@@mtgmonkey9657 How could we be aware of whether or not your consciousness continues? If someone's body is dead, how would their consciousness inform us?
1: there is a difference between death(defined here as the transition from existence to non-existence) and the state of non-existence. 2: It does not logically follow that if non-existence is completely neutral death must also be completely neutral. (the state of not having a donut is neutral, but you have the positive state of having a donut, going from that positive state to a neutral state of not having a donut by dropping it on the ground would be a negative transition) 3: If non-existence is absolute neutrality (a lack of any positive or negative influences) then death's value must be inversely tied to the value of living. (if life is bad death is good, if life is good death is bad, if life is neutral, death is neutral) 4: Life, while not constantly good, is generally a positive experience (you get to do cool things like fall in love and eat donuts and do art :3) 5: Death is a transition from a positive state, into a neutral state, and is therefore a negative transition. Even though I fully believe this, death is still not something that should be feared. Similar to how you should understand getting hit by a car is bad and you should take the needed precautions, excess anxiety about cars will worsen your life. if this is what must be believed for you or others to avoid a terrible constant anxiety, go for it. My only caveat is that this is getting close to calling life a neutral or even negative experience, and I personally have the least possible respect for those who would argue for that. I consider it genuinely grotesque to be so defeated to consider life as a whole a net loss, and the only folks lower than anti-natalists in my book are those with the most horrible of prejudices.
the Epicurus argument is pretty much what I have believed since I was like 5. I remember trying to argue it to other people, but i was a dumb child, couldn't explain any of it. The idea that not existing isn't bad has always just seemed like the intuitive, obvious answer to me, and it's kind of always been strange to see people not think that. The one argument I did make, that i kind of still stand by is, "were you unhappy before you were born?"/"Image what it was like before you were born, that is what it is probably like to be dead". It's really nice to see something that can explain these ideas I have, MUCH more eloquently and thoroughly than I ever could. I don't think any of these ideas are complicated or hard to understand, but they are very hard to put into words.
One thing that isn't mentioned in any of those arguments is what the goals of the person are. Even "loss" isn't bad if my goal isn't to own the thing in question. It seems to me that the only difference between the different outlooks on death is what they implicitly assume the goals of a person are: 1. The Harm Thesis: If my goal is only to avoid pain, then death can't be bad for me because it causes pain neither directly nor indirectly. 2. Deprivationism: If my goal is only to have as many pleasant experiences as possible, disregarding all negative experiences, then death is bad. 3. The counter-argument to the Harm Thesis at the end: If my goal is to maintain social order and support people's free will and personal space as much as possible, then someone taking a person's life is bad and I will not allow it. (Everyone should strive for this for obvious reasons) 4. The second counter-argument to the Harm Thesis: If my goal is to have a long life (whether it is to contribute to society, to reproduce or to experience pleasure), then I'd rather die at 80 than at 18. However, even so, if I'm snapped out of existence in an instant at 18, I won't even have time to reflect on my death, so a death at any age would be the same. Of course, a person can't have goals after they've stopped existing, so these goals matter only before death. However, I - the living person - am reflecting on death at the moment, so my opinion on it is definitely influenced by my goals. If I have no goals at all, then not only will death not matter at all, but life will not matter either - I'll just lie on my bed and wither away. If I do have goals, then I'll exert whatever control I have over death in order to make it conform to these goals. People's fear of death is based on their built-in desire(goal) to delay it - fear drives them to eat well, exercise, quit smoking, stay hydrated, etc.. I think the only way to break free of that fear is to get rid of the instinct for a long life, but that is not only difficult but also potentially risky.
And that is to be expected. Our genes have proven to be the best at avoiding death. It would be strange if some logic could effectively overcome millions of years of evolution.
death is to conscious creatures finite in that our perception is limited to our ideas about it which is observably not finite... interesting connection there u could look into.
I have a genuinely crippling fear of death (to the point of it manifesting in an anxiety disorder) and while arguments don't help a lot, this video was certainly at least a little comforting and ofc a bit thought provoking as well.
I was that way for a while, it's the worst. I won't detail how I got that way and the way I felt, because I imagine it wouldn't help at all, nor do I think what helped me get out of it will help you (we could be feeling very different things), but I think reading the myth of Sisyphus really helped me in coming to terms with it all. Again, not at all sure if this'll have the same effect on anyone else, and there were probably some other changes in my life before reading it that helped. Good luck with everything regardless
Yeah when a young person dies it’s interesting how optimistic we get. “They had so much left to experience…” etc, assuming those future experiences were going to be more good than bad. So the plausibility of a good future is an important factor, which leads to the weird conclusion that an 18 yo dying is more tragic if his family is rich than if they were poor. This is because if his family is rich then it’s more likely that his future will be full of good experiences; he will have the freedom to pursue his heart’s desires without worrying about money. But the poor 18 yo who dies is more likely to have future suffering. And that seems right: If we were to find out that the 18 yo who was killed actually had a tumor in their brain and they were about to die a horribly painful death within the next 6 months, then suddenly the murder is almost fortuitous. The tragedy is now concentrated in the cancer more so than the murder. But on the other hand, each soul is infinitely irreplaceable. So they are all equal in that regard. So that’s maybe why it sounds offensive to value some lives over others. But if the only thing that makes death a harm to the individual is deprivation, then what exactly is being deprived is important. Deprivation theory requires optimism 🤔
I don't want to live forever, but for the foreseeable future, if I were given the option to see (and survive) tomorrow, I would. I have things unfinished and don't expect I will stop starting things anytime soon. Also, I'm still curious what will happen. If I kept being given that choice long enough, I expect there would come a time where I find no project worth starting and stop finding the future interesting. At that time, it would kinda suck to have to keep existing just to exist. It annoys me (but only when I think about it) that I'm not presented that option, but I don't think that frustration is fear. I continue to act as if I had been given the option yesterday and took it, because to do otherwise would be paralyzing and pointless.
I have jokngly called it a proof by induction that people want to live forever, because they will always want to live one more day. I think this is sufficient justification for the transhumanist goal of defeating (nonconsensual) death. But I have also said that I want to learn everything and then kill myself, because I do anticipate that I will probably eventually run out of projects. I definitely feel fear because I am not presented the option to live, but I also try not to think about it because thinking about fearing death is not useful. I think the issue is that some people in distracting themselves delude themselves into thinking that they don't prefer to not die.
To be clear, people deluding themselves that they are fine with death is bad insofar as death is defeatable and their delusion gets in the way of the project to defeat death. I don't think blissful ignorance is intrinsically bad, but it tends to be instrumentally harmful.
@@nategibso I don't think people would run out of projects because memory is very poor. Even after just 15 years of learning one subject (philosophy, and specifically contemporary analytic philosophy), I've forgotten at least 95% of the material. I've revisited books that I first read 10 years ago, and found that I couldn't remember anything from them. As long as our minds are finite, learning never needs to end. The same goes for many other projects. So we'd just have to ensure that these transhumanist improvements are used specifically to extend life and health, but that memory remains crappy.
@@KaneB I think we probably will be able to modify ourselves so that we don't forget, but you may be correct that we will generally choose not to. We may also choose to delete memories or modify ourselves in other ways that keep things interesting. This could go on unbounded, but I think that eventually people would probably kill themselves. Maybe not. There is a simple argument that if death is irreversible and the probability of death is non-zero, as time goes to infinity you will eventually die.
These arguments only reminded me of the reality of death and didn't really stop my fear of it. And there are arguments that have in the past stopped my fear, like that life and the world goes on with or without me
I would take the view that whether or not something is good or bad depends on whether or not the presence or absence of it is actually preferred by a existing being. So whether or not Death is good or bad or neutral depends on whether or not a particular being prefers it’s existence or non-existence or has no preferences at all. All of this is independent of what would be the case if this being wouldn’t exist. It might be that every second of a beings existence is paralyzing agony but as long as that being prefers to be, it is better for it to be. Then who would I be to judge that it is better for it to not exist then to suffer if it clearly prefers it’s existence with all its suffering over suffering-free non-existence. Edit: But when it comes to non-beings, they have no preferences. So can death be a bad scenario for those that do exist? Yes. Can death be a bad scenario for those that do not exist? No.
The Epicurean view is widely implausible. The fact that it cannot explain why a great many killings would be wrong and involve harm is pretty much a refutation on its own. Indeed, a great deal of ethics seems to go out the window. And it's not just the badness of death either, but also its goodness which is important to recognize in some cases. For example, it's going to be difficult to see how something like euthanasia could possibly make sense on the Epicurean view.
Maybe what makes killing someone bad is not the fact that they die. I might argue that the pain and fear that a murder victim is caused before they die is the thing that makes killing them morally wrong. The grief of those who are still alive in itself might already justify why killings are wrong. The epicurean view can still provide reasons to call murder wrong.
@@stuartkendall4964 It can't explain why it would be wrong to kill someone painlessly, who has no family or friends. And that's a huge problem. But even in the cases where it has an explanation for the wrongness, it locates the wrongness in the wrong place. The problem with murder isn't that it harms other people, it's that it harms the person who is killed themselves.
@@Philosophy_Overdosewhile I agree the epicurean argument is false, one could explain the wrongness of killing via rights rather than killing being "bad" in the axiological sense.
@@Philosophy_Overdose To me, that doesn't seem like a big problem. I am fully ready to accept that the instant and painless killing of someone with no family or friends is not morally wrong. Of course, if I figured out that someone I knew had committed murder in this way, I would still condemn them. I don't want to be around people that have the inclination to murder others. I don't think they really did anything morally wrong, but still do not like what they have done.
I must say that the quote by Lucretius really did relieve my fear of death a little bit, as I can logically understand my fear of death to be simply something biological and nothing more.
Thank you for another really interesting video on a thought-provocative topic. Really appreciate your work as usual. I’ve got a few comments/questions on the topic, especially on the deprivationist and the symmetry argument parts. I. The phrasing of the deprivationist thesis you presented is kind of misleading. You wrote “D: Death is bad because it deprives the persons of the goods she would have experienced, had her death not occurred”. It’s more accurate to say instead D: Death is bad because it deprives the person of the goods she would have experienced, had her death occurred later than it actually did. I’m mentioning this because I felt that it would be helpful to make this clear at the very beginning of this part of the video to avoid some confusion later on. For instance when you talk about extending the the person’s life indeterminably in the past. You can’t do that (or for death in the future for that matter); there needs to be some biological restriction. In some cases people can’t die later. II. The way you phrased the Symmetry Argument didn’t look to me as the most charitable formulation. The argument can and should be interpreted as just being about attitudes. If so, it should read something like this: 1. The time before our birth is relevantly similar to the time after our death. 2. It is irrational to display asymmetric attitudes towards things that are relevantly similar. 3. It is reasonable to be indifferent towards the time before our birth. 4. Thus, it is reasonable to be indifferent towards the time after our death. “Relevantly similar" is to be interpreted as both non-existences are experiential blanks and both non-existence can deprive the person of goods she would otherwise have experienced, had she been born earlier or died later. “Asymmetric attitudes” is to be interpreted as describing attitudes whose valence are different-e.g. neutral attitude towards prenatal non-existence and negative attitude towards posthumous non-existence. It’s obvious fear wouldn’t be the proper attitude towards past events, but perhaps concern/regret would and this would be symmetric. Note that the point of the argument is to lead Deprivationism into a dilemma: either she accepts the epicurean conclusion (4.) or she denies the very intuitive claim that one shouldn’t be concerned about one’s prenatal non-existence (denying 3). III. Nagel argues that 1 is false because it is metaphysically impossible for the person to be born earlier; hence, birth cannot deprive the person of any goods (at least not in the same sense death can). Your discussion of the proper semantic analysis for counterfactual with impossible antecedents doesn’t seem relevant. If it’s metaphysical impossible to be born earlier, then the two non-existences aren’t relevantly similar, regardless whether the counterfactual with the impossible antecedent is true. Counterexamples would have worked better here: frozen sperm and egg, frozen embryo..., it’s clear one could have been born earlier in those cases. IV. Although the Parfitt example has inspired some replies to the Symmetry Argument. As it stands, it doesn’t work for the deprivationist, because death is bad not due to it being painful but due to it depriving you of pleasure. Hence the need for an analogous case with pleasure, which is what Brueckner and Fischer provide. V. I was confused by the relevance of “Is the Symmetry Claim True?” part for the discussion. It is irrelevant for deprivationists whether the non-existence is permanent or interrupted by one’s existence; so, wasn’t sure what you were trying to convey in this part of the video. VI. A suggestion: if you’d like to make a future video just on the symmetry argument I suggest tackling Brueckner and Fischer’s temporal bias as a solution that prevents the deprivationist from endorsing 4 or denying 3.
I appreciate the response, but I find a lot of your comments rather puzzling to be honest. Re I: I'm not seeing what difference it makes how we phrase the thesis there. You say, for instance, that "there needs to be some biological restriction" - why? For what? I'm not sure what this is in reference to. (With that said, I accept that your phrasing of the deprivationist thesis might be technically correct. Perhaps I was being sloppy there.) Re II: I can't recall exactly how I phrased the symmetry argument in the video, but I think the objections I discussed would be applicable to your formulation as well. To me, there is nothing counterintuitive about denying (3); indeed, I would say that I do regret, or at least feel sad about, my pre-natal nonexistence. Re III: I'm aware of what Nagel's argument is. Perhaps my objection doesn't hit the mark. But "if it's metaphysically impossible to be born earlier, then the two non-existences aren't relevantly similar" - this just seems like a non-sequitur to me. Re V: It would be possible to deny the symmetry claim without being a deprivationist. I can't recall whether I was speaking from the deprivationist's point of view when I made the point about permanent nonexistence. If I was, then that was a mistake. But the objection to the symmetry claim still stands.
@@KaneB Thank you for the quick and helpful response. I: “I'm not seeing what difference it makes how we phrase the thesis there.” The difference is that the thesis is about the badness of dying at a certain time and not about the badness of dying. For that reason the relevant counterfactuals are those where you die later (at biologically possible later times) and not every counterfactual instance of a possible death. The counterfactual where I live to be 600 is irrelevant to assess whether my actual death (at a certain time) deprived me of those goods. The relevant counterfactual is what would happen had I not died then but at the time I’d would plausibly die if I had died later. II: “I can't recall exactly how I phrased the symmetry argument in the video, but I think the objections I discussed would be applicable to your formulation as well.” Don’t think it would. The ‘fear’ objection wouldn’t apply and the talk about the move from badness of death to the proper attitude wouldn’t either, since the argument is just about attitudes towards (relevantly) similar things. “To me, there is nothing counterintuitive about denying (3); indeed, I would say that I do regret, or at least feel sad about, my pre-natal nonexistence.” This is very surprising to me. I believe most people are unconcerned about the time they started existing and find reasonable their lack of concern or regret. You may regret not having had a different life or existing at a completely different time, but that’s not an attitude towards not being born earlier than you actually did, it’s towards particular contents of your existence. III: “But "if it's metaphysically impossible to be born earlier, then the two non-existences aren't relevantly similar" - this just seems like a non-sequitur to me.” Could you elaborate? How is our late birth depriving us of anything if it’s metaphysically impossible to be born earlier? V: “It would be possible to deny the symmetry claim without being a deprivationist.” Sure, but the symmetry argument is specifically problematic for deprivationists and it’s usually discussed in that context. I don’t think you were speaking from a deprivationist point of view, I just assumed you were, due to how the argument is used in recent literature. Notwithstanding, I’m still not getting the objection. The argument isn’t assuming that both non-existence are similar in every regard. How is a block of experiential blank is followed by an experiential block and another block of experiential blank follows an experiential block a relevant dissimilarity?
@@sabate7127 I: Okay, I get it now. However, that thesis is not particularly relevant to the topic that I was interested in. The question being discussed here is whether death is bad for the person who dies, not whether death at a particular time is bad for the person who dies. There are people who want to give a deprivationist answer to that first question, and who would affirm that (other things being equal) Owen Luder would have been better off had he died at 600 rather than 93. Given the way you're understanding deprivationism, death in itself is never going to come out as bad - if we're constrained by what's biologically possible, Owen Luder might not have died at 93, but he certainly would have died of something rather shortly after that. (Of course, if you're willing to get on board with my views about counterfactuals with impossible antecedents, then in this case death can still turn out to be bad.) II: I'd have to watch the video to remind myself of what was said, which I can't at the moment. I have no idea what most people feel about this. I suspect that a lot of people simply don't think about it, but that if their attention were drawn to it, many people would share my attitude. That's just a guess though. In any case, the defender of the Harm Thesis can say that people ought to feel sad about it, or that sadness would be appropriate, or something along those lines. Whether most people actually feel sad wouldn't really be relevant. III: I think that what's relevant is the counterfactual, e.g.: "If Owen Luder had been born in 1823, he would have been better off" or "If Owen Luder had been born in 1823, he would have received many more goods." Provided those counterfactuals come out true, we can give *something like* a deprivationist account of the harm of pre-natal nonexistence. I say "something like" the deprivationist account because I'm happy to grant that this may not, strictly speaking, be in line with the deprivationist account as it's commonly understood. I don't think it matters what we label things. The point is that we can use those counterfactuals to defend the Harm Thesis. But to answer your question: How is late birth depriving us of anything if it's metaphysically impossible to be born earlier? Because if we had been born earlier (holding fixed the same date of death), we would have had more life, hence more goods. The metaphysical impossibility is irrelevant… unless we're assuming the standard semantics of counterfactuals, which would render vacuous the sorts of counterfactuals stated above. V: I disagree with your characterization of the dialectic here. I'm fairly sure the symmetry argument existed prior to deprivationism. Certainly, Lucretius was not responding to deprivationism when he gave the symmetry argument. Rather, he was responding to something like the more general Harm Thesis. How is it a relevant dissimilarity that prenatal nonexistence is followed by existence? Well… how could it *not* be? I do think there are plausible answers to that second question. I'm not sure if it's in this video, or in the "further thoughts" video on my patreon, but I suggest an answer to that second question, which is that all that's relevant to assessing prenatal and posthumous nonexistence are the "intrinsic" properties of those states (or non-states), and presumably there is no difference there (assuming we can make sense of the notion of intrinsic properties). But if you can't even comprehend why somebody might find it relevant that prenatal nonexistence is followed by existence and posthumous nonexistence is not then I'm not sure what to say. I'll take a stab at it though. Consider this dialogue: A: "I'm scared of death." B: "Why?" A: "Because I will permanently cease to exist." B: "But you didn't exist before you were born, and that doesn't concern you at all." A: "Sure. But I said that what worries me is permanent nonexistence. My pre-natal nonexistence was not permanent." No doubt there are many ways this dialogue could continue, and many objections we could raise to A's position. Surely A's position is not utterly incomprehensible, though. Indeed, A hasn't said anything false. If what worries a person is permanent nonexistence, it's prima facie odd to try to alleviate their worries by pointing to a case of temporary nonexistence. I'm not really keen on "burden of proof" claims in philosophy, but if I were, I think I'd say that the burden is on you to explain why these things are relevantly similar, rather than on them to explain why they're relevantly different. The difference is that one is permanent and the other is not, and permanent nonexistence is what they said they were afraid of.
The argument from social comparative theory takes a contemporary materialist account. It tells us two things about the dead person: that you (not personal) are not as good off as all dead persons. A tiny cohort of dead persons as negative existential like Socrates have comparatively greater social status than you. Counterfactual: your future negative existential self is better than all dead persons. Why? All dead persons are causally active in living society. Consider dark matter analogy: persons form the bulk of causal social interactions known as WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles/persons). This emerges as forward looking to death as optimistic causal influence from the perspective of a negative existential as relative social comparative forward looking as optimistic of chances getting to a Socrates or whom ever in the social fabric of culture through life works. 2: That it is possible for you to get worse off. This is social comparative downward looking as death being of no causal influence on society, similar to downward looking subordination upon ones self whist alive due to having less merit compared to a peer. The peer as a prototype of what in contemporary culture is a superstar. We are downward looking from the perspective of that dizzy height of our ambition and hence can forward look as a cautious optimism of success, prior to death, and by token of non achievement there is a fear death. The person is better off if and only if comparatively forward looking or worth off if downward looking in life that than correlates to in death as a negative existential state of affairs within a influenced lived experiential society from the B theory of time rather than A theory of time. From a B theory of time we have something to fear in death. Namely the social comparison that as a person we dread when living that person as a social comparative of either not reach ambition or making it worth off once we get close to that ambition or if at the dizzy heights fall like that Greek god who happened to fly too close to the sun. Hence a substantial cognitive capacity is devoted to feeling good about ourselves and building up the legacy for death.B theory of time contains personal identity a determinist in civilisation whereas A theory does not. The legacy is contingent on how the personal identity is constructed through indexical affiliation. Social identity is bound to the stratification of a category or in group will have strong aversion to downward looking experiences. This entails intentiional agency as forward looking career which entails death of the self qua retirement and legacy as life's outcomes. Hence fear of death is scaffolded onto a construction of power through the state. A soldier through valour fears no death on the theatre of war but not the pacifist scholar. Death is complicated as the history of philosophy ascribes it considering the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna advocates no fear of death to Arjuna on the battle field as Dharma. If what maters now does not in a million years there should be no fear of death since the points of not matter is infinite but social comparison theory suggests things do mater relative to social construction and hence we fear implicitly fear death through a construction which could be eternal damnation if a soul or a bad legacy if not a soul. The way through the horns is renounce the wicked problem through deconstruction of social comparison and designate from religious affiliations or just sit tight with old money given the fear of death is on one account about social comparison and on the other more about experiencing another golden hour sunset or a smell of a rose as hedonic feedback loops correlate to pain and pleasure. Though a way to measure fear of death can be inverse to the fear itself through a predispostion to take on more risk as to push back the fear for a time and then when things go wrong defalt to panic as a means to reboot the social comparison again but at a lower spectrum than prior to the panic onset. Being dead seems to be bad in a moral sense given no existence is a mirror metaphor of life that is all about hedonism and social comparison which if good its mirror is bad. Although bad may entail the numinous bad that is not social comparison sort of bad but a negative existential bad that is symbolical to the yin yang prototype of emergence within opposites. The state of affairs of being then non being is bad but by prototype emergence through quantum decoherence is good for a deceased person emerge as a quantum decoherence state of affairs as a super symmetrical replication. The could well be a contemporary version of the rebirth thesis that postulates fatalism where all life is a form of pain even our greatest pleasures have an element of pain given we are anticipate the transient peak pleasure. There seems to be an imperative to prevent ones own replication which then entails celibacy or a contemporary version of that to prevent definite replication through resemblance. Sex is bad for two reasons: it's the most high valance social comparative experience which results in destress if negatively contrasted which is common; and two its a transitory pleasure and if progeny then more misery given the fatalist thesis is true. Hence (ananda- bliss; used as part of the proper name of many samnyasis) or bliss is the cessation of being fatalistic emerged into pain upon that bliss is the true conscious state (satchitanand)
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the Sheol, whither thou goest" [Ecclesiastes, you can read it in 15 minutes or less] If we always did not exist for an eternity before we were born, then dying is simply returning to the original state. What we call 'existence' after birth is merely spatial existence in time, temporal existence. In this way, what we consider 'non-existent' is existent, but not in time.
Yes, but clearly those that fear death are attached to their current existence. The identification of their current spatiotemporal existence with themselves is not an accident, and cannot be overcome through reason. Imagining the current existence ending causes them fear regardless of any reasons for it being good or bad. All of these reasons commenters and Kane give only serve to guide such people out of these fearful thought patterns. Typically it being irrational to fear something does not do anything to assuage the fear (this is typical of almost every fear that isn’t borne out of ignorance).
If death is by definition not experienced and all of experience involves living, then isn’t it necessarily the case that life is endless from our subjective point of view? For if life did end from our perspective, it would require that our subjective experience involves death, which contradicts what death is. I feel like a form of subjective immortality is a natural consequence of viewing death as being the cessation of consciousness. This is barely related to the vid but I thought it was interesting, and its an idea which gives me a bit of comfort when thinking about death.
I don't like Wittgenstein but he did make a cool comment along the same lines: "Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit."
@@jeremias-serus If an opinion being milquetoast or normie is on your mind when evaluating a philosophical position, then you’re probably doing philosophy for the wrong reasons. Altho tbf, I don’t really know what the right reasons to do philosophy would be, so maybe I’m talking nonesense.
@@hihello-sx1sx How can death be "endless" if there is a defined cut off point of experience. Not being aware of the fact you're dead woldn't make your subjective experiences endless, just that you have a finite awareness confined to being alive.
Death is not bad for the dead, but it could mean everything for the alive. Logic does not alway align with feelings. Death might mean nothing to a robot operating on logic. The resistance to death is the ultimate driving force for the meaning of life.
I strongly suspect that for many people who claim to fear death are actually afraid of dying (ie they fear process involving pain and suffering on the way out rather than what happens on the other side). Personally, I fear that immortality could be a much worse fate than death, especially once one starts taking into account the social ramifications - A world without children would be hell and so would a world dominated by fierce competition for resources between generations. This means my position results in paradox - I never want to die now (and hope I never will - eg due to infirmity) but I want to die sometime in the indefinite future. I guess that means I want to be surprised by my death.
Philosophers like Heidegger talk about how we should be thinking of our death all that time but I’ve always agreed with Spinoza that kind of thinking is pointless. There’s nothing to think about
Not pointless, it will shape how you think about spending your time. Instead of wasting another hour scrolling UA-cam I *might* be disciplined enough to do something more valuable with my time 😁
Another argument against the deprivationist view of prenatal nonexistence is the question is it always the case that coming into existence earlier would've been better? Say you come into existence before the Earth was habitable. Is it still better to have come into existence then or even earlier? Presumably there is an infinite amount of time earlier one could've come into existence at, in which case it really becomes a question would existing for eternity be better and even if it was, would that even be you at that point?
Regarding the deprivationism argument, Epicurus has made some statements that seem almost Schopenhauerian: "the limit of pleasure is the absence of pain". So, while one loses the ability to have pleasurable experiences, in this view lacking all experiences would be the highest obtainable pleasure. In an empirical sense, it appears that people who practice meditation report feeling pleasure even (or especially) in the absence of any experiences. It's one possible refutation of the deprivation argument.
As much as I like Schopenhauer's pessimism, this particular claim has always struck me as so obviously implausible and contrary to my everyday experience that I can't help but wonder if Schopenhauer had some sort of mental pathology. I don't want to be dismissive, and in general I don't like psychologizing people, so don't take this comment too seriously. But it's somewhat like if I were talking to somebody who insists that there is no visual difference between red things and green things -- I would wonder if this person is simply red/green colourblind, so has different experiences to me.
I think I agree with what Kane B said. But even if pleasure is just the lack of something, it seems like that only beings can have negative properties. Being in a state of lacking something still requires a Being. It is like talking about the present King of France. The King can not lack hair if there is no King.
@@Opposite271 Yeah, Epicurus' argument rests on the idea that you can have no sensory experiences when you are dead, so *perceiving* a lack/absence of pain is also out the window. But I am not sure that this actually matters. For example, take this thought experiment similar to the the amnesia drug thought experiment from the video: Let's say you are about to undergo a life-saving surgery, and are allergic to the anaesthetics. You take an amnesia drug, fall asleep before the surgery and you wake up in the hospital bed. But in this thought experiment, you are told that the surgery already happened. Which situation would you prefer: 1) you are told that you slept through the entire procedure and experienced no pain, or 2) you are told that you woke up during the procedure and had excruciating pain the whole way through, but the amnesia drug made you forget that it happened. Both situations are identical for my current situation, since at this point I am out of the procedure. Yet I would prefer the situation where there was no pain during the procedure, even if I have no recollection or personal experiences of this event. In other words, I would prefer it if a different version of me had no pain, even if this is completely independent of my own capacity to experience that pain. By the same token, I could prefer it if a different (dead) version of me has complete absence of pain, even if I am unable to experience that situation myself. What Kane also touched on in the video is that deprivationists will probably concede that if all that you have ahead of you is a life of nothing but suffering, then dying is not so bad. At that point it boils down to essentially a prediction/quantification of how much pleasure/pain you will encounter in the "life you would have lived if you had not died", and see how this compares to not having any experience at all. But the issue is that no matter how you live your life, you will encounter some negative experiences. So, if you are someone who thinks negative experiences always overpower positive ones, or indeed that the positive is defined as lack of the negative, then the balance of the deprivationist argument can tilt in favor of dying being a good thing. I think the colorblindness comparison is very apt in this case. People will have drastically different perspectives on the value of life, and yet the viewpoints which are directly opposed to each other can nonetheless be perceived as 'obvious' or 'self-evident', since they are based on how someone subjectively experiences life.
@@Izerion I mean, I do consider it to be essential for being me that I am Alive. If you talk about a death version of myself then it seems like you are either talking about a corpse or a non-being and I do not care for the well-being of either of them, I do not even consider them to be versions of me. I think in the end of the day, whether or not death is good, bad or neutral depends ultimately not on the quantity of pain vs. pleasure but on whether or not one prefers one’s current form of existence over non-existence. If I would encounter a being in paralyzing agony that is also unable to feel pleasure and if this being still prefers this form of existence over non-existence, then I would still say that death is a bad thing for this being. It would be wrong to mercy kill a being that clearly prefers existence with suffering over suffering-free non-existence.
@@Izerion I do suspect our different perspectives are more the product of a difference in conceptual schemes rather then a difference in experience. I think we can both agree that the intrinsic properties of a sensation are not inherently good or bad. And instead that this has something to do with desire/the will/Intentionality. So our difference now is that I consider satisfaction not to be the absence of desire but instead I consider it to be the presence of a desire to conserve. Dissatisfaction on the other hand is a desire to change. Pleasure is a form of satisfaction and boredom and suffering are forms of dissatisfaction. Edit: -Of curse we have the overpowering argument but I already said that I don’t think that the ratio of pleasure and pain are the ultimate factors in determining whether or not death is good or bad. -Of curse you might have a different conceptual scheme then me and that is fine, point is that our experience are not what makes our judgments different.
Kane B character development! Once you feared thinking about death so much that you were not going to make a video about this topic. What caused this change?
I feel a very strong pull toward Deprivationism, including prenatal nonexistence. But Negel's counterargument is interesting. I am generally sus of impossible antecedent type stuff. I will have to think about it more.
I'm suspicious of that too, but only because counterfactuals in general are thoroughly suspicious. I don't see any reason to pick on counterpossibles specifically.
would be funner to go through all views after death. annihilation or the void is just one of 5 speculated things that can happen after death. some speculated that it might be worse like a hell or a worse reincarnation. some speculated it is similar to now like some other world or another somewhat equal reincarnation. some speculated that it is better like a heaven or another better reincarnation. and the last speculated thing is that ones self will somehow transform into some sort of world-soul or some blending into the world and extinction of self like nirvana or moksha and so on. would be more interesting philosophy of death to not take a particular position on it.
prenatal nonexistence is not bad but a loss after the fact is, and a bad experience is worse than no experience at all. However a good experience is better than no experience thus you could rule that prenatal nonexistence is in fact bad? not trying to make you feel bad about your vasectomy since human perception is just one form of perception which in itself has no effect on the greater universe and no experience is not bad after all. Much appreciate the vids man! i learn so much from them!
I'm sympathetic to the arguments for antinatalism, and there's certainly nothing that could convince me to have a kid (I had a vasectomy, so even if I changed my mind, it's too late now!)... but at the end of day, I just don't really care what other people do.
ok i respect ur opinion however i think deep inside we all know that having kids is the biggest problem in society, almost all of the problems originate from that no matter what problems u have in life @@KaneB
How is the antecedent that Owen Luda was born a hundred years earlier any less possible than Hobbes squaring the circle. In each case the proposition in question is false in our world, but in neither case is the proposition in question a logical impossibility.
Once dead, the person has nothing to fear. But, before death, a person would understand that they will be depeived. If i stole Steven Rosenbaum's lunch, he would be deprived of the experience of eating his lunch at some unspecified time. Stealing Steven Rosenbaum's lunch and then killing him does not make the stealing of his lunch okay.
How do we know that anyone actually dies? I’m not asking in the sense of a metaphysical supernatural post-mortem ascendancy or descent into a “hereafter”. I’m just suggesting that predators we haven’t any idea that any life actually comes to an end, in part because perhaps we don’t even know what that means.
When I personally think of death, I think of what is the thing that ceases to exist and I find nothing, I find that it is simply a world with one less conscious experience, since to me it seems that the thing that we usually consider dying is a story of the set of conscious experiences based on the sensory experience of the set of molecules that is the body of that "person". But is there some reason to consider there to be something special connecting the temporally separate conscious experiences in a body as compared to for instance a given conscious experience's relation to spatially separate conscious experiences, "other people". I want to escape this line of reasoning, I want to identify as a temporally continuous person, so is there a name for this type of reasoning and maybe a wikipedia page I could check for refutations and stuff. I was expecting this might covered in this video, since it sorta is a refutation for the badness of death since it's unlikely that people have a strong preference toward worlds with a greater amount of conscious experiencers at least not in the same way as their disposition is toward death, but it seemed that throughout the video it was asserted that there is an I or a you that is temporally continuous and which could have existed longer or come into existance earlier, but to me this seems unjustified
I think the assumptions defined at the start of this take away a lot of what we're generally concerned about on the matter. I do however agree with the conclusion, i dont fear annihilation.
I used to be terrified of death. For me, annihilation was absolutely the source of my dread. I was never particularly worried about the suffering involved in the process of dying, nor the loss that other people would feel. Both of these are bad, of course, but they're bad in ways that happen in ordinary life. I've had illnesses before; an illness that leads to death is different in degree but not in kind. Pain is scary, but I've experienced pain before and it doesn't last forever, so it's not something that would keep me up at night. The idea of annihilation, on the other hand, created a deep existential dread, unlike any other fear I felt. I'm just speaking for myself here. However, having spoken to lots of other people about this, it seems that many people have a similar attitude. So I think the Harm Thesis as stated does capture a fear that some (not all) people feel.
@@KaneB interesting, that possibility hadn't occured to me. Non existence has always had at least some appeal to me. There is a French term that translates to the call of the void, it's always been there for me. Lately more so. I didn't realize it could be a source of fear for others.
Let me tell you something you already know my son, the world isn't all raibows and shiny stuff, the world is a TOXIC waste which wears on you the longer you live, no matter how much you do what your parents say, life will beat your arss hard with all the stuped education and toil, better to never have been, just like uncle David says, earth is not a place to bring your precious kids into, do not be a fool, kids are happy when you dont give them a body -Rocky Balboa from an alternative universe
Kane, I am curious, what is your attitude on death? Do you have a special approach or do you just live like most of us mainly ignoring the fate of death?
Couldn't you argue that the closest possible world in which you were born 100 years earlier is simply the world where everything you ever interacted with also occurred 100 years earlier? And wouldn't that be equivalent (in your subjective experience) to just living 100 years longer?
Yeah, that seems plausible to me. Even if we think that it's essential to my identity that I was born to my actual parents, we can just imagine a world in which the Earth forms 100 years earlier, and then the rest of history plays out as it actually did. Then it seems like we would have appropriate counterparts for every human being, where all were born 100 years earlier. (To be honest though, I think that pretty much all these claims about essences and modalities and possible worlds are humbug, and that we can tell whatever stories we like about how things might have been.)
The Epicurean argument is interesting because it's hard to temporally locate the harm, but the Lucretian argument is just terrible - firstly, I DO feel bad about all the past events I have missed, I constantly regret not being alive - for example - during the 60s psych rock/hippy period. Secondly, the fact that I couldn't fear something when I wasn't alive says nothing about what I SHOULD fear, given that I am alive now.
Depends on the death. If it's quick and painless, I do not fear it. If it's somewhat slow and excruciatingly painful, though I don't fear death I fear the dying part.
So if a bear were running after you, but you knew it would be a painless death (the bear has magical claws that kill without inflicting pain), would you run away or not? In that case I would run away. And that’s how I know I fear death, not just pain 😁
@@bds8715 There are lots of things that I don't want to happen and I will work to avoid, but I wouldn't say I fear them. For example, I don't want to feel tired tomorrow, so I will try to get a good sleep tonight, but surely I'm not afraid of feeling tired tomorrow. This sort of thing seems fairly common to me. So the fact that a person acts in ways to avoid death, such as by running away from a bear, doesn't in itself show that they fear death.
@@KaneB Hmm… So I’m seeing two emotions here: 1) I feel the emotion of fear in regards to X. 2) I hate the idea of X happening to me. Now that I think of it, I ONLY feel fear (that panicky, dread feeling) in regards to pain. Even in the case of existential anxiety, that is a kind of cognitive dissonance where I am living and yet I don’t really believe in living; I don’t see reasons to think being alive is better than being dead. If there is any fear there, it is the fear of existential pain-the pain one feels when they are living and yet don’t want to be, or the pain of facing the badness of life itself (or at least the badness of your life). So the example of avoiding painless death doesn’t show that I fear death, but it does show that I view death as a harm. In fact I’m now inclined to think fear of death is impossible. We really just fear pain, and we hate the idea of being dead. This explains why so many people say “I don’t fear death, only the process of dying.”
Wtf does it mean for something to be “bad.” Surely this has been discussed and it varies between conversations. From a purely selfish perspective, perhaps me being not alive 1000 years ago and also a thousand years from now is bad if I assume that being alive is good.
If there is no afterlife, I generally feel fairly comfortable with death. Whenever I feel at danger of dying, I reflect on my experience in life and feel that if I die at this moment, then I will be at peace with it and rest with that idea, I suppose I am a Deprivationist when it comes to others deaths, but an epicurean insofar as facing my own mortality. Since I have different levels of evidence in the case of even knowing the existence of others vs. my own mind, I regard them differently. Sometimes though I fear an afterlife such as with a God (I grew up Methodist so my Idea of God is one that feels generally good, but there are things that exist that I don't believe I could forgive a God for and would go to hell for under some understandings) or a malevolent AI that would be able to reconstruct my conscious self as it was in some point in my life and subject it to torture it believes I deserve. I would love to see a video on the purpose of an everlasting life, filled with misery, or perfect grace, or if a video from you or your approximate perspective exists of a similar topic that would satisfy my interest I would appreciate being linked to it.
Honestly, my main fear is some sort of hellish afterlife after death. I'd probably prefer not existing over going to Hell. If we are naturally afraid of death, then that means that there is something to be afraid of, right?
We have many fears which might not really make sense, either at all or anymore. And vice-versa too. And trying not to die is life's thing: can't be alive when you're dead; can't spread life if you're not alive.
Sir I am looking for introductionary videos or articles about enviromental ethics. I have found 2 videos of yours and it was great. Could you recommend me new sources? Thanks.
Idk how long one specific sperm can last, but certainly there is some wiggle room on my birth. Or if we are counting from time I left the womb then there could be weeks of difference. But going by insemination, you could easily be created, lest just say, one second earlier.
If there’s anything about death to think about, it’s not our death. It’s our cultures’ deaths that seems to actually matter for a lot of people with their upbringing and history ingrained heavily into them. None among prenatal nonexistence, postmortem nonexistence, and postmortem suffering should matter or be seen as bad. But many think of death’s variants and fear it still. Everyone dies. That’s it. But it’s interesting to see arguments against annihilation after death being bad.
It is strange, the fear of death. Death gives meaning to everything, yet it ends it all for a person. Almost no society in the world considered death to be the end of it all, everyone thought of or wanted there to be something after death, an afterlife. Even modern secular or atheist people cannot completely swallow that the death is end of it all, when they encounter it close to them. Everyone is sad for "the loss" of loved ones, even if you dont know that deceased person.
how can you be afraid of non-existence if you come from it? at the stage of non-existence, you didn't have a life habit, so at this point it's arguable if death is bad and life is good. the point of life imo is death itself (no matter how paradoxical it sounds) , because pleasures that only exist in life are valuable because of death, because death gives them the criteria of limitness.
We were all dead for billions of years prior to being born and so we were in a state of annihalation. And we'll go back to that state afterwards. The only thing is that there'll be leftovers.
@@scrobblesbyDJGunbound I don't believe that's true when using those words in everyday language. When we say something exists we usually mean it exists right now, or at least existed in the past. To say everything has existed is nonsense, unless you're misusing the words.
@@lorenzomizushal3980 Tip: look for Graham Priest's "Everything and Nothing" where he concludes 'Absolute Nothingness' is the metaphysica grounding / Ultimate Reality. But understand that 'nothingness' here has a different meaning from what we usuallly use to think about
you live on through your offspring, no you won't be the same in some aspects but essentially you continue to exist. It is important to understand this video's philosophy so people don't do stupid things and die young, there is merit in that but it is not correct. If your DNA exists in your body or someone else's, you exist. Will you have your memories? Not exactly. You won't remember your favorite hockey team but you will remember after revisiting it that for example fire hurts and usually if not always avoid it. This philosophy is designed to cater to those who are infertile so they don't become morbidly depressed. Plus there is also Cryogenics which I strongly believe will be successful one day.
>> you live on through your offspring This has always seemed to me like the biggest cope of all time but if it makes you feel better, you do you I guess.
notice how your comment didn't debunk anything I said, it was just a jab because you yourself can't handle your own ego and philosophies being challenged. @@KaneB
@@irondraak960 Why should I have to debunk anything? Also, it wasn't a jab; I was simply expressing my own attitude in the first part of the sentence, and everything after the "but" was sincere. It doesn't bother me that people hold those sorts of beliefs, and it's a good thing if they can derive some comfort from them. My mother held similar views.
four things. One you don't have to debunk anything, you didn't have to reply. Your opinion is your own just as mine is. Two I got the attitude part, you're right and don't contradict you ya ya. Three that was a jab, you accused me of coping which doesn't make sense to me and someone else on a different video said the same damned thing Bureautrash. Four you could leave it as it is now but you won't because you do have an ego and can't stand someone challenging your beliefs. I on the other hand don't care what you think so it doesn't matter what your response is, I'm moving on and no I won't be subscribing a Pseudo intellectuals crap on UA-cam. @@KaneB
@@irondraak960 You expressed a view; I expressed my view. If you don't like that kind of thing, don't comment in a public forum. Yes, I did accuse you of coping. How is that a jab? What's the problem with coping? Maybe you take issue with that, but I don't. >> Four you could leave it as it is now but you won't because you do have an ego Correct. I like getting the last word. (I don't have a problem with challenges to my beliefs, but I don't see anything here that amounts to a challenge to my beliefs.) Of course, you also could have left things as they were and moved on after my first response, but you didn't. It seems we're not so different, you and I.
Here is my take. There is no death for oneself! You can never think about your own death for when you do you are necessarily alive. So death is not only not of our concern like Epicurus held, it is an impossibilia like a circle with 4 corners. So death is only a sensible term at all when referring to others, else it is gibberish. And as a sidenote after experiencing the death of my old father: I was prepared, I philosophized a lot about this topic, I had good reasons to be content (my father was 88 and had a good life) but still when it happened I grieved and when I think about him I see him rot and I feel down even I know it is just natural. That showed me that reason cannot do sh*t against our (archaic) emotions, it is just a computer who can serve you with calculations but nothing more. That proves to me that a real philosopher MUST be someone with also a great deal of life experience. Those „university nerds“ can have all the theoretic insights, but that is at best 50% of the issue. They are rather elite thinkers than philosophers. And yes many „philosophers“ like e.g. Kant would fall under this category.
but death can be predicted if one believes in the external signs of it~s existance, it is my concern as i can influence the moment of my death in time with behaviour. starting with the presumption that death means total non existance and then questioning whether non existance will be felt by us ( when non existance means non feeling) is a self concluding toy example. I am not certain what will actually be experienced after my death should it occur and I therefore can not say what will be felt and whether that feeling will matter to me should it exist.
@@lucycoleclough1182 As I wrote: you cannot even refer to your death, it is logically impossible. All you can do is refer to a simulated death of an avatar of you - fantasized by the real you that has to be very alive. This is what we can only mean with our death but it is not what we intend to mean. We can literally only see and think about others dying. So when we refer or think about our own death we get into ex falso. This is no disaster. It justs says we cannot coherently think about our own death, not that it aint happen because from ex falso does not follow falsehood. But in a sense you can argue to being able to prove that you live forever: there was never a point (for you!) when you did not exist nor will there ever a point (for you!) where you do not exist anymore. It basically leads to a variant of what Epicurus preached: do not worry, only the others die. But of course our archaic emotions somehow know more than our pure reason, so it _feels_ weird to argue like that.
>> You can never think about your own death for when you do you are necessarily alive I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Why would this make it impossible for me to think about my own death? This doesn't seem like a very plausible constraint on the content of one's thoughts.
@@KaneB Kane: „I am dead“. From „I am dead“ it follows that whoever stands for „I“ is dead. Since I = Kane, so Kane is dead, but Kane makes the very utterance, so he lives.
@@ostihpem "I am dead" is false whenever I say it, but in order to know that it's false, I need to assign a meaning to it, so it seems that I am able to think about it in some sense. I can have thoughts that are necessarily false -- for instance, though Venus is identical to the Morning Star, I can imagine a world in which these turn out to be different. In any case, there are other ways of thinking about one's own death than the proposition "I am dead." There is also: "One day, I will be dead," which seems to be not just meaningful but true.
Pay close attention to the assumptions Kane lays out at the start of the video. A lot of the things that make death in gaza right now aweful are not applicable to what he's addressing. He is not addressing the pain of those injured or left behind, and he is not addressing the pain leading up to the moment of death. You offer an off topic appeal to emotion. We can all agree that a world with gaza at peace is better than the world we have today. That has no bearing on any of the arguments he presents.
where does this leave us? my fear of death makes me deeply uncomfortable, but so do the consequences of the epicurean view (that killing might not be intrinsically bad) i guess leaving you uncomfortable is what philosophy does best!
Being dead might not be bad but being made dead by someone else against your own will when you could perfectly carry on living sounds bad enough. If it's not bad just because for the person it will be like it never happened, then literally everything else is also okay because it will also be like it never happened when they are eventually dead. But murder is indeed about more than the victim, it's about their loved ones too. Death itself might not be bad, but for several people the fact we can die untimely deaths is really bad and trying to prevent murder is as good as it gets.
Hedonism and the experience machine: ua-cam.com/video/YQgeUfDoAmA/v-deo.html
I appreciate the way you presented various arguments. However it would be preferable to get a dead person to speak on this
Bob, the necromancer is working on that
Once you 're dead , you are dead . but your spirit goes somewhere .
@@johnsmith-rs2vk wdym by spirit? As far as we are aware, consciousness ceases upon death.
Maybe but one 's spirit lives on . @@mtgmonkey9657
@@mtgmonkey9657 How could we be aware of whether or not your consciousness continues? If someone's body is dead, how would their consciousness inform us?
1: there is a difference between death(defined here as the transition from existence to non-existence) and the state of non-existence.
2: It does not logically follow that if non-existence is completely neutral death must also be completely neutral. (the state of not having a donut is neutral, but you have the positive state of having a donut, going from that positive state to a neutral state of not having a donut by dropping it on the ground would be a negative transition)
3: If non-existence is absolute neutrality (a lack of any positive or negative influences) then death's value must be inversely tied to the value of living. (if life is bad death is good, if life is good death is bad, if life is neutral, death is neutral)
4: Life, while not constantly good, is generally a positive experience (you get to do cool things like fall in love and eat donuts and do art :3)
5: Death is a transition from a positive state, into a neutral state, and is therefore a negative transition.
Even though I fully believe this, death is still not something that should be feared. Similar to how you should understand getting hit by a car is bad and you should take the needed precautions, excess anxiety about cars will worsen your life. if this is what must be believed for you or others to avoid a terrible constant anxiety, go for it.
My only caveat is that this is getting close to calling life a neutral or even negative experience, and I personally have the least possible respect for those who would argue for that. I consider it genuinely grotesque to be so defeated to consider life as a whole a net loss, and the only folks lower than anti-natalists in my book are those with the most horrible of prejudices.
the Epicurus argument is pretty much what I have believed since I was like 5. I remember trying to argue it to other people, but i was a dumb child, couldn't explain any of it. The idea that not existing isn't bad has always just seemed like the intuitive, obvious answer to me, and it's kind of always been strange to see people not think that. The one argument I did make, that i kind of still stand by is, "were you unhappy before you were born?"/"Image what it was like before you were born, that is what it is probably like to be dead".
It's really nice to see something that can explain these ideas I have, MUCH more eloquently and thoroughly than I ever could. I don't think any of these ideas are complicated or hard to understand, but they are very hard to put into words.
You're not unhappy before you were born, but you are happy alive (or, most people are)
@@ToasterLightningmost?
@@helrem I'd say so, yeah
One thing that isn't mentioned in any of those arguments is what the goals of the person are. Even "loss" isn't bad if my goal isn't to own the thing in question. It seems to me that the only difference between the different outlooks on death is what they implicitly assume the goals of a person are:
1. The Harm Thesis: If my goal is only to avoid pain, then death can't be bad for me because it causes pain neither directly nor indirectly.
2. Deprivationism: If my goal is only to have as many pleasant experiences as possible, disregarding all negative experiences, then death is bad.
3. The counter-argument to the Harm Thesis at the end: If my goal is to maintain social order and support people's free will and personal space as much as possible, then someone taking a person's life is bad and I will not allow it. (Everyone should strive for this for obvious reasons)
4. The second counter-argument to the Harm Thesis: If my goal is to have a long life (whether it is to contribute to society, to reproduce or to experience pleasure), then I'd rather die at 80 than at 18. However, even so, if I'm snapped out of existence in an instant at 18, I won't even have time to reflect on my death, so a death at any age would be the same.
Of course, a person can't have goals after they've stopped existing, so these goals matter only before death. However, I - the living person - am reflecting on death at the moment, so my opinion on it is definitely influenced by my goals.
If I have no goals at all, then not only will death not matter at all, but life will not matter either - I'll just lie on my bed and wither away. If I do have goals, then I'll exert whatever control I have over death in order to make it conform to these goals.
People's fear of death is based on their built-in desire(goal) to delay it - fear drives them to eat well, exercise, quit smoking, stay hydrated, etc.. I think the only way to break free of that fear is to get rid of the instinct for a long life, but that is not only difficult but also potentially risky.
Sorry Kane, it was a good effort on your part, but my fear of death took the W in this debate.
And that is to be expected. Our genes have proven to be the best at avoiding death. It would be strange if some logic could effectively overcome millions of years of evolution.
Yeah, I doubt that arguments are likely to do much to change one's attitudes here.
Reincarnation is a bigger fear man
death is to conscious creatures finite in that our perception is limited to our ideas about it which is observably not finite... interesting connection there u could look into.
I have a genuinely crippling fear of death (to the point of it manifesting in an anxiety disorder) and while arguments don't help a lot, this video was certainly at least a little comforting and ofc a bit thought provoking as well.
I'm sorry to hear that! Glad you found the video interesting at least
I have the same thing and these kinds of videos help a bit.
I was that way for a while, it's the worst. I won't detail how I got that way and the way I felt, because I imagine it wouldn't help at all, nor do I think what helped me get out of it will help you (we could be feeling very different things), but I think reading the myth of Sisyphus really helped me in coming to terms with it all. Again, not at all sure if this'll have the same effect on anyone else, and there were probably some other changes in my life before reading it that helped. Good luck with everything regardless
DOES ANYONE REMEMBER BEING BORN?
Yeah when a young person dies it’s interesting how optimistic we get. “They had so much left to experience…” etc, assuming those future experiences were going to be more good than bad.
So the plausibility of a good future is an important factor, which leads to the weird conclusion that an 18 yo dying is more tragic if his family is rich than if they were poor. This is because if his family is rich then it’s more likely that his future will be full of good experiences; he will have the freedom to pursue his heart’s desires without worrying about money. But the poor 18 yo who dies is more likely to have future suffering.
And that seems right: If we were to find out that the 18 yo who was killed actually had a tumor in their brain and they were about to die a horribly painful death within the next 6 months, then suddenly the murder is almost fortuitous. The tragedy is now concentrated in the cancer more so than the murder.
But on the other hand, each soul is infinitely irreplaceable. So they are all equal in that regard. So that’s maybe why it sounds offensive to value some lives over others.
But if the only thing that makes death a harm to the individual is deprivation, then what exactly is being deprived is important.
Deprivation theory requires optimism 🤔
I don't want to live forever, but for the foreseeable future, if I were given the option to see (and survive) tomorrow, I would. I have things unfinished and don't expect I will stop starting things anytime soon. Also, I'm still curious what will happen. If I kept being given that choice long enough, I expect there would come a time where I find no project worth starting and stop finding the future interesting. At that time, it would kinda suck to have to keep existing just to exist.
It annoys me (but only when I think about it) that I'm not presented that option, but I don't think that frustration is fear. I continue to act as if I had been given the option yesterday and took it, because to do otherwise would be paralyzing and pointless.
I have jokngly called it a proof by induction that people want to live forever, because they will always want to live one more day. I think this is sufficient justification for the transhumanist goal of defeating (nonconsensual) death. But I have also said that I want to learn everything and then kill myself, because I do anticipate that I will probably eventually run out of projects.
I definitely feel fear because I am not presented the option to live, but I also try not to think about it because thinking about fearing death is not useful. I think the issue is that some people in distracting themselves delude themselves into thinking that they don't prefer to not die.
To be clear, people deluding themselves that they are fine with death is bad insofar as death is defeatable and their delusion gets in the way of the project to defeat death. I don't think blissful ignorance is intrinsically bad, but it tends to be instrumentally harmful.
@@nategibso I don't think people would run out of projects because memory is very poor. Even after just 15 years of learning one subject (philosophy, and specifically contemporary analytic philosophy), I've forgotten at least 95% of the material. I've revisited books that I first read 10 years ago, and found that I couldn't remember anything from them. As long as our minds are finite, learning never needs to end. The same goes for many other projects. So we'd just have to ensure that these transhumanist improvements are used specifically to extend life and health, but that memory remains crappy.
@@nategibso You think we can defeat the heat death of the universe?
@@KaneB I think we probably will be able to modify ourselves so that we don't forget, but you may be correct that we will generally choose not to. We may also choose to delete memories or modify ourselves in other ways that keep things interesting. This could go on unbounded, but I think that eventually people would probably kill themselves. Maybe not. There is a simple argument that if death is irreversible and the probability of death is non-zero, as time goes to infinity you will eventually die.
These arguments only reminded me of the reality of death and didn't really stop my fear of it. And there are arguments that have in the past stopped my fear, like that life and the world goes on with or without me
I appreciate you trying to speak on behalf of the dead community, they almost never get a platform
I would take the view that whether or not something is good or bad depends on whether or not the presence or absence of it is actually preferred by a existing being.
So whether or not Death is good or bad or neutral depends on whether or not a particular being prefers it’s existence or non-existence or has no preferences at all.
All of this is independent of what would be the case if this being wouldn’t exist.
It might be that every second of a beings existence is paralyzing agony but as long as that being prefers to be, it is better for it to be. Then who would I be to judge that it is better for it to not exist then to suffer if it clearly prefers it’s existence with all its suffering over suffering-free non-existence.
Edit:
But when it comes to non-beings, they have no preferences.
So can death be a bad scenario for those that do exist? Yes.
Can death be a bad scenario for those that do not exist? No.
The Epicurean view is widely implausible. The fact that it cannot explain why a great many killings would be wrong and involve harm is pretty much a refutation on its own. Indeed, a great deal of ethics seems to go out the window. And it's not just the badness of death either, but also its goodness which is important to recognize in some cases. For example, it's going to be difficult to see how something like euthanasia could possibly make sense on the Epicurean view.
Maybe what makes killing someone bad is not the fact that they die. I might argue that the pain and fear that a murder victim is caused before they die is the thing that makes killing them morally wrong. The grief of those who are still alive in itself might already justify why killings are wrong. The epicurean view can still provide reasons to call murder wrong.
@@stuartkendall4964 It can't explain why it would be wrong to kill someone painlessly, who has no family or friends. And that's a huge problem. But even in the cases where it has an explanation for the wrongness, it locates the wrongness in the wrong place. The problem with murder isn't that it harms other people, it's that it harms the person who is killed themselves.
@@Philosophy_Overdosewhile I agree the epicurean argument is false, one could explain the wrongness of killing via rights rather than killing being "bad" in the axiological sense.
I find some of the consequences of Epicureanism counterintuitive, but not so counterintuitive that I would take them as a reductio of the position.
@@Philosophy_Overdose To me, that doesn't seem like a big problem. I am fully ready to accept that the instant and painless killing of someone with no family or friends is not morally wrong. Of course, if I figured out that someone I knew had committed murder in this way, I would still condemn them. I don't want to be around people that have the inclination to murder others. I don't think they really did anything morally wrong, but still do not like what they have done.
I must say that the quote by Lucretius really did relieve my fear of death a little bit, as I can logically understand my fear of death to be simply something biological and nothing more.
Good timing. I just read De Rerum Natura a week ago. It's a lovely poem.
Thank you for another really interesting video on a thought-provocative topic. Really appreciate your work as usual.
I’ve got a few comments/questions on the topic, especially on the deprivationist and the symmetry argument parts.
I. The phrasing of the deprivationist thesis you presented is kind of misleading. You wrote “D: Death is bad because it deprives the persons of the goods she would have experienced, had her death not occurred”. It’s more accurate to say instead D: Death is bad because it deprives the person of the goods she would have experienced, had her death occurred later than it actually did. I’m mentioning this because I felt that it would be helpful to make this clear at the very beginning of this part of the video to avoid some confusion later on. For instance when you talk about extending the the person’s life indeterminably in the past. You can’t do that (or for death in the future for that matter); there needs to be some biological restriction. In some cases people can’t die later.
II. The way you phrased the Symmetry Argument didn’t look to me as the most charitable formulation. The argument can and should be interpreted as just being about attitudes. If so, it should read something like this: 1. The time before our birth is relevantly similar to the time after our death.
2. It is irrational to display asymmetric attitudes towards things that are relevantly
similar.
3. It is reasonable to be indifferent towards the time before our birth.
4. Thus, it is reasonable to be indifferent towards the time after our death. “Relevantly similar" is to be interpreted as both non-existences are experiential blanks and both non-existence can deprive the person of goods she would otherwise have experienced, had she been born earlier or died later. “Asymmetric attitudes” is to be interpreted as describing attitudes whose valence are different-e.g. neutral attitude towards prenatal non-existence and negative attitude towards posthumous non-existence. It’s obvious fear wouldn’t be the proper attitude towards past events, but perhaps concern/regret would and this would be symmetric. Note that the point of the argument is to lead Deprivationism into a dilemma: either she accepts the epicurean conclusion (4.) or she denies the very intuitive claim that one shouldn’t be concerned about one’s prenatal non-existence (denying 3).
III. Nagel argues that 1 is false because it is metaphysically impossible for the person to be born earlier; hence, birth cannot deprive the person of any goods (at least not in the same sense death can). Your discussion of the proper semantic analysis for counterfactual with impossible antecedents doesn’t seem relevant. If it’s metaphysical impossible to be born earlier, then the two non-existences aren’t relevantly similar, regardless whether the counterfactual with the impossible antecedent is true. Counterexamples would have worked better here: frozen sperm and egg, frozen embryo..., it’s clear one could have been born earlier in those cases.
IV. Although the Parfitt example has inspired some replies to the Symmetry Argument. As it stands, it doesn’t work for the deprivationist, because death is bad not due to it being painful but due to it depriving you of pleasure. Hence the need for an analogous case with pleasure, which is what Brueckner and Fischer provide.
V. I was confused by the relevance of “Is the Symmetry Claim True?” part for the discussion. It is irrelevant for deprivationists whether the non-existence is permanent or interrupted by one’s existence; so, wasn’t sure what you were trying to convey in this part of the video.
VI. A suggestion: if you’d like to make a future video just on the symmetry argument I suggest tackling Brueckner and Fischer’s temporal bias as a solution that prevents the deprivationist from endorsing 4 or denying 3.
I appreciate the response, but I find a lot of your comments rather puzzling to be honest.
Re I: I'm not seeing what difference it makes how we phrase the thesis there. You say, for instance, that "there needs to be some biological restriction" - why? For what? I'm not sure what this is in reference to. (With that said, I accept that your phrasing of the deprivationist thesis might be technically correct. Perhaps I was being sloppy there.)
Re II: I can't recall exactly how I phrased the symmetry argument in the video, but I think the objections I discussed would be applicable to your formulation as well. To me, there is nothing counterintuitive about denying (3); indeed, I would say that I do regret, or at least feel sad about, my pre-natal nonexistence.
Re III: I'm aware of what Nagel's argument is. Perhaps my objection doesn't hit the mark. But "if it's metaphysically impossible to be born earlier, then the two non-existences aren't relevantly similar" - this just seems like a non-sequitur to me.
Re V: It would be possible to deny the symmetry claim without being a deprivationist. I can't recall whether I was speaking from the deprivationist's point of view when I made the point about permanent nonexistence. If I was, then that was a mistake. But the objection to the symmetry claim still stands.
@@KaneB Thank you for the quick and helpful response.
I: “I'm not seeing what difference it makes how we phrase the thesis there.”
The difference is that the thesis is about the badness of dying at a certain time and not about the badness of dying. For that reason the relevant counterfactuals are those where you die later (at biologically possible later times) and not every counterfactual instance of a possible death. The counterfactual where I live to be 600 is irrelevant to assess whether my actual death (at a certain time) deprived me of those goods. The relevant counterfactual is what would happen had I not died then but at the time I’d would plausibly die if I had died later.
II: “I can't recall exactly how I phrased the symmetry argument in the video, but I think the objections I discussed would be applicable to your formulation as well.”
Don’t think it would. The ‘fear’ objection wouldn’t apply and the talk about the move from badness of death to the proper attitude wouldn’t either, since the argument is just about attitudes towards (relevantly) similar things.
“To me, there is nothing counterintuitive about denying (3); indeed, I would say that I do regret, or at least feel sad about, my pre-natal nonexistence.”
This is very surprising to me. I believe most people are unconcerned about the time they started existing and find reasonable their lack of concern or regret. You may regret not having had a different life or existing at a completely different time, but that’s not an attitude towards not being born earlier than you actually did, it’s towards particular contents of your existence.
III: “But "if it's metaphysically impossible to be born earlier, then the two non-existences aren't relevantly similar" - this just seems like a non-sequitur to me.”
Could you elaborate? How is our late birth depriving us of anything if it’s metaphysically impossible to be born earlier?
V: “It would be possible to deny the symmetry claim without being a deprivationist.” Sure, but the symmetry argument is specifically problematic for deprivationists and it’s usually discussed in that context. I don’t think you were speaking from a deprivationist point of view, I just assumed you were, due to how the argument is used in recent literature.
Notwithstanding, I’m still not getting the objection. The argument isn’t assuming that both non-existence are similar in every regard. How is a block of experiential blank is followed by an experiential block and another block of experiential blank follows an experiential block a relevant dissimilarity?
@@sabate7127 I: Okay, I get it now. However, that thesis is not particularly relevant to the topic that I was interested in. The question being discussed here is whether death is bad for the person who dies, not whether death at a particular time is bad for the person who dies. There are people who want to give a deprivationist answer to that first question, and who would affirm that (other things being equal) Owen Luder would have been better off had he died at 600 rather than 93. Given the way you're understanding deprivationism, death in itself is never going to come out as bad - if we're constrained by what's biologically possible, Owen Luder might not have died at 93, but he certainly would have died of something rather shortly after that. (Of course, if you're willing to get on board with my views about counterfactuals with impossible antecedents, then in this case death can still turn out to be bad.)
II: I'd have to watch the video to remind myself of what was said, which I can't at the moment.
I have no idea what most people feel about this. I suspect that a lot of people simply don't think about it, but that if their attention were drawn to it, many people would share my attitude. That's just a guess though. In any case, the defender of the Harm Thesis can say that people ought to feel sad about it, or that sadness would be appropriate, or something along those lines. Whether most people actually feel sad wouldn't really be relevant.
III: I think that what's relevant is the counterfactual, e.g.: "If Owen Luder had been born in 1823, he would have been better off" or "If Owen Luder had been born in 1823, he would have received many more goods." Provided those counterfactuals come out true, we can give *something like* a deprivationist account of the harm of pre-natal nonexistence. I say "something like" the deprivationist account because I'm happy to grant that this may not, strictly speaking, be in line with the deprivationist account as it's commonly understood. I don't think it matters what we label things. The point is that we can use those counterfactuals to defend the Harm Thesis.
But to answer your question: How is late birth depriving us of anything if it's metaphysically impossible to be born earlier? Because if we had been born earlier (holding fixed the same date of death), we would have had more life, hence more goods. The metaphysical impossibility is irrelevant… unless we're assuming the standard semantics of counterfactuals, which would render vacuous the sorts of counterfactuals stated above.
V: I disagree with your characterization of the dialectic here. I'm fairly sure the symmetry argument existed prior to deprivationism. Certainly, Lucretius was not responding to deprivationism when he gave the symmetry argument. Rather, he was responding to something like the more general Harm Thesis.
How is it a relevant dissimilarity that prenatal nonexistence is followed by existence? Well… how could it *not* be? I do think there are plausible answers to that second question. I'm not sure if it's in this video, or in the "further thoughts" video on my patreon, but I suggest an answer to that second question, which is that all that's relevant to assessing prenatal and posthumous nonexistence are the "intrinsic" properties of those states (or non-states), and presumably there is no difference there (assuming we can make sense of the notion of intrinsic properties). But if you can't even comprehend why somebody might find it relevant that prenatal nonexistence is followed by existence and posthumous nonexistence is not then I'm not sure what to say. I'll take a stab at it though. Consider this dialogue:
A: "I'm scared of death."
B: "Why?"
A: "Because I will permanently cease to exist."
B: "But you didn't exist before you were born, and that doesn't concern you at all."
A: "Sure. But I said that what worries me is permanent nonexistence. My pre-natal nonexistence was not permanent."
No doubt there are many ways this dialogue could continue, and many objections we could raise to A's position. Surely A's position is not utterly incomprehensible, though. Indeed, A hasn't said anything false. If what worries a person is permanent nonexistence, it's prima facie odd to try to alleviate their worries by pointing to a case of temporary nonexistence. I'm not really keen on "burden of proof" claims in philosophy, but if I were, I think I'd say that the burden is on you to explain why these things are relevantly similar, rather than on them to explain why they're relevantly different. The difference is that one is permanent and the other is not, and permanent nonexistence is what they said they were afraid of.
The argument from social comparative theory takes a contemporary materialist account. It tells us two things about the dead person: that you (not personal) are not as good off as all dead persons. A tiny cohort of dead persons as negative existential like Socrates have comparatively greater social status than you. Counterfactual: your future negative existential self is better than all dead persons. Why? All dead persons are causally active in living society. Consider dark matter analogy: persons form the bulk of causal social interactions known as WIMPS (weakly interacting massive particles/persons). This emerges as forward looking to death as optimistic causal influence from the perspective of a negative existential as relative social comparative forward looking as optimistic of chances getting to a Socrates or whom ever in the social fabric of culture through life works.
2: That it is possible for you to get worse off. This is social comparative downward looking as death being of no causal influence on society, similar to downward looking subordination upon ones self whist alive due to having less merit compared to a peer. The peer as a prototype of what in contemporary culture is a superstar. We are downward looking from the perspective of that dizzy height of our ambition and hence can forward look as a cautious optimism of success, prior to death, and by token of non achievement there is a fear death. The person is better off if and only if comparatively forward looking or worth off if downward looking in life that than correlates to in death as a negative existential state of affairs within a influenced lived experiential society from the B theory of time rather than A theory of time. From a B theory of time we have something to fear in death. Namely the social comparison that as a person we dread when living that person as a social comparative of either not reach ambition or making it worth off once we get close to that ambition or if at the dizzy heights fall like that Greek god who happened to fly too close to the sun. Hence a substantial cognitive capacity is devoted to feeling good about ourselves and building up the legacy for death.B theory of time contains personal identity a determinist in civilisation whereas A theory does not.
The legacy is contingent on how the personal identity is constructed through indexical affiliation. Social identity is bound to the stratification of a category or in group will have strong aversion to downward looking experiences. This entails intentiional agency as forward looking career which entails death of the self qua retirement and legacy as life's outcomes. Hence fear of death is scaffolded onto a construction of power through the state. A soldier through valour fears no death on the theatre of war but not the pacifist scholar. Death is complicated as the history of philosophy ascribes it considering the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna advocates no fear of death to Arjuna on the battle field as Dharma. If what maters now does not in a million years there should be no fear of death since the points of not matter is infinite but social comparison theory suggests things do mater relative to social construction and hence we fear implicitly fear death through a construction which could be eternal damnation if a soul or a bad legacy if not a soul. The way through the horns is renounce the wicked problem through deconstruction of social comparison and designate from religious affiliations or just sit tight with old money given the fear of death is on one account about social comparison and on the other more about experiencing another golden hour sunset or a smell of a rose as hedonic feedback loops correlate to pain and pleasure. Though a way to measure fear of death can be inverse to the fear itself through a predispostion to take on more risk as to push back the fear for a time and then when things go wrong defalt to panic as a means to reboot the social comparison again but at a lower spectrum than prior to the panic onset. Being dead seems to be bad in a moral sense given no existence is a mirror metaphor of life that is all about hedonism and social comparison which if good its mirror is bad. Although bad may entail the numinous bad that is not social comparison sort of bad but a negative existential bad that is symbolical to the yin yang prototype of emergence within opposites. The state of affairs of being then non being is bad but by prototype emergence through quantum decoherence is good for a deceased person emerge as a quantum decoherence state of affairs as a super symmetrical replication. The could well be a contemporary version of the rebirth thesis that postulates fatalism where all life is a form of pain even our greatest pleasures have an element of pain given we are anticipate the transient peak pleasure. There seems to be an imperative to prevent ones own replication which then entails celibacy or a contemporary version of that to prevent definite replication through resemblance. Sex is bad for two reasons: it's the most high valance social comparative experience which results in destress if negatively contrasted which is common; and two its a transitory pleasure and if progeny then more misery given the fatalist thesis is true. Hence (ananda- bliss; used as part of the proper name of many samnyasis) or bliss is the cessation of being fatalistic emerged into pain upon that bliss is the true conscious state (satchitanand)
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the Sheol, whither thou goest" [Ecclesiastes, you can read it in 15 minutes or less]
If we always did not exist for an eternity before we were born, then dying is simply returning to the original state. What we call 'existence' after birth is merely spatial existence in time, temporal existence. In this way, what we consider 'non-existent' is existent, but not in time.
Yes, but clearly those that fear death are attached to their current existence. The identification of their current spatiotemporal existence with themselves is not an accident, and cannot be overcome through reason. Imagining the current existence ending causes them fear regardless of any reasons for it being good or bad. All of these reasons commenters and Kane give only serve to guide such people out of these fearful thought patterns. Typically it being irrational to fear something does not do anything to assuage the fear (this is typical of almost every fear that isn’t borne out of ignorance).
If death is by definition not experienced and all of experience involves living, then isn’t it necessarily the case that life is endless from our subjective point of view? For if life did end from our perspective, it would require that our subjective experience involves death, which contradicts what death is. I feel like a form of subjective immortality is a natural consequence of viewing death as being the cessation of consciousness.
This is barely related to the vid but I thought it was interesting, and its an idea which gives me a bit of comfort when thinking about death.
I don't like Wittgenstein but he did make a cool comment along the same lines:
"Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit."
@@KaneB”I don’t like Wittgenstein but” top 10 most milquetoast uncontroversial normie statements ever uttered
@@jeremias-serus Okay, and? Am I supposed to be bothered by the idea that other people also recognise that Wittgenstein sucks?
@@jeremias-serus If an opinion being milquetoast or normie is on your mind when evaluating a philosophical position, then you’re probably doing philosophy for the wrong reasons.
Altho tbf, I don’t really know what the right reasons to do philosophy would be, so maybe I’m talking nonesense.
@@hihello-sx1sx How can death be "endless" if there is a defined cut off point of experience. Not being aware of the fact you're dead woldn't make your subjective experiences endless, just that you have a finite awareness confined to being alive.
well explained, thanks
Death is not bad for the dead, but it could mean everything for the alive. Logic does not alway align with feelings. Death might mean nothing to a robot operating on logic. The resistance to death is the ultimate driving force for the meaning of life.
Logic and rational are not the same
I strongly suspect that for many people who claim to fear death are actually afraid of dying (ie they fear process involving pain and suffering on the way out rather than what happens on the other side). Personally, I fear that immortality could be a much worse fate than death, especially once one starts taking into account the social ramifications - A world without children would be hell and so would a world dominated by fierce competition for resources between generations. This means my position results in paradox - I never want to die now (and hope I never will - eg due to infirmity) but I want to die sometime in the indefinite future. I guess that means I want to be surprised by my death.
nice videos keep em coming interesting thoughts and research
Philosophers like Heidegger talk about how we should be thinking of our death all that time but I’ve always agreed with Spinoza that kind of thinking is pointless. There’s nothing to think about
Not pointless, it will shape how you think about spending your time. Instead of wasting another hour scrolling UA-cam I *might* be disciplined enough to do something more valuable with my time 😁
"[...] that to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die"
It is indeed pointless if you are atheist
@@jeremias-serushow does theism solve the matter?
They will be granted paradise@@uninspired3583
It doesn’t matter . We all die irregardless of what you say. You are just talking
I have to admire you making this video...knowing you're so terrified by death!...
Well, thank you Dr Kane!
I'm not afraid of death anymore. I talk about why my attitude changed in this video: ua-cam.com/video/9UAPH7JlLkE/v-deo.html
Another argument against the deprivationist view of prenatal nonexistence is the question is it always the case that coming into existence earlier would've been better? Say you come into existence before the Earth was habitable. Is it still better to have come into existence then or even earlier? Presumably there is an infinite amount of time earlier one could've come into existence at, in which case it really becomes a question would existing for eternity be better and even if it was, would that even be you at that point?
It is not death or dying that scares me, it’s not being able to accomplish all the things I want to that worries me.
I love this channel.
Regarding the deprivationism argument, Epicurus has made some statements that seem almost Schopenhauerian: "the limit of pleasure is the absence of pain". So, while one loses the ability to have pleasurable experiences, in this view lacking all experiences would be the highest obtainable pleasure. In an empirical sense, it appears that people who practice meditation report feeling pleasure even (or especially) in the absence of any experiences. It's one possible refutation of the deprivation argument.
As much as I like Schopenhauer's pessimism, this particular claim has always struck me as so obviously implausible and contrary to my everyday experience that I can't help but wonder if Schopenhauer had some sort of mental pathology. I don't want to be dismissive, and in general I don't like psychologizing people, so don't take this comment too seriously. But it's somewhat like if I were talking to somebody who insists that there is no visual difference between red things and green things -- I would wonder if this person is simply red/green colourblind, so has different experiences to me.
I think I agree with what Kane B said.
But even if pleasure is just the lack of something, it seems like that only beings can have negative properties.
Being in a state of lacking something still requires a Being.
It is like talking about the present King of France. The King can not lack hair if there is no King.
@@Opposite271 Yeah, Epicurus' argument rests on the idea that you can have no sensory experiences when you are dead, so *perceiving* a lack/absence of pain is also out the window. But I am not sure that this actually matters. For example, take this thought experiment similar to the the amnesia drug thought experiment from the video: Let's say you are about to undergo a life-saving surgery, and are allergic to the anaesthetics. You take an amnesia drug, fall asleep before the surgery and you wake up in the hospital bed. But in this thought experiment, you are told that the surgery already happened. Which situation would you prefer:
1) you are told that you slept through the entire procedure and experienced no pain, or
2) you are told that you woke up during the procedure and had excruciating pain the whole way through, but the amnesia drug made you forget that it happened.
Both situations are identical for my current situation, since at this point I am out of the procedure. Yet I would prefer the situation where there was no pain during the procedure, even if I have no recollection or personal experiences of this event. In other words, I would prefer it if a different version of me had no pain, even if this is completely independent of my own capacity to experience that pain. By the same token, I could prefer it if a different (dead) version of me has complete absence of pain, even if I am unable to experience that situation myself.
What Kane also touched on in the video is that deprivationists will probably concede that if all that you have ahead of you is a life of nothing but suffering, then dying is not so bad. At that point it boils down to essentially a prediction/quantification of how much pleasure/pain you will encounter in the "life you would have lived if you had not died", and see how this compares to not having any experience at all.
But the issue is that no matter how you live your life, you will encounter some negative experiences. So, if you are someone who thinks negative experiences always overpower positive ones, or indeed that the positive is defined as lack of the negative, then the balance of the deprivationist argument can tilt in favor of dying being a good thing. I think the colorblindness comparison is very apt in this case. People will have drastically different perspectives on the value of life, and yet the viewpoints which are directly opposed to each other can nonetheless be perceived as 'obvious' or 'self-evident', since they are based on how someone subjectively experiences life.
@@Izerion
I mean, I do consider it to be essential for being me that I am Alive. If you talk about a death version of myself then it seems like you are either talking about a corpse or a non-being and I do not care for the well-being of either of them, I do not even consider them to be versions of me.
I think in the end of the day, whether or not death is good, bad or neutral depends ultimately not on the quantity of pain vs. pleasure but on whether or not one prefers one’s current form of existence over non-existence. If I would encounter a being in paralyzing agony that is also unable to feel pleasure and if this being still prefers this form of existence over non-existence, then I would still say that death is a bad thing for this being. It would be wrong to mercy kill a being that clearly prefers existence with suffering over suffering-free non-existence.
@@Izerion
I do suspect our different perspectives are more the product of a difference in conceptual schemes rather then a difference in experience.
I think we can both agree that the intrinsic properties of a sensation are not inherently good or bad. And instead that this has something to do with desire/the will/Intentionality.
So our difference now is that I consider satisfaction not to be the absence of desire but instead I consider it to be the presence of a desire to conserve. Dissatisfaction on the other hand is a desire to change. Pleasure is a form of satisfaction and boredom and suffering are forms of dissatisfaction.
Edit:
-Of curse we have the overpowering argument but I already said that I don’t think that the ratio of pleasure and pain are the ultimate factors in determining whether or not death is good or bad.
-Of curse you might have a different conceptual scheme then me and that is fine, point is that our experience are not what makes our judgments different.
Kane B character development! Once you feared thinking about death so much that you were not going to make a video about this topic. What caused this change?
I talk about my changing attitude to death in this video: ua-cam.com/video/9UAPH7JlLkE/v-deo.html
A prelude to antinatalism.
The problem there is that I'm just not keen on telling other people what to do.
@@KaneB What about telling other people not to assault each other?
@@ToasterLightning Not really keen on that either.
@@KaneBnot trying to sound insulting, but are you a strict pacifist?
@@xenoblad What is a "strict" pacifist? My personal inclinations are strongly pacifist, sure.
I feel a very strong pull toward Deprivationism, including prenatal nonexistence. But Negel's counterargument is interesting. I am generally sus of impossible antecedent type stuff. I will have to think about it more.
I'm suspicious of that too, but only because counterfactuals in general are thoroughly suspicious. I don't see any reason to pick on counterpossibles specifically.
@@KaneB Counterfactuals are a great way to sneak in stuff that only works because it is not sufficiently well defined.
would be funner to go through all views after death.
annihilation or the void is just one of 5 speculated things that can happen after death.
some speculated that it might be worse like a hell or a worse reincarnation.
some speculated it is similar to now like some other world or another somewhat equal reincarnation.
some speculated that it is better like a heaven or another better reincarnation.
and the last speculated thing is that ones self will somehow transform into some sort of world-soul or some blending into the world and extinction of self like nirvana or moksha and so on.
would be more interesting philosophy of death to not take a particular position on it.
prenatal nonexistence is not bad but a loss after the fact is, and a bad experience is worse than no experience at all. However a good experience is better than no experience thus you could rule that prenatal nonexistence is in fact bad? not trying to make you feel bad about your vasectomy since human perception is just one form of perception which in itself has no effect on the greater universe and no experience is not bad after all. Much appreciate the vids man! i learn so much from them!
whats ur opinion on Stop Having Kids community?
I'm sympathetic to the arguments for antinatalism, and there's certainly nothing that could convince me to have a kid (I had a vasectomy, so even if I changed my mind, it's too late now!)... but at the end of day, I just don't really care what other people do.
ok i respect ur opinion however i think deep inside we all know that having kids is the biggest problem in society, almost all of the problems originate from that no matter what problems u have in life
@@KaneB
the new fonts gave me extra death anxiety.
How is the antecedent that Owen Luda was born a hundred years earlier any less possible than Hobbes squaring the circle. In each case the proposition in question is false in our world, but in neither case is the proposition in question a logical impossibility.
Quick question: Why did you use the example "Owen Luder died in 2021.", an architect who died aged 93?
Why not? I had to use somebody's name, so why not his? I like a lot of brutalist architecture.
@40:11 is an error: "people in Africa would have cared" should instead be "people in Africa would not have cared".
I'm indifferent regarding the surgery I did or shall forget. Tomorrow is Tuesday, after all.
Once dead, the person has nothing to fear. But, before death, a person would understand that they will be depeived. If i stole Steven Rosenbaum's lunch, he would be deprived of the experience of eating his lunch at some unspecified time. Stealing Steven Rosenbaum's lunch and then killing him does not make the stealing of his lunch okay.
Great presentation
Thanks!
How do we know that anyone actually dies? I’m not asking in the sense of a metaphysical supernatural post-mortem ascendancy or descent into a “hereafter”. I’m just suggesting that predators we haven’t any idea that any life actually comes to an end, in part because perhaps we don’t even know what that means.
Would it be bad if everyone died in an instant right now?
When I personally think of death, I think of what is the thing that ceases to exist and I find nothing, I find that it is simply a world with one less conscious experience, since to me it seems that the thing that we usually consider dying is a story of the set of conscious experiences based on the sensory experience of the set of molecules that is the body of that "person". But is there some reason to consider there to be something special connecting the temporally separate conscious experiences in a body as compared to for instance a given conscious experience's relation to spatially separate conscious experiences, "other people". I want to escape this line of reasoning, I want to identify as a temporally continuous person, so is there a name for this type of reasoning and maybe a wikipedia page I could check for refutations and stuff. I was expecting this might covered in this video, since it sorta is a refutation for the badness of death since it's unlikely that people have a strong preference toward worlds with a greater amount of conscious experiencers at least not in the same way as their disposition is toward death, but it seemed that throughout the video it was asserted that there is an I or a you that is temporally continuous and which could have existed longer or come into existance earlier, but to me this seems unjustified
Why Death is 'Nothing', to Fear
I think the assumptions defined at the start of this take away a lot of what we're generally concerned about on the matter.
I do however agree with the conclusion, i dont fear annihilation.
I used to be terrified of death. For me, annihilation was absolutely the source of my dread. I was never particularly worried about the suffering involved in the process of dying, nor the loss that other people would feel. Both of these are bad, of course, but they're bad in ways that happen in ordinary life. I've had illnesses before; an illness that leads to death is different in degree but not in kind. Pain is scary, but I've experienced pain before and it doesn't last forever, so it's not something that would keep me up at night. The idea of annihilation, on the other hand, created a deep existential dread, unlike any other fear I felt.
I'm just speaking for myself here. However, having spoken to lots of other people about this, it seems that many people have a similar attitude. So I think the Harm Thesis as stated does capture a fear that some (not all) people feel.
@@KaneB interesting, that possibility hadn't occured to me. Non existence has always had at least some appeal to me. There is a French term that translates to the call of the void, it's always been there for me. Lately more so. I didn't realize it could be a source of fear for others.
Let me tell you something you already know my son,
the world isn't all raibows and shiny stuff,
the world is a TOXIC waste which wears on you the longer you live,
no matter how much you do what your parents say,
life will beat your arss hard with all the stuped education and toil,
better to never have been, just like uncle David says,
earth is not a place to bring your precious kids into,
do not be a fool, kids are happy when you dont give them a body
-Rocky Balboa from an alternative universe
Kane, I am curious, what is your attitude on death? Do you have a special approach or do you just live like most of us mainly ignoring the fate of death?
you don't need to fear death if you don't die
Couldn't you argue that the closest possible world in which you were born 100 years earlier is simply the world where everything you ever interacted with also occurred 100 years earlier? And wouldn't that be equivalent (in your subjective experience) to just living 100 years longer?
Yeah, that seems plausible to me. Even if we think that it's essential to my identity that I was born to my actual parents, we can just imagine a world in which the Earth forms 100 years earlier, and then the rest of history plays out as it actually did. Then it seems like we would have appropriate counterparts for every human being, where all were born 100 years earlier. (To be honest though, I think that pretty much all these claims about essences and modalities and possible worlds are humbug, and that we can tell whatever stories we like about how things might have been.)
What’s the worst thing that can happen to you that you won’t mind at all after it has happened?
Hyped to watch this later!
Just be careful not being too late 💀
@@AM-gx3dy💀💀💀
The Epicurean argument is interesting because it's hard to temporally locate the harm, but the Lucretian argument is just terrible - firstly, I DO feel bad about all the past events I have missed, I constantly regret not being alive - for example - during the 60s psych rock/hippy period. Secondly, the fact that I couldn't fear something when I wasn't alive says nothing about what I SHOULD fear, given that I am alive now.
Same here, I've often felt like my prenatal nonexistence is rather tragic.
Depends on the death. If it's quick and painless, I do not fear it. If it's somewhat slow and excruciatingly painful, though I don't fear death I fear the dying part.
So if a bear were running after you, but you knew it would be a painless death (the bear has magical claws that kill without inflicting pain), would you run away or not?
In that case I would run away. And that’s how I know I fear death, not just pain 😁
@@bds8715 There are lots of things that I don't want to happen and I will work to avoid, but I wouldn't say I fear them. For example, I don't want to feel tired tomorrow, so I will try to get a good sleep tonight, but surely I'm not afraid of feeling tired tomorrow. This sort of thing seems fairly common to me. So the fact that a person acts in ways to avoid death, such as by running away from a bear, doesn't in itself show that they fear death.
@@KaneB Hmm… So I’m seeing two emotions here:
1) I feel the emotion of fear in regards to X.
2) I hate the idea of X happening to me.
Now that I think of it, I ONLY feel fear (that panicky, dread feeling) in regards to pain.
Even in the case of existential anxiety, that is a kind of cognitive dissonance where I am living and yet I don’t really believe in living; I don’t see reasons to think being alive is better than being dead. If there is any fear there, it is the fear of existential pain-the pain one feels when they are living and yet don’t want to be, or the pain of facing the badness of life itself (or at least the badness of your life).
So the example of avoiding painless death doesn’t show that I fear death, but it does show that I view death as a harm.
In fact I’m now inclined to think fear of death is impossible. We really just fear pain, and we hate the idea of being dead. This explains why so many people say “I don’t fear death, only the process of dying.”
Wtf does it mean for something to be “bad.” Surely this has been discussed and it varies between conversations. From a purely selfish perspective, perhaps me being not alive 1000 years ago and also a thousand years from now is bad if I assume that being alive is good.
To be dead is not a bad experience but is is bad for my life.
Im feeling like Arjuna on the fields of battle lol😂😂
If there is no afterlife, I generally feel fairly comfortable with death. Whenever I feel at danger of dying, I reflect on my experience in life and feel that if I die at this moment, then I will be at peace with it and rest with that idea, I suppose I am a Deprivationist when it comes to others deaths, but an epicurean insofar as facing my own mortality. Since I have different levels of evidence in the case of even knowing the existence of others vs. my own mind, I regard them differently. Sometimes though I fear an afterlife such as with a God (I grew up Methodist so my Idea of God is one that feels generally good, but there are things that exist that I don't believe I could forgive a God for and would go to hell for under some understandings) or a malevolent AI that would be able to reconstruct my conscious self as it was in some point in my life and subject it to torture it believes I deserve. I would love to see a video on the purpose of an everlasting life, filled with misery, or perfect grace, or if a video from you or your approximate perspective exists of a similar topic that would satisfy my interest I would appreciate being linked to it.
Honestly, my main fear is some sort of hellish afterlife after death. I'd probably prefer not existing over going to Hell.
If we are naturally afraid of death, then that means that there is something to be afraid of, right?
Maybe, maybe not. We are also animals, that are programmed to not want to die. If we all wanted to die, our species would not propagate.
We have many fears which might not really make sense, either at all or anymore. And vice-versa too. And trying not to die is life's thing: can't be alive when you're dead; can't spread life if you're not alive.
everything else is inbetween
Sir I am looking for introductionary videos or articles about enviromental ethics. I have found 2 videos of yours and it was great. Could you recommend me new sources? Thanks.
Death cannot be cured...
Idk how long one specific sperm can last, but certainly there is some wiggle room on my birth. Or if we are counting from time I left the womb then there could be weeks of difference. But going by insemination, you could easily be created, lest just say, one second earlier.
If there’s anything about death to think about, it’s not our death. It’s our cultures’ deaths that seems to actually matter for a lot of people with their upbringing and history ingrained heavily into them. None among prenatal nonexistence, postmortem nonexistence, and postmortem suffering should matter or be seen as bad. But many think of death’s variants and fear it still. Everyone dies. That’s it. But it’s interesting to see arguments against annihilation after death being bad.
we are all just shit in front of it all
It is strange, the fear of death. Death gives meaning to everything, yet it ends it all for a person. Almost no society in the world considered death to be the end of it all, everyone thought of or wanted there to be something after death, an afterlife. Even modern secular or atheist people cannot completely swallow that the death is end of it all, when they encounter it close to them. Everyone is sad for "the loss" of loved ones, even if you dont know that deceased person.
You don't speak for me. I'm an atheist and find beauty in the idea of annihilation.
Father?
Prenatal and postnatal are not the same. Prenatal period is all semi necessary prerequisite leading up to my birth.
how can you be afraid of non-existence if you come from it? at the stage of non-existence, you didn't have a life habit, so at this point it's arguable if death is bad and life is good. the point of life imo is death itself (no matter how paradoxical it sounds) , because pleasures that only exist in life are valuable because of death, because death gives them the criteria of limitness.
We were all dead for billions of years prior to being born and so we were in a state of annihalation. And we'll go back to that state afterwards. The only thing is that there'll be leftovers.
Only things born into life can die and be dead.
Everything has always existed, it happens that eventually some things also come to exist in time for a certain period
@@scrobblesbyDJGunbound I don't believe that's true when using those words in everyday language. When we say something exists we usually mean it exists right now, or at least existed in the past. To say everything has existed is nonsense, unless you're misusing the words.
@@scrobblesbyDJGunbound if you mean, basic building blocks, then yes. But if you're saying specific arrangements of those building blocks, then no.
@@lorenzomizushal3980 Tip: look for Graham Priest's "Everything and Nothing" where he concludes 'Absolute Nothingness' is the metaphysica grounding / Ultimate Reality. But understand that 'nothingness' here has a different meaning from what we usuallly use to think about
you live on through your offspring, no you won't be the same in some aspects but essentially you continue to exist. It is important to understand this video's philosophy so people don't do stupid things and die young, there is merit in that but it is not correct. If your DNA exists in your body or someone else's, you exist. Will you have your memories? Not exactly. You won't remember your favorite hockey team but you will remember after revisiting it that for example fire hurts and usually if not always avoid it. This philosophy is designed to cater to those who are infertile so they don't become morbidly depressed. Plus there is also Cryogenics which I strongly believe will be successful one day.
>> you live on through your offspring
This has always seemed to me like the biggest cope of all time but if it makes you feel better, you do you I guess.
notice how your comment didn't debunk anything I said, it was just a jab because you yourself can't handle your own ego and philosophies being challenged. @@KaneB
@@irondraak960 Why should I have to debunk anything?
Also, it wasn't a jab; I was simply expressing my own attitude in the first part of the sentence, and everything after the "but" was sincere. It doesn't bother me that people hold those sorts of beliefs, and it's a good thing if they can derive some comfort from them. My mother held similar views.
four things. One you don't have to debunk anything, you didn't have to reply. Your opinion is your own just as mine is. Two I got the attitude part, you're right and don't contradict you ya ya. Three that was a jab, you accused me of coping which doesn't make sense to me and someone else on a different video said the same damned thing Bureautrash. Four you could leave it as it is now but you won't because you do have an ego and can't stand someone challenging your beliefs. I on the other hand don't care what you think so it doesn't matter what your response is, I'm moving on and no I won't be subscribing a Pseudo intellectuals crap on UA-cam. @@KaneB
@@irondraak960 You expressed a view; I expressed my view. If you don't like that kind of thing, don't comment in a public forum.
Yes, I did accuse you of coping. How is that a jab? What's the problem with coping? Maybe you take issue with that, but I don't.
>> Four you could leave it as it is now but you won't because you do have an ego
Correct. I like getting the last word. (I don't have a problem with challenges to my beliefs, but I don't see anything here that amounts to a challenge to my beliefs.) Of course, you also could have left things as they were and moved on after my first response, but you didn't. It seems we're not so different, you and I.
Here is my take. There is no death for oneself! You can never think about your own death for when you do you are necessarily alive. So death is not only not of our concern like Epicurus held, it is an impossibilia like a circle with 4 corners. So death is only a sensible term at all when referring to others, else it is gibberish.
And as a sidenote after experiencing the death of my old father: I was prepared, I philosophized a lot about this topic, I had good reasons to be content (my father was 88 and had a good life) but still when it happened I grieved and when I think about him I see him rot and I feel down even I know it is just natural. That showed me that reason cannot do sh*t against our (archaic) emotions, it is just a computer who can serve you with calculations but nothing more. That proves to me that a real philosopher MUST be someone with also a great deal of life experience. Those „university nerds“ can have all the theoretic insights, but that is at best 50% of the issue. They are rather elite thinkers than philosophers. And yes many „philosophers“ like e.g. Kant would fall under this category.
but death can be predicted if one believes in the external signs of it~s existance, it is my concern as i can influence the moment of my death in time with behaviour.
starting with the presumption that death means total non existance and then questioning whether non existance will be felt by us ( when non existance means non feeling) is a self concluding toy example.
I am not certain what will actually be experienced after my death should it occur and I therefore can not say what will be felt and whether that feeling will matter to me should it exist.
@@lucycoleclough1182 As I wrote: you cannot even refer to your death, it is logically impossible. All you can do is refer to a simulated death of an avatar of you - fantasized by the real you that has to be very alive. This is what we can only mean with our death but it is not what we intend to mean. We can literally only see and think about others dying. So when we refer or think about our own death we get into ex falso. This is no disaster. It justs says we cannot coherently think about our own death, not that it aint happen because from ex falso does not follow falsehood. But in a sense you can argue to being able to prove that you live forever: there was never a point (for you!) when you did not exist nor will there ever a point (for you!) where you do not exist anymore. It basically leads to a variant of what Epicurus preached: do not worry, only the others die. But of course our archaic emotions somehow know more than our pure reason, so it _feels_ weird to argue like that.
>> You can never think about your own death for when you do you are necessarily alive
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Why would this make it impossible for me to think about my own death? This doesn't seem like a very plausible constraint on the content of one's thoughts.
@@KaneB Kane: „I am dead“. From „I am dead“ it follows that whoever stands for „I“ is dead. Since I = Kane, so Kane is dead, but Kane makes the very utterance, so he lives.
@@ostihpem "I am dead" is false whenever I say it, but in order to know that it's false, I need to assign a meaning to it, so it seems that I am able to think about it in some sense. I can have thoughts that are necessarily false -- for instance, though Venus is identical to the Morning Star, I can imagine a world in which these turn out to be different.
In any case, there are other ways of thinking about one's own death than the proposition "I am dead." There is also: "One day, I will be dead," which seems to be not just meaningful but true.
In death I lose nothing, things lose me
"Why Death is Nothing to Fear" is the sentiment in Gaza right now.
Pay close attention to the assumptions Kane lays out at the start of the video. A lot of the things that make death in gaza right now aweful are not applicable to what he's addressing.
He is not addressing the pain of those injured or left behind, and he is not addressing the pain leading up to the moment of death.
You offer an off topic appeal to emotion. We can all agree that a world with gaza at peace is better than the world we have today. That has no bearing on any of the arguments he presents.
@@uninspired3583 I think that the OP meant the jihadis and terrorists who are glad to die for Islam...
where does this leave us? my fear of death makes me deeply uncomfortable, but so do the consequences of the epicurean view (that killing might not be intrinsically bad)
i guess leaving you uncomfortable is what philosophy does best!
Being dead might not be bad but being made dead by someone else against your own will when you could perfectly carry on living sounds bad enough.
If it's not bad just because for the person it will be like it never happened, then literally everything else is also okay because it will also be like it never happened when they are eventually dead. But murder is indeed about more than the victim, it's about their loved ones too. Death itself might not be bad, but for several people the fact we can die untimely deaths is really bad and trying to prevent murder is as good as it gets.
Didnt expect to see you here
@@wahwah12wahwah12 didn't expect to be recognized here lol