(August 18, 2015 at 9:21 am)Qwraith Wrote:(August 18, 2015 at 9:07 am)Pyrrho Wrote: The thing is, when you are dead, you will not be pissed about it and you will not want to see anything and you will not hope to be alive. So it will all be perfectly fine, just like the year 1800 was for you. In 1800, you were not pissed about anything, you did not want to see anything, and you did not hope to be alive.
Well, sure, but I'm pissed about it now.![]()
Why be pissed about something that you will not mind when it happens?
Here is what Epicurus had to say about this:
Quote:Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.
http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.