Death

[canninator]

Right.  Anyway, the idea that everything which is important to know, we can know for certainty, is itself an article of faith.

Just for the hell of it and to throw the cat among the pigeons I will disagree on the following grounds.

1. Everything which can be known (not just the important things) will be known.
2. ...because quantum mechanics will prove to be deterministic.
3. ...because there are non-local hidden variables that make it thus.
4. ...and because (and here's the clincher) we will be able to determine those variables.
5. ...therefore given sufficient computing power all things can be known.

All faith based statements but there is no logical reason I can think of that makes these statements implicitly untrue. Well, I can think of several but then this wouldn't be any fun.

[karlhenning]

Just for the hell of it and to throw the cat among the pigeons I will disagree on the following grounds.

1. Everything which can be known (not just the important things) will be known.

Do we disagree?  Is [ everything which is important to know ] a subset of [ everything which can be known ] ?

[Dr. Dread]

The sky is filled with ultimate truth;
Other and self are both forgotten.
Having a mind like iron,
Why care that my hair's grey as frost?
A clear spring follows the valley far,
An old cottage lies deep in the clouds.
This is where I'm at peace,
Blissful delight without end.

- Wen-siang (1210-1280)

[canninator]

Do we disagree?  Is [ everything which is important to know ] a subset of [ everything which can be known ] ?

To avoid quality statements I would propose that

[ everything which is important to know ] ⊆ [ everything which can be known ]

If you want to know something with certainty, say X_n (if that is ultimately possible etc etc), then all other things (X₁, X₂...X_n-1 must also be known with certainty. I suspect there is a logical short circuit in here somewhere.

Anyway, I've realized the whole thing falls to pieces if non-computable determinism is true. Alas, such is the fate of those who speak before their time on the internet.

[vandermolen]

Beauty!

Glad you like the quote Karl

[Bulldog]

The "so what" is the "discuss" part, you see?   For instance; many people are awfully afraid of death, many people wish they were immortal, many people worries with "the things I want to do before I die", etcetera (a long etcetera) So: What happens if I am correct (as you put it) and, as far as it concerns you, there is not death?

Well, I think the best thing is to not get hung-up about death - concentrate on living while you are alive.  I find your concerns and fears about this matter on the morbid side.

[vandermolen]

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

[Dr. Dread]

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

Disagree.

[vandermolen]

Disagree.

Fair enough.

[karlhenning]

They call him free-thinkin' Dave . . . .

[mahler10th]

I assume it will be like before I was born.  0:)

My philosophy exactly.  We're all going back to where we were before we were born.  It's the same answer I give whenever the subject comes up.  "Death?  Where were you ten, a hundered or even a million years before you were born?  Right.  Well, whatever that is, that's where you're headed right now."

[Bulldog]

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

Right on target.

[Elgarian]

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

Alternatively:

To philosophise is to learn how to die.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Looks like we're just going to have to put them in the ring together and let 'em slug it out.

[karlhenning]

Is it about the hedge?

http://www.youtube.com/v/YoBTsMJ4jNk

[Elgarian]

I was wondering about Schrodinger's cat. There's this curious paradox at the heart of quantum mechanics, whereby it's supposed that several alternative states can exist together in a system, until an observation is made on the system - at which point the alternatives are resolved into a single event. Schrodinger told the story of a cat in a closed box, with a poison that is only released when triggered by a random internal event - such as a radioactive decay (essentially unpredictable). The only way we can find out if the cat is dead or alive is by opening the lid of the box and making the observation; but what quantum theory appears to be saying is that until we actually open the lid, the 'dead cat' and 'alive cat' states exist simultaneously.

The point here is that intuitively this seems nonsense; yet that is what the laws of quantum mechanics seem to imply.

I'm not proposing any kind of theory - just following a trail. But suppose the box has a lid that can't be opened. Or at least, a lid that could only be opened from the inside, if at all. All we can say is that we put a cat in the box. We can have no way of knowing whether the cat is alive because we can't open the lid; and since we can't open the lid we can't make the observation that would resolve the simultaneous alternative states. They would both coexist within the box. Dead cat? Or live cat? The question is not merely irresolvable, but unaskable, because there is no possible answer beyond the simultaneous coexistence of states. It would be a non-question - like asking whether a dog were an elephant or a cow.


As I say, I'm just fooling around here, but if one thought of death as a Schrodinger box with an unopenable lid, then it might be the case that the question of 'what death is' is fundamentally unaskable in the same kind of way. No observation can be made, from outside the box (i.e. 'death') that would resolve the possible alternate states within it. When we ask the question 'what happens when we die?', the answer, for us folks outside the box, is not 'eternal life' or 'you turn into a pumpkin', or indeed, even 'nothing'. The only response is: 'that question is fundamentally unanswerable, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of reality'. We think we're asking a reasonable question, but actually we may not be asking a real question at all.

[drogulus]

As I say, I'm just fooling around here, but if one thought of death as a Schrodinger box with an unopenable lid, then it might be the case that the question of 'what death is' is fundamentally unaskable in the same kind of way. No observation can be made, from outside the box (i.e. 'death') that would resolve the possible alternate states within it. When we ask the question 'what happens when we die?', the answer, for us folks outside the box, is not 'eternal life' or 'you turn into a pumpkin', or indeed, even 'nothing'. The only response is: 'that question is fundamentally unanswerable, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of reality'. We think we're asking a reasonable question, but actually we may not be asking a real question at all.

    Death isn't a thing, or a state. It means that a living thing has ceased to be alive. It's one of the strange features of language, and therefore of certain philosophies, that nonexistence can be treated as some alternative form of existence.

    There's more than one reason why a question can be unanswerable. It might depend on knowledge we don't have access to, though at some point we might. Then there are questions that embody a premise that leads nowhere, like the one about death having a nature. Like the philosophers who think that Being is something with attributes, the questioner is indulging an unwarranted assumption and spinning fantasies about it. The problem is not that death isn't purple or oblong or something else, the problem is that the mistaken notion that death has qualities is not recognized as a mistake.

    At this point someone might remark that "we don't know that for sure", as if the question depended on facts we don't have. That's what I'm objecting to. The nature of an unknown something doesn't depend on knowledge we don't happen to have. I don't need to know about the all the propositions that can't be rendered into sensible form, which is fine with me since there isn't any way to know about them. And why treat one of these propositions that finds its way into language in such a discrepant manner? I don't see people worrying all that much about the infinite number of unknowables in "proposition space", but only these few that keep resurrecting themselves. That's why Russell's Teapot is such a good illustration. Since you don't know it isn't there, why not think it is?

    Perhaps if we make it a religious object it will exist a little more insistently. Then a dumb proposition will suddenly become "meaningful". So, all you Teapotists, get busy and Believe!! It can't be that hard to turn a joke into a faith that moves mountains. It happens all the time, so you....uh....never know.

   Seriously, "you can't prove x isn't true" isn't a good reason to think that it is, or that nonexistence is some thing the contents of a box might reveal.

[vandermolen]

My philosophy exactly.  We're all going back to where we were before we were born.  It's the same answer I give whenever the subject comes up.  "Death?  Where were you ten, a hundered or even a million years before you were born?  Right.  Well, whatever that is, that's where you're headed right now."

This seems a reasonable assumption to me.

[drogulus]

This seems a reasonable assumption to me.

      Yes, and it isn't really necessary to prove it's correct. If you can start to exist, you can cease to exist, too.

      I like to speculate, so I sometimes think about whether existence as understood for beings like us could also be understood as applying to the Universe as a whole. Can a Universe die, or be born? I think not, because existence and nonexistence for entities in the Universe is really just moving things around. So a Universe can't do anything except change. To say something exists is to say a certain form is stable and persistent enough to be recognized as such. Nonexistence is the loss of that form. It's an impersonal way to be immortal if you need that. 

[drogulus]

     Douglas Hofstadter raises the question of whether a persistent form existing anywhere and when would be you if it resembled you closely enough and thought it was. He arrives at his idea by a process of elimination to the objections and can't find any convincing ones. This accords with the popular imagination which believes that Capt. Kirk isn't dead but merely moved when Scotty beams him up. My impulse is to say he's dead and there's a copy (Kirk₂) that thinks he's Kirk. Since there's no original Kirk to object that he (Kirk₁) is dead and Kirk₂ is an imposter no one bothers about it. But what if the transporter misfires and Kirk is just copied and pasted back to the Enterprise? Which one is the real one? Hofstadter says they both are.

[Iconito]

The OP turned out to be highly inept. No biggy. Let’s try again.

This discussion begins with an assumption: There’s no afterlife. When you die, you die completely. You cease to exist. Zilch. You can’t even realise that you just died, because there’s no more “you” to realise anything. Your death will be very real for those who outlive you but, as far as it concerns you, your own death will never happen.

The first thing I should have stated much more clearly than I did is that discussing the validity of that assumption is totally out of the question. That’s a different thread, if you like. This is like “Let’s discuss morals assuming there’s no God” or “Let’s discuss 9/11 assuming all those conspiracy theories are false”. You just don’t mention God or Loose Change in those threads. You simply either play along or keep out.

So, now that that’s (I hope) clear: There is no death for you. Have you ever thought it that way? What are the implications (if any) to your life? (like, how much sense does fear of dying make? or, how much power does someone pointing a gun to your head have? etc)

There.