Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity (1994)

https://www.naturalism.org/philosophy/death/death-nothingness-and-subjectivity

by demomi • 4 years ago

14 31 4 years ago

naturalism.org

tarun_anand• 4 years ago

Could someone explain to a layman what this article is trying to say?

coldtea2• 4 years ago

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).

sparedwhistle• 4 years ago

When people like Asimov expressed their view on death--nothingness--they probably meant the same thing this Author is trying to say here. I would say when most people say death is nothingness, they don't mean there will be a remnant of them expericing nothingness, they just mean nothingness. I feel this author is just intentionally misinterpreting people's words.

drblast• 4 years ago

Imagine a star trek transporter was a real thing. In that show, I think the common explanation was that the transporter didn't send you places, but merely created a copy of you somewhere else and destroyed the original.

Now imagine if it were possible to instantly and cheaply travel to Paris this way. Many people would likely be just fine with doing this.

Now imagine that one day, the transporter doesn't destroy the original you and now two copies of you exist. From that moment on, the individual experiences diverge but each copy believes it's the original.

If ten days after that a technician came and said "ok, time to disintegrate you, don't worry, your copy in Paris is A-OK" I think that most people wouldn't agree to be disintegrated just because another mostly identical consciousness is alive.

And yet, if it were to happen flawlessly and instantaneously, likely that same existential fear doesn't exist. Most people think the star trek transporter is pretty cool.

But why? We have to realize that our consciousness is really an evolutionary trick that's expedient for our continued survival. The idea that the survival of my own ego and continuous conscious experience is pretty much the basest mechanism I have that makes me value staying alive.

But there's a paradox in the case of my exact copy. Logically, I shouldn't care of the star trek transporter works instantaneously or not. Let's say that it makes a copy that exists for twenty minutes before disintegrating me, but I have no way of knowing that and instead just sit in a room bored for twenty minutes until disintegration. Functionally that's a nearly identical experience to instant transport, but also seems a lot more like the broken transporter scenario.

But let's say this is the future of travel and everyone accepts the fact that my continued conscious experience is what's really important, so I'm willing to be disintegrated painlessly as long as a copy of me exists somewhere else in the universe.

That's not too big a leap to make, but it seems strange, right? Why am I not then just fine being disintegrated as long as any consciousness continues to exist?

My answer to that question is that it's an evolutionary advantage to want to live, therefore we want to live. A bit of circular reasoning. It's also our species' biggest unquestioned assumption too - that consciousness and self-awareness is better than the alternative. But "better" might just be "important to the survival of the human species."

I think the article touches on that.

joegibbs• 4 years ago

Would many people really be totally fine with getting disintegrated and a copy made immediately, if they knew that's what was happening? Even if it's instant I think that if you told someone they would be killed and an exact clone of them could get a free trip to Paris there'd be a very low chance they'd agree to it.

teekert2• 4 years ago

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?

tgflynn7• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

teekert2• 4 years ago

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.

AQuantized• 4 years ago

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.

Koshkin2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, more often than not, words begin having a life of their own. Speaking of “nothingness,” if we must, isn’t it obvious that the only instance of it is exactly the (absence of the) very person who is dead, and that it’s us still living who experience it?

coldtea2• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

So. Many. Words. What was the point of this article? I'd rather die than read it.

layer82• 4 years ago

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.

Koshkin2• 4 years ago

By why would that “negative reality” of yours only extend into the future but not also into the past, i.e. the time before birth?

layer82• 4 years ago

Because there is no hope for an earlier life in the past, as opposed to for a later life in the future. While we mentally live both in the past and in the future (and only little in the present), it’s not symmetric. We usually live for a better future. Depression for example is correlated with hopelessness for the future. You can’t lose hope for the past, because you consider it immutable and (usually) known, whereas the future is in flux and can be influenced, and is yet unknown (to some degree). The prospect of death on the other hand is incompatible with any subjective future one could hope for.

galgot• 4 years ago

Being thinking about the question of time and death for some time :p If ever consciousness still exist after death (that is termination of physical body functions), then it would be out of our material dimension, thus out of time. So there is no "life after death", because there can be no "after" when out of this dimension. It could be like consciousness being "disconnected" from the time conveyor belt. Need another beer...

bwi4• 4 years ago

I once read a bunch of accounts of near-death experiences. Descriptions run the gamut, but the one that stuck with me described it as “turning off a light switch.”

Shout out to Peter F. Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction trilogy, in which an interstellar humanity is threatened by the discovery that souls persist after death. Recommended for my fellow sci-fi aficionados.

satisfice• 4 years ago

Now go see The Prestige.

Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity (1994)

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