[HN Gopher] Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity (1994)
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       Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity (1994)
        
       Author : demomi
       Score  : 12 points
       Date   : 2022-07-10 21:28 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.naturalism.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.naturalism.org)
        
       | tarun_anand wrote:
       | Could someone explain to a layman what this article is trying to
       | say?
        
         | coldtea wrote:
         | Something akin to: "When you die you're dead, so you can't
         | "experience" nothingmess, hence death can't be nothingess".
         | 
         | In other words, he just means "death is not an experienced
         | nothingness".
         | 
         | Well, big deal. It's still nothingness, as far as we're
         | concerned as living beings now (when we consider our death).
        
       | teekert wrote:
       | What an enormous amount of words just to say: When you die you
       | are not there anymore to experience the nothingness that you
       | often picture death to be like.
       | 
       | I kept thinking that something profound was coming but no.
       | 
       | Edit: Perhaps it is interesting that so many non-theistic
       | historical figures do reference death as a nothingness and
       | suggest that that nothingness is somehow experienced by some
       | remainder of one's being, which is of course bit of a spiritual
       | stance. A paradox in their worldview perhaps? Or just a sign that
       | to drop a believe in god does not mean to drop believe in a soul,
       | for some at least?
        
         | AQuantized wrote:
         | I actually don't think it's arguing for that typical stance,
         | but rather for conscious experience to always 'be' in some
         | sense regardless of specific physical instantiation. It seems
         | purposefully vague, but it's almost more like Hinduism than the
         | typical atheistic interpretation.
        
         | tgflynn wrote:
         | I think it is quite profound since many people seem to fear
         | death because they imagine it is nothingness. But nothingness
         | contains neither things to be feared nor a perceiver to fear
         | them if they did.
         | 
         | On the other hand I highly doubt that nothingness actually
         | exists. Why should we expect the arising of experience to be a
         | one off occurrence ?
         | 
         | If the void exists it has a major bug because experience (ie.
         | non-void) somehow arose from it and every programmer knows that
         | bugs always repeat.
        
           | simonh wrote:
           | >Why should we expect the arising of experience to be a one
           | off occurrence ?
           | 
           | Given 7.9 billion people alive right now, give or take, I'm
           | not quite sure where the idea it might be a one-off
           | occurrence comes from.
           | 
           | But even if you mean our individual personal experience, I'm
           | not sure what that would mean. A copy of me would think and
           | experience in ways similar to me to a point, but we would
           | still have different and distinct actual individual
           | experiences of being.
        
             | tgflynn wrote:
             | Well, I think that most people don't believe in
             | reincarnation.
        
           | teekert wrote:
           | Hmm I guess after attaining my current worldview and dropping
           | religion, I stopped worrying about death as a "state".
           | Because I was not uncomfortable before I was born I always
           | reasoned. I tell my kids the same if they ask what is after
           | death? I ask them back, what was it like before being born?
           | It will be like that. Of course I still don't want to die.
        
             | tgflynn wrote:
             | I think that reasoning makes sense up to a point. But how
             | do you know you weren't uncomfortable before you were born
             | ? There were likely times you were uncomfortable when you
             | were a baby but you don't remember them.
        
       | coldtea wrote:
       | > _The same is true of the time after death. There will be no
       | future personal state of non-experience to which we can compare
       | our present state of being conscious. All we have, as subjects,
       | is this block of experience. We know, of course, that it is a
       | finite block, but since that 's all we have, we cannot experience
       | its finitude._
       | 
       | Yeah, you just re-invented nothingness after death, just with
       | more words...
        
         | scoot wrote:
         | So. Many. Words. What was the point of this article? I'd rather
         | die than read it.
        
       | layer8 wrote:
       | The reification of the nothingness after death is warranted
       | insofar as we compare it to the alternative of not dying. The
       | continued life is certainly a real thing, so there is (negative?)
       | reality to its absence. Otherwise murder wouldn't be a felony.
        
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