Woody’s brilliant quote, which I have known about for quite some time, reminds me of one expressed conversely by Allen Saunders (though, it is commonly attributed to John Lennon): “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.”

I feel the same way.

I can totally understand.

@maturin1919 It's literally the end of everything we've ever known, or ever will consciously know. Are you gonna look me in my optic stems and really, really make the argument that it's not rational to worry over it ending?

Grandstanding.

@mzbehavin Not wanting to live is not the same thing as not fearing to die.

I've been down that road. I've dialed that 800 number.

@maturin1919 Your condescension is duly noted and equally not cared about. I suppose you might as well drop it.

You didn't say "well I just think differently from you" you said, "it's not rational." Don't move the goalposts.

@mzbehavin Yes ma'am. It is.

@maturin1919 There is some thinking here that is absolutely off. This isn't meant to be condescending or mean, but let me be clear: Your opinion or your thinking differently from me are irrelevant. I don't care. Why does it keep getting brought up?

Calling a spade a spade is not condescension. I'm not even being impolite. Implying that I could only be that way because I can't somehow fathom people think differently is incredibly so.

It is grandstanding to suggest fearing death is not rational. It's, as you provide evidence to, simply an extension of your opinion and not based in any logic or reason.

Fear of death is completely rational if only for the fears surrounding it. The fear of death is the fear of change, it being the ultimate change. There is no return, no coming back. To fear that is completely rational and to suggest otherwise is, in my opinion, grandstanding. If it isn't, I do apologize. I'm not trying to be a dick, but you're stating an obvious untruth for a reason I cannot fathom.

@mzbehavin No, you're absolutely right. I am not trying to project the opinion that everyone fears death, and I don't think I did a good job expressing that.

There are a lot of people who have come to terms with and have accepted death. It's not impossible, a lot of people do it. I didn't mean to imply that if I did.

Thanks for the back-and-forth.

@maturin1919 I'm not sure where this is coming from, honestly. It's not about not so much about me not caring about opinions. It's my acknowledgement that you have your opinion, and I'm not arguing against your opinion on the fear of death. I said it's irrelevant because I'm not arguing against your opinion.

I'm arguing against the incorrect statement that fear of death is not rational. It's one of the more rational things we'll ever do. I'm glad you've found a way around that, but because you have doesn't make it irrational for everyone else. I think you're confusing your opinion in this instance with objective fact and I'm sorry, that's just not true.

I was a little stabby-stab with my OP. I intentionally left it vague so I won't directly be calling anyone a liar. But it was not meant to be a personal attack either way, I'm just skeptical. I don't think some people who say they don't fear death really feel that way. Now if you want to argue I'm wrong about that, then that's fine. That's just an opinion. Saying fear of death is irrational is not.

@maturin1919 Baby, ILY, let's not fight. Can we both agree to bring it down? Tis a silly thing.

@Xuande ,
when you get older you will probably feel differently.
we have assisted suicide in canada now & a significant number of people go that way even though the govts make it difficult.

It's not like I'd refuse a magic biological immortality pill so that I could satisfy my curiosity about (or even participate in) the lunar or Martian colonies or something. Just to see what we'd learn from it and be changed by it. It's always nice to have the option to have more new experiences, assuming you can have them in good health and reasonable comfort and find it all interesting.

However, everyone is born when they are born and dies when they die and there will always be bright shiny new objects on the horizon no matter when you're alive so ... I'm not greedy. I came in with Sputnik and got to experience the dawn of digital computing and the information age and everything that went with that. I focus on what I have experienced, not on what I won't experience.

Jews really think death is the absolute end of everyone? They don't think , or wish, that an afterlife could exist? That would totally ruin Dieter's & my theory that the fear of death is a major reason we have religions. Also, without a final reward or punishment, why do Jewish people feel motivated to follow the rules of their religion?

@Carin there is a jewish afterlife called sheol; it's neither heaven nor hell. someone described it as being at a concert and hell is being in the back row and heaven is being in the front row lol. and individual jews may have all kinds of afterlife-related beliefs and/or wishes that are not written in; there is jewish folklore on top of torah and talmud, after all. but as for why follow the rules.... two reasons spring to mind. one, for those who believe in god, do it because god wants it done, not for the reward of an afterlife but for the reward of god's approval. the other is that these are good things to do, for the most part. people who don't know judaism think it's all about, say, not eating bacon, but it's actually about charity and fairness. the thing is, whether or not a jew is religious, whether or not one actually even believes in a god (i don't), judaism focuses on making the world a better place, not aiming to leave it behind for somewhere better. we tend to speak of how we live on after our deaths as how we live on in the memories of those who knew us, or whose lives we changed. it sounds as if i'm touting judaism, or that judaism is perfect. nah! just explaining how that works is all.

g

@Carin oh i forgot t address the fear of death being the reason for religion thing. i don't know. maybe. it's possible.

g

@genessa You make it sound fairly appealing!

I agree with your first two sentences here. And the gist of the rest of it, mostly. I still don't know (but am open) what indication there is that nature at large is conscious.

@skado Here I go again, making a bald-faced assertion of my speculative opinions as though they were absolutely true.

I reason that for conscious awareness to arise from electro-chemical processes in the brain seems impossible. Yet we do experience conscious awareness—consciousness is behind all we know. How can we understand anything at all, even our own selves except in terms of conscious awareness?

Unless you accept ESP studies and such, I don’t know that there’s any hard evidence that can be tested, however a lot of smart people have advocated the idea of universal consciousness. Here’s one of many articles that talks about the concept:

[ecstadelic.net]

@WilliamFleming
Please don’t apologize for stating your hypothesis as fact. I already assume that everything anyone says is just their opinion, myself included of course. And it’s way too cumbersome to begin every sentence with a disclaimer, so please be advised, I will be doing the same thing!

The article you linked is an interesting read but it contains the two components that identify all God-of-the-gaps arguments. The first is that it relies on very scientifically plausible sounding material that is just beyond the line that divides well-established, mainstream science from, well, everything else.

And secondly, it manages to leave the door open to immortality of some description. A quote from the article is beautifully illustrative:
“However, it doesn't make you insignificant in the "Grand Scheme of Things", because in order to compute your whole life separately with all its "ups and downs", every fleeting thought, it would take enormous computing power and would be an incredibly difficult task even for the most advanced computers. Without you, the whole system would be incomplete and could fail!“

The motivation behind this type of thinking is always to avoid facing our insignificance and our impermanence.

Another telling quote is “The Biocentric Universe also makes the Quantum Immortality hypothesis more compelling.”

There’s that all-important suggestion of immortality, and the notion of “biocentrism” which is surely motivated by the same impulses that created the notion of geocentrism, which was overthrown by Copernicus in the 16th century.

All we have to do to protect our sacred theory of “noblivion” is to wrap it in the inscrutable language of quantum mechanics, drop a few names of famous physicists, and voila, an irresistible free pass from extinction, not to mention an article length advertisement for a new book by a fellow whose credentials curiously don’t happen to include “physicist” but do include “media artist.”

The reason even the real physicists play with this idea is that all scientists are human and humans are designed by evolution to believe they are immortal. It gives us a survival and reproduction advantage. So it is an indelible illusion in the minds of even the most brilliant and accomplished scientists.

For the 500 years of modern science, god-of-the-gaps arguments have been constructed, always just on the other side of that line that describes the limits of the known, and for five hundred years, the slow progress of science has broken every one of those hypotheses, only to see another emerge, yet again just outside the boundary of the known (where it is always possible to safely make such constructions).

Hope springs eternal.

When the so-called hard problem of consciousness is finally dragged across that line into the known, I'm betting it will be just as mundane as everything else that has crossed that line for the last half millennium. If we want immortality we need to invest in medical research, not hope.

@skado Actually I don’t argue for personal immortality—just the opposite. Well, I’ve said it over and over too many times.

Here’s a different article that might interest you. If not it’s ok.

[huffpost.com]

@WilliamFleming
That’s why I said immortality of “some” description. Isn’t being a part of a universal mind a kind of immortality?

@skado Yes, it is immortality of a kind, but not in the way most people think of immortality. To strive for perpetual life as a unique and separate individual seems kind of foolish in light of the extremely nebulous nature of personal identity, which depends wholly on memory, and varies over time.

Universal consciousness is something we can identify with that goes on after we die. We live on through other people, but it’s “We” collectively.

That’s what some people are saying, and the idea is appealing somehow. I don’t know if you looked at that last link, but there’s this:

“Lest the idea of a unitary, group, or universal mind be dismissed as new-age woo-woo, we should note that some of the most distinguished scientists of the 20th century have endorsed this perspective. The renowned physicist David Bohm said, "Each person enfolds something of the spirit of the other in his consciousness. Deep down the consciousness of mankind is one. This is a virtual certainty... and if we don't see this it's because we are blinding ourselves to it." Anthropologist and psychologist Gregory Bateson: "The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in the pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system..." Physicist Henry Margenau: "There is a physical reality that is in essence the same for all... [This] oneness of the all implies the universality of mind... If my conclusions are correct, each individual is part of God or part of the Universal Mind." Nobel physicist Erwin Schrodinger also believed that minds are united and one. He said, "To divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless. There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousness... [I]n truth there is only one mind." [huffpost.com]

I really think there’s more substance to the concept than just fear of death, If nothing else the idea gives me a feeling of excitement.

@WilliamFleming
Yes, I read all of both links. My response above applies equally to the second article, the point being that the personal opinions of famous scientists are not the same thing as information that has passed the test of the scientific method. Therefore, their opinions are no more to be regarded as "science" than mine or yours. And the fact that an idea is appealing, whether that appeal comes from the hope of immortality or just a feeling of excitement, is indistinguishable from faith in God, as a method for choosing which ideas to include in one's worldview assumptions.

(not intended as personal criticism - just talking philosophy)

@skado I agree that Universal Consciousness is not science. It’s not a thing that I believe in firmly. I don’t take your criticism personally—I’m just being me. We have very different points of view in some areas. My only world view is a sense of awe and bewilderment.

This conversation is giving me a possible insight into the psychology of religion or spirituality. I said that the idea of universal consciousness is exciting. It is exciting in the way mountain climbing or skydiving is exciting—sort of an addiction, but a beneficial addiction in my case. We both agree that there’s no firm scientific basis for universal consciousness, yet there’s at least some evidence—enough for the concept to be fascinating and to provide a boost of pleasure, joy, gratitude, or whatever. I think it’s because the concept deals with the enormity and mystery of nature, which is very awe inspiring.

I’ve never had television but I can turn my thoughts to such things at any time and escape boredom or unhappiness. I wonder if that might be the same benefit for more traditional religious people, and also a survival mechanism for our ancient ancestors. Being strung out on Zeus was better than staying drunk.

@WilliamFleming
Joy is always welcome.