I feel that a lot of philosophical and mental anguish arises from the revelation that we, as thinking things, have a beginning and an end. The anguish being caused by the fear and loathing of death. In the infinite expanse and existence of the universe, the little flicker that is human beings amounts to nothing; is worthless.
Verily mortality has been a source of nihilism. Our world is dotted with decaying structures left behind by tyrannical men in power who desired to defeat time and death by building these monuments to themselves; to be remembered.
They reason that by creating something for future generations, they will in some sense still be alive, or have more value.
Now i wouldn’t try and tell someone that helping future generations is not valuable, as many of you know i would say value is entirely subjective, and depends on your desires. So if creating things gives you comfort, by all means do so, but there is a point where you must asses your desires, and determine which ones are rational to fufill. The first emperor of china used his desire for grandeur to unite China, which probably was for the good, though i cannot say for sure, but he fell prey to that age old desire to be immortal. He devoted his life to looking for some way to defeat death and become immortal. He eventually resolved to build the terracotta army in order to conquer the afterlife (in lunacy).
People fear death. Not just instinctually like something with big teeth, but like an idiot stands on train tracks, screaming and pointing at a train that will hit him in 52 years.
I suppose many religions try to adress this discomfort by giving reassurance that there is an afterlife; that life has a begining but no end. Personally i have never experienced anything that would make me believe in any mainstream religion, nor have i seen anything that would make me belilieve that we are anything more than biological beings whose consciousness arises from and is dictated by the physical universe.
Being agnostic, I do not claim to have all the answers or to know what happens after death, but i am prepared for the worst.
Spending your potentially only life chasing immortality seems a very risky gamble. Ask yourself, what are the odds you will discover a way to live in this world forever? You’re probably better off risking death to see where that leads. But again i have to say that if you are that unsettled by the prospect of death, and if searching for a way to cheat it is the only way you can rest easy, then by all means go right ahead.
As an agnostic i’d like to think i am prepared for and have accepted the possibility that when i die i will become no more, and never think or feel pain and pleasure again. I’ll be gone.
In accepting that, this life and the time you have in it becomes infinitely valueable; it’s everything you have. It is indespensible.
This position is somewhat similar to the point from which nihilism would come in and and say that since you die, nothing you do matters and you are worthless. However this is not the same sort of nihilism that arises from comparing the finite with the infinite, it’s more of a fear of loss. All we have is life, and time, and we know that’s something. It’s definitely the most important thing we have if anything was ever important. If you accept that comparing what we have to what we could have if we were immortal incites nothing but jealously and obsession, not nihilism.
So if time is valueable, it should matter how we spend it, it should matter what we do during life, to ourselves anyway.
The nature of our consciousness leads me to say things like “people want to be happy” or “comfort is the ultimate goal”. Given that, is it rational to spend the greater part of your llife struggling to create a monument to be remembered? do you think the peace of mind you get from that is worth the sacrifice of most of your time in life? When you’re dead it’s not like you can continue to enjoy your sucess, so what was it all for? Is it also rational to spend your entire life in search of a way to defeat death? Spending your entire life in a futile struggle doesn’t seem very comfortable to me. People throw away all the time they have for the chance at an infinite amount of time, and wind up with nothing. People wadger that entering into any bet where the reward is unlimited is a good bet to make, but what they don’t realise that though the pay off is infinite, the odds are infintesimal.
To exist for eternity is inconcievable. For all intents and purposes you can think of immortality simply as the ability to exist for a really really long time, but to actually be immortal is inconcievable.
Many nihilists i know disregard the value of life as not worth the price of pain they pay, yet they still want to exist forever. Would this just result in an eternal struggle or eternal discomfort and pain? They want to exist as an all powerful immortal, not like the do now, but as their ideas would have it; to be god. If that’s rational then i’m napolean.
How long would it be before we lost al interest in life and committed suicide? 6000 years? How spoiled would be become with god like powers?
Here’s a question for you, can god satisfy his own insatiable desires?
The implications of immortality are many, and i have spoken of how the desire to be immortal can be irrational.
My logic professor said that if my desires are irrational, then i should change my desires. I must admit that changing my desires is easier said then done, at least i can change which desires i act on.
I’m not sure how these ideas will be recieved. I have talked about why immortality is an irrational desire, but i would not tell you to stop day dreaming.
If you take anything from this post let it be the the tenacity to cast aside your fears and confront death, and plan for it. Your death is comming and you need to know that, so you don’t waste any time.
So in your spare time dream about being a vampire, leprachaun or a Q from Star Trek, but when it comes to your direction in life, do what will make you the happiest, applying reason to your decisions of course…
Wonderer-