(May 23, 2015 at 9:09 am)Razzle Wrote:(May 21, 2015 at 5:59 pm)francismjenkins Wrote: I sort of feel like until science can say we have a cure for human aging and death, religion will continue to exist. I'm in a minority among my fellow biologists in that I believe aging should be approached as a disease to be treated (not an inevitable outcome that we accept as a foregone conclusion).
When I was a child, about seven, I used to worry about the fact that I'd one day die and not exist anymore, and I comforted myself by telling myself that I'd somehow find a way to live forever. I now know that was the wrong goal. A much better solution to the anxiety was to stop fearing non-existence in the first place. I didn't set out to lose that fear, it just happened as a natural consequence of having the altered sense of time and self experience that non-dual philosophers, including Buddhists and Western secular philosophers, talk about.
Ever since I realised that a continuous "self" having all of these experience was an illusion, and that "I" am only ever this moment of consciousness, with a new, separate instant of consciousness dying and being born every waking moment from this biological process called a functioning brain (not a true entity lasting over time either, just one of the universe's patterns of matter and energy), then fearing this particular brain ending one day seems just as silly as fearing that of a complete stranger ending one day. I don't fear the deaths of the thousands of people dying every day who I know nothing about. In exactly the same way, why fear the death of the brain generating this moment of consciousness right now (me) when the consciousness it generates at the time it dies will NOT be me? The person that dies is a stranger to the person who was born, and to the person who feared death in the years, months and minutes before it happens. A mere genetic clone. When the brain dies, it's no different to what happens every moment of consciousness in life, i.e. one moment later, that person is gone, dead. New consciousness that happens to be aware of very similar memories and perceptions but is NOT the same consciousness, just a clone that has the illusion of having been there to experience the events it has memories of.
Losing the normal illusion of the nature of self at least once is beneficial, and even better is honing the ability to...FAIRLY easily slip back into that state of consciousness at will, in which there is no emotional anticipation of the future because "I" won't exist in it just as "I" didn't exist a moment ago. I still experience anxiety, due to OCD, but only ever of a "what if [my intense philosophical fear about the true nature of humanity] is true" kind of anxiety. Never about the future. I could never develop an OCD fear about germs or anything like that anymore, because they involve fearing future consequences. The only source of obsessive anxiety to me now is my intense emotional reaction to "timeless" ideas that aren't tied to the future. When those thoughts cause me to think about suicide, getting back into that state of consciousness stops me, because again, "i" won't be suffering in the future, it will be someone else with the same genes, personality and some of the same memories, that's all. Suicide for me now would only be an act of compassion for the conscious moments this brain will generate in the future, and because it wouldn't be compassionate act until relatives are all dead, that probably won't happen for quite a number of years.
I don't know if that is clear at all, but the details don't really matter, the point is that losing the irrational fear of death (whether by believing what I tried to explain above, or less controversial ideas like "I won't be around to know I'm dead or miss being alive", and "The billions of years before I was conscious weren't so bad"), is better than a pipe-dream of immortality.
That is more complicated than it needs to be. Before you were conceived, you did not exist. Think about the year 1800. Was that a bad year for you? Did you suffer in any way at that time? That is like what 2200 will be for you.
This is not something new, and is a very old idea. Here are the words of Epicurus:
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.
