• Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
    2·
    15 hours ago

    Human life is the cold dead universe come to life to observe itself, experience itself. What a waste it would be to have that tiny glimmer go out too fast, or not be spent on experiencing everything possible.

  • ynthrepic@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 day ago

    Life is all we can possibly conceive of knowing. I can’t tell you that you ought to live, but I can tell you that there might not be anything it’s like to be dead. Is it worth the risk?

    However bad life might be at any given moment, unless total non-existence sounds “good” to you, death isn’t a risk worth taking. After all, we are always at some risk of dying. It’ll happen eventually.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      Is it worth the risk?

      Life is temporary and fleeting. Death is a universal certainty, not a gamble.

      I would say that so long as we are alive we have agency over ourselves and our surroundings, even if only marginally. The real benefit of life is not merely the fear of death. It is the opportunity to see and to know and to change the world around you. Cognition is a gift, even if it is a confusing and imperfect one.

      What’s more, death is not non-existence, it is non-sentience. The stuff that is you is still there. It is simply rendered powerless and ignorant. You are still of the world and in the world. You have only given up your ability to actively participate in it.

      • ynthrepic@lemmy.world
        1·
        22 hours ago

        Death is undefined from the perspective of conscious experience. That’s really my point.

        It is axiomatic that if there is something that it is like to be dead then you are not in fact “dead”.

        Just for fun then, I agree with you in some respects. Panpsychism might be the way the universe works and is in fact my own sense of reality - but the kind of “consciousness” that may persist upon the disintegration of the brain and body, won’t answer to “you” unless there is in fact a soul or spirit that exists separate to the body. Of that, I am not so sure. I’m thinking consciousness is probably something spooky separate to the body, but the idea that this fleeting thing that answers to my identity could have its own potentially eternal or at least much more resilient contingency doesn’t really make sense. More like, we are all part of the same singularity of consciousness that is the universe, dreaming ourselves into existence as discrete conscious actors in a grand play. Something like that, haha.