
Death - sutro
http://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/death/content/class-sessions
======
Tichy
Confirms my prejudice that studying maths and economics is much more
worthwhile than philosophy. (Edit: I have only read chapter 23, which is
concerned with choices and values - really, game theory and economics give you
much better insights here, with fewer words).

~~~
thorax
That's not very fair. "Worthwhile" can be judged in lots of ways. I agree that
math and economics are very practical, but that doesn't mean philosophy is
without value.

I was a very interested in philosophy in college, and if I had chosen anything
other than CompSci, that probably would have become my major. I have a lot of
respect for people exploring metaphysical questions. While it's easy to
dismiss them as "non-practical", I can't think ill of people who try to seek
underlying meaning behind the day-to-day sciences/morality/etc. and improve
our understanding of truth and logic.

Those questions are really far harder than the ones I tackle day-to-day or
even in my highest math/CS studies. I still feel like a wimp sometimes for not
trying to attack "deeper" questions and paradoxes.

In a sense, philosophy asks questions that all the sciences, ultimately, try
to get us closer to answering. I don't think there's as much glory in asking
the questions, but there's still a whole lot of them to ask.

That being said, I understand your position entirely. Had I become an engineer
without being introduced to philosophy first, everything there (sans the
logic/fallacy discussions) would seem impractical. Now I see it as a
fundamental that helped to start most of the major branches of science, and
keeps growing discussion around some of the tougher problems we've yet to
solve.

~~~
Retric
Most philosophy questions are a result of language not abstract ideas. When
someone says something 'blue boy dry kite' you try and extract meaning so when
encountering an idea that lacks meaning you still try and parse it. Some words
even imply a world view that could be wrong. So: Q: What is ethics in a random
universe? A: They are not compatible concepts. (In other words the question is
wrong.)

PS: As to the few big questions like life after death there is nothing in
philosophy that let's you tackle such questions.

~~~
thorax
Philosophy (as I see it) is about asking big questions before science has a
good answer. It's not about _tackling_ questions as much as it is about posing
questions and testing possible answers with logic before experiments or
empirical evidence are available. Saying it has something to do with language
parsing really sounds like a misguided generalization from some discussions.

For an example nearer to a hacker's heart, take the "brain-in-a-vat" concept:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat>

While science can't simulate this (well) for someone we can ask quite yet, I
believe there's value in thinking about the implications of a fully simulated
reality. This discussion was more or less started in the 1600's before we had
any sort of technology that could remotely get us near to this. We still can't
explore it yet, but it's a valid question and it's an important discussion on
subjective reality.

I think it's very healthy and productive for people to ask and explore deeper
questions about reality. To pretend that you can't study things without
experiments is taking the scientific method. True, experimental evidence is
required (in my mind and for most educated folks in our era) to confirm or
disprove even the most well-founded theories. Still, there is a very abundant
space of theories that are nearly impossible to prove. I feel there's value in
discussing them, building conceptual models, and reasoning about them before
science is ready.

~~~
Tichy
Stuff like "brain in a vat" is exactly why I dismiss most philosophy. Where is
the reference to that possibility in the lecture that was posted here? If we
(or one of us) is just a brain in a vat, surely it would have a lot of
implications for the value of life?

I think "brain in a vat" only makes a stronger case for mathematics. After
all, in the end what else but information and it's transformation matters?
Everything else can be stripped away. And stuck with pure information, I think
we are talking maths.

~~~
GavinB
Amusing that you dismiss philosophy in the first paragraph and then go right
ahead and engage in it in the second.

~~~
Tichy
Yes, as probably becomes evident from my other posts, I am just disappointed
by the shallowness of most philosophy out there. In the sense that I consider
mathematics to be philosophy, of course I accept it. I just don't like that
almost all non-mathematical philosophy texts I have encountered start from
invalid assumptions.

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sethg
Does the Yale philosophy department have a "Taxes" course, as well?

~~~
steveplace
Certainly.

------
mrtron
Dying is easy to understand, and you won't fail to accomplish it. Living well
on the other hand...

~~~
yelsgib
"well"

Dying is not easy to understand.

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fauigerzigerk
What about the "Hacking Death" lecture? I'd really love to find a cool hack to
make death a little more palatable ;-)

~~~
j2d2
I think the 60's discovered a few.

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mynameishere
27\. Parrots, and

~~~
clueless
could someone enlighten us as to what this means?

~~~
mhartl
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot>

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delackner
Thank you. This is the most thoughtful and really mind expanding thing I have
read in months.

I notice a lot of commentary on lecture 23. Skip that. Read 16 onward. The
meat of this whole thing is his really long treatment of the questions of why
we fear death, what it is we fear, what about death is so bad, and what that
suggests about how we should LIVE.

These are not new concepts, but it is easy to try to ignore them.

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andreyf
Most Philosophy departments have something like this, although with more wordy
names. At Rutgers, there was (01:730:371) Philosophies of Death and Dying.

[http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nb-
ug_current/pg20657....](http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nb-
ug_current/pg20657.html#82082)

~~~
lg
Yeah, and at Rutgers I think this is usually a summer class taught by a grad
student and taken by nonmajors trying to fulfill a requirement. Probably for
good reason.

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iamelgringo
-1 off topic

~~~
mechanical_fish
I don't think this is necessarily true, but in this case I'd agree with you.
This link utterly fails to _convince_ me that it's on topic.

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time_management
A major philosophical problem with death is that its character changes
dramatically depending on what happens afterward, and nobody knows what does
happen, which makes the whole topic rather difficult to evaluate. The best we
can do is to study how death's approach affects our lives, which has more to
do with our attitudes toward it and what we _think_ will happen.

If there's no afterlife, death is to be hated intensely, but not feared at
all, because no unpleasant experience will come from death itself, though the
prelude may be terrible. In fact, the great casualty of materialism is not
death but aging. Death becomes neutral, while aging becomes terrible,
pointless, and ultimately disgusting. The fact that we're aging from the first
moment of life makes materialism especially horrifying. No offense to the
atheist materialists here, but I'd become severely depressed if I thought
materialism were the case, because the omnipresence and inevitability of
eventual bodily failure are rarely far from my mind.

If there is an afterlife, death is not to be hated, and possibly to be loved,
but it _is_ to be feared, because it marks a transition into a sort of
existence we know nothing about. Many atheists who have near-death experiences
describe an initial, liminal point of awareness, surprise, and fear. They
anticipated eternal sleep in death, and yet experience a moment of awareness
while being "dead", and this is shocking to them.

So it seems like exactly one of these two attitudes-- hatred, fear-- is
appropriate for death. It seems like very few people can sustain the sort of
metaphysical confidence that would prevent them from having one of these two
attitudes; I think it's psychologically difficult to keep perfect faith. Death
could be hated _and_ feared by a person who anticipated a negative afterlife,
but few people anticipate such a fate for themselves, and indeed this scenario
seems far more unlikely than any of the alternatives (namely, a positive
afterlife such as heaven, a neutral-positive one such as rebirth, or the
dismal but ultimately neutral scenario of annihilation).

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Herring
You gotta figure something's gone horribly wrong if you're still reading Plato
for _anything_.

Anyone got some decent resources to wash away the taste of fail?

~~~
river_styx
You're right. Classics are _such_ a waste of time. Let's throw out Ovid,
Homer, Dante, Bach, and Mozart while we're at it.

~~~
maurycy
You're comparing oranges to apples, and depreciating philosophy, which is more
science than art. No one seriously discusses papers of guys who believed odd
scientific theories from XVI.

~~~
river_styx
My point is that, even if you dismiss those works as having little scientific
value, they have great literary value as well.

~~~
maurycy
So, their place would be in the literature courses, not philosophy ones.

~~~
river_styx
You're still not getting it. What I'm saying is that Plato's works have both
philosophical and literary value. Even if you dispute the first, there is
still the second. I'm not sure why this is would mean moving them from
philosophy to literature courses (or why those should be mutually exclusive in
the first place).

