Your philosophy implies (if I understand correctly) that we should be indifferent between being alive and dead, but I’ve never once encountered a person who was indifferent. That would have very strange implications. The concepts of happiness and suffering would be hard to define in such a philosophy...
If you want me to benefit from your answer, I think you’d need to explain a bit more what you mean, since the answer is so detached from my own experience. And maybe write more directly about the practical implications.
I wouldn’t describe it as indifferent. More like enthusiastically embracing both the life we currently have, and the inevitable death we will experience. Happiness might be defined as such an embrace, and suffering as resistance to that which we can do little about, other than delay the inevitable a bit.
We know we’re going to die.
It can be reasonably proposed that no one really knows what the result of that will be.
If true, then what we can do in the face of this unknown is manage our relationship with this situation so as to create the most positive possible experience of it.
Should someone provide compelling proof of what death is, then we might wish to align our relationship with death to what the facts reveal. But there are no facts (imho) and so the enterprise rationally shifts away from facts which can not be obtained, to our relationship with that which can not currently be known.
Ok, let’s talk practical implications. Everybody will have to find this for themselves, but here’s how it works for me.
My mother died of Parkinson’s after a very long tortured journey which I will not describe here. The point is that observing this tortured journey from a ring side seat filled me with fear. What if this happens to me? (It did happen to my sister)
To the degree I can liberate myself from fear of death, I can escape this fate. When the doctor says I’m going to experience a long painful death from a terminal case of Typoholic Madman Syndrome :-) I can go to the gun store, and obtain a “get out of jail free” card. To the degree I can accept this solution, I don’t need to be afraid of Parkinson’s. Death embraced, life enhanced.
I don’t have a secret formula which can relieve everyone from their fear of death. In my case, whatever freedom I have (exact degree unknown until the final moments) comes from factors like this:
I had great parents. Being so lucky so young tends to install in one a kind of faith that the universe is basically kind. How valid such a faith might be is unknown, but experiencing such a faith is helpful.
Next, I spend a TON of time in the North Florida woods. Way more than a lot. From such experience one can conclude that nature is cyclical, not linear, as implied by the formula born>live>die.
Anyway, the rational message here is, focus on controlling that which we can control, and that is our relationship with death, and thus with living.
I hope something in there is helpful, or interesting, or something. If this is a topic of interest to you, and you’d like to see me crash the server with excessive typing on the subject :-), it would be cool if maybe you started a post on the topic.
Oh, society can delay death by a lot [1]. GiveWell computes that it only costs in the low 100s of dollars to delay someone’s death by a year. I think this is something very meaningful to do, generates a lot of happiness, and eliminates a lot of suffering.
My original post is about how we could do even better, by doing work targeted at the far future, rather than work in the global health space.
But these abstract considerations aside: I’m sorry to hear about the death of your mother and the Parkinson in your family. It is good to read that you seem to be coping well and spend a lot of time in the forests. Thank you for your thoughts.
Why do you think that?
Your philosophy implies (if I understand correctly) that we should be indifferent between being alive and dead, but I’ve never once encountered a person who was indifferent. That would have very strange implications. The concepts of happiness and suffering would be hard to define in such a philosophy...
If you want me to benefit from your answer, I think you’d need to explain a bit more what you mean, since the answer is so detached from my own experience. And maybe write more directly about the practical implications.
Hi there Sjlver, thanks for engaging.
I wouldn’t describe it as indifferent. More like enthusiastically embracing both the life we currently have, and the inevitable death we will experience. Happiness might be defined as such an embrace, and suffering as resistance to that which we can do little about, other than delay the inevitable a bit.
We know we’re going to die.
It can be reasonably proposed that no one really knows what the result of that will be.
If true, then what we can do in the face of this unknown is manage our relationship with this situation so as to create the most positive possible experience of it.
Should someone provide compelling proof of what death is, then we might wish to align our relationship with death to what the facts reveal. But there are no facts (imho) and so the enterprise rationally shifts away from facts which can not be obtained, to our relationship with that which can not currently be known.
Ok, let’s talk practical implications. Everybody will have to find this for themselves, but here’s how it works for me.
My mother died of Parkinson’s after a very long tortured journey which I will not describe here. The point is that observing this tortured journey from a ring side seat filled me with fear. What if this happens to me? (It did happen to my sister)
To the degree I can liberate myself from fear of death, I can escape this fate. When the doctor says I’m going to experience a long painful death from a terminal case of Typoholic Madman Syndrome :-) I can go to the gun store, and obtain a “get out of jail free” card. To the degree I can accept this solution, I don’t need to be afraid of Parkinson’s. Death embraced, life enhanced.
I don’t have a secret formula which can relieve everyone from their fear of death. In my case, whatever freedom I have (exact degree unknown until the final moments) comes from factors like this:
I had great parents. Being so lucky so young tends to install in one a kind of faith that the universe is basically kind. How valid such a faith might be is unknown, but experiencing such a faith is helpful.
Next, I spend a TON of time in the North Florida woods. Way more than a lot. From such experience one can conclude that nature is cyclical, not linear, as implied by the formula born>live>die.
Anyway, the rational message here is, focus on controlling that which we can control, and that is our relationship with death, and thus with living.
I hope something in there is helpful, or interesting, or something. If this is a topic of interest to you, and you’d like to see me crash the server with excessive typing on the subject :-), it would be cool if maybe you started a post on the topic.
Oh, society can delay death by a lot [1]. GiveWell computes that it only costs in the low 100s of dollars to delay someone’s death by a year. I think this is something very meaningful to do, generates a lot of happiness, and eliminates a lot of suffering.
My original post is about how we could do even better, by doing work targeted at the far future, rather than work in the global health space.
But these abstract considerations aside: I’m sorry to hear about the death of your mother and the Parkinson in your family. It is good to read that you seem to be coping well and spend a lot of time in the forests. Thank you for your thoughts.
Whether we can delay death indefinitely depends on many things, e.g., your belief in sentient digital beings, but it might also be possible.