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I feel very sad and Bad. I Hope there will me a miracle for this man. If he reads my comment, i want him to know i give him a lot of love, to this dad of childr

I feel very sad and Bad. I Hope there will me a miracle for this man. If he reads my comment, i want him to know i give him a lot of love, to this dad of children and to his children and all of his family, and that I want to cry. Hope a miracle will be, really. From a French young computer scientist.

bckr 4y ago
It's natural to feel this way. Also consider that all creatures before us went away in this way as well, and all will. Even if we attain superhuman lifespans, one day something will put an end to our lives. Finally, consider being curious about death itself. There are many strange and interesting features of the death of a sapient being.
- beebeepka 4y ago
  I am curious about your last paragraph. What does it mean?
  - bckr 4y ago
    Death is something people in my culture try not to think about much. It is considered that the dead are totally dead and gone, never to be spoken to again and spoken of with sadness and distance. People of other cultures think differently about death. Death is welcomed into the day to day life. Consciousness of death is invited, even celebrated. The dead are spoken to. This second group of people don't believe in the finality of death. They believe and live towards life after death, believing in either some sort of continuum of consciousness or of their own consciousness as the process of an immaterial soul that will live after the body stops. Stories of death and near-death are full of the unexplained and perhaps unexplainable. From a western materialist perspective alone, death is fascinating if you look at it. Where does our consciousness arise from? It must be from the brain, right? And it is a sort of illusion, since we don't have individual souls. The perception of consciousness is a labyrinth of mirrors, self references. Yet, the same machinery for perceiving ourselves is also used to perceive others. We are constantly simulating and imitating one another. We're even working to modify and live up to others' images of us. So the patterns of the consciousness of any individual are actually distributed, holographically, through a community of brains. This being known.... Who or what died when one brain dropped off the grid? (For more in this direction, read Hofstadter). Even more simply, what changes take place in a dying person? What is the difference between a person who embraces death and a person who dies in fear? Is it possible to be happy while dying? What would it take to live a life that ends happily? This is what I mean when I say that death is worth being curious about.
    - jemmyw 4y ago
      The processes in your brain and body that are your consciousness stop and you cease to be forever. After that point nothing that happens or happened matters to you because you no longer exist. Various cultures, religions, spiritual people want to deny this. They're probably happier for it, but I can only accept the dull explanation that we just stop and it's not very interesting.
      - bckr 4y ago
        Hello, hard materialist camp representative :) That possibility makes sense, but I don't really know enough about the universe to be certain.
        jemmyw 4y ago
        We don't know everything for sure. And we'll never know everything. But, we know enough up and down the physical stack through biology, chemistry and physics that there isn't some non-physical other going on in there. Here's where the idea of life after death really breaks down for me: If you have a degenerative disease when do you get to this afterlife? Some people have effectively died long before they die, in terms of mind. If you see this as a process that is entirely physical it makes sense, it's sad but it makes sense. If you think there's something non-physical there then it poses some really hard questions: did they die already? why do personality changes happen if who a person is is contained in some non-physical thing? when they do die does the degenerated form go to the afterlife or the whole, and if its the whole then what happened to the person that was degenerative? Now throw in non-human life where we have a continuum of brain complexity down to nothing and ask similar questions - it just makes no sense. Unless you hold humans above other animals, which I find really distasteful and short sighted. Really though, if you try to explain all this you're just explaining away needless complexity to justify wishing for something that seems very unlikely. A christian chap I used to live with told me that after we die our soul goes to heaven but its just our consciousness and not our personality, and we spend the rest of all time praising god. Well, not me, I was going to hell for not believing. Honestly, of the things he described, not sure which sounded better, but a materialistic death definitely trumps either of those options.

bckr 4y ago

It's natural to feel this way. Also consider that all creatures before us went away in this way as well, and all will. Even if we attain superhuman lifespans, one day something will put an end to our lives. Finally, consider being curious about death itself. There are many strange and interesting features of the death of a sapient being.

beebeepka 4y ago
I am curious about your last paragraph. What does it mean?
- bckr 4y ago
  Death is something people in my culture try not to think about much. It is considered that the dead are totally dead and gone, never to be spoken to again and spoken of with sadness and distance. People of other cultures think differently about death. Death is welcomed into the day to day life. Consciousness of death is invited, even celebrated. The dead are spoken to. This second group of people don't believe in the finality of death. They believe and live towards life after death, believing in either some sort of continuum of consciousness or of their own consciousness as the process of an immaterial soul that will live after the body stops. Stories of death and near-death are full of the unexplained and perhaps unexplainable. From a western materialist perspective alone, death is fascinating if you look at it. Where does our consciousness arise from? It must be from the brain, right? And it is a sort of illusion, since we don't have individual souls. The perception of consciousness is a labyrinth of mirrors, self references. Yet, the same machinery for perceiving ourselves is also used to perceive others. We are constantly simulating and imitating one another. We're even working to modify and live up to others' images of us. So the patterns of the consciousness of any individual are actually distributed, holographically, through a community of brains. This being known.... Who or what died when one brain dropped off the grid? (For more in this direction, read Hofstadter). Even more simply, what changes take place in a dying person? What is the difference between a person who embraces death and a person who dies in fear? Is it possible to be happy while dying? What would it take to live a life that ends happily? This is what I mean when I say that death is worth being curious about.
  - jemmyw 4y ago
    The processes in your brain and body that are your consciousness stop and you cease to be forever. After that point nothing that happens or happened matters to you because you no longer exist. Various cultures, religions, spiritual people want to deny this. They're probably happier for it, but I can only accept the dull explanation that we just stop and it's not very interesting.
    - bckr 4y ago
      Hello, hard materialist camp representative :) That possibility makes sense, but I don't really know enough about the universe to be certain.
      - jemmyw 4y ago
        We don't know everything for sure. And we'll never know everything. But, we know enough up and down the physical stack through biology, chemistry and physics that there isn't some non-physical other going on in there. Here's where the idea of life after death really breaks down for me: If you have a degenerative disease when do you get to this afterlife? Some people have effectively died long before they die, in terms of mind. If you see this as a process that is entirely physical it makes sense, it's sad but it makes sense. If you think there's something non-physical there then it poses some really hard questions: did they die already? why do personality changes happen if who a person is is contained in some non-physical thing? when they do die does the degenerated form go to the afterlife or the whole, and if its the whole then what happened to the person that was degenerative? Now throw in non-human life where we have a continuum of brain complexity down to nothing and ask similar questions - it just makes no sense. Unless you hold humans above other animals, which I find really distasteful and short sighted. Really though, if you try to explain all this you're just explaining away needless complexity to justify wishing for something that seems very unlikely. A christian chap I used to live with told me that after we die our soul goes to heaven but its just our consciousness and not our personality, and we spend the rest of all time praising god. Well, not me, I was going to hell for not believing. Honestly, of the things he described, not sure which sounded better, but a materialistic death definitely trumps either of those options.