Figured I'd make a new topic as to not detract from the Does God Exist? thread.
It becomes quite apparent to me that the general thinking is "death is nothing to me, therefore fear of death is irrational" Epicurius said when I exist, death does not, when death exists I do not. Death cannot harm us when we are not around to suffer. We do however often want to avoid death either to get things done or just for the sake of avoiding it, I think little thought is given to the idea that living is not worthwhile (certainly not in the animal kingdom so I can't see how it'd be any different for humans), even when we are at great pain and the decision is made that we would prefer to die life is still given high value.
The thing of importance is not whether I have any reason after I die to worry about being dead, it is whether while I'm alive can I, or must I have a reason to avoid death. As long as I have things which I would enjoy doing after X I have a reason to live after X. It's much like if I desired to write something down, I would need a pen and paper. However I feel that we feel that death in its self is a loss. Drinking with friends requires no more explanation than "cause I felt like it" and neither in my opinion does the desire to live. But it seems that when it comes to a matter of life or death whereby I do not have any particular life goals such as avoiding further pain or continuing to look after my family I have no reason to choose either over the other. Without life I miss out on the possibility of many good opportunities, but I also miss out on many bad things and in a real sense I will not regret my decision anyway for I will cease to exist. However, we don't seem to treat life and death in such a way - We see living as a good thing and death as an evil, even if sometimes death is the lesser of two evils and it is not clear to me the 'reason' for this being true.
Fear of death I would argue is a pre-rational thing, taken in a rational context it is illogical however the fear of it comes before our rational mind touches it. We don't need to work out that death is to be feared before we fear it, we don't need to be taught in any way to fear it. It is somewhat like sexual desire - it is not the result of any sort of rational argument.
Fear of death to me is one way we have evolved for self-preservation, though it is not the only way... For example say someone is tangled up in some weeds at the bottom of a beach would not so much be struggling to stay alive as struggling to get the chance to breathe. Natural selection is therefore likely to select people who are more likely to struggle to keep oxygen coming in when it stops. This is death-avoidance without the need for the person to even think in terms of fear of death, however I believe the relation is fairly clear. There are many such automatic evolutionary reactions, fear of death seems to be something which creatures more capable of conceiving their own death might add to deal with more elaborate threats to their life. Many creatures can respond automatically, without any calculation to the threat of sudden movement near them, humans are sophisticated enough to fear the threat of say... nuclear war. Fear of death then, while being perhaps a more sophisticated form of self preservation behaviour is, as in line with the others, an automatic response to a perceived threat however because it goes through a reasoning process upon recognising such a threat, the behaviour that follows (if it does at all) is more in our control than the others... we can cope with our fear much better than we can a startled jump upon hearing a loud bang.
The state of being dead is not in its self a bad thing, it is the loss of life which makes it bad - However while being alive seems to be an advantage, if being dead is a disadvantage it seems we can not suffer it, just as none of us before we were born had to suffer our un-birth. However, before my birth I had no projects I might desire to complete, we are agents, creatures of action and concern ourselves much more with our future than our past. Furthermore would we not pity a formerly intelligent person who is perhaps reduced by mental illness to the content happiness of a child? Someone who dies could go on living a happy life, but instead they die... I was born on March 29th 1987, someone born before that date would be somebody else, I had yet to come into existence. Once I have a life, an identity, it is something which we can imagine going on further.... this question is partly answered by the concept of identity.
Let's say I'm the man who is reduced to the mentality of an infant tomorrow due to some accident... Who suffers? I would say that my current (i.e. present as of typing this) identity suffers if we are to focus instead of on the general well-being of this new 'infant chadd' but instead consider who I was and who I could have become had this accident not befallen me. I would analogise this with death, If I were to die tomorrow the 'dead chadd' non-entity would suffer nothing, however I was once alive and if I had not died I could have continued living, is this not harm? Perhaps...
It becomes quite apparent to me that the general thinking is "death is nothing to me, therefore fear of death is irrational" Epicurius said when I exist, death does not, when death exists I do not. Death cannot harm us when we are not around to suffer. We do however often want to avoid death either to get things done or just for the sake of avoiding it, I think little thought is given to the idea that living is not worthwhile (certainly not in the animal kingdom so I can't see how it'd be any different for humans), even when we are at great pain and the decision is made that we would prefer to die life is still given high value.
The thing of importance is not whether I have any reason after I die to worry about being dead, it is whether while I'm alive can I, or must I have a reason to avoid death. As long as I have things which I would enjoy doing after X I have a reason to live after X. It's much like if I desired to write something down, I would need a pen and paper. However I feel that we feel that death in its self is a loss. Drinking with friends requires no more explanation than "cause I felt like it" and neither in my opinion does the desire to live. But it seems that when it comes to a matter of life or death whereby I do not have any particular life goals such as avoiding further pain or continuing to look after my family I have no reason to choose either over the other. Without life I miss out on the possibility of many good opportunities, but I also miss out on many bad things and in a real sense I will not regret my decision anyway for I will cease to exist. However, we don't seem to treat life and death in such a way - We see living as a good thing and death as an evil, even if sometimes death is the lesser of two evils and it is not clear to me the 'reason' for this being true.
Fear of death I would argue is a pre-rational thing, taken in a rational context it is illogical however the fear of it comes before our rational mind touches it. We don't need to work out that death is to be feared before we fear it, we don't need to be taught in any way to fear it. It is somewhat like sexual desire - it is not the result of any sort of rational argument.
Fear of death to me is one way we have evolved for self-preservation, though it is not the only way... For example say someone is tangled up in some weeds at the bottom of a beach would not so much be struggling to stay alive as struggling to get the chance to breathe. Natural selection is therefore likely to select people who are more likely to struggle to keep oxygen coming in when it stops. This is death-avoidance without the need for the person to even think in terms of fear of death, however I believe the relation is fairly clear. There are many such automatic evolutionary reactions, fear of death seems to be something which creatures more capable of conceiving their own death might add to deal with more elaborate threats to their life. Many creatures can respond automatically, without any calculation to the threat of sudden movement near them, humans are sophisticated enough to fear the threat of say... nuclear war. Fear of death then, while being perhaps a more sophisticated form of self preservation behaviour is, as in line with the others, an automatic response to a perceived threat however because it goes through a reasoning process upon recognising such a threat, the behaviour that follows (if it does at all) is more in our control than the others... we can cope with our fear much better than we can a startled jump upon hearing a loud bang.
The state of being dead is not in its self a bad thing, it is the loss of life which makes it bad - However while being alive seems to be an advantage, if being dead is a disadvantage it seems we can not suffer it, just as none of us before we were born had to suffer our un-birth. However, before my birth I had no projects I might desire to complete, we are agents, creatures of action and concern ourselves much more with our future than our past. Furthermore would we not pity a formerly intelligent person who is perhaps reduced by mental illness to the content happiness of a child? Someone who dies could go on living a happy life, but instead they die... I was born on March 29th 1987, someone born before that date would be somebody else, I had yet to come into existence. Once I have a life, an identity, it is something which we can imagine going on further.... this question is partly answered by the concept of identity.
Let's say I'm the man who is reduced to the mentality of an infant tomorrow due to some accident... Who suffers? I would say that my current (i.e. present as of typing this) identity suffers if we are to focus instead of on the general well-being of this new 'infant chadd' but instead consider who I was and who I could have become had this accident not befallen me. I would analogise this with death, If I were to die tomorrow the 'dead chadd' non-entity would suffer nothing, however I was once alive and if I had not died I could have continued living, is this not harm? Perhaps...
