When people say ‘‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you’’ i ask, then why the fear of death? Take into account;
So if i one can no longer think then the term ‘‘what you don’t know cant hurt you’’ should apply here right? It should but does it? Why do people still fear death?
Rami.[/list]
in proper form, this argument sounds like this :
Why should one fear death ? for when you are, death is not yet, and when death is here, you are no longer.
It is not so much fear of death as it is fear of missing something … if you are dead you can’t know what happens next.
you presume something could happen after you die tho. it may be so, it may be not so.
We technically cannot be certain that death is not something to be feared. I mean, are you absolutley certain that whatever happens after death or even during death (regardless of how you die) is actually a peacefull thing? What if dying is actualy a psychologically or physically painfull experience-----------even if you are dieing of natural causes? 
In addition, I never did agree with that original statement, “What you do not know can’t hurt you”. I mean, what you do no know can kill you.
dieing and death are not the same thing. i have no clue how dieing might be like, if it can even exist. i was discussing death as a state of non existance, opposite of life.
Yes, death as non existence. Somebody said it’s not so much thye fear of death but rather the feeling of ‘‘missing out’’. Knowing you wont know what happens next, cos your dead. But why does that matter? Why would be scared of not knowing what happens next? The fear of non existence? It’s like missing somebody who u never actually met or knew, the fear of death just doesn’t make sense, nor does the feeling that you will '‘miss’ something.
Rami.
rami that might be as you say, or not. however i for one have missed people i never met and things i never seen. so inasmuch as this is not just my own personal madness but to some extent shared by others, it might be an explanation.
But zenofeller. How is it possible to miss somebody whom you’d never actually met? How can you miss ‘‘nobody’’? Somebody you’d never known or spoken to, surely you can’t miss them, otherwise you’d miss me right?
Obviously you will not miss me, so why do u think one may say that he is afraid of missing what happens ‘‘next’’?
Of couse what you dont know cant hurt you. In order for pain to be received by the brain, you must become “aware” of it in some way. So if you do not have the awareness or knowledge of the event, there is no way it could hurt you. 
So why does one feel as though he will miss what happens next after he is dead? Why should it bother him if he is not going to be aware of it?
rami, it would go like this (lets consider the simplifed matter of finding a mate):
you go about your daily business and meet a number of women. many of them have strange peculiar odours, so in your mind the desire for a woman that doesnt smell is built.
later on, you meet more women, some are entirely fanatics on the matter of pornography, if they could they would burn it all. so in your mind the desire for a woman that enjoys porn is born
even later, you meet even more, but most of them dont manage to stay awake during an entire football game. so a desire for a girl that likes sports is burn
then suddenly some woman walks in that doesnt smell, carries the latest issue of playboy (or whatever you fancy) and asks you who won yesterday’s game. and you will tell her you have missed her your entire life.
hugely oversimplified, but makes the point. i think.
I think it all boils down to this:
If there is no real afterlife of any kind (meaning, there is absolutely no forms of experience or anything of the like immediately after death. This leaves us with simply a state of no exsistence), then death should no be of any harm to anyone.
If there is an afterlife, then the actual act of dieing is nothing more than the process by which we transform from one state of “life” to another state or form of life.
Your talking in general, you will not physically feel sick or depressed if she dies. You simply didn’t know her, lets assume that you never met this ‘‘perfect woman’’ . I just don’t think u could miss her, it’s absurd.
Think of it like this, 12am midnight and the football game starts at 2a,…u sit there thinking ‘‘mus stay awake to watch the game’’. sadly enough you do not manage to stay awake so you miss the game, do u care that you missed the game? Whilst your in the motion of sleep, you don’t care if your mother has just been stabbed to death, you dont care if u never wake again.
I think the idea in this thread that we can only fear death if death contains suffering is very wrong-headed. I think we can fear death as a cessation of life, as a point beyond which we will no longer be ourselves. To illustrate what I mean, suppose you discovered that in a few days, someone will come to you and shoot you with a special, mind-altering ray. This ray will completely annhiliate your memories, re-write them, and effectively turn you into a new person with no recollection of your past self. Suppose it was guarenteed that your new ‘self’ will lead a happier, more fullfilling life than you. Would you resist? Would you fear? I know I would.
Yes, the fear of not being, but it’s quite an irrelevant fear. Since when it happens, your not there
but no one can ever return from the dead to actually confirm to us that the cessation of being is actually a “bad” thing or a thing to be feared. This was one of Plato’s arguments: that death should not be feared, since no one can really tell if it a good or bad thing.
I mean, this may sound stupid, but are you certain that being is beter than non-being? I mean, we as humans have no ability to even comprehend one percent of what the state of non-being is like. All we no is that we no longer are.
Hence, the fear of what you speak comes not from the desire to cease from be-ing, but rather from not having any ability to comprehend what non-being is actually like. Just my humble opins, anyway.
Why would one have to be? Isn’t one of the greatest fears the fear of the unknown? The mere fact that what comes after dying might be horrible is enough to be afraid for it!
Ultimately, I think there’s no point in saying “this fear is rational” and “this fear is irrational”- we’re talking about emotions here, after all. All we can do, is compare death to other sorts of things people are afraid of, and attempt to understand what sort of relation there is.
True, and I certainly don’t mean to sound as if I’m attempting to deny the fact that all men are born naturally fearing death above all things.
My bigger point was the fact that the fear is the fear of the unknown, rather than the fear of cessation of exsistence, itself.
Just my 2 cents…
Erm, it’s probably relative. I think that the idea of not being is what is scary. Many of us probably didn’t care much about the time before our births, i mean…we smply were ‘‘not’’. And if we’d have stayed in that state then why would it even matter? It’s like hanging of the edge of a cliff and holding onto a rope for deal life, you do everything in your power to hold on cos it matters so muh to you for aslong as you ‘‘are’’, but when you lose grip and fall, it all doesn’t matter right?