"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain
Here's a different take, another thought experiment Re: death, from Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death:
“We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.”
I think this is an important consideration. A subjective observer can never be ‘dead’ from their own perspective. So we are left with something like Zeno’s paradox. We can get closer and closer and closer to death, but we will never reach the end. Could this lead to a form of eternal life? Your final living moment, subdivided endlessly, could play out as entire additional lifetimes in your experience.
>A subjective observer can never be ‘dead’ from their own perspective.
As a former boxer who has been "knocked out", I have always speculated that feeling is akin to what death would "feel like" (that is, nothing at all). When you are knocked out (as aside from asleep) you have no experience. You don't dream, you don't feel has though time has passed - you don't feel anything. One second you are awake and aware and the next second you wake up lying on the ground (or don't wake up at all, if you are dead). It feels like an instant, no matter how long you actually been knocked out for. This makes it different than sleeping and simply not remembering your dreams upon waking.
This may not be everyone's experience, but I have been "lucky" enough to be choked out accidentally during some sparring sessions.
It doesn't always happen this way, but when it does it's insightful: I first get a very strong sense of "Wrong," as my understanding of the laws of physics vanish. If the choke has finished and I'm left standing but still going to black out, I'll probably topple at this point as I misunderstand gravity and forget about/lose control of my legs.
Enough of my ego will still be aware enough to have the thought "this is embarrassing, I've fallen," but it fades quickly as I lose understanding of why falling is bad, what embarrassment is, and what ground is. Then there will be a fading out of visual input (auditory goes before anything else), with my awareness quickly shrinking to a tiny ball of awareness, which visualizes itself as a bright speck of light surrounded by nothing. Panic will still exist and set in, as the speck loses subsystem after subsystem, not quite sure what is being lost but knowing things are, and feeling an encroaching blackness.
Eventually the only thing left is a feeble desire to not vanish, followed by nothing.
This might actually happen every time I get choked out, but only the right circumstances allow it to be "written" to memory.
It aligns with what friends have told me about near death experiences (heart attacks, overdose).
I wonder how much this aligns with the parts of the physical brain associated with those different parts of the consciousness (ego, understanding, fear, sensory, autonomous nervous system), and when they start to be deprived of oxygen. From the way you described it, it very much has the feel of going back in time from "civilized person" to "lizard brain".
Just as it takes infinite local time to enter a Black Hole, we live for the entirety of our lives. We are immortal, for in our local frame of reference, we will never die, just as a mathematical point existing in the open interval (0,1) will never reach the end of the interval.
It's like saying that the future is exactly like the past. (Which is true when applied to the question of non-existence, because what did not exist will cease to exist or continue to be non-existent.)
But that is only true of things which do not come into existence, no? I can safely say I did not exist a thousand years ago, nor will I exist in a thousand years. Further, I can say that from my point of death on, I am non-existent. Similarly, before my birth, I was non-existent.
However, my state of non-existence ended at my birth. Just as my state of existence will end at my death.
In this regard, the future is not exactly like the past. In the past, there was never a time in which I came into existence. In the future, there was a time where I came into existence. Neither of those statements transfer between past and future.
>I can safely say I did not exist a thousand years ago...
I'm not sure of that, yet. We haven't managed to pin down what "I" is or even what "existence" is. I'm thinking in the "we virtualized a copy of your brain" sense - just what is consciousness?
Indeed, the very existence (and non-existence) could be relative - just like time and space. For example, in one frame of reference there may exist a magnetic field while in the other there may be none.
This is "memory", or "trace". Their existence take away from your non-existence, making it incomplete (imperfect), which indeed makes one's future different from one's past.
Non-existence is complicated. In an obvious (and trivial) sense future itself does not exist, so one cannot tell whether someone in particular (e.g. another Einstein) is not born "yet" or "ever".
On the other hand, one might argue that (for example) wasted sperm and eggs should count as "not born". But even that can be seen as too limiting, because - perhaps, somewhat paradoxically - to be completely objective one should be considering statistical parameters rather than a physical measure.
Re sperm and eggs, this is my go-to argument against anti-womans-choicers: functionally there is no difference between plan A (condoms and birth control), plan B (the morning after pill), and plan C (abortion) - all three result in a baby not being born. If one is going to argue that it's a crime that a fertilized egg is terminated, one must also lament the loss of billions of lives to periods.
Unfortunately this argument doesn't hold water when someone tries to say that their god intervenes and decides to overcome man-made barriers to fertilization, because that particular special snowflake baby needs to be born. Unsure why the soul assigned to that fertilized egg doesn't just find another but that just goes to show how messy the whole damn debate is.
Incidentally, this is also my argument against me having babies - knowing that regardless of the number of babies I have, I will feel unconditional love and gratitude at each and every one's existence, and because I can't possibly compare my comfort or economic well being against the value of a human life, the only logical conclusion I can come to is I should have as many babies as I physically can. Or, I should have none.
> Unsure why the soul assigned to that fertilized egg doesn't just find another
That's the thing with free will - if it's free, then it can choose things that will prevent (for example) the woman who will discover a general cure for cancer from being born. Just as a random guy with a knife can prevent that same woman from publishing the cure she figured out last night when he stabs her to death in an alley in Queens. "Free will without consequences" is as nonsensical as "rights without duties".
> I should have as many babies as I physically can
Consider quantity vs. quality, though. Quoting Lenin, "We must follow the rule: Better fewer, but better. We must follow the rule: Better get good human material in two or even three years than work in haste without hope of getting any at all." 'None' would be the best choice here: you could, instead, adopt a child and by doing so save a life and contribute to keeping the human population within reasonable bounds at the same time!
First, I'll agree that my not existing after death would be similar to my not existing before death. In that, it helps make this a cute saying.
However, that still says nothing of the difference between dying and not being born. Just because things have a large similarity does not mean they are equal, after all.
Your odd argument that "wasted" sperm and such should somehow count towards "born/not born" just seems a non-sequitor. That is quite literally unrelated. The sperm/egg are merely mechanisms and say nothing of the person unless we plan on presupposing a conscious person exists before they exist.
Well, clearly, non-existence after death is different from both types of non-existence mentioned above. (Incidentally, there are many more types of non-existence than just these.)
Do you need it exactly, to know that it exists? What is the difference between two stars in the sky? Must you know the physical differences exactly to say they are different?
Again, why would I have to be explicit/exact on it? Two stars in the sky have an obvious substantial difference between their existences. Even if I couldn't readily express what those differences are.
I mean, I get that these are fun discussions to have. Likely even meaningful. But the odd friction this is adding to enter the conversation seems overblown.
>Again, why would I have to be explicit/exact on it
Did I ask you to be "explicit/exact"? I'm just curious for you to describe, at all, the supposed "substantial difference" that you apparently know of between being "not yet born" and being "dead".
>Two stars in the sky have an obvious substantial difference between their existences.
In what way are two stars analogous at all to being not yet born and being dead?
That is Schopenhauer's argument against fear of death. Not that it was unique to him, but since Twain was writing during Schopenhauer's popularity, I wonder if he found it there.
