There are a lot of interesting points brought up in it, but it all boils down to:
Why is death perceived as a "bad" thing?
"So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more." - Epicurus
(For the sake of discussion, set aside the notion of an afterlife. You die, you cease to exist.)
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A tier 3 Legacy deck was named after me. What have you done with your life?
I don't think Isee death as a bad thing. A thing to be mourned? Sure. A thing to be feared? Do you fear the rising sun? It happens will always happen and should be treated as such.
If an event is "bad", that means that, according to some metric, a scenario in which it occurs is considered less preferable than an otherwise-equivalent scenario in which it doesn't.
Say you could choose between dying tomorrow and not dying tomorrow. Would you find not dying preferable? Then you think death is bad.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I'm about to eat breakfast. I can choose between a bowl of cereal and a piece of toast. The bowl of cereal is preferable to me, but I don't think toast is bad. (If I were smart, I'd just eat both )
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A tier 3 Legacy deck was named after me. What have you done with your life?
Death is not bad. It's a standard component of all living things. Comes with us - like the ninja chop action.
HOW you die though, can be bad.
Everyone is going to die, fact.
Do you die of natural causes at the end of a long and fulfilled life - or is your life cut short by a crime, a disease, or tragic accident? That is what can be bad about it, but death itself is neutral, it is neither good nor bad.
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Thanks to Xenphire @ Inkfox for the amazing new sig
“Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments
are we bound to prosperity and ruin.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
If an event is "bad", that means that, according to some metric, a scenario in which it occurs is considered less preferable than an otherwise-equivalent scenario in which it doesn't.
Say you could choose between dying tomorrow and not dying tomorrow. Would you find not dying preferable? Then you think death is bad.
This is a very succinct way of putting it, and accurate.
Most of us live according to values where not-death is ordinarily preferable to death, but where some extreme circumstances can reverse this (e.g. not-death, and preventable death for 1,000,000 others so long as you die). Asking 'why' this is the case is basically an empirical question - why do we hold the values that we do? The answer is going to be some combination of sociology and biology. Asking "Should this be the case?" seems to me to be a regression - because the answer is "Well, according to my values, yes!" To make any headway we'd have to have a way of resolving which set of values is 'correct'. I don't think we ever will have that (I don't think it's a terribly meaningful thing to ask, honestly).
No death is not bad, death is just the inevitable that people don't want to face because of a the fear of what lies after death. In fact, in an odd sort of way death is a "good" thing because whenever I think of death i'm reminded of the famous line that Death of the Endless said to her mortal self
I'm about to eat breakfast. I can choose between a bowl of cereal and a piece of toast. The bowl of cereal is preferable to me, but I don't think toast is bad. (If I were smart, I'd just eat both )
It's all relative. The toast is good compared to some other food but bad compared to the cereal.
The idea that death gives life meaning is a rationalization we use to protect ourselves. Mortality really is as bad as when you first confront it in your childhood, you just learn to cope with the terror as you mature. As I said in the previous thread about why we die, death is the obliteration of a human soul. People you love and care about cease to exist, and there is no sense or purpose to it.
Now, the reason why I'm somewhat outspoken about this is that we are actually approaching a point where we can begin to talk about a solution. It wouldn't be easy, it might be beyond our ability to cooperate. But the attitude that death is somehow valuable, which was once a harmless coping mechanism, could ultimately be the most damning lie ever concocted if it prevents us from even seeing the path.
The idea that death gives life meaning is a rationalization we use to protect ourselves. Mortality really is as bad as when you first confront it in your childhood, you just learn to cope with the terror as you mature. As I said in the previous thread about why we die, death is the obliteration of a human soul. People you love and care about cease to exist, and there is no sense or purpose to it.
Now, the reason why I'm somewhat outspoken about this is that we are actually approaching a point where we can begin to talk about a solution. It wouldn't be easy, it might be beyond our ability to cooperate. But the attitude that death is somehow valuable was once a harmless coping mechanism, could ultimately be the most damning lie ever concocted if it prevents us from even seeing the path.
I don't agree with everything you've said but I agree in general that "Death gives life meaning" is a rationalization, not some profound notion.
Why would death have some power to give meaning to anything? And why do I need something external to give my life meaning? My existence today is meaningful to me whether I will die or not.
As I said in the previous thread about why we die, death is the obliteration of a human soul. People you love and care about cease to exist, and there is no sense or purpose to it.
All things eventually cease to exist, be they people, species, mountains, or stars. I don't see how this passage somehow invalidates the meaning of their existence and accomplishments.
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Why would death have some power to give meaning to anything? And why do I need something external to give my life meaning? My existence today is meaningful to me whether I will die or not.
What if you learned today that you had lost a few thousand dollars? You'd likely be angry/upset. Would you feel the same way though if you had several million dollars? How about several trillion? What if you got everything you wanted in life for free? Money is valuable because there isn't infinite, in the same way that life is made more precious because it's not infinite either.
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"Proving god exists isn't hard. Proving god is God is the tricky part" - Roommate
How can death suck for the individual, if the individual who died doesn't exist anymore? The process of dying might suck (the individual is alive) but when death comes, I can't imagine a nonexistent entity "caring" at all.
Any why are people sad about this individual's death? Is is because they don't exist anymore? If we're merely sad about the state of nonexistence, what about the time before birth? The individual didn't exist then either. Are we sad about that too?
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A tier 3 Legacy deck was named after me. What have you done with your life?
What if you learned today that you had lost a few thousand dollars? You'd likely be angry/upset. Would you feel the same way though if you had several million dollars? How about several trillion? What if you got everything you wanted in life for free? Money is valuable because there isn't infinite, in the same way that life is made more precious because it's not infinite either.
The finitude of money gives it value because money is a medium of economic exchange, and thus its function is dependent on its scarcity. Life... isn't.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
The finitude of money gives it value because money is a medium of economic exchange, and thus its function is dependent on its scarcity. Life... isn't.
True, but time is in many ways a medium of exchange. We trade time towards the same end as money, and our lives give scarcity to our own available time. Grant someone infinite life, they have infinite time. They have infinite time, the time loses its value in the same way money does.
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"Proving god exists isn't hard. Proving god is God is the tricky part" - Roommate
True, but time is in many ways a medium of exchange. We trade time towards the same end as money, and our lives give scarcity to our own available time. Grant someone infinite life, they have infinite time. They have infinite time, the time loses its value in the same way money does.
Time as you describe it is a commodity, not a medium of exchange. You're right that an abundance of a commodity drives its value down, but that's a good thing. For instance, food is a commodity. If food is abundant, then its value is low - which means that more people can buy more food. What you're saying about time is like saying, "This food shortage is good because it means that even a simple loaf of bread costs ten dollars." It fundamentally misses the point of economic value.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I am majoring in physics currently and have been raised by parents (also scientists), so my mode of thought is going to reflect that. From an evolutionary stand point death is absolutely essential. Evolution requires that life units die to leave behind, not only physical space, but also food and other essentials in order for the progeny to live and prosper. Should this next generation of life units have advantageous mutations, evolution succeeds in producing a more adapted organism.
For a self-aware, self-referencing, and emotionally capable life unit (such as a human being), the notion of death is frightening. However, if one loses consciousness after death that individual wouldn't be aware of their nonexistence so it wouldn't bother them. There would simply be nobody there to be bothered.
it's a strange concept, while we are alive we fear death. Yet after it has occurred there is no possible way to fear it happening again (if you still exist in some way shape or form that is transcendent of this universe), or you won't even know what hit you. Approaching the concept of death from a logic-based path yields a paradox. Is it death that is "bad", or is being alive and having the ability to contemplate death "bad"? If one had a choice before they entered the world to live or to remain nonexistent, the choice could have surprising results. Considering that after death one would have no recollection of their life (disregarding an after life), and remaining out of the existence realm would be null of everything we can understand as having substance. With this reasoning, choosing life is choosing anxiety resulting from self contemplation and, in turn, death. Either way you'll be dead in the end, with no memory, null of everything that makes you you. Both choices lead to the same conclusion, one includes a life that can't be remembered and if memory doesn't serve it, it might as well have never happened.
How can death suck for the individual, if the individual who died doesn't exist anymore? The process of dying might suck (the individual is alive) but when death comes, I can't imagine a nonexistent entity "caring" at all.
Any why are people sad about this individual's death? Is is because they don't exist anymore? If we're merely sad about the state of nonexistence, what about the time before birth? The individual didn't exist then either. Are we sad about that too?
Depends where you denote the "suckage" factor, as people have been trying to seek immortality for centuries. The people that wish to die are those with a failing body or have depression of some sort or have some sort of reason to martyr themselves like a soldier jumping on a grenade.
Considering most religions have some sort of "life after death" scenario that leads to some sort of paradise for the "good people," the natural inclination to want to live is a strong impulse. And people that are alive can fully cognate about death and dying.
Furthermore, being worm food doesn't mean you're going to be a high achiever either so from a productivity stand point for an employer as a measure for economic performance is a real downer.
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Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Time as you describe it is a commodity, not a medium of exchange. You're right that an abundance of a commodity drives its value down, but that's a good thing. For instance, food is a commodity. If food is abundant, then its value is low - which means that more people can buy more food. What you're saying about time is like saying, "This food shortage is good because it means that even a simple loaf of bread costs ten dollars." It fundamentally misses the point of economic value.
I don't think your analogy really fits. For one thing, humans essentially consume food to get more time. You can't consume time to get more time -- that doesn't make any sense.
I feel that a better analogy would be equating the current human lifespan to be exactly as much bread that you need to survive (equating a human want with a human want). You will still be hungry and want some more, but at some point you will have so much bread that you will be sick of it. If you have infinite bread, after a while you will get so sick of eating bread that you would probably be tempted to just quit eating it, even if it meant you would die.
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http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Death-Bad-for-You-/131818/
There are a lot of interesting points brought up in it, but it all boils down to:
Why is death perceived as a "bad" thing?
"So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more." - Epicurus
(For the sake of discussion, set aside the notion of an afterlife. You die, you cease to exist.)
"It's the unknown we fear of death and darkness, nothing more" -Dumbledore
I agree very much with that view of death though. It's one of the reasons I consider myself a huge optimist.
RBUThraximundarUBRRUNiv-Mizzet, the FiremindUR
BWGhost Council of OrzhovaWBWUBRGChild of AlaraGRBUW
WBRKaalia of the VastRBWGBSapling of ColfenorGB
Say you could choose between dying tomorrow and not dying tomorrow. Would you find not dying preferable? Then you think death is bad.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
HOW you die though, can be bad.
Everyone is going to die, fact.
Do you die of natural causes at the end of a long and fulfilled life - or is your life cut short by a crime, a disease, or tragic accident? That is what can be bad about it, but death itself is neutral, it is neither good nor bad.
Thanks to Xenphire @ Inkfox for the amazing new sig
“Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments
are we bound to prosperity and ruin.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Once you die there is nothing bad for you anymore. This makes death good.
All things considered, it seems like a wash. I'll say death is neutral.
Dying isn't "bad". I have no problem with eventually dying... but NOT TODAY. I have too much to live for!
Of course it's ALWAYS "today", no matter how much time goes by, eh?
We always have plans no matter how old. So even as an old man I'll probably still say it, though I doubt I'll cling as hard.
This is a very succinct way of putting it, and accurate.
Most of us live according to values where not-death is ordinarily preferable to death, but where some extreme circumstances can reverse this (e.g. not-death, and preventable death for 1,000,000 others so long as you die). Asking 'why' this is the case is basically an empirical question - why do we hold the values that we do? The answer is going to be some combination of sociology and biology. Asking "Should this be the case?" seems to me to be a regression - because the answer is "Well, according to my values, yes!" To make any headway we'd have to have a way of resolving which set of values is 'correct'. I don't think we ever will have that (I don't think it's a terribly meaningful thing to ask, honestly).
"It always ends. That's what gives it value."
[Clan Flamingo]
The clan for custom card creators!
A relevant short story that I enjoyed and which sums up my attitude:
http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
The idea that death gives life meaning is a rationalization we use to protect ourselves. Mortality really is as bad as when you first confront it in your childhood, you just learn to cope with the terror as you mature. As I said in the previous thread about why we die, death is the obliteration of a human soul. People you love and care about cease to exist, and there is no sense or purpose to it.
Now, the reason why I'm somewhat outspoken about this is that we are actually approaching a point where we can begin to talk about a solution. It wouldn't be easy, it might be beyond our ability to cooperate. But the attitude that death is somehow valuable, which was once a harmless coping mechanism, could ultimately be the most damning lie ever concocted if it prevents us from even seeing the path.
I don't agree with everything you've said but I agree in general that "Death gives life meaning" is a rationalization, not some profound notion.
Why would death have some power to give meaning to anything? And why do I need something external to give my life meaning? My existence today is meaningful to me whether I will die or not.
All things eventually cease to exist, be they people, species, mountains, or stars. I don't see how this passage somehow invalidates the meaning of their existence and accomplishments.
What if you learned today that you had lost a few thousand dollars? You'd likely be angry/upset. Would you feel the same way though if you had several million dollars? How about several trillion? What if you got everything you wanted in life for free? Money is valuable because there isn't infinite, in the same way that life is made more precious because it's not infinite either.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
How can death suck for the individual, if the individual who died doesn't exist anymore? The process of dying might suck (the individual is alive) but when death comes, I can't imagine a nonexistent entity "caring" at all.
Any why are people sad about this individual's death? Is is because they don't exist anymore? If we're merely sad about the state of nonexistence, what about the time before birth? The individual didn't exist then either. Are we sad about that too?
The finitude of money gives it value because money is a medium of economic exchange, and thus its function is dependent on its scarcity. Life... isn't.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
True, but time is in many ways a medium of exchange. We trade time towards the same end as money, and our lives give scarcity to our own available time. Grant someone infinite life, they have infinite time. They have infinite time, the time loses its value in the same way money does.
Time as you describe it is a commodity, not a medium of exchange. You're right that an abundance of a commodity drives its value down, but that's a good thing. For instance, food is a commodity. If food is abundant, then its value is low - which means that more people can buy more food. What you're saying about time is like saying, "This food shortage is good because it means that even a simple loaf of bread costs ten dollars." It fundamentally misses the point of economic value.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Because nobody wants to die, and nobody knows what might come after death.
That being said, death must occur, else life would be impossible.
For a self-aware, self-referencing, and emotionally capable life unit (such as a human being), the notion of death is frightening. However, if one loses consciousness after death that individual wouldn't be aware of their nonexistence so it wouldn't bother them. There would simply be nobody there to be bothered.
it's a strange concept, while we are alive we fear death. Yet after it has occurred there is no possible way to fear it happening again (if you still exist in some way shape or form that is transcendent of this universe), or you won't even know what hit you. Approaching the concept of death from a logic-based path yields a paradox. Is it death that is "bad", or is being alive and having the ability to contemplate death "bad"? If one had a choice before they entered the world to live or to remain nonexistent, the choice could have surprising results. Considering that after death one would have no recollection of their life (disregarding an after life), and remaining out of the existence realm would be null of everything we can understand as having substance. With this reasoning, choosing life is choosing anxiety resulting from self contemplation and, in turn, death. Either way you'll be dead in the end, with no memory, null of everything that makes you you. Both choices lead to the same conclusion, one includes a life that can't be remembered and if memory doesn't serve it, it might as well have never happened.
Not at all, it was very interesting. Welcome to the MTGSalvation forums!
Depends where you denote the "suckage" factor, as people have been trying to seek immortality for centuries. The people that wish to die are those with a failing body or have depression of some sort or have some sort of reason to martyr themselves like a soldier jumping on a grenade.
Considering most religions have some sort of "life after death" scenario that leads to some sort of paradise for the "good people," the natural inclination to want to live is a strong impulse. And people that are alive can fully cognate about death and dying.
Furthermore, being worm food doesn't mean you're going to be a high achiever either so from a productivity stand point for an employer as a measure for economic performance is a real downer.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
I don't think your analogy really fits. For one thing, humans essentially consume food to get more time. You can't consume time to get more time -- that doesn't make any sense.
I feel that a better analogy would be equating the current human lifespan to be exactly as much bread that you need to survive (equating a human want with a human want). You will still be hungry and want some more, but at some point you will have so much bread that you will be sick of it. If you have infinite bread, after a while you will get so sick of eating bread that you would probably be tempted to just quit eating it, even if it meant you would die.