jafosei

Personally, I don't believe in an immortal soul, nor do I believe in a consciousness that is in any way seperate from our body. Still, I can certainly understand what you mean about leaving something behind through the way we have affected other people's lives.

With over 6 billion people on the planet, I have the feeling that the impact that I, personally, will make on the world will be very small, and wouldn't likely be missed if I had never been. It would affect the lives of my friends and family, certainly, and there are definitely a few people who would probably be worse off if I hadn't been around, but on the whole, most everyone would be in the same boat as they are now.

Given the cases you presented (where my non-existence would mean the elimination of war, hunger, poverty, etc.), my non-existence would have immensely more impact on the world than my existence ever could, and the positives would live on longer than my memory would have. True, nobody would know that the wondrous world they lived in was due to my choice not to exist, but very few of them would have known of my existence anyway.

Of course, my view entails the idea that any individual is, by and large, not particularly special. That's just my take on it.

crocodile deathroll

There is a part of us that lives on, it is called "genetic information" which is not so much material but of a data nature. Information per se has no well defined boundaries as an alien intelligence on the fartherest reaches of the Universe would be just as capable of producing a perfect copy of Windows XP as Bill Gates.

xorbie

Tsk, tsk... Have none of you a sense of romance? A sense of mystique? All so dull. :boohoo:

World peace, elimination of poverty, hunger and disease would matter not if I had never even existed. This is clearly a fate not onyl worse than death, but worse than anything.

crocodile deathroll

By the same token our evolution as a species relied very much on those "evils" of hunger and disease and aggression, because they are merely nature's tools of natural selection.:boohoo:

Dubin

World peace and the elimination of poverty, hunger, and disease would certainly matter not to you if you had never existed, but what about the billions who do exist, despite your absence?

jafosei

I find my mystery and romance within a reality I can directly experience.

Ideas of immortality, either via an eternal soul or through the impact our lives might have on the course of the larger world, are interesting in an abstract sense, but that's all they are to me: abstract. They have nothing to do with the world as I experience it day-to-day.

I can appreciate layers of abstraction in an intellectual sense, but I don't want an abstraction to frame my life. I realize we all use abstraction to some extent to make the world easier to process, but I prefer to minimize it when I can.

Of course those things only matter to people who exist, but that's part of the concept that you're not acknowledging. You are only thinking in terms of your existence because you exist. If you didn't exist, there would be no thoughts or worries, because you wouldn't exist.

Getting beyond the intellectual exercise, though, is another point: you do exist. Your birth has already happened, and there's no going back. Nobody can undo your existence, so there is no "fate worse than anything" for you to fear.

xorbie

Who knows, perhaps this entire thread was meant to be under "a fate worse than death." Maybe I am missing something, but there seems to be no way to argue that lack of existence at all is better than death. Sort of a "to have loved and lost is better than to have never loved at all" sort of thing. I think there are some fates worse than death in many ways, at least death brings with it a sense of mystery, an unknown. There is no uknown, no mystery with regards to lack of existence. You simply don't exist. There is no question of heaven or hell, afterlife or not. You just don't exist. How does this not trouble you more than death?

crocodile deathroll

With regards to the "you" that does not exist in 1000 AD and the "you" that does not exist in the year 3000 AD. there is also no question of a Heaven or a Hell. So how can you know the difference between those two states of non-existence?

jafosei

I suppose that's the main difference between our comments as posted thus far. At a very basic level, I see nothing wrong with non-existence. I didn't exist for millions or billions of years before my birth, and after I die, I won't exist again. Nothing about my previous non-existence bothers me, and I can't see why it should.

The other reason that it doesn't trouble me is that I do exist. The idea of never having existed is purely a mental exercise, because the fact is that I am here. The world has played out in a certain way, and we can't go back and undo it, so any conception of the world that is different from the current world is merely an image or a dream. It is interesting to talk about different possibilities and ideas, and I get a kick out of thinking about alternate realities, but in the end they're only imaginary and don't concern me too much.

Death, on the other hand, is a reality and it will come. In an intellectual sense I'm not bothered by death either; it's inevitable and natural. I believe I'll just cease to exist at that point, and as I've said before, not existing doesn't bother me. I'll have to wait and see to find out if this intellectual reserve will hold out when I'm confronted by a direct and real possibility of emminent death, of course.

crocodile deathroll

jafosei

Do you believe time flows and has some physical quality?
Or is it no more than a fixed dimension and that passage from the past to the future is an illusion?