My take on death is not new with me. Here are the words of Epicurus:
http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html
Basically, the year 1800 was not a problem for you at all. Nothing bad happened to you then. That is what the year 2200 will be like for you.
So, I am not afraid of death at all. It is only what can happen in life that may be a source of fear.
As for technology, I am not convinced that it will ever make people immortal. The 'best' it could deliver would be keeping people 'young' and fit, but there would still be accidents and murder. If I could have an indefinitely young body, with no bad side effects, I would take it. But I do not expect science to ever provide that.
Anyway, it is not a big deal to be dead. That is just like not having been conceived. In both cases, you do not exist.
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
Basically, the year 1800 was not a problem for you at all. Nothing bad happened to you then. That is what the year 2200 will be like for you.
So, I am not afraid of death at all. It is only what can happen in life that may be a source of fear.
As for technology, I am not convinced that it will ever make people immortal. The 'best' it could deliver would be keeping people 'young' and fit, but there would still be accidents and murder. If I could have an indefinitely young body, with no bad side effects, I would take it. But I do not expect science to ever provide that.
Anyway, it is not a big deal to be dead. That is just like not having been conceived. In both cases, you do not exist.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
