The Fact of Death

robinrohan This is probably a false impression since if you had all the time in the world to get around to it then in all likelihood it would never get done unless you happen to have discipline for it in the first place. "The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss."
Thomas CarlyleThe clock is always ticking for each of us.It is certain we die in this life so no matter your belief you need to deal with it only once.Just think,only one instant over thousands or millions of moments in a life.It is my observation that in life you get what you focus on.If you are waiting for life to treat you differently than everybody else I think you need to kick yourself in the ass.
A full life is one where you are involved to the hilt with those causes that give you enjoyment and that ease the burden for others. Here is an excercise that may make you realize the meaning of the term "heart".Go to your local hospitals and see if they have a ward dealing with babies born of mothers whose drug habit has led to a condition in the child that is terminal.In certain places there are programs to allow volunteers to come into the wards to hold and rock the children that they may live their short lives comforted by human touch and voice.If after helping one of these infants cope till they die I bet you will not cry about the "unfairness" of life that you lived.

robinrohan My mistake I misunderstood the implication of this sentence here. This is why I thought you were complaining about things.My mistake.

Faith Eternal misery is what I equate eternal life with.Just contemplate never having an end to existence.Trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years and no let up.Whatever length of time you wish to consider has no meaning on the scale of infinite.What do you suppose you could occupy yourself with on such a scale?

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And since you know you cannot see yourself,
so well as by reflection, I, your glass,
will modestly discover to yourself,
that of yourself which you yet know not of

Faith Even the most marvelous vistas jade one on the scale of eternity.
Did you even stop to contemplate what the passing of a trillion years implies? Are you to seriously believe that after a mere trillion years you will be still full of wish for even more existence?Eternity with no rest from the assault of life makes even heaven a hell.

Ben! No,for a conscious being there is the perception of time as a construct of the brain.When you are not conscious as,say,in a coma time passes on since it is a property of the world in which you are but your perception is not obseverved by the brain.When death occurs the processes that give you consciousness cease to function permanently as the structure of the molecules of which you are made lose the integrity necessary to maintain the brain and organs.
The entropy you produced throughout your life and have held at bay by obtaining energy from food scales to maximum and you no longer participate in this process and your existence as a mind and body comes to a halt. Awareness is a product of conscious processes which are themselves the product of the electrochemical inerplay within the tissues of your brain.This also ceases to exist at death. Since there is absolutely nothing of the consious entity you have that is your awareness of yourself,since this is an illusion produced by the brain as a consequence of having no nervous feedback loop of itself,at death this ceases to operate.This sense of self needs to cease existence as well since it too is a consequence of the activity of the brain.
As Isaac Asimov once stated "Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."This message has been edited by sidelined, Mon, 2005-05-16 09:22 AM

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And since you know you cannot see yourself,
so well as by reflection, I, your glass,
will modestly discover to yourself,
that of yourself which you yet know not of

robinrohan And after the first 100,000,000 times you take a pill to let you sleep for a hundred years? You will always...have...more...time!Shit! What challenge could possibly be faced by those who live eternally? After seeing wonder after wonder after wonder after etc..etc... forever!Do you see what I am getting at?At what point does it all become boring?What do you do if after 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years you cannot be bothered anymore.You still must continue to exist!!This many years is no different from the first one on the scale of eternity.Trapped with no release from existence would be my version of hell.

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chris simon
porteus jr Not true, we know much about the world and the forces at work in it.
We of course do not know everything but we have only very recently in our history begun to ask the proper questions of nature and in the last century,with the advent of applying scientific methods of investigation to all fields of human endevour that huge advances in understanding have been accomplished.It is a sad characteristic of our society that we structure such a marvelous system of enterprise based on science and technology while at the same time we structure our learning instituions to prevent the understandings we do have from reaching the consciousness ofthe general public. I am hardly disappointed since I think the concept of heaven and hell are the result of normal human longing bred of both fear and isolation through our common history.Until the advent of proper rational understanding of nature we had no way to otherwise cope with the dangers inherent in the natural world nor any means by which we could explain things to ourselves to maintain a sense of control.It is far more probable that these concepts are the result of human beings and their states of emotion and interaction with others than any actual invisible immaterial realm that only some appear able to acess.

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In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams

chris simon
porteus jr In a natural world the absence of knowledge of god is because there is not one outside our imaginations. Here is the entire sentence What I mean by this is the common struggles that people of all races and nations faced during their early history.

chris simon
porteus jrA spiritual existence? No. I can accept a spiritual belief but this is to be expected since without the construct of their beliefs they would live in abject fear of the world around them that they have neither the tools nor the understanding to combat or control.
In the face of people dying as they do,leaving them,in some instances,alone to face the uncertain world about them,it would make sense for them to develop an imaginary afterlife to allow them cope with the loss.Of course the construct of this belief is natural but illusory.

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In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams

Ben I beg to differ but the seat of consciousness is the brain.If you have ever been unconscious you can understand this. I agree with this statement however this one You are defining infinity in a way I am not familiar with.Could you elaborate? Time elapses regardless of whether we are conscious of it or not.We may not be "aware" of time passing but there is no mystery here since we require the conscious mind to inform our awareness of the passage of time. You have never lost consciousness? Trust me you experience nothing till you regain consciousness for the reason that the normal processes of the brain have been interrupted by the event that caused you to lose consciousness. Just because you are not aware of experiencing the passage of time does not mean that time is not passing for you.Time is an artifact of the world around us. I do not see how,in the event of death,after your brain decays into its constituent parts,that you think it will somehow be reawakened.There is certainly no evidence that such would be the case. Where do you get this mistaken idea that when you cease to exist at death that time itself comes to a halt.Your experience of time comes to a halt not time itself. You have lost me.What definition of death {lack of conscious experience} implies that it cannot be infinitely long?

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In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams

Ben Acouple of things I see wrong with this from a physics viewpoint.First we have the arrow of time which has the universe tending towards maximum entropy and two we have the uncertainty principle which would not allow the same position- momentum or energy -time from occuring over again.Nature at her core is incapable of repeating itself.The uncertainty principle is the mathematical barrier to your scenario.

chris simon
porteus jr Our beliefs are a natural construct we use to ease the fear of death and loss of loved ones that are threatening to many people. In what way do you feel my view is limited? If you mean that I view the world oas being void of gods and ghosts and such things I admit that this is the case. We are in many ways still afraid of the world and our mortality.We are less fearful in that we have learned that many of the semmingly oppressive enviromental factors such a lightning,floods,earthquakes are natural results of natural processes.We excercise a level of control on many of the things that in the past {famine,disease,natural disasters} claimed lives on a regular basis. I am not sure what you are aiming at here. Could you please clarify?

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In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams

chris simon
poteus jrI do not think there is a why woven into the world.We are the result of forces interacting in a mysterious way that we are slowly uncovering as we learn to ask the right questions.The mystery is only such until we reveal its workings.
Interestingly the universe shows us that first impressions of the nature of how we think about origins is heavily biased by our attempts to relate subtle nuances of the world to our preconcieved but false notions.This is not to say that life can have no purpose.

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In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams

chris simon
porteus jr Not at all.That we are limited in what we can learn is a consequence of our ability to investigate scientifically.There are limits imposed on investigation simply by the nature of the world.Quantum physics only allows us to set probabilities of events in space-time and also presents to us a clear stricture on the properties of the universe as a consequence of the structure of the universe.We all die as a consequence of the way the physical laws of the world unfold.We are subject to those physical laws and they are immutable. Just so we are clear as to my statement concerning false notions The error in human reasoning is to suppose that our usual experience of existence is true to the nature of the world.We are normally content to assume that the world our senses relate to us are true but they are quite often in error.That we make mistakes in judgement when we do not carefully investigate phenomena is well documented.
We have debates endlessly about how the universe began but due to misunderstanding of the actual nature of things we never stop to pay attention to the ramifications of physical laws.You may or may not have heard of the uncertainty principle.This law of the universe states that we cannot know both the position of a particle and its momentum to a better accuracy than a certain limit.So what you say? OK, because of this we cannot ever reach the limit of temperature known as absolute zero since if all motion were to cease as required by absolute zero then we would therefore kwno both the position and momentum to better than the limit of the uncertainty principle.If we know the momentum very accurately then the particle has a wide range of places{position} where it can be.Conversely if we know its position well we have no real idea of the momentum.This also holds true for energy and time.So what? OK now we have a question as to where the energy of the universe comes from.Since a large amount of energy is allowed by the uncertainty principle the amount of time within which that energy can be available must be exceedingly brief.Here comes the fun part.We do not know {since experiments to confirm this are difficult in the extreme} if the laws of physics apply at the extremes of temperature back at the start of the universe we know today however if the uncertainty principle is still valid then the universe need not have had a definite beginning for the following reason.
Since the background radiation we measure today means that the temperature {and thus the avaiable energy} was not infinite then the amount of time that could be available to begin the universe had to be exceddingly tiny in order for the energy -time relation of the uncertainty principle to stay within the limit imposed.
There could not have been an actual beginning either since this would also violate the uncertainty principle because the momentum and position of all paricles would be zero and thus below the limit the universe itself imposes.So where does this leave us? It now restricts us to a given set of possibilties and we must change our way of viewing momentum position time and energy of the particles which make upo the universe. I never said it was preconcieved. I said it was constructed as a defense mechanism to deal with a frightening uncertain world governed by unkowable{to them} forces attributed to god or gods.Or dragons etc. We make our own out of the interplay of ourselves with others to enjoy life for as long as we have it:to sing,to dance,to go canoeing, to rest on a beach watching waves to raise children aand watch them grow. The list is endless.That a mortal life is our irreversible fate does not make it meaningless while we can produce our own raison d^etre right?This message has been edited by sidelined, Thu, 2005-05-19 12:42 AM

robinrohan What the heck did you do that age would be a barrier to correcting?This message has been edited by sidelined, Mon, 2006-05-08 07:48 AM