Philosophy and death

Death, Faith & Existentialism
Filiz Peach explains what two of the greatest existentialist thinkers thought about death: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.

And of course that has absolutely nothing to with how people feel when contemplating that everyone and everything they know and love will be obliterated for “I” at the moment of death. Including, one supposes, how those millions upon million of men, women and children felt before they died in Hitler’s death camps.

Instead, let’s pin down the “existential significance” of death here as it relates – philosophically? – to “Dasein’s being-in-the-world”.

No, really, what important “technical” distinction am I missing here?

Like it takes a philosophical mind to grasp that being born is a death sentence. Like the human species, in being the only species on Earth able to grasp this self-consciously [given free will], is the only species that needs to find a way to fit death into life itself.

Okay, in the face of one’s existential death, does authenticity then come to revolve for some around being or not being a Nazi? Or, given that death here is only explored as a conception, are things of that sort largely irrelevant?

Unless, of course, historically, culturally and experientially, different communities of men and women come to configure living and dying in very different ways. And, in so doing, configure the relationship between I and we, I and you, us and them etc., in very differernt ways.

The part where, among other things, memes and my own understanding of dasein come into play.

Death, Faith & Existentialism
Filiz Peach explains what two of the greatest existentialist thinkers thought about death: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.

This can make for any number of rather mind-boggling scenarios. If you are convinced that death encompasses the utter obliteration of all that you know and love, of all that you are as an extant human being, what then would you be willing to do to prolong that life? For example, how many others would you be willing to trample on if they got in the way of your continuing to exist?

Say some sadistic bastard threatened to kill someone you love – or many that you love – if you did not take your own life…is there a “right answer” here? In fact, we can think up any in number of situations in which, in order to sustain the existence of “I”, we might be required to do all manner of nasty things.

Is there a line here that you won’t cross?

This is just intellectual gibberish to me. As though the flesh and blood ontic dasein can explore the ontological philosophical Dasein and come away with an understanding that makes the points that I raise go away.

Unless, of course, someone here would like to make that attempt. Given a particular context.

Instead, the closest that the “serious philosopher” seems to come is encompassed in an assessment of this sort:

Again, what I would prefer are those who either agree with or disagree with Heidegger’s assessment of Dasein, Being and Authenticity, noting how in their own interactions with others these capital letter words are relevant to encounters that precipitate conflicting behaviors revolving around conflicting value judgments that are not manifested existentially given the manner in which I construe the meaning of dasein in my signature threads.

Death, Faith & Existentialism
Filiz Peach explains what two of the greatest existentialist thinkers thought about death: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.

As though, given the staggering vastness of the universe, that is even possible! Sure, take cracks at it. Why not? But to suppose that as a “serious philosopher” one can encompass an ontological – teleological? – assessment of the human condition? How could that be other than “in your head”?

Consider this: sciencechannel.com/tv-shows … universe-2

Here we bump into just how staggeringly vast – weird? eerie? – the universe is. After watching it, ask yourself how close you think philosophers or scientists are to broaching an onotological/teleological understanding of mere human beings.

Okay, somewhere between “personal immortality” and “total annihilation”. On the other hand, what else could it be? Perhaps we exist in a certain way beyond our death but only for a certain amount of time. Or we exist in embodiments that are very different. Or “I” itself isn’t sustained into eternity but some component of it is manifested in ways that we can scarcely conceive of now.

Again, when you watch episodes like the one above on the Science Channel, nothing at all seems beyond possibility. And then throw in the quantum world and multiple universes?

And then the part where secular philosophy ends and theology/religion begins? The part where we start to capitalize words like Existenz, Transcendence and Being?

Death, Faith & Existentialism
Filiz Peach explains what two of the greatest existentialist thinkers thought about death: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.

And yet, clearly, in the either/or world, this “empirical self with a temporal dimension” is bursting at the seams with attributes that can readily be grasped objectively by all with functioning senses and functioning brains.

Really? Okay, then note a set of circumstances in which individuals interact and describe those aspects of these interactions that reflect the “non-objective free self” and those that don’t. In the either/or world, authenticity is built right into us genetically, biologically.

“Transcend one’s finitude?” Same thing. Focus in on flesh and blood human interactions and point to instances when one either is or is not transcending their finitude. I merely shift the discussion here from the either/or I to the is/ought “i”.

See, I told you. But: two or more people can be in exactly the same situation and yet, in regard differentiating between right from wrong behavior, be all over the map morally and politically. And what explains this other than the part where in reacting to behaviors entirely rooted in the either/or world, the is/ought “i”, is embodied in my subjective/subjunctive dasein rather than in anything that philosopher kings might provide us with.

Death just raises the stakes here all that much more.

Death, Faith & Existentialism
Filiz Peach explains what two of the greatest existentialist thinkers thought about death: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.

Again, the gap between any particular one of us facing our own particular death as dasein, and attempts by philosophers [existentialist or otherwise] to speak of this in terms of either authentic/dignified behavior or inauthentic/undignified behavior.

As though this is something that philosophers can actually accomplish!

Well, unless of course they can. In the interim however…

Just as there are countless numbers of profoundly problematic contexts in which we can live our lives, there are just as many problematic contexts in which we can die. Sure, up to a point we can communicate the thoughts and the feelings we have about our own demise, but only up to a point. Beyond that the ever fluid permutation of existential variables that can differ so dramatically for each of us will always be a barrier that, in my view, philosophers are, like the rest of us, unable to really transcend.

Or, perhaps, as Orson Welles once surmissed:

“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”

You have your rendition of this, I have mine.

Likewise, our individual reaction to conjectures of this sort is rooted in dasein. Is there an optimal manner in which to grasp it? Is how you relate it to your own life and the death of loved ones more reasonable then how I relate it to mine?

You tell me:

In regard to your own loved ones lost “phenomenally”, what “existential communication” have you managed to “preserve” for all of eternity? Isn’t this precisely the sort of intellectual contraption that some philosophers think up to take death itself up into the stratospere of abstraction?

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

Unless of course you are convinced that you have existed in past lives. Or are likely to be reincarnated into a new life. Then the quandary revolves more around the extent to which this is an incarnation/reincarnation of “I” [as you know yourself to be here and now] or the embodiment of a reality that is not able to actually be put into words.

This reminds me of one possible take on an observation John Fowles made in [I believe] The Aristos. Human existence, he noted, is analogous to sitting at a desk awash with telephones. Big ones. Small ones. In between ones. They represent all of those different things above that can afflict our bodies. Our minds. We sit there waiting for the next one to ring…hoping that this time it is just one of the small ones. Or not more than one at a time. But we know that among the phones is the one that we dread the most. The one that, in ringing, ushers in the Big One. The physical ailment that culminates in our death. And, clearly, “a sense of meaning” here can be many different things to many different people.

That’s how it works all right. Only, when the Big One has pounced on any particular one of us, the “big picture” can quickly be whittled down “in our head” to “me”, “myself” and “I”. Not the philosophy of death but our own.

What then of a “sense of meaning”? Why one and not another?

And what will yours be?

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

It’s one thing to imagine “death the teacher” when you have thought yourself into believing that, one way or another, death is not the end at all. Then what death teaches you is that in order to attain what you imagine your fate to be beyond the grave, there are certain requistes propelling you to choose particular behaviors in this side of it.

But what does death teach you when you have instead thought yourself into believing that what awaits you on the other side of the grave is oblivion…the utter obliteration of “I” for all time to come.

Many of course will see the lesson here as revolving around behaviors that sustain your existence. And that becomes problematic because you can find yourself not choosing to do things you would like to try because these behaviors bring with them an increasing possibility that one’s life is endangered. Or you can find yourself in situations where others expect you to act in certain ways that you hesitate to choose because there is in turn increasing dangers involved. Someone might threaten those that you love but you note the risk that in intervening your own life is put at risk.

There are in fact countless existential contexts in which what you believe about death can have a profoundly problematic impact on how you react to them.

Same here. Ask that question to scores of people living in different historical, cultural and experiential contexts and you are likely to get different “top 5” answers. That some answers will occur more often than others reflects the continuities that all of us share as human beings. But individual regrets would seem to be manifestations of dasein. Each of us will regret different things for different reasons. And philosophers would not appear able to pin down the most “rational” things that one ought to regret.

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

Indeed: How would being associated with fascists and Nazis not be the existential equivalent of being associated with but one more historical “herd”?

How is political and racial ideology not just another manifestation of the inauthentic man?

And, in fact, isn’t the whole point of ideology to subsume death in the authentic life? Okay, you die. And maybe that’s all there is. But at least your life came to reflect necessary truths on this side of the grave.

In regard to either life or death, what can it mean philosophically to speak of a “fundamental flaw”? After all, as soon as the focus becomes “who or what is doing all of this questioning” we are immediately confronted with all of the many, many historical, cultural, and individual narratives there have been. And that’s just so far. Sometimes they overlap, other times they are very much at odds.

Instead, it is basically the objectivists who set philosophers to the task of “classifying and analyzing” human interactions as though they too were just one more function of the “scientific method”. Thus philosophers like Ayn Rand came to champion Aristotle. And for her there was absolutely no distinction made between the either/or and the is/ought world. Even human emotions could be analyzed and classified as either the right or the wrong emotion to have in any particular context.

As for death: atlassociety.org/commentary/com … 4280-death

Sure, if, as an Objectivist, someone is able to think him or herself into approaching death “objectively” in this manner, and, thus, is able to learn not to fear it, more power to them. That just doesn’t work for me.

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

Not just being there. But existing “out there” in a particular world that is embedded in a particular historical and cultural context. And what makes our own consciousness a “wonder” along side the “rest of existence” is our awareness of death. The knowledge that we ourselves will one day die. And, assuming some measure of human autonomy, this awareness is understood by each of us as individual daseins.

In other words, there are many, many different ways in which to think about death. Our own and others. And to the best of my knowledge philosophers are unable to “think up” the most rational manner in which mere mortals are obligated to think about it. This “existential contraption” can then precipitate human behaviors that rationalize everything from the taking of one’s own life to historical instances of genocide.

For some, sure. But what of those who have come to conclude that this meaning will be derived largely from within the existential parameters of the life that one lives. That one cannot merely assume that what he or she concludes encompasses a “moral, caring person” is the template that all others are required or compelled to embrace in turn. For example, my own understanding of dasein in the is/ought world.

Indeed, the “search for meaning, purpose and value” can bring some to conclude that there is no overarching moral narrative able to be reconfigured into an overarching social, political and economic agenda. A few in fact coming to conclude that the most reasonable frame of mind here will lead one to suicide.

That someone like Victor Frankl survived the death camps enabling him to make that constructive leap forward in his own “search for meaning”, does not entail that others in similar or very different sets of circumstance are being irrational if they choose a very different outcome.

When it comes to death, there appears to be only a frame of mind that one’s lived life predisposes one toward. Unless of course someone here is able to convince me that this is not the case at all. Having already convinced himself.

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

Can you say that?

But that’s always my point. We think and we feel and we say what we do about death based largely on our own personal experiences with it. With our own death and with others.

Think about it this way…

One day in your youth you come to think about death in a way that you had never thought about it before. Given whatever context, you have an experience that for the first time propels you into thinking — really thinking – about death.

My experiences emanated from the jungles of Vietnam. Yours from situations that, no doubt, were entirely different.

Okay, but what can we learn about it by probing the minds of all the great thinkers who have, down through the ages, themselves written about it. Scientists, philosophers, theologians. Is there a frame of mind that seems to encompass it the most rationally? Are you convinced that there is a way that reasonable men and women are most likely to accept as the most profound, least problematic assessment?

Or, instead, is your thinking far more likely to be derived from a personal experience such as is described above by the author?

And if that is the case how can you adequately respond to the assessments of others who have not had your own experiences? And how can they adequately respond to you not having had your experiences? What you share in common is the fact of death. But the facts embedded in any particular death can vary in ways that may well be beyond our capacity to communicate.

As for the cliche about dealing with your own death by living whatever is left of your mortal existence to the fullest – and on your own terms – that to is no less an existential contraption embodied in the lives of others that we may or may not be able to grasp with any real degree of empathy. Or even sympathy.

My experiences were more varied, biggy.
I did actually survived a major conflict -WW2 , in Hungary. ( as a baby) Then a revolution, then illegally crossing a border, then capture and imprisonment, into a ‘lager’ for what seemed like eternity, then almost death and a revival from LSD ingestion, then nearly dying on an almost crashing air force jet.

So , death and dying has always been a process by which I was always surrounded and involved in, the current pandemic notwithstanding.

We all have our battles, and my current ones appear the most radically profound, and enigmatic, lead ing me to the search for and.through gnosis.

The fear has.caused me to search : and to try to arrive at some logos , through which a catapault may enable a jump , a transcending jump into self realizing methods by which to access the intent that the supposed higher realm can re position the conflicting venues between background, and foreground, that may become the focus , rather then the object.

In some manner, the jump becomes the ultimate contrast between the inception and the extinction it’s self.

The more impersonal such sensation becomes , does not imply a corresponding caveat that the less personal situation necessarily should loose significance.

On the contrary, or even without using opposing forces as if the will has.to obey , in likeness to field mechanical , pre-transitional Newtonian laws. (Integrating them, rather then disqualifying them).

The battles within overwhelmingly overbear those that are without, in both sense.of the word.

Holy cow.

Speaking of which, what do you all think of belief in reincarnation as an ethics, which prepares the believer for death in a natural way?
It doesn’t even have to be true to be useful in that sense.

Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website

But grappling with the importance of death-awareness merely becomes another manifestation of how as a proponent of Eastern philosophical and religious traditions, it is juxtaposed to how one construes the “spiritual” contours of life-awareness. How does that really get us any closer to connecting the dots between life and death insofar as how we actually choose to live that life and experience that death.

Still, the manner in which one comes to approach his or her own death appears to be no less the embodiment of dasein. Instead, we simply have any number of conflicting religious/spiritual denominations providing the faithful with endless assumptions about how one is expected to love others, develop equanimity of mind and stay the present.

When? where? how? why? In what actual set of circumstances? Let’s not go there, okay?

In other words, spiritually. As a way of thinking of human interactions in a world where the reality of conflicting goods is simply subsumed in general description intellectual contraptions like this.

As for detaching oneself from worldly pleasures that become considerably more attainable if you are able to think yourself into believing that, to the extent you focus instead on spiritual growth, you will be rewarded on the other side. And, of greatest importance of all, that there is existence beyond the grave. And, thus, that connecting the dots between morality/enlightenment here and now and immortality/salvation there and done becomes by far your greatest concern.

On the other hand, if one is actually able to believe this sort of thing…

…how exactly is that to be made applicable to the behaviors you choose? Behaviors predicated on the moral and political values [prejudices] one comes to embody existentially as the personification of dasein out in a particular world historically, culturally and circumstantially.

I know: let’s not go there either.

Or, for the objectivists among us, sure, go there, but wholly in sync with their own trajectories.

The Meaning of Death
Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr. and David Vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it.

A misunderstanding? Doesn’t this suggest there is in a way in which to think about death that reflects the most reasonable understanding. Or at least a selection of options such that if your idea isn’t among them then you are in fact misunderstanding death?

In fact there are any number of narratives [religious by and large] which position death in the only possible way in which the faithful are expected to embody it. By the Book, as it were.

As for the relationship between a possible meaning of death and a possible meaning of life, few things can possibly be more existential. After all, when push comes to shove, it’s your life and your death. And all of us are in the same boat here: able to communicate them to others only up to a point. Even identical twins will not live exactly the same lives.

Here, as Sartre suggested, “existence is prior to essence”. At least until some philosopher comes along and demonstrates that his or her own assessment of life and death is essentially true. And not in the manner in which the objectivists here do it: by confining this demonstration to what they believe is true “in their head”.

This perspective only makes sense to me if “meaning” in our lives revolved entirely around the existence of one or another teleology or intellectual contraption. As though we spent the preponderance of our actual lived lives thinking about the meaning of it itself.

Which is simply not the case. Instead, we have a mind and a body programmed biologically to afford us any number of pleasurable experiences. The food we eat, the drinks we down, the orgasms we feel, the love we share, the friendships we sustain, the music we hear, the films we enjoy, the arts we explore, the endless gratifications available to us through the use of drugs.

How does a lack of overall meaning in our lives make these things less fulfilling, less absorbing, less enthralling?

The Meaning of Death
Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr. and David Vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it.

Ever and always, how can this not be but a point of view? Assuming that oblivion is in fact the fate of “I” at death nothing can matter to a corpse. And one’s death will have meaning [or no meaning] to someone as the embodiment of dasein. The point here being that there does appear to be an argument able to encompass what one’s death ought to mean to others.

And then suppose next week or next month or next year or the next century the really Big One comes hurtling down from space, smashes into Earth and literally wipes out the entire human species. No minds are around for the life and the death of anyone to have meaning.

So this part…

…is no less embedded in that part. Sure, as long as minds are around that remember you, minds that engage in behaviors that precipitate consequences derived precisely from the fact of knowing you, you can take some sort of comfort “here and now” that even beyond death “you” stick around. “You” matter.

If this takes a bit of the sting out of oblivion for you, all the better. It just doesn’t for me.

Come on, only to the extent that “I” itself is able to participate in one or another measure of existence on a “cosmic scale”, does it make sense [to me] to even bring it up. Instead, the sheer mind-boggling mystery of existence is something we can cling to as one or another measure of hope. Maybe in that 95% we know little or nothing of at all there is a place for “I”. And in a way that we can’t even begin to imagine.

It’s just that when the body disintegrates in the grave or comes down to a pile of ashes in an urn, the part about “I” then becomes reconfigured into a “soul”. And that can be pinned down…how exactly? In faith?

Maybe to you all of this makes finding our existence meaningless a long shot. If so, that’s all that matters. I just wish I could come up with a way to convince myself of the same.

Not at all. The death of the gods , then followed by the death of the higher culture, then the abstraction of art, finally the reduction of the foundemental distinctive features ,where contrast disperses, without universal emphatic and universal effects. The identity, that personal attribute, has been reduced into various machinery, by Deuleuze and Attari, and prognosed by Huxley.

We have become what we always were, , animals, who tried to place ourselves in a scheme, where accountability meant something.

Started with the Copernican revolution, where the East meant an initial , nameless, faceless mass, with little more function then working ant colony. The will to overcome the power of ego death has lost pretty much all it’s significance.

Good thing and a saving grace, is, that thanatos has overcome the life force, by negating it’s significance, and death is pretty much a formless transition of masses and energies.

Man , as an experiment , has failed to measure up to its potential, but individual death is passe, and it is this feer, that has propelled the species man, albeit with a nagative motive, to achieve this.

Knowledge, and the fear of it’s absence has reduced mankind to an absolute dependency on replacing a qualified position of certainty, back into the abyss .

A reversal toward the negative eternal return. Maybe a quantum break will qualify as the primordial return of a Christ as Superman.

The Meaning of Death
Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr. and David Vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it.

And these definitions are pertinent by and large to human interactions in the either/or world. The hard sciences are bursting at the seams with facts about life that we here rarely get into debates about. Let alone heated debates. And even the soft sciences have accumulated a large number of psychological, social and political facts about our relationships which are widely accepted. Definitions sustaining rational thinking here make a lot of sense if our communication is going to be intelligible at all.

And, in turn, biologically, physically, phenomenologically, there are any number of apparently objective truths about death. How we die. What we can die from. What keeps death at bay. And we are able to acquire more precise knowledge over time.

Thus:

Still, the bottom line is that one way or another we will die and there will be a way in which to establish it. Where the definitions give way to debate, however, is when life and death are intertwined or pitted against each other in one or another ontological and/or teleological assessment which all others are meant to share.

The purpose of life, the meaning of death. You tell me: how close have philosophers come to establishing this? Link me to what you consider to be the best arguments.

Instead, these questions and answers are still largely reserved for the hard guys:

On the other hand, in grappling with an understanding of your own life and death, is this the place that you would start? Or would you concede that biologically, chemically, physically, “I” is ever and always embedded in the parameters of the either/or world. In nature. But what of nurture? What of the social, political and economic parameters of “I” in the is/ought world of conflicting goods.

How might “I” here be profoundly more problematic?

Iamgious says,

"On the other hand, in grappling with an understanding of your own life and death, is this the place that you would start? Or would you concede that biologically, chemically, physically, “I” is ever and always embedded in the parameters of the either/or world. In nature. But what of nurture? What of the social, political and economic parameters of “I” in the is/ought world of conflicting goods.

How might “I” here be profoundly more problematic?"

I can not begin by a literal descriptive difference between the sift and the hard sources.

Tangentionally a critique could be leveled to a particularly Western tradition, since such as an either/ or starting point is not really emphasized in the East.

So this possible critique aside, which can be generalized by a/ the critique of pure reason, a flung out tangency relates emphatically to moralistic sources, and that You may confirm.

The basic difference in the personality of the phenomenology of Christ is subsumed under and not over that of the ontology of the Yahweh, as the Father subsumes the Son

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This is important the concern with the “i”, as a transposutional object/subject.

Are this point I concur with Your description of the insufficiency of the above quoted references, for they are closed categorically in the usual Kantian method to inquire about the substantiallly that was likewise categorically foreclosed.

However, like all great thinkers, what they thought privately , may not have coincided with their descriptions, and what they have symptomologically guarded, was a hidden intentionality, which , may have upset real-politic6 in dime immeasurable manner.

That goes for Jesus, for Kang, Nietzsche Darwin …

The basic tribalism does rule, at least in the heyday of philosophical investigations, and it is no irony or coincidence that the intuitive progression of variables was realized as measurable only by a probabilistic route of a reduction which may have missed coils of extra traveled routed-through mazes of least resistant simplest, most readily accessibly channels.

So here, the art of philosophical venue. was made to conform to the basic mirrored stage of tribal apotheosis, gained by superintelligent. dominance over the supra intelligent transpersonal objective.

This hidden intention took time to mature, as do fruit, and the timeliness of the forbidden one, fell far from it’s source.

The metaphor, which grew out of what has essentially been reduced to myth, suffers the same fate, it has to find it’s least dimensional representation through the either/ or, mot coincidental Wittgenstein sourced: philosophical investigations: with reliance on mass literacy on the most phenomenal level.

But Russell/Wittgenstein had their optimistic days in the sun, overshadowed by returns which have diminished considerably.

So I totally agree, with Your patent description, and it is with apprehension that such uncovering may bring to light that represents a coiling snake consuming it’s own tale, which is extremely concerning

The Meaning of Death
Laszlo Makay, George Marosan Jr. and David Vatai consider whether death destroys meaning or creates it.

On the other hand, given your own inevitable existential death, how comforting is that? On par with, say, seeing it as but one more manifestation of being “at one with the universe”. Yet there are some who are in fact able to take some measure of comfort in it. I’ve bumped into them on and offline now for years. Unfortunately, it’s not like this consolation is able to be reconfigured into a pill. Swallow it, and that’s how you can feel too.

Instead, most are likely to suckle on one or another religious or spiritual path in order to not have nothing to suckle on at all. Also, those who are able to blot it all other through distractions, or actual drugs that are around to provide the sort of “high” that nothing will bother you at all.

Yes, if we were able to live forever in a No God world it would seem reasonable to me to argue that life could still be construed as meaningless. But so what? Think about all of the pleasure that you are able to derive from your body such that not having any meaning behind it is, well, irrelevant.

The food we eat. The music we love. The art that enchants us. The athletes we admire. The love that we feel. The sex that we crave. And on and on and on. Who needs meaning then? I certainly don’t.

The problem of course is this: that along with the pleasure, comes all of the pain too. So, sure, if I was unable not to live forever and the pain began to overwhelm the pleasure, that would be terrible. That’s the beauty of suicide even given the 70 odd years we have now. It’s comforting to know that it is an option if the suffering does become unbearable.

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