I have made appropriate sacrifice and homage to the Great One, Cthulhu. With his blessing, I shall be assured an honoured place in the extradimensional sunken city of R'lyeh. I do his bidding, such that I may be rewarded when he awakes.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. |
:
|
I am not afraid of death. In fact I never think about it except when discussions like this come up - not because I try not to, but because it doesn't bother me at all. One day I will die. I will die, and nothing can stop me doing so. And even if it could I wouldn't want it to. I want to die, in seventy or eighty years. During that time I will enjoy myself so that when it comes to an end I will have as few regrets as possible.
Believing in an afterlife is overcoming your fear by changing the object of it. It's like overcoming arachnophobia by getting your father to take the spider away, or overcoming claustrophobia by installing a skylight and French windows. |
I'm not so sure how you distinguish overcoming the fear of death with simply being used to the idea of it being the end. I mean, I know I am much less disturbed by that idea than the religious who do not hold to it, but I don't know that I could say that it does not bother me at all. Eternal life bothers me too. But I know that I want to be alive tomorrow, and I can only assume that I will keep wanting that to be true. There seems to be some emotional contradiction, in which I am disturbed by both death and immortality. I would rather remain less than a century old forever, if you know what I mean.
Eliezer Yudkowsky paints a utopian picture of an ever-increasing population of immortal humans spreading throughout the stars after defeating death. I'm not so sure that that would be desirable itself, or that we could psychologically handle lives that long (or writing that many Christmas cards). Especially when the Stellar Age of the universe starts to wind down. |
I personally don't hold the same fear of immortality that other people do - at least, not of the idealised "never grow old but otherwise totally normal" version. I think seeing the course of the universe first-hand would be an unmissable opportunity.
e: fuck having a whole race of immortal humans though, that shit would be unbearable. |
Hah, thankee, I hope that I am at least giving a fraction of the argument you are proposing to me.
:
|
:
:
|
:
I don't want to die tomorrow, because I am young and my family would be heartbroken and there are things I want to do. I'm not afraid of dying tomorrow because I don't think I will, but even if it was likely I don't think I would be very afraid. I would just get out and do some exciting shit today. There would be great disappointment but, as far as my imagination goes, not fear. Eternal life would bother me. Death being the end does not, at all, though I am not keen for it to come too soon. |
Sorry OH, I can't elaborate any more than I have done already without confusing my argument too much.
|
Eternal life would not bother me if I had people to share it with. The worst thing about living forever would be to continually lose everyone around you for eternity.
Or you could be like motherfucking Hob Galding and not give a shit. |
:
|
I would love to be immortal. Specially if I could be a vampire.
Yes Im immature, get over it :D |
I'd be angel, angeloi class just for the wings! Soaring around on hench feather dusters with a burning sword. Nyah.
|
I used to think living forever would suck, now I think it would be pretty neat. Which is weird since it conflicts with my fear of eternity that I stated earlier, but there's something about being able to still be alive 1000 years into the future that would be really cool.
|
:
|
:
:
Those hypotheses are not interpreted correctly by the public properly. There are additional spatial dimensions in various models, which are alien to our intuition and don't really amount to much more than solutions to specific mathematical problems. The same for parallel universes, of which there are two different hypotheses. One is a solution to quantum mechanics (the many worlds interpretation), whereby both outcomes of a quantum event occur in different universes that bud off from one another (and NOT as a result of human decisions). The other is the proposition that our universe is one of many that are born and die, though this is much more complex than it sounds, especially with ideas such as false vacuums and the actual physical distance between you and your perfect double. I don't know what's up with some of these, it's beyond me and I don't know if they are all different models as or if I'm just getting different aspects of it depending on the author describing them. But that any one of them should correspond perfectly to any human fiction(?) and be esoterically accessible to (some of) us? I don't think so. Such conflagrations of religion with bleeding edge science are always very clumsy, and I've heard them all. |
:
|
:
The first hundred (Or is it two hundred) or so years go well, then he has one hundred years of pretty much hell on earth where he's drowned for being a witch, thrown out of his town, robbed of all his possessions, watches his family die in front of him and spends about more than a decade living as a begger and perpetually starving. He's less than happy when Dream next meets him and yells and spits in his face for the majority of the conversation. When Dream finally asks if he wants to undo their agreement he says something along the lines of 'Hell no, dying's a mug's game. I won't be having it.' Badass. |
Valhalla is the place to be when you die. Drink, depravity and large scale wars for the upcoming apocalypse.
|
:
Well... I guess you'd be massively ugly... but who's going to dare tell you that? (OT: Dead Space is an incredible game.) |
:
:
|
didn't we already have a thread for the afterlife somewhere?
But anyways, My friend once told me that it wouldn't be scary for her to die, because she would be resting with the ever turning cosmos from which we all originated. Or something. |
We are all star children.
|
Is it that time again?
|
|
so now the Ten Commandments are contradictory?
|
I haven't ripped into the Decalogue on here yet, have I? Another time.
That tablet is supposed to be a full holy text. It is the stone age. |
And this is Babylon.
|
I regret that I missed the inference there.
|
That's because he probably meant Sodom or Gommorah.
|