[zombie groan]: Unnhhh
[electronic theme music]
[music fades to background]
Death.
Hopefully, it won't happen to you for a long time, but rather like cleaning the mold out of the shower,
it's something we're all going to have to get 'round to eventually.
This is quite a morbid topic, but there's no reason we can't discuss it
reasonably and dispassionately.
The question is, should we be afraid?
Davy Jones: "You fear death."
Obviously it makes sense to fear /dying,/ since dying can be quite unpleasant.
And it makes sense to fear other people being dead, since their loss will upset us.
But for us -- just us -- does it make sense to fear /being dead?/
Now, if you believe in an afterlife where the good are rewarded and the wicked are punished,
and we all get to see our loved ones again, then obviously you don't have much to fear from being dead.
Assuming, of course, you've been good.
So, just for the purposes of argument, let's assume that there is no afterlife, no reincarnation,
no divine beings will be conducting any kind of exit interview at all,
and death is the end of you. Boom! Forever.
So, perhaps a better way of phrasing the question is:
should we be afraid of personal non-existence?
The locus classicus for thinking about this question is the Roman poet, Titus Lucretius Carus,
or Lucretius for short,
who wove the philosophy of Epicurus into a didactic poem called "De rerum natura,"
which is actually quite beautiful, if you have the time for it.
Lucretius argued that, since death is a state of non-existence, it's not going to hurt,
it's going to be painful for you, so there's nothing to fear in the sense of
being stuck in a box in the ground or
"crowded in a tomb to be oppressed with monumental marble upon thy breast."
People often think that when they're dead, they'll miss things that they enjoy about being alive,
like spending time with their friends and their family.
But Lucretius said that you won't miss them.
You won't even notice that they're not there. You won't even know that you're dead.
"After life's fitful fever, you will sleep well,
Nor steel, nor poison, malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch you further."
He also pointed out that you have not existed before.
There was a time, before you were born, when you did not exist
and not existing after death will be similar to that.
Nobody's afraid of pre-birth so, logically, if death is similar, then we shouldn't be afraid of that either.
But, that last point is a little bit dodgy.
It's true that nobody's afraid of a period of non-existence before they were born
and if death is also non-existence, then they are kind of similar.
But pre-birth lies in the past,
and fear is necessarily directed towards the future.
It doesn't make sense to fear things in the past.
Like, I was quite afraid before I took my driving test, but it's irrational for me to fear doing it now,
because it's done. It's past.
Rafiki: "It doesn't matter, it's in the past!"
If I'm afraid of something, it must lie in the future.
So we can't say that I shouldn't fear death because I don't fear pre-birth.
I couldn't fear pre-birth. It wouldn't make sense to do that.
There's another angle we might approach this from, though.
Throughout the rest of your life, hopefully, there will be things called "possible goods"
which you will have the chance to acquire.
Not goods in the sense of "stuff," but goods in the sense of "things that are good for you,"
because they make you happy, or whatever.
Death, particularly untimely death, will represent a total loss of possible goods.
You will enter a state, i. e. non-existence,
at which it is no longer possible to accrue good things.
And since we desire good things, the loss of possible goods is rational to turn your nose up at.
Or . . . is it?
There's still a question hanging over this of what exactly "possible goods" are.
It's easy to understand what a "good" is: a good thing that exists now.
But what about a "possible" good
that lies in the future?
This is a similar issue to the one that we touched on in our episode about the environment and morality:
if a possible good lies in the future, then it doesn't really exist at the moment, so
losing it doesn't count as anything, really.
And there's another clue in the name: /possible/ goods.
You don't even know they're /definitely/ in your future.
An untimely death, however tragic, may actually help you avoid a future in which
you would have been completely miserable.
The ontological (that is "concerned with being or existence") state of possible goods is kind of a puzzle.
They seem to suffer from something like the Nonidentity Problem that we discussed last month.
Although, it's all well and good to say that possible goods don't really exist,
but if somebody came to you and offered you a deal to take away all of your possible goods,
would you stick to your logical guns and still think they don't exist?
What do you guys think? Should we fear death?
Does it represent a loss of possible goods (whatever those are)?
Leave a comment with your questions and suggestions and we'll answer them at the end of next video
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because "I love the name of honor more than I fear death."
First of all, yes, I am wearing a different shirt.
Eh, that's 'cause I just got back from my holiday and I'm filming this the day before it goes up.
But, let's see what you guys had to say about whether the physical world really exists.
Zach Lathouris said that things don't need to be observed by people.
In this day and age, a camera can do the observing.
Mmmm. . . I'm not sure a camera really observes things in the same way that we do.
If you put a camera up in the forest and there's a tree falling
and you wanted to know whether or not it made a sound,
the camera would detect something, but does it really experience sound
in the same, subjective way that we experience sound?
I don't know. I think Berkeley would probably say that the camera doesn't exist when you turn around either.
Joshuaedwardpearson, yes that's absolutely right,
he thought that the empiricism of people like John Locke might lead to atheism,
which, as a bishop, he was obviously very much against.
I think he uses God to support his idealism and his idealism to support God,
but I don't necessarily think that it's a vicious circle.
Forrest Gump: "Maybe both is happening at the same time."
BBrucker2 said that properties aren't just in our minds.
They're actually real features of the world.
Mmm. . . Sometimes I think that as well, but then what about something like color?
If we look at something like a cabbage and it looks green to us,
but then you show it to a organism that doesn't have color vision, it won't look green.
So which is it /really/?
In itself?
Asswaxer100, with the kind of intellectual rigor that you might not expect from someone with that screen name,
really fleshed out what we were talking about in the video about illusion
when we mentioned dreaming about elephants.
Yes, asswaxer, you are absolutely right.
Berkeley doesn't really have a very good way of distinguishing between illusion and reality.
Dehamaster asks, "Who observes the observer?"
My good fellow, I refer you to episode one, on "I think therefore I am."
I don't have a picture of it here, but somebody called afoxyfocked messaged me asking what the music is
that you can hear at the start of the videos --
not this stuff that you can hear now, but the actual PhilosophyTube theme.
if anyone can tell me what that music is, then I will send you a prize.
I don't think you'll be able to use your smartphones to figure out what it is either
'cause I'm not sure it'll be on a database. You'll have to just know it.
But if you think you know what it is and you want to take a guess, then send me a message,
and don't forget to include your address so I can send you a prize.
And the first person to guess it correctly, I will send you a little something.
[music swells and fades]
[end]