I feel that it's probably best to die before technology arrives that makes immortality possible. I doubt we are built to be able to handle that - or maybe we are and such technology would our 2001 monolith heralding the next stage of our development - this might actually just be a quant period of history in which people's consciousness is lost to us.

Such tech would need to be accompanied by inter stellar travel.

Being over the half way mark I do think it about it but as an earlier poster stated - kids make you worry about their untimely demise instead and I'd also rather live longer than my wife as I wouldn't want her to be alone.

There's now't to worry about though - if there is an afterlife then that's a result, if not, then we are only going back to where we have already been.

Best to try and make sure to minimise anything you feel you would miss or regret before it happens.

davyK wrote:

I feel that it's probably best to die before technology arrives that makes immortality possible. I doubt we are built to be able to handle that - or maybe we are and such technology would our 2001 monolith heralding the next stage of our development - this might actually just be a quant period of history in which people's consciousness is lost to us.

The book Flash Forward (not the horrible TV series) had an extremely interesting example of how immortality like that could work.

Not sure where to start with this really.

First off, nearly dying is a bit of a recurring theme with me.  (I've mentioned a couple of my comedy accidents in the clumsiness thread).  These range from a variety of car accidents - being asleep in a car which then hit central reservation as driver was doing the same, falling out of a tree in front of an AA van - to blind stupidity - falling through a roof, falling off a cliff etc.

The only one that really registered though was having meningitis just before my 18th birthday.  I was in a coma for about 3 days and my prognosis, delivered with terrifying lack of subtlety to my mother, was "if he's lucky he'll survive, but with severe brain damage".  (As it happens, I'm just a tiny bit deaf.)  This resulted in a massive change in me subsequently - I went from a silent, bookish, academic recluse to, well kind of the same but significantly more sociable.  There was a palpable sense of being given a second chance at life which lasted for a couple of years before I gradually settled back into not really thinking about it.  (But my personality altered pretty much permanently.)

"Not thinking about it" is kind of an established learned behaviour for me (and I'd argue most people).  I vividly remember the moment at which I "got it", drifting off to sleep as a child, and thinking "this next bit is what it's like when you're dead, only you never come back".  I found myself suddenly gripped by anxiety, and for a short time everything in my life focussed around this horrific sensation.  Until I tuned it out.  Of course, it tunes back in occassionally, usually, inevitably, when I'm falling asleep.  That sensation of existential terror is undimmed, and whilst I spend most of my life pretending it doesn't happen, it's not escaped my notice that pretty much anything creative that I've embarked upon has death (and escaping it) as a central theme somewhere.  Doubtless not helped by the knowledge that on my mother's side of the family men rarely make it past 40 due to a particularly rare genetic condition that I've chosen not to find out if I have.  (I'm 38, start your sweepstake now.)

The weird/pathetic thing is that, rather than my fear causing me to seize the day (as my second chance once, briefly, did) it has the opposite effect.  My refusal to contemplate, means that pondering on what must be done before I'm gone doesn't really happen.  I know life is short, and precious, and could be swept away at any moment.  (The day job rams that home on  a regular basis.)  Yet I decide to just trudge along, because it feels easier that way.  I know I'll be one of those on their death bed berating their failure to do the stuff that really mattered and wishing I had more time, but somehow I just let it go...

I really have no issue with the concept of my own death, or others. I know it'll come, and going off how life is, it could happen in five seconds, it could happen in sixty years. Fuck knows. I think growing up with a children's ward (on a fully dedicated children's hospital) as my second home (well, I'd semi grown up, we're talking 10-16 years old here) made me understand it more at a younger age. There were a few kids my age who I befriended when a patient who were there one day, gone the next. As in deceased, not merely gone home.

I remember one lad (and kids being fickle as they are, nobody but me seemed to want to get to know him) being completely bedridden. His body would just twist and contort in all positions as he screamed out in pain. Barely a second wandered by without those screams, which when you first wandered onto the ward terrified you at such a young age. I think it was cerebral palsy, but unflinchingly horrific. There must've been some other condition(s) thrown into the mix, but I can't remember anymore. He couldn't talk, move or do anything on his own. But I do remember spending hours sitting at his bedside when his family wasn't there with him, just holding his hand. On the odd occasion, he'd make eye contact, and somewhere underneath all this pain he was going through, there was him. Just a boy, my age, his life fucked by all this. There was humanity and feeling. And then he'd be lost again, grunts and screams as his hand tightened around mine.

Roughly three years he was on that ward, while I was an intermittent tourist, booking weeks on end there then heading home to continue life. Then next time I visited, he was gone. I knew what'd happened, and my parents, knowing how I felt about him, asked the nurses. And just knowing he lived that life, of no hope, no real fucking existence, just makes me think that whatever the fuck happens to me, no matter how I die, be it painful or horrific or quiet and at peace, I can face it. Its just a fact of life really, nothing you can do to change things. Only regret I have is, I can't remember his name.

I think it's the egotism that really annoys. That humans are some kind of evolutionary pinnacle that deserves a place in eternity.

Dark Soldier wrote:

Awareness after death would be great. Espesh if you've been cremated.

You certainly wouldn't forget the smell in a hurry.

I like to think about all the things I have been before my life, and all the things I will be after my death. Nothing is destroyed, just recycled.

Well either evolution is wrong Davy, or the idea of afterlife is wrong. There is incredible evidence for the former and fuck all for the latter. It's literally a bit of a no brainer.

I'm a big believer in reincarnation, the idea of recycled consciousness.

Elmlea wrote:

Sasukekun wrote:

I'm a big believer in reincarnation, the idea of recycled consciousness.

I like the idea, but I don't understand how the necessary transfer of energy would happen.

It's just a bit difficult to imagine everything you were disappearing, as unlikely as it seems. As much as it seems like it requires a religious side to you, religion is not required to believe in reincarnation.

The only reincarnation I believe in is that the atoms that make up me right now will eventually be present in millions of other creatures.

Sasukekun wrote:

It's just a bit difficult to imagine everything you were disappearing, as unlikely as it seems.

It's more than difficult, it's impossible.  You simply cannot fully comprehend your not existing, because it involves some sort of spectating of the things in your life without you there.

I don't think I'm articulating this very well.

Oh ffs.

FFS.

I challenge you to prove anything.