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But I don't think it's just a question of priorities. It seems like the longer life you have, the more fragile it becomes in a mortality sense, knowing that one significant scrape could lead to cancer and being robbed of long life. Compare that to a thousand years ago when life expectancy was at least half. People may have had a basic background fear of death, but because life was so much shorter and more fraught with mortality, there wasn't this sense of clinging to life like today. Maybe the best recipe for hypochondria is the promise of long life.
I find that a pretty wild hypothesis. People have always feared death, it seems.
Well, a "realized project of immortality on earth" would actually do away with all those fears, wouldn´t it?
Possibly. I think, though, that these degrees (these are feelings, after all) are hard to determine (and that "in earlier times it was less, now it´s more" is a pretty unsubstantiated gerenalization), and - assuming this were indeed an observable trend) I also think that your analysis of the causalities is way too sloppy.Of course, but there are varying degrees of death anxiety, and there are things that determine these varying degrees.
This needs to be explained to me. Typically, we are assuming that that which is there in abundance has less value than limited resources. I´m not saying you are wrong, I just don´t understand how you arrive at this statement (and possibly I don´t even understand how you use the term "value").The immortality I'm talking about means potentially living forever so long as you don't get killed. In this case, life would gain much more value,
I´m trying to make sense of this. Is it something like "people will live with the idea that they deserve to live forever"?if not dying is your priority, and the more of a value it has the more fragile it becomes with the possibility of losing it -- such as through a car accident.
It seems like the longer human beings live, and the more power they have over preventing death, that the more they fear death and idealize life. I think the contemporary person with a 70+ year life span is a vastly different human being than the one who lived 30+ years, in that the latter seems more connected with the idea that death (whether or not there's anything after) is a part of life and therefore nothing to be feared. There's a real saving helplessness and acceptance with our ancestors that's foreign to most people today, when the idea of welcoming death and accepting one's limits (at least well before the deathbed is a reality) seems almost crazy.
I think one of the worst things that could happen with a realized project of immortality on earth would be that this sort of anxiety about death and overidealization and attachment to life would only grow infinitely more, maybe to the point to where really living in a qualitative sense is dampened because of the extreme anxiety about the possibility of having an experience that results in death. Everyone would develop a sort of neurotic mothering instinct, hypervigilant to every scraped knee and bruised arm, and so a real appreciation for life not as a collection of years but as a type of quality would be lost. Nietzsche said the great secret to life is to live dangerously and to "build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius!". He's not promoting recklessness, but seems to have that old vein in mind of accepting death rather than dreading it by fearlessly living as a first priority.
Because that's what it seems to be about: a question of priorities. When we start focusing too much on not dying, we're not focusing on how to live.
Why else did we start dreading death with such an existential sense?
How would you then explain, the fairly recent trend, of the general population being more open to allowing one to terminate their own life, in certain medical conditions?
You meant "death", no?That when suffering reaches a point life isn't feared but welcomed.
But it may give a more parsimonous (or at least alternative) explanation for the claimed trend that people today fear death more than back then: The different circumstances of life.I don't think this negates the reasoning above. Just because people generally fear death doesn't mean all people do in all circumstances.
You meant "death", no?
But it may give a simpler explanation for the claimed trend that people today fear death more than back then: The different circumstances of life.
OTOH just because a hypothesis is claimed I am under no pressure to refute it. And calling a hypothesis a "theory" is not really adding to the pressure.I don't think appealing to different circumstances really refutes any theory that is claimed to work in general.
"Psychological rules" - such as?There are almost always particular circumstances that refute psychological rules.
It seems like the longer human beings live, and the more power they have over preventing death, that the more they fear death and idealize life. I think the contemporary person with a 70+ year life span is a vastly different human being than the one who lived 30+ years, in that the latter seems more connected with the idea that death (whether or not there's anything after) is a part of life and therefore nothing to be feared. There's a real saving helplessness and acceptance with our ancestors that's foreign to most people today, when the idea of welcoming death and accepting one's limits (at least well before the deathbed is a reality) seems almost crazy.
I think one of the worst things that could happen with a realized project of immortality on earth would be that this sort of anxiety about death and overidealization and attachment to life would only grow infinitely more, maybe to the point to where really living in a qualitative sense is dampened because of the extreme anxiety about the possibility of having an experience that results in death. Everyone would develop a sort of neurotic mothering instinct, hypervigilant to every scraped knee and bruised arm, and so a real appreciation for life not as a collection of years but as a type of quality would be lost. Nietzsche said the great secret to life is to live dangerously and to "build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius!". He's not promoting recklessness, but seems to have that old vein in mind of accepting death rather than dreading it by fearlessly living as a first priority.
Because that's what it seems to be about: a question of priorities. When we start focusing too much on not dying, we're not focusing on how to live.
Why else did we start dreading death with such an existential sense?
That when suffering reaches a point life isn't feared but welcomed. I don't think this negates the reasoning above. Just because people generally fear death doesn't mean all people do in all circumstances.
Bumping this question for you:
How do you know, when life expectancy was only half what it is today, people still didn't cling to life?
Hello Received - this is David Gould.Good to see you again.
Very interesting. I recently read this article: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-...-to-1000-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/6860396
The part that I found interesting, and which I discussed with my students just yesterday, was the whole notion of the loss of self. What, exactly, is surviving to 1,000 if the entity has little or no memory of its first century or so? Now, you know that I do not think that the self exists in the way that we commonly think it does, and that the 'me' who started this post is the same as the 'me' who finished it. But how different does one have to be before there is no connection with the entity at the early stage of the process?
For you to live forever, the you that is now must die. And then the next you must die. And the next. But, of course, we do not want to be the one in the continuum of 'many me's to end. In any case, it is something that I think about from time to time. I want to be here to see the story of how humanity progresses 10, 100, 1,000 years into the future. But I can't ever be ...
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