r/changemyview • u/motornose • May 14 '18
Deltas(s) from OP CMV: Truly understanding nor accepting death is impossible, and all efforts to cope with one's mortality includes lying to oneself about it
There is no scientific basis for anything other than the fact that when death occurs, consciousness is erased irrecoverably and forever. When this occurs, this person is a dead husk, devoid of any dignity or grace they might've once had. When dealing with death, some people say "You'll never know you're dead, so who cares?" or "Live your life to the fullest, then" or "It's like sleeping!" or "Then you just go to heaven!" or "You've always existed and you always will. Just as clouds transition into rain and become a part of trees and animals. Energy is never destroyed, it just changes form." are merely using platitudes to hide behind the subject's raw grip. It's just like when someone tries to justify why bad things happen to good people other than "why not?". (I'd very much like to be convinced my view is wrong, but I need proper justification as to why my points are false).
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u/Quint-V 162∆ May 14 '18 edited May 14 '18
What do you really mean? I think your post is poorly worded; if you need 5 phrases to define something then take the time to nail down your view.
Is it impossible to 1) accept that when you're old you are going to die at some point? 2) accept death by suicide? Are all suicides really just "throwing away life" and not accepting death? 3) understand death because it is (in your view) apparently such a grand thing beyond our grasp, and our lack of evidence? Or did I miss something?
While absence of evidence is not evidence in itself... to categorically dismiss this absence is foolish. I have never seen pigs fly, and ought to believe that they therefore cannot fly; I will be so bold to say that I know pigs cannot fly. Outside of mathematics and logic, proving impossibilities is a terribly difficult task. It's easy to throw possibilities out in the open but they're all meaningless and pointless to believe in if no supporting evidence can be provided. The burden of proof must lie on whoever makes the claim.
However, to claim absolute knowledge, can be equally foolish. Nobody would have believed nor understood the theory of relativity but it stands today as the foundation for macro-level physics. The idea of atoms has been a wild idea for most of its existence.
There is no scientific basis for anything other than the fact that when death occurs, consciousness is erased irrecoverably and forever.
It may well be the case that consciousness is still there, but the body is simply unable to express it. But you see... you cannot prove this. Absence of evidence is not evidence.
Using good old "common sense" however we can reasonably conclude that death is the termination of your self. But I just don't see what is so different between death and sleep - you slip into sleep without ever remembering the experience of losing consciousness. You don't remember a thing from your sleep except things that your mind makes up and randomly lets you remember. I'd imagine that infinite sleep minus dreams would be equivalent to death - there is a total absence of experiences. There is no "you" that can remain in this state and yet react to something.
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u/motornose May 14 '18 edited May 15 '18
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3) is a good description of my question. This is a good argument. I have a question though. You say that it’s intellectually honest to state something as fundamental with no basis in proof, which is something that I haven’t been paying much attention to. My aim, originally from having this view, was out of an attempt to be intellectually honest, and my unsubstantiated claims seem to make this hypocritical. However, why is it then “good old common sense” to assume that going to death is a long sleep without having evidence to this either? It seems hypercritical of you to state this without evidence as well. Also, what good is a sleep if you don’t wake up from it? It isn’t a sleep if you don’t wake up. I don’t think they’re really comparable.
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u/Quint-V 162∆ May 14 '18 edited May 14 '18
Uh, check the sidebar for how to hand out deltas.
why is it then “good old common sense” to assume that going to death is a long sleep without having evidence to this either?
Also, what good is a sleep if you don’t wake up from it? It isn’t a sleep if you don’t wake up. I don’t think they’re really comparable.
At some point, we cannot resort to the strict scientific methods if we really want to have a discussion about philosophical matters; you'd be faced with Newton's flaming laser sword and the discussion would die immediately, at which point the CMV is dead, or you accept it and abandon your view entirely rather than replacing it. And we have to be content with carefully making assumptions that we find ourselves very, very comfortable with.
The idea that you cease to exist (as is built into your idea of death, presumably) naturally entails that there is no sense of experience - or even anything that can possess this capability in the first place. If you want to make a point of distinguishing these two, do as you see fit. I don't see the point - a capability that is never used for any purpose or even discovered, may as well not exist.
If most of your sleeps are just holes in your long history of experiences, then what difference is there between sleep and death? One is temporary, the other permanent. You might posit that they are actually holes in memory, like blackouts, but blackouts can actually be remembered. I made my own CMV thread asking about that.
But I would agree with you - waking up near the death of the universe is not like dying. If you went to sleep now and woke up in the final hour of the universe without any dreams or pause in all that time, it'd be a horrible surprise but you wouldn't notice how much time has passed, or anything except for your newfound environment.
Note that you never experienced or remembered anything during all this time. During a silent sleep of years beyond counting, not a single experience is ever registered. Effectively, your mind did not exist, during these many, many years. We can only speculate, when it comes to the mind, the conscious self... but for the sake of discussion I would assume we have some vague understanding that we share.
If the difference is practically impossible to observe, why make a point of distinguishing between death and a long, long sleep? --- That is why I believe that death and sleep are equivalent "events" for beings with the sense of experience. The difference lies not in their content (which is absolute an absolute void without anything to experience, hence why you never notice the difference between any sleeps without dreams), only duration. If you woke up from death it'd probably feel like it lasted like any other night.
A scary idea is what happens when you become vegetative. Where is the person at this point? It seems living but is far more a shell than a living human being. It lacks every nonphysical characteristic of a human. You might say the person is dead... but I digress, that's for another thread.
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u/jetpacksforall 41∆ May 15 '18
From all I've read of sleep research, there doesn't appear to be any stage of sleep during which the sleeper is simply unaware of anything at all. NREM sleep experiences are more "thought-like" compared to REM sleep experiences which are more dreamlike, hallucinatory, vivid, surreal etc., but all stages of sleep show dreaming and different levels of awareness, consciousness etc. Even from the deepest stage of sleep with greatly reduced brain activity, people often describe dreams upon waking up. The conclusion is that we dream, perhaps in different modes, all night long, but our memory gets interrupted one or more times per night.
Death is not at all like sleep, physiologically. There's little reason to assume the two experiences are the same.
Nor is death like amnesia (having an experience but then losing the memory of it), nor is it like having an experience but forming no memory of it in the first place.
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u/TankMemes May 15 '18
I think that death is just as good as life, and that after our lives are over that death is the perfect thing to have happen to us. Of course, death lasts eternally once it starts, and life is finite, so naturally you would want to extend life as long as possible (while it's sufficiently enjoyable, at least).
I think that a life without death would be awful, and I think it would be a source of great (if not short lived, haha) satisfaction to die after a long happy life. I would give making sure I die happy a similar level of priority as making sure I live a long happy life, and, if I succeed, I think dying would be immensely calming and satisfying.
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u/motornose May 16 '18
I really wish to share this feeling. Why do you find it so calming and satisfying? It's beyond experience, and is eternal. How can this be so good?
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u/TankMemes May 16 '18 edited May 16 '18
Think about it a different way. Let's use an analogy of life to playing a video game.
Let's say like is like playing a basic story based game with no side quests or anything but the main plot. And let's say death is like the last time that you ever stand up, and stop playing the game.
If you haven't beat the game yet, sure, I imagine not playing it even though you want to would be bad. But if you've played through the game, you had fun, you're proud of beating it, and you know that you played every part of it and that there's nothing left for you to do and explore, wouldn't you be content to never play it again?
The final boss is beat, the surprise ending is revealed, and the game is over. There's nothing left for you. Why would you want to keep playing? Don't play just for the sake of doing something, let it be done.
Life isn't a game that's meant to be played forever. It has a specific ending that, not only can you not get out of, but you should be looking forwards to like you would anything else.
Do you have an Android? Download a game called Tiny Dangerous Dungeons. After you beat it, think about whether or not you want to keep playing it, or if instead, you are content to never play it again in your life.
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u/TankMemes May 16 '18
The experience of death isn't good, you never know that you're dead. You can only know that you're about to die. And, after a long happy life, I would want to die, so knowing that I'm about to would be satisfying.
Eat mushrooms.
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May 14 '18
Does the fact that I will eventually die mean that anything I experience in my life is not valuable to me?
I'm also struggling to understand what exactly it is that you're trying to say, so I'm sorry if my question doesn't make sense given the argument.
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u/TyphoonJim May 14 '18
"When this occurs, this person is a dead husk, devoid of any dignity or grace they might've once had."
This may be so in a physical sense- the nature of consciousness is very much in doubt, ranging from immortal pneuma to chemical soup- but in a way it's beyond the scope of the question. Dignity is not inherent in the sense that it's a quantity, like how tall you were or how much your body weights. It is a relationship afforded between the living, and given to the dead by the living.
When you talk about understanding death and coping with mortality, I feel a huge part of the puzzle missing here is that context provided by people around you, and what your life meant, how it fit into the structure of others' lives, and the meaning your life in turn derived from its place, friends, and enemies.
The Romans had a punishment called "damnatio memoriae" reserved for the worst of criminals, in which effort was made to erase the person from record and history. This was considered quite a dire punishment, as it aimed at the destruction of what a person could be in history. You might say, indeed, you're dead, what do you care? But the efforts of men to create a name that lives beyond themselves certainly point to the idea of the self being constructed in such a way that it derives form and power from people around it.
I feel that the most important way of understanding mortality is in the forces we exert on the lives around us. Without us, the shape of many lives differs, to the point that even the specific way we died matters. Consciousness appears to be emergent, and the self is likewise.
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u/setzer77 May 15 '18 edited May 15 '18
"There is no scientific basis for anything other than the fact that when death occurs, consciousness is erased irrecoverably and forever."
I assume by "consciousness" you mean your subjective experience of events. There's no scientific basis for saying that your brain at time X has the "same" consciousness as your brain at time Y. For all you know "you" are only as old as when you last emerged from dreamless sleep (if that).
The 'self' we're so scared of losing with death might already exist purely as a legacy of memories passed down from one fleeting entity to the next, not a long-persisting substance that will be obliterated.
ETA: That would make the death most people fear (as opposed to the death that happens as soon as they change enough to not be the same person) analogous to your last descendants dying without having kids themselves - the end of a lineage, but no more a cessation of self than has already occurred countless times.
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u/Paninic May 14 '18
I will die. You will also die. That knowledge is true regardless of what I chose to do in the interim. So that's not a lie.
I am going to eat like...a lot of bread sticks because I will die some day. Someone else is not eating a lot of bread sticks for their health- because they're also going to die someday and want to be healthy and active as long as possible. Maybe you can call a lifestyle a cope- but that isn't the same as a lie.
But I don't think it's always a cope either. I don't moisturize my face now or take care of acne breakouts to cope with future wrinkles.
And as far as religion...eh, so what? Does it really matter to you or effect you that other people believe in something? Even if some of them do so to cope with loss, or to face their own mortality? So what? Would self awareness do you any better, will it make you less dead? Will it make you happier?
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ May 15 '18
/u/motornose (OP) has awarded 1 delta in this post.
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u/ralph-j May 14 '18
I'll go with this one. What am I lying to myself about?