Is our fear of death justified?

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Magical Realist, Mar 2, 2013.

  1. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Plato certainly didn't think so:

    "To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest blessing for a man, men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know."

    Aren't we only fearing a certain belief we hold about death? Or is fear of death programmed into us from birth? Isn't it all ultimately just the unknown that we fear the most?
     
    Last edited: Mar 2, 2013
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  3. Syne Sine qua non Valued Senior Member

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    Survival is a biological imperative, and death is counter-survival. We simply think of survival in the only terms we know, i.e. organisms. It is not unreasonable to fear losing the known for the completely unknown. Pointless yes, unreasonable no.
     
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  5. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    I don't see death as a big unknown. It is natural for all life to die. It's only humans that want to make more of it.
     
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  7. river

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    It is not justified

    Since life is an energy form and that energy form transmutable
     
  8. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

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    What fear of death are you referring to, exactly?

    I certainly fear the process of dying, but I don't fear the state of death itself - as I consider it will most likely be the same as before I was born - and I wasn't there to experience that either.

    That is not to say that I don't want to hold on to life as strongly as possible, as I consider death to be a one-way proposition.

    In that way it's like being asked if you fear Iceland if told you could emigrate there but never return... you don't actually fear the country itself, nor living there. But you don't want to give up what you currently have.
    In the same way I don't fear the state of death, but I certainly don't want to give up what I have.
    I know I have to emigrate there eventually - but I can only hope that when I do the voyage is swift.

    Personally I don't see that as a fear of death, but others may I guess.


    So what exactly do you mean by "fear of death"?
    Do you equate it to the desire for self-preservation - i.e. that such a desire is the flip-side of a fear of death?
     
  9. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Fear of death means fear of entering into whatever state death is. Along with that goes all that we mean by dying too. The realization that we are leaving everything we know. The pain of dying itself. And the angst of possibly being nowhere at all forever and ever, whatever that even means. Death as the whole package deal, from the moment you realize you are dying..to the moment, or whatever it is, you are actually dead.
     
  10. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Death in the abstract may be intellectually known as the cessation of life processes in the body. But death personally? What of THAT do we know? I have no idea how I will react to it. It will be the most private and alone experience I can ever have. Nothing we have seen happen to others will prepare us for what that moment will be for us. Why should we NOT be terrified by the prospect of our ensuing nonexistence, if that is indeed what it is? Not existing forever does not sound very natural to me.
     
  11. Nehushtan Registered Member

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    I think fear of death is not so much fear of dying as fear of being killed. There is hardly anything to fear when you consider death as an inevitable process and know that you have to die one day. On the other hand, if you see someone coming at you with a knife, then fear in this situation is natural – fear that you are about to die before your time. Such an emotion is the product of evolution. If an organism does not recognize a life-threatening situation for what it is, then it won’t survive – simple as that.
     
  12. C C Consular Corps - "the backbone of diplomacy" Valued Senior Member

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    The common type of dream which concludes via one plummeting from a high place toward death at the bottom of that fall, and then waking up. Would the dream-self fear that end any less if it could know beforehand that it would only return to a similar or radically different version of itself in a parallel world? Probably a little less fear; but it's still the termination of being a character in the dream realm, losing all to become / return to someone else with possibly different interests and goals.

    Charles Manson: "What a disappointment to be walking around free, having a life, being a constructive member of a near-perfect community... and then suddenly turning into a murder-inducing, mini-cult psycho leader of this strange, imperfect world's past, locked-up in a prison."

    [For demonstrative purposes only. Fictional quotes from names resembling actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental....]
     
  13. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

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    In my view you experience "death" whenever you are unconscious and not dreaming. I recall once going to bed, closing my eyes momentarily and then opening them to find it was the morning. I imagine death will very much be like that middle part - an utter lack of experience of any kind.
    So to me it is rather odd to see people talking as it being "the most private and alone experience I can ever have". Because I don't think you can experience your own death. It is like light experiencing utter darkness.
    You can experience your life, and have the realisation that your life is ebbing away - but once dead you have no experience (imo).
    So there is nothing to fear (imo) about the state of death itself. Just, perhaps, the realisation while alive that your life is running out.
     
  14. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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    I'm just going to live until I die and do the best I can while I'm here in helping others which in turn helps myself to certain degree. I can't let death worry me for I'm to busy living and trying to enjoy the time I'm here by learning and working with others to make this place a better place for our future generations that will one day need this place to live within.
     
  15. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    The desire to stay alive doesn't need justification: it's part of the requirement for defining a living organism.
    However, "fear of death" is too facile and simplistic a phrase for the human's relationship with mortality.
    The human brain is big enough to understand that death, including his own, is inevitable, and to think about this in more ways than the organic imperative to defer death. We talk about different means and methods and times and reasons for dying. We dislike the prospect of leaving our life - people, places, activities, pleasures - as much as we are anxious about what happens after, and speculate on both, endlessly. We don't all experience the imperative to stay alive as fear, nor does each of us experience it in the same way under all circumstances.
     
  16. Balerion Banned Banned

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    For me it's the fear of the unknown. I assume that it's simply oblivion after death, but even that has unknown qualities. Does nothingness feel like anything? Do we feel the moment of passing? They're silly concerns, for the most part, but they're very real. Whether they're justified or not isn't something we can answer.
     
  17. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    I once told myself something like that. That dying would basically be just like going to sleep, and so what was there to fear about it? But on second thought, when I go to sleep I have the very sure anticipation of waking up. I also have a very active dreamlife, full of magical adventures and fantastic places I have never been to. So being unconscious as I drift off to sleep hardly even enters my mind as it really doesn't even enter my experience. I fall alsleep. I dream. And I wake up. But what would it be like to become permanently unconscious? To permanently lose all possibility of experience? There's something qualitatively different about this prospect that I find unnerving. What could an unending state of timeless blankness even be like. Well precisely. It will be like nothing because we aren't existent anymore. Or so many of us believe. With all other unconscious states that we have experienced, there was always the waking up at which point we retroactively inferred our having been unconscious due to a lapse in time. But death will be nothing like that. It will either be an unimaginable state of nonexistence, or a state so strange and new it won't relate to anything we have ever experienced before. Still others believe it will be the greatest experience we've ever had. As Morgan Freeman said in the Bucket List: "Just close your eyes, and let the waters take you home."
     
  18. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    I vaguely fear becoming a ghost. I fit the ghost profile to a tee: a little obsessive compulsive, full of regrets over my past, sporting an arrogant reluctance to ask for help, with a touch of agoraphobia to boot. I can see myself stuck in a limbo of wondering where the hell I am. "Go to the light James! Go to the light!" "Duh, what light?"
     
  19. Tamorph Registered Member

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    I am a former medic and a former Christian minister, and in both capacities I have been alongside many people at the moment of their death. Too many to count. I've always been fascinated by the moment of death, and wondered about the physical process that determines one second that someone is alive and the next that they have died.

    Having seen so many people die, most of them prematurely, I have no fear of death itself.

    I am though, as a pensioner, scared stiff that death will come along before I'm ready. These are such exciting times from a scientific point of view, and I have so much I want to do and learn, that I fear death will come before I've done everything I want to do.

    Having said that, the alternative would be worse. I'd hate to have accomplished everything I wanted to do in life and just be hanging around waiting for death.
     
  20. Balerion Banned Banned

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    I think that's my biggest fear, too. That I'm not going to see something. And inevitably, I'm going to miss things. We all are. What's the world going to look like 200 years from now? That kind of stuff fascinates me, and I won't be around for it. Hell, it's probably safe to say that we were all born at, at least relatively, the early days of humanity. There could be millions of years ahead of our species for all we know.
     
  21. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    Very good point. As one gets older, they start thinking about how much time they have left. They also think about how much of that time left will be quality time. I personally fear living many years with a low quality to my life or no quality to life. After all, suicide or assisted suicide is not permitted no matter how much you are suffering with no chance of it getting better.

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  22. Jeeves Valued Senior Member

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    If you think your life sucks, consider the alternative. If it still sucks, consider the alternative.
     
  23. KilljoyKlown Whatever Valued Senior Member

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    Are you suggesting the fear of death will always make you choose life over death?
     

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