= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
entirelyuseless comments on Open Thread Feb 22 - Feb 28, 2016 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (228)
You may be getting at the truth here, but there is a simpler way to think about it.
Quotation from Epicurus:
“Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?"
Whether you pick your point of view, or a divine point of view, if you pick any moment in your life, random or not, you are not dead yet. So basically you have a kind of personal plot armor: your life is finite in duration but is an open set of moments, in each of which you are alive, and which does not have an end point. Of course the set has a limit, but the limit is not part of the set. So subjectively, you will always be alive, but you will also always be within that finite period.
Because there are other things associated with death, such as suffering from a painful terminal illness, where the excuse of Epicurus does not apply. With things like this, "quantum immortality" could potentially be the worst nightmare; maybe it means than after thousand years, in the Everett branches where you are still alive, in most of them you are in a condition where you would prefer to be dead.
I agree, except that you are not actually refuting Epicurus: you are not saying that death should be feared, but that we should fear not dying soon enough, especially if we end up not dying at all.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something. How do we know this?
Either it is finite in duration, or mostly finite in duration, as Viliam said. These come approximately to the same thing, even if they are not exactly the same.