Death?

[Goresplatter]

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.

[Manco]

Don't be rude to my only sparring partner.

I will when he stops being bad at it.

[enchilado]

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.

[Bullet Magnet]

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.

[Manco]

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.

[STM]

Hah, thankee, I hope that I am at least giving a fraction of the argument you are proposing to me.

Especially when the Stellar Age of the universe starts to wind down.

Do we know that Heaven and Hell, whatever you call the Afterlife, is in the bounds of our Universe, scientists debate the reality of alternate planes and 'alternate universes', could Heaven be one of those? What say you?

[Manco]

Hah, thankee, I hope that I am at least giving a fraction of the argument you are proposing to me.



Do we know that Heaven and Hell, whatever you call the Afterlife, is in the bounds of our Universe, scientists debate the reality of alternate planes and 'alternate universes', could Heaven be one of those? What say you?

But before you start thinking about that you need to come up with a solution to the problem proposed earlier:

So sure that there isn't one? Because the brain is the seat and origin of intelligence and consciousness. Consciousness is what it is like to be a brain. Damage it and the personality can change. This alone makes a mockery of afterlife claims. What state does the "soul" take? Having lived 30 years with the new personality does the old one reassert itself in heaven or not? What if that damage occured in your first year of life? Would you then experience the afterlife as the completely different person you would have been? What if the damage takes away your inhibitions to sin? Are you still accountable, or are you for all divine intents and purposes dead at the moment of injury? Talking of personality changes, we all change hugely through our lives. At every age we are very different people. Which exists in the after-life? The final version (which may be besotted with dementia) or one of the others? Which is the "true" self that endures? Is it perhaps a new one? We know that consciousness is the product of the brain, but the brain's structure is completely different as a child from the adult. Less connections and more myelination etc when fully developed. If there really is a "soul" (an idea that is very hard to take seriously) then it is clearly not in control and all memory storage is in the hardware. Is it still "us" when liberated from these influences? Can it even feel emotions without the body? I know the names of the hormones that are responsible for such sensations. I feel the buzz in my lower back as my adrenal glands dump into my blood stream, my collar flushes with blood and endorphins flood my brain as I type stuff like this. That is passion, and without the organs and tissues that make it possible, what is left is not me. Arguing things that I am passionate about is one of the things I enjoy, and no heaven can have anything more than a facsimile of that while my adrenal glands (and, hell, my fucking brain) have been converted into a colony of Clostridium perfingens bacteria.

[enchilado]

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.

Believing in an afterlife solely so you won't be afraid of death doesn't make sense to me, but maybe that's just because I've never been afraid of death myself.

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.

[STM]

Sorry OH, I can't elaborate any more than I have done already without confusing my argument too much.

[Wings of Fire]

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.

[Manco]

Or you could be like motherfucking Hob Galding and not give a shit.

I'm not really sure who that is but that's my approach!

[T-nex]

I would love to be immortal. Specially if I could be a vampire.

Yes Im immature, get over it :D

[STM]

I'd be angel, angeloi class just for the wings! Soaring around on hench feather dusters with a burning sword. Nyah.

[metroixer]

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.

[JennyGenesis]

I would love to be immortal. Specially if I could be a vampire.

I wish they were real, Vampires are totally hot. Only problem being though is that I wouldn't trust them, I'd end up getting bitten

[Bullet Magnet]

I think seeing the course of the universe first-hand would be an unmissable opportunity.

So do I, except for the fact that I would have to be there for it. Shit takes a long time. Also no food or air and what have you. Eternity drifting in space without even a stable telescope is not my idea of scientific bliss.

Do we know that Heaven and Hell, whatever you call the Afterlife, is in the bounds of our Universe, scientists debate the reality of alternate planes and 'alternate universes', could Heaven be one of those? What say you?

Perhaps one of them is nothing but an uninhabited version of Pokemon's Kanto region?

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.

[Manco]

So do I, except for the fact that I would have to be there for it. Shit takes a long time. Also no food or air and what have you. Eternity drifting in space without even a stable telescope is not my idea of scientific bliss.

I was working under the assumption that, if not humanity, some form of civilization would still be around. That'd be the most interesting thing to see.

[Wings of Fire]

I'm not really sure who that is but that's my approach!

He makes a deal with the Lord of Dreams to grant him eternal life so he has someone to talk as an equal with. They meet in a bar every 100 years and have a chat.

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.

[Ridg3]

Valhalla is the place to be when you die. Drink, depravity and large scale wars for the upcoming apocalypse.

[Goresplatter]

I would love to be immortal. Specially if I could be a vampire.

Yes Im immature, get over it

Vampire? That's for wusses! People who really want immortality and invulnerability would become Necromorphs! Literally finding life in death, and regenerating any wounds in a matter of seconds.

Well... I guess you'd be massively ugly... but who's going to dare tell you that?

(OT: Dead Space is an incredible game.)

[Nate]

One thing I never understood about those scripts is why the word "and" has to be used to much. It really disturbs the flow of reading.

Blame that on crappy translators and the fact that Hebrew grammar is different to English. Hebrew has no concept of a comma'ed list; you put 'and' (which is actually a one-letter prefix) before every word in the list.

I worry about death because I'm not at an age yet where I can truly accept my mortality, but I'm too much of a thinker to not dwell on it.

Is there an age where anyone can accept their mortality? The only people I've known to be able to do that are those who have been diagnosed with something terminal and are staring it in the face.

[Gwan-Thwei]

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.

[STM]

We are all star children.

[Wings of Fire]

Is it that time again?

[Bullet Magnet]

[STM]

so now the Ten Commandments are contradictory?

[Bullet Magnet]

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.

[STM]

And this is Babylon.

[Bullet Magnet]

I regret that I missed the inference there.

[Wings of Fire]

That's because he probably meant Sodom or Gommorah.