Kevin's Watch

I've never died before (or so I believe). I have lived for all the days that I have had experiences. So nothing in my experience seems to prove that I'm going to die--I can't reasonably inductively conclude, "One day, I will die."

If death is so uncertain for me, does it make sense for it to matter to me? Or would it be more sensible for me to act as if I will always be alive? (False dichotomy?)

Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:I've never died before (or so I believe). I have lived for all the days that I have had experiences. So nothing in my experience seems to prove that I'm going to die--I can't reasonably inductively conclude, "One day, I will die."

If death is so uncertain for me, does it make sense for it to matter to me? Or would it be more sensible for me to act as if I will always be alive? (False dichotomy?)

Based on our sample size of the entirety of humanity ever, I think it is reasonable (to say the least) to conclude that "One day, I will die".

Of course, that does not make your following questions invalid, we'd just have to look at a different frame of reference. I would propose that, not knowing when we will die or how unless we take it into our own hands, we should act as if we will always be alive. This is because any day in the near future we have a certain probability of still being alive (in my case, it's a high probability, for someone with terminal cancer, that probability becomes lower depending on the stage).

Should it matter to you? Yes, because your mortality should be kept in mind to limit your foolishly reckless actions.

Do I know that enormous numbers of humans have died in the past, or would that be something I take on faith? (Do I know whether there are a handful of humans who have not died, or who came back to life, or w/e--or would that be a matter of faith too?) Have I ever seen another human die? Off the top of my head, I can only think of seeing that clip of that one guy who was shot in the head during the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. Do I know he really died, though?

Also, what if I have evidence of my own non-mortality? Suppose that I tried several times over the years to kill myself. Suppose also that I did a number of "foolishly reckless" things, that seem as if they should have killed me, and yet did not. I could, of course, conclude that my attempts/accidents were not the sort of thing that could kill me. Or could I conclude that they are examples of my immortality?

These aren't entirely academic questions for me, btw.

Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:
These aren't entirely academic questions for me, btw.

What? I hope you mean "I've discovered that I might be immortal" and not "I've discovered I have a lethal disease, but hope for evidence it really isn't."

On the evidence for dead people: you might want to consider the enormous number of "things that must be lies" [and how many must be in on the conspiracy] in order to continue the lie that all people die.

How odd. Just the other week I was toying with the idea of immortality.

I have been trying to read The One Tree but finding it difficult due to various responsibilities and commitments putting a drain my spare time. Anyway, while walking through town a few days ago I had a crazy idea of the tsunami, that pop's up every now and again in the chronicles, might be a representaion of people turning away from an idea that death was actually a misconception, or longer than normal life an unbelief.
Imagine if there were someone like Thomas Covenant who could show people how to cheat death - to prolong life like in SRD's Land. What kind of a reaction might that cause? - tsunami!

No sooneer had I felt the incipient ripple presaging the tsunami did I banish the very thought from my mind. Much too scary an idea to live with, to say the least. Such things are best left safely tucked away in fantasy novels, far from the realities of life.

I'm not dying haha! No, it was two other things.

One, my religious attitude: I know of Hume's argument against miracles, and I think it made enough sense for me when I read it first for me to accept it, so there's something strange about having faith in the Resurrection nevertheless, though the nature of it in my book is strange compared to what it would be if it were a miracle, maybe.

Two, though, one time I ate what I had read would be an overwhelmingly fatal amount of digitalis. I blacked in and out for several hours as a result but didn't die. So I wonder sometimes what happened.

You would first need to have proof that you live - I think.

+JMJ+

"Do I have proof that I'm going to die one day?"???

Rather, perhaps, the thread title should be "Do I have to prove that I'm going to die one day?" Because if the answer to this question is anything other than a decisive "No", one might want to ask whether one is living a little too much in abstract logic puzzles rather than in Reality-As-Is.

Logic's jumping-off point is always Reality. Reality doesn't take its cue from logic. Logic (any abstraction, really) must always depart from, and return to, Reality. This means that there is always the soupçon of indeterminacy, an uncloseable flaw or rupture, in every abstract system (à la Godel), else the system can't exist at all.

Wosbald wrote: flaw or rupture, in every abstract system (à la Godel), else the system can't exist at all.

Yea...a trinity, of such perhaps? The limits of systems you mention, plus things that must-but-only-can be true in an abstract system, plus the gap-that-transforms that's always present when moving between the abstract and the concrete/material.

I can't use words like "abstract" and "concrete" like that. They have too many connotations for me, that they would mean that in my book. However, I would like to comment on the relationship between logic and reality. "Reality" is a word, with a definition, that can be understood in terms of its relationship to other sentences, and so on. Ultimately, logic is just a very careful appreciation for the objective relationships between things meant in sentences, and so on. To think of a fact, for instance, is just to think of sentence-like slices of reality (as one philosopher, Quine I think, mockingly or not put it). "The world is the sum of the facts," means that the world is like a book, to the point where there are not just objects floating about, not just random names/nominal expressions scattered on different pages, in no order: no: but not even is the book limited only to lists of simple sentences, but it contains its own wordplay in uncanny coincidences, a space for transaesthetic character in the semantic and semiotic functions of the unmarked (and, implicitly, inversely marked) parts of the pages in the book, etc.

If such were not so, technology could not exist in the form it does in our life. For if anything proved the efficacy and concrete value even of abstraction--for the general and the specific are not opposed but must be conceived of in harmony, if we are to understand the world by their conceptual lights (and the balance lies in the dual emptiness of pure haecceities, the this-nesses of individual, particular beings, on the one hand, and the absolute truth function on the other (the ATF = our theory about the meaning of the word-concept "truth", e.g. correspondence with facts, coherence with an ideal set of sentences, or whatever))--then it would be technology, which is reason's friend even when advanced by intellectual accident.

The only meanings that cannot be communicated in languages, are ones we cannot ever speak of at all, not even to speak of our inability to speak of them. To ever speak of something and then to say, "But it is beyond our minds," is to lie to reality itself, even if self-deceptively so. For either we refer to what we speak of or we refer to nothing possible whatsoever. If we can speak of the possibility of a thing, there is not going back to knowing nothing of it, for a question that is unknown is not one that prompts us to state professed answers thereto.

Does this have anything to do with logic being essentially "flawed" or not, somehow? I daresay it's not clear to me that it does. But that means, at this point, that it is unclear to me that it does: I can see the outline of it as a smudge in my deeper judgment. For we might ask ourselves just what a flaw is, and therefore, what things can be flawed (could we intelligibly speak, non-metaphorically, of a flawed color?), and so on (we would not want to say all inability is a flaw; that a rock cannot eat mice is not a flaw).

I decided years ago that I would not die. now when the time arrives, I may want to.

if not, I'll let you know.