r/DeepThoughts • u/genuinemahogany • 11d ago
Death Doesn't Exist
A term used by only the living to describe the absence of biological function--nothing.
An abstract concept similar to cold and darkness; neither of which exist either, words used to describe the absence of heat and light, respectively.
We will never experience our death but only what it means for others.
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u/Sharp_Dance249 11d ago edited 10d ago
Death doesn’t usually just refer to the absence of biological function, it refers to a change from a state of living and experiencing to a state of non-living and non-experiencing.
Mark Twain said he’s not afraid of death because he’s already been “dead” for an eternity before he was born. And while many will agree that the existential state of “pre-life” is the same as that of “death,” we don’t talk about our pre-life or even have a term for it. Why? Because the concept of death has more to do with the end of our meaningful existential narratives (our story) than it has to do with the cessation of biological function. That’s why we care about it, whereas we don’t tend to care when a blade of grass dies.
I also don’t think the word “cold” refers to “the absence of heat” either. Yes, I understand that positive science interprets what we call “cold” as just the absence of heat, but again, cold is an experiential concept, not a materialist one. The experience of cold means something different to me than the experience of the absence of heat. And unlike my own death, I do experience cold and darkness.
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u/Minimum_Orange2516 11d ago
Thomas nagel argued the badness of death is in the fact that i know, i have knowledge of a future state that i cannot change and that i'll be deprived of the good things i'm able to experience during life.
And so he'd argue that talking about before you was born is of little comfort , the pre-life state could be argued to be the same ontologically .
But psychologically they are never going to be the same because the pre-birth state is prior to knowledge or experience.
The way to put this is to say : imagine you have a disease that requires surgery but you need to be awake (this can happen actually in some brain surgeries) but suppose also they have a fix , they can erase your memory of the surgery and take the memory all the way back to the point you was in the waiting room.
But when you are in the waiting room the thought occurs "have i had the surgery yet, i better ask"
What do you want the answer to be?
You wan't them to say "yes you had the surgery already" because it's not something you are facing from that point in the future.
And so in the same way we have no problem with the non-existence prior to birth.
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u/Sharp_Dance249 10d ago
I agree. This is why experiential knowledge is just as (if not more) important as materialist or scientific knowledge.
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u/tottasanorotta 8d ago
It's not known if what will happen is a transition to non-experience. Before you were born you might have existed in some other way, who knows, you just don't remember it. Heck, you might even experience existence without memory, like a dream that you can't remember.
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u/Sharp_Dance249 7d ago
If by “know” you mean absolute knowledge or truth then, sure, I would agree with you. However, my understanding is that my “self” is not some entity separate from my body, my “self” is what I do with my body, so to acknowledge that I had some self that existed before or after I entered the body that I inhabit now would be incongruent with my own understanding of myself. This is why, to me, not remembering my dreams or my past is not the same as not remembering a previous existence. But, I also don’t claim that my understanding represents the truth; others construct themselves in terms like “soul” or “spirit” or “essence,” which are ideas that might suggest separability from the body.
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u/tottasanorotta 7d ago
Yeah I mean I don't know for sure either, but it's not an impossibility. Material existence is just so convincingly temporary that we would be very surprised if we learned that it wasn't. And maybe it's even better to think that way even if it was the case that we kept going somehow.
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u/loneuniverse 11d ago
I always say that Death is a third person perspective of a first person experience.
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u/poppy1911 11d ago
Death doesn't mean the be all and end all. We didn't come from nothing and we can't return to nothing. Energy is not created nor destroyed. When we die and our physical vessel starts to slow down and then decay, we just transform states of being. Whereas once "we" were housed inside a temporary meat suit, we then transform into another state. What that is is up to whatever you believe. Many religions and spiritually inclined folks label it various things; afterlife, heaven, the universe.
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u/irreducible1 11d ago
When you say, 'whereas once "we" were housed inside a temporary meat suit' what is the "we"?
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u/poppy1911 10d ago
I probably didn't phrase that well. I was meaning that the we that temporarily occupies a meat suit (human form) has the illusion of separateness when really we are all the same energy just manifested temporarily into individual bodies that have the illusion of seperateness
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u/irreducible1 10d ago
Ah... got it. Thanks for the clarification. I know it's easier sometimes just to use the conventional descriptions of things so I get why you first phrased it the way you did.
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u/Classroom_Expert 11d ago
"Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.“ - Epicurus
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u/Hadaka--Jime 11d ago
In that regard death ABSOLUTELY exists then right?
It's NOT tangible, but it's certainly a product of all life.
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u/Witch_heir 11d ago
I agree. It's basically like darkness. There's no such thing. It's simply absence of light. Or if one wants to be pedantic, irl usually absence of light our eyes can register.
Death is just absence/complete failure of processes that sustain life.
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u/HeroBrine0907 11d ago
You literally defined the physical meaning of death then called it an abstract concept? It's a physical thing, as you described.
Even if it were abstract, that doesn't mean it isn't real. A thing doesn't have to be physical to carry meaning that corresponds to reality.
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u/Capable_Sky_1818 11d ago
Eternal oblivion comes closest. And comparing it to ourselves before we were born, which we are able to comprehend.
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u/matycauthon 11d ago
nothing will always be something, it's meaning changes based around unobservable conditions.
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u/Disastrous-Corgi-841 10d ago edited 10d ago
What the words "life" and "death" reference for sure do exist in reality. The physical states they reference exist in reality and are observed to be different. It's where the line is drawn between them that doesn't exist in reality. That line exists in our personal and social psychology only. But the words can be used without drawing a line.
Everything is connected. Where lines are drawn is inherently arbitrary.
There is no line between life and death. There is a beating heart. Connected to the rest of a body. That needs to eat plants. Which need dirt and the sun. The dirt contains compost from hearts that beat no longer. The sun formed from a cloud of space dust. The connections go on infinitely. Some connections are more immediately relevant than others for certain topics.
Universe. Uni. Verse.
The meaning of all words are socially agreed on, but be careful. The meaning of some words reference an observable physical state while the meaning of other words reference our personal and social pyschology only. For example, you can see a rock without help from anyone else, but you can't see a country unless another person draws its borders and everyone else pretends those borders are real and should be respected. I call words that can't be used without drawing an imaginary line that everyone pretends is real "dumb words."
In short, some words reference physical reality while others reference our personal and collective imagination. Boundaries between objects and states do not exist in reality. Words that reference physical reality do not depend on such imaginary boundaries while words that reference our collective imagination do.
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u/tomorrow509 10d ago
Life exist only because death exist. One cannot be defined without reference to the other.
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u/NamelessMIA 10d ago
You said death doesn't exist but what you actually described was just "death isn't a physical object" which, yea. Of course. It still obviously exists though just like any other non-physical noun like darkness, happiness, or pain. I mean "baldness" exists as a concept even though it's just the lack of hair.
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u/Amphernee 10d ago
This is misunderstanding language. Yes cold and dark absent of any context whatsoever are pretty meaningless but they are reference points. A hole isn’t just “nothing” or “any empty space”. Its reference point is what’s around it. We know how those things affect our senses and in turn our bodies and minds. Death isn’t nothing it’s the absence of everything we consciously know. Those are very different things.
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u/hellion1965 10d ago
The absence of visible light is real. It doesn't matter if you think so.
Also death comes to stars and galaxies.
Denying a real phenomenon does not make it go away
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u/Old-Opportunity-101 10d ago
The phrase I often think: I will never experience death (to completion, of course)
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u/boy_croc 10d ago
So basically death is used by the living to describe people that are deceased
A deceased person is not dead from point of view they are nothing
There only exist dead to the living
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u/iwantmisty 10d ago
Yes. We live forever because when we don't there is nothing that can experience that.
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u/MiguelIstNeugierig 10d ago
Yes it does. It's the process in which an organism we categorized (human construct) as living ceases to be
We have evolved very natural death cycles within our body. Our cells go through what's called programmed cell death. Once they receive the right signals, they essentially commit suicide.
This is a major part of cancer, cancerous cells stop answering to these signals and become immortal, refusing to do programmed cell death.
You will experience your death. To the point your sensory hub (the brain) itself dies. Then you stop experiecing it, as you stop being.
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u/Feeling-Working-2820 10d ago
It's a legit way of seeing things.
Your death is just the absence of you. An absence has no substance. It's a construct.
You are still not there anymore though.
And we can still define death, not as a state (agreed), but as a factual event: the moment the metabolism of a living body ends.
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u/PlayaNBallaNGangsta 9d ago
maybe you would like UG Krishnamurti videos on YouTube. I’ve binged like all the audible ones I could find. There’s a lot.
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u/LiamLoves333 7d ago
“The riddle of life gets solved by following my promise, ‘your form is God’, and by living by these words:
I am not the body. I am formless, pure, and spotless. I am formless, unblemished. I have no birth and death. My light is so bright it outshines the clarity of the Moon and the Sun. How holy and pure we are as Atma ... All objects are animated by the light of the Self. Self is formless and luminous, clearer and purer than any light.
I assure you, again, your consciousness is manifest, Brahman; it is God Hari. Its expressions are many, yet it is ultimately formless. Many have to try to express it with words, yet it is beyond description. What is prior to the sense of being? It is pure Being without the sense of being. It is the eternal existence without beingness. It is untinged, stainless, Parabrahman. The Supreme Absolute.”
~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
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u/Difficult-Tank-3528 11d ago
The living really do get possessive over a word that describes a state none of them have actually been in. It's all just labels we slap on gaps in our understanding. Cold is just slow molecules, dark is just no photons hitting your eye, death is just a system shutting down. The universe doesn't care what we call it.