WHAT? Im never going to die!
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WHAT? Im never going to die!
"Good" and "bad" do not exist objectively. They are subjective, and whether something is considered one or the other depends on which conscious being you ask. Obviously, in most conscious beings, the destruction of that conscious being would be considered "bad".
Death is not objectively bad, and life is not inherently valuable.
And at what point did I say anything like 'animals don't die'? :\
So killing is fine?Quote:
Death is not objectively bad, and life is not inherently valuable.
I guess this is what Nietsche was talking about with the whole death of God, degredation of morals and society thing.
Er, you asked when they don't like to die.Quote:
And at what point did I say anything like 'animals don't die'? :\
They don't like to die or be in danger because that is the kind of trait that pushes the species forward.
Yes that's what my whole thread's about? It's just that these ironic statementsQuote:
Er, you asked when [sic?] they don't like to die.
They don't like to die or be in danger because that is the kind of trait that pushes the species forward.
don't mirror anything I was saying. I said animals don't know what death is, I didn't say that they don't die or don't want to die.Quote:
Animals don't know what evolution is but they evolve. They don't know how the sun works but it does.
Yes I got the point as soon as you made it. I'm now asking you what your objection is to killing people.Quote:
I don't think you got my point. "Fine" falls into the same category as "good" and "bad". Is gravity "fine"? Are asteroids colliding "fine"?
While there may be no objective moral values, pragmatic cost/benefit analysis is enough to stop most people from killing each other. I don't kill because the consequences--social, psychological, and quite possibly physical--would range from unpleasant to horrific.
Likewise with my own death, I don't fear it or take undue caution to avoid it, because the consequences of doing so are, pardon the cliche, worse than death.
I did get your point. I still get your point. And you answered the question anyway so I don't see what the problem is...
Now, why do you think it is terrible?
Because of my empathy, I get pain from the pain of others, and death is generally painful. Even if it is painless, I empathize with their loss of opportunities to live out a full life, and the pain of their relatives and loved ones.
What are you driving at, Socrates?
I think fear of death and appreciation of life are both subconsciously determined and consciously discovered. Anything that makes one think he might die is associated with a whole lot of unconsciously triggered psychological responses such as fear and increased identification with ones culture. However, philosophical inquiry will also lead most humans to the understanding that life is valuable in itself and that thus, death is to be avoided for the purpose of preserving the beauty that is life. Being human in itself means having a system of values and things we hold dearly and live for. It means that we discern between good and bad. There's no escaping this. Any remotely intelligent being is subject to this. If this weren't the case, we would be neither human nor alive.
I think the fear of death is an evolutionary adaption, and not a rational thing. There are rational people in the world who do not fear death. Not fearing death doesn't equate to throwing your life away. It just means that you're fine with the idea of dieing. You can still have reasons to live besides just a fear of death.
I think birth is the essential thing for evolution and not death. Without death, evolution can still occur, you just end up with huge populations.
I think Death is a pretty cool guy.
What about when a pet mourns when another pet in the family dies? by that i am curious if they know about death. Or if you have say a dog who is always barking anr wanting to attack eveyr dog it see's but when it looks ina mirror it does nothing, yet there is a dog he/she has never seen before. No bark...why? although this is OT about death.
yes i've read about some type of elephants that actually gather around a dead fellow elephant and basically mourn over it
as for death being good or not, it's actually a good thing, without death no one would value life, and we wouldn't be here right now, because if we lived forever there would of been no reason to reproduce, or possibly we would of never had a reproductive system, and nothing would of ever evolved.
so basically, if nothing died there wouldn't be life, so all in all with that all being said, you need death to have life.
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The conscience of death accompanies us since childhood, as conscience of the absolute destruction of the only precious treasure of ours: our I.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality... The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.
George Santayana, 1863-1952, American philosopher, Reason in Religion
Unlike man, animals, so to speak, live without knowing death. The individual animal enjoys fully the immutability of its gender, being conscious of itself only as an immortal being.
Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860, German philosopher, Le monde comme volonté et comme représentation
"Who am I?" Maybe you've never even asked yourself this question. You might think you already know who you are. Unfortunately, however, it's likely that you don't know who you are at all. And if you don't know your real identity, you're in trouble. You'll spend your life in a kind of dream state—you'll falsely identify yourself as something or someone you aren't. Then, on the basis of this false identification, you'll determine the goals of your life and the purpose of your existence. You use these goals to gauge whether you are making "progress" in life, whether you are a "success." And you are aided and abetted in this delusion by a complex network of relationships with other dreamers. Of course, at death (and sometimes before), the whole thing turns into a nightmare
Jagad Guru Chris Butler
DEATH TORMENTS MAN
Death is a source of drama, interrogations, grief and revolt.
The anguish of death hangs over and leads the human spirit to wonder about the mysteries of existence, man’s destiny, life, the world.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V
It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.
Epicurus, 341-270 b.C., Greek philosopher, Vatican Sayings
The certainty of death and the uncertainty of the hour of death is a source of grief throughout our life.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V
Death is never a trick; nature doesn’t play a comedy; instead, it’s a tragic, colossal and unstoppable drama.
L. Fuerbach, 1804-1872, German philosopher, cited in Edgar Morin O homem e a morte
The irresistible and incessant stream of time carries all creations in its wave, throwing them into the depths of obscurity, regardless of whether they are trivial or, on the contrary, notable and important.
Ann Comnena, 1083-1150, Byzantine historian, The Alexiad of the princess Ann Comnena
The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb.
Shakespeare, 1564-1616, English writer, Romeo and Juliet
She died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which was subsequently mislaid.
Boris Pasternak, 1890-1960, Russian writer, Doctor Jivago
Death frights us. Death is a perpetual torment, for which there is no sort of consolation. There is no way by which it may not reach us. We may continually turn our heads this way and that, as if in a suspected country, but we can’t forget death.
Montaigne, 1533-1592, French writer, Montaigne: Essays
Men come, go, sing and dance, without uttering a word about death. All this is very fine: but, when it comes either to themselves, their wives, their children, or their friends, taking them unawares and unprepared, then what torment, what outcries, what madness and despair.
Montaigne, 1533-1592, French writer, Montaigne: Essays
Man is a being that knows death, but can’t believe it.
E. Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, Method V
Systematically, we insist on the occasional nature of death – accidents, illnesses, infections, advanced age - revealing in this way our deep desire to deprive from death all its necessary element, thus making it become just an accidental event.
Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939, Austrian psychoanalyst, Essais de Psychanalyse
UNDERVALUING DEATH
Against the fear of death, man has produced a lot of logical arguments which undervalue both the fear and death.
Death, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, since when we are, death is absent, and, when death is present, we are not any more. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead (…).
Epicurus, 341-270 a. C., Greek philosopher, Letter to Menoeceus
Don't fear the gods, and don't worry about death, because what's good is easy to get, and what's terrible is easy to endure.
Epicurus, 341-270 a. C., Greek philosopher,
Death is nothing to us; for once the body is dissolved into its elements, there will be no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us.
Epicurus, 341-270 a. C., Greek philosopher, Principal Doctrines
Foolish is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect.
Epicurus, 341-270 a. C., Greek philosopher, Letter to Menoeceus
Man who is dead cannot be made unhappy.
Lucrecius, 98-55 a.C, Roman poet and philosopher, De rerum natura
Death is nothing to us, nor should it worry us a bit; we can’t suffer after death, since the nature of the spirit we possess is something mortal.
Lucrecius, 98-55 a.C, Roman poet and philosopher, De rerum natura
There is nothing to be feared in death; it matters not a scrap whether one might ever have been born at all, when death that is immortal has taken over our mortal life.
Lucrecius, 98-55 a.C, Roman poet and philosopher, De rerum natura
All those things told in fables about the land beyond the grave are here, in our life on earth. There is no such thing as a wretched Tantalus, numbed with idle terror, fearing the fall of a great rock hanging over him in the air, as the tale tells. Rather, it’s here, in life, that the empty fear of the gods threatens mortals.
Lucrecius, 98-55 a.C, Roman poet and philosopher, De rerum natura
HUMOUR ABOUT THE FEAR OF DEATH
When death comes around, nobody is willing to die and old age is no longer a burden.
Euripides, 480-406 b. C., Greek poet, Alcestis
Railing at life, and yet afraid of death.ath.
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death shouldn’t be an even greater one.
Vladimir Nabokov, 1889-1977, Russian writer, Pale Fire
All tragedies are finished by a death.
All comedies are ended by a marriage
The future states of both are left to faith.
Lord Byron, 1788-1824, English poet, Don Juan
I had two dogs and one died a few years ago. The other did nothing remotely out of the usual...Quote:
What about when a pet mourns when another pet in the family dies? by that i am curious if they know about death. Or if you have say a dog who is always barking anr wanting to attack eveyr dog it see's but when it looks ina mirror it does nothing, yet there is a dog he/she has never seen before. No bark...why? although this is OT about death.
Maybe your dog wasn't too keen on the other one. You probably weren't too choked up when Sadam was hung.
I've had baby puppies mourn when their brothers died...though they don't mourn in the exact same way as people do. They do show signs of being upset when an animal dies. What they are upset about however will remain a mystery since we can't talk to them.
Of course it's an evolutionary adaption. Fear of death really is the ultimate form of fear isn't it? And what is fear? A useful adaption to stay alive. We are programmed to survive, hardwired to survive, and since death is the worst thing we can imagine because it (quite simply) is the bane of all things alive, we fear it. Death --> fear --> survival, therefore: evolutionary adaption.
In addition: on the question whether 'is death good?', then I'd have to say no. From our human perspective, it is really bad. We're hardwired to live and survive, remember? So dying is reeeaally bad.
From a vaguely psychological/philosophical viewpoint it may indeed be a good thing: if we were to live forever, then life would be pretty boring. You'd run out of things to do, basically.
I don't agree with the idea that if there were no death we wouldn't value 'life' anymore, though, because there'd be no concept whatsoever of 'life'. Life is a definition through which we can differentiate between (you've guessed it) living organisms and dead organisms. If there were no death at all, then there would be no life either. There'd only be existance and non-existance in the purely biological sense of the word 'life'.
Furthermore: we wouldn't have to value life anymore because we wouldn't die. That's not a bad thing. It doesn't mean this would suck all joy out of life; we could still enjoy ourselves... Forever and ever (as long as the fun would last, anyways), and we would value existance, fun experiences and our friends, but not life in the definition we use today in our finite -lifetime-existance.
And then there's the deep philosophical viewpoint that 'death isn't good or bad, it just is'. When people do classify it as good or bad, it's called the naturalistic fallacy. When a tiger eats a deer and kills it, is that good or bad? Neither, it just is. It's simply a fact, there's no moral there, because nature is amoral. The same applies to death: it isn't good, it isn't bad, it just is.
And about the animals: while most have no concept of death, they're still survival machines like us. They're still programmed to escape death, even if they don't know what 'death is, exactly. They still have fear. While they aren't self concious, they're still concious, and therefore can feel danger and respond to it. It is for that reason that only the self-concious creatures (us, chimps, dolphins, probably, and elephants) have a concept of death and fear it, or mourn. So while non-self-concious animals might not be concious enough to fear death itself, as they have no concept of death, they they still have that primal survivalistic adaption from evolution (which seems to work very well).
To be scared of death is natural, it's a human instinct to fear something they have no knowledge about, nobody knows for sure what happens after death, thats what people get scared about...
The brain does not like information, but enjoys curiosity. Ultimately, the resultant pleasure of our actions generally coincide with their predicted outcome. A first order example would be going to school. We do not enjoy this because it only begets more work and information flow. A second order example would be going to college. We like that because it can potentially reduce work in the future. However, most of the time, the brain does not function optimally. We often do activities which makes us ultimately unhappy without realizing it.
Death really isn't that bad. I mean living is great, but thats no reason to fear death. Death is just the end of your physical body. Your soul cannot die. I see death as a way for the soul to escape the confines of the body and become truly free in the univesre. We all gotta die so whats the point of being afraid of it? I don't wanna die but thats only because I got shit to do right now. People shouldn't be afraid of anything. Life is just a ride.