death

29 Jan 2023 09:55 - 17 Jun 2023 08:29
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    • Something from 2008 Beyond the Reach of God - LessWrong
      • The obvious example of a horror so great that God cannot tolerate it, is death - true death, mind-annihilation. I don't think that even Buddhism allows that.
      • This is sort of a surprising thing to hear from someone with a Jewish religious background. Jews spend very little attention and energy on the afterlife. (And your picture of Buddhism is simplistic at best, but other people have already dealt with that). I've heard the interesting theory that this stems from a reaction against their Egyptian captors, who were of course obsessed with death and the afterlife.
      • Religion aside, I truly have trouble understanding why people here think death is so terrible, and why it's so bloody important to deep-freeze your brain in the hopes it might be revved up again some time in the future. For one thing, nothing lasts forever, so death is inevitable no matter how much you postpone it. For another, since we are all hard-core materialists here, let me remind you that the flow of time is an illusion, spacetime is eternal, and the fact that your own personal self occupies a chunk of spacetime that is not infinite in any direction is just a fact of reality. It makes about as much sense to be upset that your mind doesn't exist after you die as it does to be upset that it didn't exist before you were born. Lastly, what makes you so damn important that you need to live forever? Get over yourself. After you die, there will be others taking over your work, assuming it was worth doing. Leave some biological and intellectual offspring and shuffle off this mortal coil and give a new generation a chance. That's how progress gets made -- "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it". (Max Planck, quoted by Thomas Kuhn)