.

Freddie Mercury sings us the question: "Who wants to live forever?" Not me.

OK, so let's take a look at why our experiences are meaningful at all. It's because of the impact that they have on us. There is no emotional or intellectual impact of something that's been felt very many times before. I dare say there wasn't ever a person who died who had experienced everything that would've meant anything to them, but with thousands upon thousands of years of life imposed on a person, I'd say they probably would want to exit life.

Sam Harris points out that for every parent, there's a time when they pick up their child for the last time. Thing is, (barring truly extraordinary circumstances,) they don't know it's the last time. There will come a time when they'll pick up their child, and the next time doesn't come, and they won't remember the last time because they didn't attach any particular significance to it when they did it.

It is that unique nature of each moment, with its uniqueness granted by its passing nature, that makes our experiences so meaningful. Everything comes and goes, and if it didn't go away, it would become mundane and meaningless.

So if I were to live for a very long time, I would certainly hope to end it at some point, and preferably long before it reaches the point where years go by without anything having an awakening impact on me, either intellectually or emotionally. It just wouldn't be worth the wait.

When you experience something new, something meaningful, something with an impact on you, you grow as a person. You grow emotionally or you grow intellectually. (Or, if the experience is very negative in some ways, you might instead lose something of yourself, but I'd still argue that at least that's change.) When you stop changing and settle into a permanent mental and emotional state, everything is just white noise. Nothing in there.

Now, surely our close ones could have experienced more and participated in more of our experiences, but now that you've already accepted that death is theoretically desirable in some cases (preferable both to meaningless or entirely unpleasant life, imposed by real conditions such as mental diseases or a slow, torturing death in some accident, or to infinite life, which in any case is impossible,) you're just going to have to adjust the greatest possible happiness you can imagine (average life expectancy of hundreds or thousands of years, depending on your preferences) to the reality of the world, and you'll find that we've actually got a pretty good trade: we come about without any imput from us, and we get to ride this wonderful magical mystery tour of life. Life is short, but that is part of the reason why our emotions feel so large and our thoughts so important.

Is it too short? Well, for people who get to live well past the age of 50 or so, I don't think so. You have to take into account the effect that aging has on the brain. If your brain deteriorates, you lose some of your memory, and you lose some of your ability to have meaningful experience (by losing some faculties of your mind without which some experiences are inaccessible.)

As you accumulate more memories, unless you forget them, the space of possible new experiences shrinks, though I would never claim that it's possible to explore a sufficient share of that space with a healthy mind in just a few centuries that life would be boring. But your mind isn't equipped to be able to have meaningful experiences for such a long time, though we don't know what future medical advances await.

In a century, you get to experience so many different kinds of things without excessive repetition (assuming that you manage to keep your mind healthy and curious, and that you're in a position where you can pursue your interests) that you'll never be too bored to live. But a couple of centuries more, and I'd argue that you might really wish for it all to end before the wonders of the universe finally do get boring. A half a century and a couple of decades, and everything that'll have made your mind dance will feel larger than the life you had, and I think that's where you're so far ahead in the game of life that I don't know why you should fear death, and most people actually don't at that stage. Sure, you could've seen more, thought more and done more, but what you had was magic. It was unique, and it was special, and if it ever got repetitive, well, you won't remember those bits.

I don't believe in life after death, so that's a huge comfort for me, as it completely removes all fear of death except for the experience itself. No matter how much agony it brings me to think of the emotional asphyxiation that my passing will bring to those who hold me dear, even that will be over for me when my consciousness loses its ability to think or feel about it. I won't be sad for them because nothing will remain that could experience grief; and whatever I lose at the moment I die, after I'm gone there will be nothing lost for me, because there won't be a me to know what's gone. It's not emptiness; it's not even that. It's not dark and silent, because there's nothing to which it could be dark and silent. It won't be anything. It won't be. I won't be.*

That's why I think it's a good idea to try and comfort someone who's passing. It's their last experience, so there would be no point in having that person worry about the world they're leaving behind, or anything, anything thereof. If there's only time for one more experience, let it be a warm hand holding yours, a smile, an encouraging word, or an expression of love.

* Someone, though I don't know who, with the same approach to this question as me has come up with this pearl: "What was it like for you before you were conceived? That's what it'll be like after you die." That's just a brilliant way of putting it. To put it, then, in my own words (which I'm inventing now,)

Instead of everything ceasing to be from my perspective, my perspective will cease to be anything.

edited 23rd Nov '11 3:24:19 PM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

No. But I cannot imagine tomorrow either. Not truly.

Still, I do desire that a tomorrow exists for me. And tomorrow, I am pretty sure that I will desire the same. And so on.

But I agree, true eternity is incompatible with the nature of the universe, as it is now. Whatever happens, there is only a finite number of state configurations that a human brain can assume — if you go on for long enough, you will get stuck into some sort of loop, that is truly inevitable (basically, what I am saying is that the Pumping Lemma holds for human brains just as for any other finite state machine).

But in my opinion, this just means that the universe — and, by extension, myself — is not what it should be.

EDIT:

That was Mark Twain, if I am not mistaken. I don't remember the exact wording; but he said something about he having no reason for fearing death — after all, he had been dead for thousands of years before being born, and he did not recall it hurting in the least.

edited 23rd Nov '11 3:23:26 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

I've heard the quote with the appropriate indication of its origin any number of times, but I still fail to recall who it was that said it first. It really does sound like Mark Twain.

Since you acknowledge that an infinity of tomorrows would result in most of them being just white noise for all senses and the mind, with no meaning in anything, it seems to me that you desire that there is meaning in each tomorrow, and that meaning would never end.

I personally don't wish that it were so. I'm content - and in fact I'm more than that; indeed, I'm happy - with what we get, and if I die tomorrow, assuming that I'll have a few moments to think this a and feel a feeling, I'll be happy that I had what I had. I'll be happy that the Universe gave rise to mechanisms capable of giving rise to a perspective that could experience things and attach meaning to what it experienced, both internally and externally. It is simply such a wonderful thing that I was that I can't* be sorry that I won't be.

*Not "shouldn't", can't. Can not.

EDIT: Here's the quote; according to Wikiquote, it's in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, so that alone is reason enough that I would've been exposed to it dozens of times (as Dawkins often says the same things in his lectures that he does in his books.)

The person who said/wrote it was, indeed, Mark Twain.

What a typo! Granted, it's only 2 keys away, but because it's a real word, the spellchecker didn't spot it.

edited 11th Dec '11 7:16:49 PM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Mark Train?

This is a signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

edited 24th Nov '11 5:09:04 PM by joeyjojo

hashtagsarestupid

Both fearing and not fearing death are perfectly natural. Which happens with you is more or less totally dependent on what kind of person you are.

Likewise your reaction to death is much the same. I feel that most statements to the contrary are generalizations.

edited 24th Nov '11 9:48:26 PM by BlixtySlycat

go ahead and do every stupid thing you can imagine

I’ve always been pretty susceptible to the emotions surrounding death, and I know for a fact that my grandmother never recovered from my uncle’s death. My grandfather died about seven weeks ago, and only my mom and sister reacted at all (and he’s my dad’s father, too, not my mom’s). Everyone else just kind of…didn’t react. It’s possible that they just didn’t show it (we’re all very emotionally shut down), but I know for a fact that I had no reaction. And I sincerely don’t think my grandmother did either. My mom couldn’t quite understand how no one seemed to notice. And it was…surreal. At the funeral, nobody in the immediate family cried. And for the record, my grandfather was a wonderful person, so it wasn’t because we were glad to see him go. He was in our guest bedroom when he finally passed, and my father didn’t seem to have any reaction either, other than to start making funeral arrangements.

I don’t know why that happened. But I guess I’m just saying that I was surprised by my lack of reaction, like you were. I understand why you’re distressed that you felt nothing; it’s bizarre and feels unnatural. I can’t think of any sufficient explanation, so I’ve just sort of accepted it.

And if I claim to be a wise man, well, it surely means that I don't know.

I wish I could have such a reaction.

I have such an overwhelming fear of death of anyone I know it keeps me up at night. When my cat died, my first actual death of anything I knew, I was catatonic for like a week. Its been about 10 months and I still cry about just thinking about it.

And I know if anything were to happen to my parents my life would end right there.

edited 24th Nov '11 11:42:20 PM by Thorn14

Everyone has different reactions to different deaths. I cried when our pet cat died and so did I when my grandfather died. Yet, numerous other funerals, where person I have know(or not) has died, I have more or less felt nothing. When my grandmother died, I really didn't feel that much, just kinda disappointed that she had died. Not sad or something, just.. .disappointed.

Accepting death is good thing, if you can't accept death then you can't really live. One thing that makes life worth is knowing that it will end and that what you have experiences ment something.

I'm not sure how worth follows from impermanence; in fact, I suspect beliefs like that to be more of a coping mechanism, or rationalization, than any sort of accurate statement on reality.

edited 25th Nov '11 1:43:38 AM by MRDA1981

Enjoy the Inferno...

My vast post above goes some way to explaining that.

Basically, experience is only meaningful to us if it isn't mundane, and if life were to go on forever, everything would feel mundane eventually. Since life is short, many kinds of experience are unique and feel larger than life, as something that happens in such a short time will feel disproportionately important. If life were to be extended indefinitely, even larger experiences like that would feel very small in comparison to the entire duration of one's life.

I don't think I'm getting this through properly with such a short post as this, so if you want to go deeper into this, read my megapost above.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Best Of explained it better than me, go read that one. Basicly, if you can live forever, nothign you do has any meaning since... well, you live forever and as such, no matter you do, no matter what you do it has no meaning. Drop one study to do another? Doesn't matter, since you live forever you can learn it whenever you want. Experience mean nothing, since you live forever and as such, you can pretty much experience everything. With limited lifespan, you only have limited time to experience something, which makes it count. When you die, you can happily say for example "I climbed to Mount Everest!". Not everyone can do it. Yet, if you were to live forever, it's just somethign you could do to pass time, not soemthign you do to prove you could do it.

All that assumes that everything you want to do will always be available. Even if you're permanent, the things you'd want to experience might not be.

Enjoy the Inferno...

Of course there are some things you can't really expect to experience for real when you live forever; the laws of physics might prevent you from, say, dancing in 118 dimensions or travelling backwards in time. If you have forever, however, you can make computers as large as galaxies that can simulate for you anything you want. Anything. (I covered this in my huge post, BTW.)

Then there's another issue.

EDIT: Wow. Looking at this now, several hours after writing it, I notice once again how huge my posts become without me noticing. Terribly sorry, though I'm fairly sure I couldn't have said any of this with fewer words than I did without losing something.

Imagine a finite line. It's your life. Every experience you have is represented as a bulge in the line - so its' not a straight line, but a graph with all kinds of mountains and saw edges and what not.

When you're really young, even small experiences like bouncing a ball will appear huge on your line, because relative to everything else, to you subjectively it'll be among the top-10 biggest experiences ever, in terms of personal intellectual and/or emotional impact on you.

So if you're looking at a really short line, whatever spikes there are are really high. In fact, the intensity of a personally significant experience can climb so high that the length of the upward climb is larger than the horizontal length of your life; it's "larger than life."

OK. Now, the longer you live, the more experiences you have, both mundane and important. So bouncing the ball, which once was so high as to compete with the length of your life, will become smaller and smaller, and thus less and less important, as time goes by. In other words, the volume (so to speak) of the meaning that we attach to any given experience is determined by its emotional and intellectual impact compared to our whole life.

Another thing that comes into this is the distinction between short-term and long-term memory. Basically, the entire long line is your long-term memory, though most of it will be a blur. Then there's the short-term memory, which is the point that you're living right now and a couple of hours (or maybe a day) before that. Then you've got less recent experiences stretching back a couple of weeks or so, but those are already getting blurry.

One way for an experience to be meaningful is that it stands out distinctly in the line that is your short-term memory. If it's really big compared to that, but still pretty small compared to your whole life, it'll still feel important, but its importance will decrease as time goes by and it settles into your long-term memory in a compressed form (meaning that most of the details will be forgotten.)

That kind of goes for the ball, too, so I'll try to elaborate on it here instead of going back and changing the earlier paragraph. That way, you can follow my train of thought, which may or may not be helpful. So, the ball was really important, right? Well, compared to all of the sensations of birth (what a traumatic experience!) it's nothing. But you don't remember your birth in any kind of detail; your brain isn't capable of storing such precise memories at that point. Still, compared to the birth, bouncing a ball is nothing. But bouncing a ball is very, very big in such a short life and especially such a short short-term memory. For the 10-year-old you, however no distinct memory of a particular time you bounced a ball will be stored.

Eventually, you're gonna forget that ball. What once was the defining experience of your life will have evaporated from your memory, with only a very faint print left - something like "I've got this faint feeling that I learned something about the world (that bouncy objects bounce and that they'll settle down eventually) by doing something fun."

A very important event will be saved almost as-is from your short-term memory to the long-term one, and those are the defining moments of your life, the kind that you can't expect to get every year.

If you were to live forever, sure, you'd have huge events. But they would pale in comparison to your whole life, and as your life gets saturated, even very significant events in the short-term will feel like white noise because of the sheer volume of experience you'll be carrying in your history. If you were to live for centuries, the birth of your first child would feel like a mid-sized event compared to the whole volume of your life. You'd still remember it, but it wouldn't really feel like such a huge deal, and as more centuries go by, it'd become like bouncing the ball.

The longer you live, the more impact would be needed for an experience to stand out. Eventually, as I said, everything, including your most precious memories, would be white noise.

But fortunately, you'll never have to go there. You'll die long before you'll have to compare centuries of experience to the birth of your child. If you were to live forever, the birth of your child would be as important as bouncing the ball was to the 10-year-old you. It'll be a vague feeling of something sensational in your past, but you won't be able to return to that moment because there's simply so much stuff between that moment and now.

I hope I managed to get the point across now. (I'm glad I wrote this post despite my girlfriend pestering me for attention, because this helped me clear up this issue for myself.)

edited 25th Nov '11 10:45:07 AM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Who cares about experiences? The appeal of infinite life is not in the amount of things you could experience, but in being able to watch the progress of history, evolution and so on. Immortality is awesome because you'd be able to see the whole story instead of a tiny fraction of it.

As for the topic, my grandma died in August and I felt nothing. She was a huge part of my childhood, but I had not seen her for years, and so she had become pretty much a stranger. I found her death more weird than sad, since she always struck me as the sort of a person who'd live to a hundred.

edited 26th Nov '11 3:00:12 PM by fanty

I have to say, "the march of history" is far, far, far less interesting when you're actually living through it, as compared to viewing it from posteritiy.

You can't even write racist abuse in excrement on somebody's car without the politically correct brigade jumping down your throat!

Not the case for me. Keeping up with latest developments of Arab Spring has been, so far, for me, even more entertaining than reading about/listening to lectures about/watching documentaries about history. Probably because it all comes in manageable chunks.