bjowan

In my opinion you only die once, and can't get any better at it. If you are dead at the end of the process of dying it was a success.

Most of those that believe in reincarnation think that you do not take your memories with you in your next life, and therefor your previous deaths can't teach you anything.

That makes it kinda silly, in my mind, to practice it at all.

premjan

believers in reincarnation say it is your personality that changes, not your memories (which are not central anyway). Your software literally changes again and again until it becomes perfect (reaches God). So it is intellectually a sensible theory.

andy_d

It's not retention of memories which are required, it's simple cause and effect (aka karma)

The best analogy i've heard to explain the relation between one rebirth and the next is that of a billiard ball being struck by another one. The second ball receives some of the energy (ie: information) of the first, but it isn't the same ball, even though it behaves in a similar way.

The concept of rebirth is similar. Information moves from one rebirth to the next. It's not the same person who gets reborn. It's just that some of the effects of their mental habits take a relatively long time to manifest themselves.

premjan

Basically there are aspects of reincarnation that are sensible, seen from a perspective of ancient beliefs and even to some extent modern knowledge. Some people are good mimics: they are literally able to copy others behaviors. In a sense, such a people have more general software than others. Other people have more of well-defined personality characteristics that make them very recognizable and they are not likely to be able to live "out of their own skins". Also, when people meet each other and talk to each other, there is some subliminal sharing of personality traits going on. You may have caught yourself copying another person with unusual traits after meeting them. There is a sense in which human society acts like a vast distributed computer with recycling of bits of information. It may be that there is recycling of information in some global sense, albeit not in a strict reincarnation sense (who knows, maybe even in that sense) over generations and even short periods of time. This may be the essential nature of intelligence. The "soul" is informational in this view. It consists of certain human characteristics that move and get recycled through different human brains and gradually move from being more locale-specific to being more general. This kind of specific-to-general movement, at its final stage, is equivalent to "merging with God" (reaching max generality). It is a sort of primitive meme theory.

paul30

I have said this before, but I will say it again.

I think most people in good health and not in dangerous situations (like war) do not spend too much time thinking about or fearing death.

It is only when you have a close call or get sick or see people close to you die that you dwell on it.

Those who DO spend time in dread of death--those not in precarious situations or bad health--I think are displacing fear from some other cause.

Those I have known who say they are afraid of death are actually, I think, afraid of not having lived very much.

So get out there and live to the fullest. You don't have to worry about death, or even dying. It will come.

ACow

I really don't understand this fear of death. It appears to me that fear of death is fear of the unknown and inevitable. Even if its just non-existance, i'm sure most will agree that they never suffered or worried about it before they were born. Really. And the way isn't avoiding it or not thinking about it or anything else like that, its by staring it right in the face and saying "You know what, it really doesn't bother me anymore, one day, i'm going to die". Kudos to those trying to come to terms with the whole thing. :notworthy

And as the old saying goes:

"If a problem can be solved, no need to worry. If a problem cannot be solved, worrying won't fix it."

Once you come ot terms with the whole thing, one can focus on life rather than the inevitable

premjan

I think there are two sorts of motivations for people in their lives. One is scarcity (e.g impending death). The other is abundance (e.g. happiness, bliss). As long as people act from the latter rather than the former, life is almost entirely a positive experience. Unfortunately people are not all one way in this regard.

reverendmoss

I agree. it's always better to chase your dreams than run from your fears.
Focus on what you want, not what you don't want.

disgracian

i would have thought the opposite is true. surely the more you love life and the greater value you place upon it, the more you have to lose by dying.

you youself probably admit as much in your last sentence. to the apathetic or miserable, death would be seen as either neutral or even beneficial.

thus on the unhappy are truly at peace?

Ramen

It isn't the actual fear of death that we can fear, it's our own concepts of death that we fear. Conceptualizing something is NOT knowing it. The only fear is what the mind constructs and treats as equivalent to reality. We will face the reality when we face death itself. Until then we are only dealing with speculation.