Death: practical conclusions and exercises

Date: 14.10.2017

Death Epistemology

Make sure you have read Death.

1. Nobody (living) has experienced the after-death state. Hence, anything being claimed regarding that belongs to beliefs. No matter who is claiming: the highest top-scientist Oxford professor or a ragged gentleman from the corner of the street.

2. Death is central to life, it may be more to life than the life itself. Ask your epistemology professor why he keeps occupying you with other irrelevant topics and keeps silent when it comes to death.

3. Consider the following bias: you can think of many other possible human beings that may have been born and never were, but every one that has been born dies.

4. Death is not a disease: medical doctors know when it comes and do not even try to treat the dead human beings.

5. Death is not opposite of life (as some dictionaries might claim). It is an event of termination of life. The events bringing (back) one to life could be considered as the opposites of death (for example, birth).

6. There is an extrapolation problem with death too: if you are alright, you think instinctively (your brain sort of "models" into the future) that this state will continue… Consider the opposite: if you feel bad or are ill, it is extremely hard to think positive and the brain extrapolates negative thoughts into the future.

7. Human beings love new, unexplored areas, hence death is boring to most of the people.

8. There are people (philosophers and other speculative thinkers of the modern age) that argue that everything is subjective, that there is nothing we could know objectively, that our minds do the tricks cheating us regarding reality. Note that one cannot argue this with death. Death is objective to everybody, there are no tricks about it.

9. There are no words suitable to describe death unless you taste it yourself. But to be prepared for it, you need to be familiar with it to any degree possible: visit graveyards on any occasion, seriously ill people (oncological wards), funerals of your relatives. In any case, you will taste death, but only once.

10. Although it seems obvious, but you do not have to believe in death (in the casual sense of the word "believe"). It is an empirical, trustworthy, escaping the induction problem result:

    I may or may not believe that tomorrow there will be a town in the sky or the grass will reach the sun in growth, but it is impossible to believe or not to believe that tomorrow will be today or three will be one and still three. It is obvious that the one saying this cannot make it clear or cannot put it in a clear way based on what he has (Leo Tolstoy, On the Dogmatic Theology).

11. Another delusion which perpetuates this life is: everything is designed to make you forget the reality of death (school, friends, first love, career, family, pleasures etc). Just ask yourself how much time your teachers dedicate to death. If not much, if not even most of the time, you and your teacher are in delusion.

12. Some people believe that they will never die. It is the most unreliable type of belief. It does not come any close to reality. It is not based on the most reliable empirical evidence.

13. Another group of people thinks that they can extend life to unreachable time limits (by means, for example, of biological alterations of aging processes and factors). It is an epistemological arrogance to suddenly realize that you know more than all of humanity that lived before you.

14. Everything can be fixed as they say… This does not work with death. Even if you believe in having several lives, since you do not have access to your previous lives (you do not remember them), it is absolutely unpractical to think this way.

15. Without even touching the topic of meaning of any kind (meaning of life or death): To simply live appreciating the fact that you will die is an achievement in itself.

16. "Truth is relative," the democracy inclined modern thinkers tend to say. They instill this meaning through their books. Death is relative: so let them jump from a 100th floor of a building somewhere in Manhattan and see if the result depends on a person… Yet they call themselves intellectuals.

17. The induction problem is not equivalent to the problem of death. The induction problem cannot guarantee one tomorrow, or future, whereas the end-of-life problem indicates you know the future, which is death by any possible or impossible scenario. Both problems deal with the future. Negligence in both of the problems deludes you in your present.

18. You build a house, plan it meticulously. Once the house is complete, it is destroyed the city council. The city council has a condition: you can build as much as you can, but once you complete construction everything you built is subject to demolition.

    Building – Life. Living in the house – End of Life. The city council – Death. The condition – Aimless existence.

19. You want a career in jurisprudence. You save money and go to a college. You exert effort to get highest possible grades, you graduate… and your degree is nullified (condition of your contract with the university).

    Education – Life. Career and great job – End of Life. The invalidation – Death. The contract – Aimless existence.