how should one face death? the two common/standard answers i see are to ignore death entirely, which i think is the atheistic standard, with doctors avoiding being frank about a patient's death and schools never really bringing it up, and few people thinking about the horror of nursing homes and how to live your life such that you are never sentenced to one.
the other answer is faith in an immortal soul of some sort, whether that be through some notion of heaven or some notion of reincarnation or something else entirely.
the first is obviously stupid, and the second to me seems irrational. there is never evidence for such a thing, and it doesn't really even confront the problem. it feels like making up the most direct story that can negate the fear rather than coming to terms with it. also, i for one think the concepts of "immortal" and "eternal" are meaningless.
I'm skeptical of orienting your life toward biological propagation, many descendants, or fame and glory *as such.* All of those turn to dust after enough time, and anyone who is striving for immortality is really striving for 10,000 years of remembrance at most. Even if your name survives to be a household term, that's no different from a gravestone.
All attempts at immortality do not stack up against the forces of time. There's no point living toward it.
Eternity is a different matter. Live for the kingdom that is not of this Earth, and if your preparation for it means you must embrace meekness, poverty, strength, or wealth... then so be it. Those are the roles we are assigned to live through and we will be judged by whether we perform or desert them.
The tough part is disambiguating the signal from the noise, and coming to know what we already are. I think the best way to practice that is to constantly visualize the many forms by which you could die. Your preferred exit suggests a lot about your caste.
Replying to 471, it's likely impossible to imagine death before dishonor outside of the context of protecting one's friends and family. Everything else we are defined by culturally is devoid of any substance that would make us cling to it so viscerally and instinctually, including our own honor. Perhaps that cynicism is the right thing to believe at a point in time when concepts worth preserving no longer serve man, and instead modern man is instrumentalized to serve abstractions.
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
>anyone who is striving for immortality is really striving for 10,000 years of remembrance at most. Even if your name survives to be a household term, that's no different from a gravestone.
Yes, which is why eternal fame in the less mortal interpretation, having done something great that stands on its own from a universal perspective regardless of consequences, is the ultimate test. Everything dies in the heat death, but if God cracked the whole time-crystal of the universe open and asked "what cool things happened in here", would he find you and say "that was well done"?
>All attempts at immortality do not stack up against the forces of time. There's no point living toward it.
But longevity allows for playing big games. That the mud fish that grew legs eventually spawned Werner von Braun is to his eternal credit, even if the sun blew up tomorrow.
>Live for the kingdom that is not of this Earth, and if your preparation for it means you must embrace meekness, poverty, strength, or wealth... then so be it.
These are all fictions. What kingdom is not of this earth? Why does that matter? Why should we suppose that failing in this world is the key to some other world we know nothing of? I invoke a metaphorical God looking for interesting and well-done things in our world, but we can verify with our own eyes that such things exist and are valuable and interesting. We need not suppose that God (or whoever else we might choose to justify ourselves to) has some whole other value system that is the opposite of this world.
The only reason anyone would come up with or believe this crap is because they were a failed form of life, rejected by this world, rejected by God, but needing to cope and imagine that the world they resent is somehow false and that there is some big rock candy mountain somewhere else where hobos are better esteemed.
>Live for the kingdom that is not of this Earth, and if your preparation for it means you must embrace meekness, poverty, strength, or wealth... then so be it.
Yes. How shall we spend our lives and deaths is the question.
The second answer is correct. There is evidence of it. You should smoke DMT and you will realize that it is possible to be a conscious soul without human identity, memory, emotions, or experience of spacetime. When you die, your brain releases a megadose of DMT and thus immediately prior to physiological death you enter a subjective space of infinite time that splits off from the "main" linear timeline, where your experiences depend on whether you died in a good or bad mental state, which you will experience in its pure state unadulterated by your hormones or emotions or rationalizations. Therefore when you die you will in fact experience an ageless and emotionless eternity. Everyone who has ever died is in fact still experiencing infinite consciousness without spacetime on branching subjective timelines in our past.
Now consider that the defining feature of DMT is directly interfacing telepathically with other conscious entities. So it is also possible to experience other consciousnesses in this infinite subjective space.
Some people tell me that God wouldn't let you preview the supernatural infinite by smoking chemicals out of a crackpipe. But God's only son was a carpenter who got spit on and crucified by a mob of disgusting peasants. The Holy Grail is not adorned with gems. So why not?
Counterpoint, DMT is gay. You would not allow your body to be penetrated (colloquially, fscked), neither ought you allow your mind - much less should you bugchase such an experience.
There are interesting correlations between the reported phenomenology of DMT trips and Near-Death Experiences, but the biosynthetic production capacity of the pineal gland appears sub-clinical for the kind of subjective eternal dreamtime being proposed. A balanced discussion of the state of research may be found here: https://icpr-conference.com/the-science-and-folklore-of-dmt/
Finally, orienting your entire life, spent making and doing and acting in the real world, in service to a final wireheaded hallucination, is little more than a betrayal of principles.
>The point is that there is rational material evidence for experiencing supernatural phenomena that defy ordinary rules of spacetime.
Subjective violations are not objective scientific demonstrations of violation.
>anti-materialist cope
None of this is even suggestive of the non-subjective reality of the supernatural. Yes consciousness is mysterious, but it's all phenomena of the subjective, which has few natural limits and the extremes of which say little about reality.
the interpretation of phenomena is so so broad. you see this in meditation circles where some people will say stupid shit like "there is no self" or "i am just conscious awareness/an instance of subjectivity" and some people give lengthier, more technical, and more sane accounts. It's pretty clear that you should expect interpretation of DMT trips to be mostly completely retarded. That would need some pretty serious philosophical skill to treat well.
psychedelics mostly function to crank up one's sense of meaningfulness while disrupting ones mental capacities, and so are biased towards creating delusions
>>476 >Everything dies in the heat death, but if God cracked the whole time-crystal of the universe open and asked "what cool things happened in here", would he find you and say "that was well done"?
I think this is heuristically a good question to ask but it also seems unsatisfying to me because it is taking an eternalist view from nowhere perspective as well, so to live your life this way (rather than treating it as an offhand heuristic) is to still serve an abstraction.
A purely pragmatic approach, which feels very incomplete, is just to treat your death as some event in this world which you are somewhat responsible for, and is connected to all sorts of other things in this world. So to die well is to die in a way which is as good for the world that you die in as your death can be.
>>499 The reason I think it's appropriate to end up taking the eternal perspective is that from the local immediate perspective, there is this ungrounded chain of "why" questions. Sure I want to eat, fuck, fight, build, own, etc, but by what logic do I resolve conflicts between those instincts? I have to know why I'm doing those things. When I think of that I find that I settle on a narrative of my life, which for me includes understanding those as subordinate goals to the higher goal of a certain kind of life including success and reproduction. Why do I care about that? Well it seems to be baked into the universe that the proliferation and development of life is favored, naturally considered "good" in some way. There is an implied imperative there "live!". What kind of life? Well, the kind that seems most compelling to me is the kind that is impressive as a natural phenomenon, the same way we are impressed by big waves, ice-carved mountains, and volcanoes. Genghis Khan or von Braun are impressive in this way. Why should I trust that instinct? What has it got to do with the higher narrative? Well I see this resonance with powerful life, impressive life, and worldly successful life. I see that the universe has been created in some sense to bring this kind of stuff forth. I understand that as a purpose for it all. If not the purpose of creation, then one I can well understand to suggest itself to anyone considering the question of value. So the eternal perspective is both a highly developed elaboration of my immediate perspective, and the ultimate cause and purpose of my immediate perspective. We are formed in the image of God, so to speak.
There is always a leap of faith even about simple matters like induction. None of this stuff is deductively provable, but at the same time it seems inescapable that there be some such narrative that by combination of reason and feeling we understand to be the most plausible value-picture. For me, this is what it looks like. I suspect this (reflective equilibrium on some form of self-confident will-to-power) is true of almost all viable minds, the same way a leap of faith on induction is the reflective equilibrium. There are of course different strategies to achieve life, additional leaps of faith required to get anywhere real, and that's where the fun is. We need not only this general picture but also particular revelation to give us life.
>>494 All experience is necessarily subjective. The objective is a hallucination of the subjective experience. Your subjective experience is real and you should take it very seriously, including the reality of your own consciousness and your ability to experience supernatural phenomena like dreams or non-spacetime reality under the influence of DMT.
>>519 so when my grandmother's lungs filled with fluid and suffocated due to complications with her declining health, she did not die? there was no body to bury? this is nonsense.
>Since time is infinite, eventually subjective experience will begin again this is a nonsensical leap in logic. it does not even make sense to ask about whether or not subjective experience will begin again or not because it is a meaningless question to ask. imagining waking up or being born while attempting to bracket all the memories you have now does not constitute an understanding of your subjective experience beginning again.
and that's to put aside the fact that even if it makes sense to say that time is infinite (check your philosophy of math on that one), not all things happen within a given infinity. consider a function which takes a natural number n as input and outputs 1 if n<82, and 0 otherwise. As a binary sequence (by iterating over the natural numbers as inputs), this will produce 1s up until the 82th input, where it will then start producing 0s. it will never produce a 1 again. now consider if this function is "years since your birth in which you are alive"
Consciousness is pre-paradigmatic, but I think the winning move is to treat it as something that *could have* a paradigm in the future. I think the claim “not all experiences have the character of being experienced” is mystical/obscurant in a bad way.
In general I don’t think there’s a problem turning an experience into an object; it’s like turning the electromagnetic field into an object. No big paradoxes, just doing normal science on something that traditionally hasn’t been under science’s purview. There’s also no direct objective correspondence between experience and reality, only systematic correlations.
>In general I don’t think there’s a problem turning an experience into an object; it’s like turning the electromagnetic field into an object. No big paradoxes, just doing normal science on something that traditionally hasn’t been under science’s purview. There’s also no direct objective correspondence between experience and reality, only systematic correlations.
what about actually addressing all the problems i outlined? just treating them as objects in a sort of broad grammatical sense is fine, like in the way we can treat a baseball game as an object even if it is nothing like an object in the sense that a baseball or a photograph is an object. the problem is treating them as an object in the second narrower sense, something like a photograph, something which is separated from the objects of the experience, and then placing that object in the mind.
then in order for any notion of reality to make sense, in order for it to be meaningful to ever say "this is a knife," there needs to be something for these experiences to correspond or refer to, whether that be "directly" or "systemically". but everything, all that we thought was the world, is now subsumed into these mental objects of experiences. there is nothing left for them to be about.
to put it in more mathematical logic terms, any theory which has a term "experiences" and a term "reality" which are related by a "correspondence" relationship has no models when "experiences" is interpreted as your experiences, so such a model cannot be applied to yourself, so it is literally without meaning when you try to use it to understand yourself.
the correct understanding of experience sees the phrase "there is no direct objective correspondence between experience and reality" as nonsensical as "there is no direct objective correspondence a my finger and my hand". the objective knife in the world, in reality, is contained within my experience, because my experience is an event in the world involving me and the knife, not some private mental object
>The problem with this is that in your account, reality is a model, so it is in your mind, so this is a form of solipsism.
No this is stupid. Obviously "reality" is an idea that we are talking about so is in our minds. But this is not solipsism. Solipsism is when the referent itself is supposed to be in the mind too. Reality itself is not in the mind, but is posited by the model which is in the mind. The mind is in reality. We experience reality fairly closely most of the time.
You don't need any talk of photons to notice that your experiences are consistent with each other. I see the dog on day 1, and then on day 2 it's the same dog. Why? Because that's how the dog is; it doesn't change much. That's how we usually experience things. But sometimes you dream that the dog has a blue tentacle, then wake up and realize that wasn't real, but a dream. Or you realize someone has been tricking you and the dog actually doesn't live here. Thus you have distinguished between belief and reality. This is necessary.
The idea that these things are in my mind (beliefs, models, words) is convention. We conventionally label the subjective part that can be mistaken about what is real as "the mind". Do you want to challenge this idea?
>>558 I should have made the thesis of the distinction more clear. The distinction is between concepts and ideas, with concepts not being in the mind and ideas being in the mind.
>>560 Concepts not being in the mind is a whole other level of claim. Let's unpack. I think what you mean is that we have this reflective imaginary arena where we can see things in the mind's eye (like a knife) and do simple computations with our concepts (eg "imagine dropping the knife point down on your foot. What happens?"), and you are calling this thing the "mind". Concepts are not *in* this thing, though we use them to construct and interpret what is in this thing. I agree with all that.
But where are the concepts then? In particular how do they relate to reality? It's hard to find consistency issues with simple operational concepts like those we have for knives, but if we're learning a tricky skill like kick-flipping a skateboard, then we can. I can imagine kick flipping a skateboard, I may even know the theory and can visualize my feet doing the motion, but then I go and try it and I realize that no, I can't do it that way. My concepts were mistaken. That was just in my mind. In reality, you have to do this other little sub-kick at the right time.
I can parse this inconsistency in various ways. One way is like you say, excluding the action-concepts from the mind. "I/my feet don't have this skill" as a direct statement of non-mind reality. But one could also say "the action concepts/patterns themselves are knowledge (usually supposed to be mental and in-the-mind) that I have to learn". For all I know the introspection geeks are right and you can re-engineer your concepts as/with ideas in the mind. There is no clear and hard border between the mental and the physical, it's more like which direction you're coming at it from. The first statement, of actually-existing skill, comes at it from the reality end. The second, of knowledge, comes at it from the mind end. Those two lenses overlap.
Ideas vs concepts is a useful distinction, but these divisions are not particularly hard, given that the mind is (we suppose) embodied in reality and reality is often within our direct mental experience.
I think when i was a bugman atheist I was secretly terrified of death, that was the root cause of extropianism/transhumanism/radical life extensionism... it's just fear of death.
After becoming religious, my own mortality does not really concern me that much. "Momento Mori," Remember that you are going to die. I pray, I receive the sacraments, I share my metaphysical beliefs with my children, and one day I will die. I hope to go to heaven. That's it. That's how I "face death"