I'm sorry to hear that you believe this. It shows a lack of appreciation for people who get out in the world and really live their lives... People who do things that have risk, but would rather follow their passions than live without it.

For people like that, dying doing what they loved really does make it better. They lived their lives, following their own choices. And those lives do end early sometimes. But all lives end. Sitting behind a desk for 40 years then cheering at how long you lived... that sounds like the tragedy to me.

What are you implying? That I'm not "really living my life" because I don't try to convince myself death is better if I was having fun just before it happened?

You really think a chainsaw juggler is going to have more fun getting mutilated by a chainsaw than dying in their sleep? Or that drowning is somehow not unbearably frightening just because you like water? Have you never heard of post traumatic stress? When you almost die doing something, it can make you not like it anymore. So why would you assume dying doing something you love isn't actually a good way to die losing the thing you love most?

Because you don't want to believe it.

Death has no valuation. It is not good or bad. It is just the progress of time and the existence of entropy. Everything must die.

Dying is scary. Death is not.

My take on death is since there is no way to be certain what happens after death, all possibilities are, well, possible. Death can be extremely good, extremely bad, neutral or anywhere in between.

Yes, I'm talking about life after death here. I think it's relevant to the OP's comment because what happens after death (good, bad, nothing) logically effects the valuation of death.

Since it is inherently very difficult if not impossible to scientifically evaluate what the probabilities are in terms of life after death, it's pretty much a crap shoot and what we choose to believe about it is based on faith (in nothing, God, etc). Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

The concept is self-contradictory, and thus not possible. That is knowable. It's also incoherent, and thus not a justifiable position even if it weren't self-contradictory.

PS: Pascal's Wager can be used to justify any belief whatsoever. It's not a good argument for anything.

> The concept is self-contradictory, and thus not possible.

Ok, let me frame it this way then. We're talking about the possibility of (a different kind of) life after physical death. My assertion is that there is no way to prove its existence or its non-existence. Therefor, any assertion about its nature or lack there of is uniformly based on faith.

> Pascal's Wager can be used to justify any belief whatsoever.

Not sure I follow you on this one, but it's not central to the discussion here.

Thought about it more and I think I understand your reasoning now. But I included Pascal's wager not to justify any particular belief (although I can totally see why you came to that conclusion as Pascal does come to a concrete conclusion in terms of a particular belief).

I included Pascal's wager not for his conclusion but because it supports my assertion that one can not know what happens after physical death. Therefore, any conclusion about that is based on faith alone.

EDIT: Addition to last point.

>We're talking about the possibility of (a different kind of) life after physical death

I know what you're talking about. And it is still not possible because it's a vacuous assertion. (And there's no such thing as 'non-physical' death, so that qualifier doesn't do anything. The word 'physical' is, for the most part, useless.)

But why are you even talking about life after death? Why aren't you talking about the invisible giant crab that's eating you right now? Or the dream that you're going to wake up from? Or the existence of Hogwarts?

You simply can't argue "nobody can really know" to a rational person in a convincing way. A rational person then must conclude that it doesn't even matter -- You have to make decisions, and you can't make reliable decisions by cherry picking belief in one absurd thing over the trillions of other absurd things.

We could debate all day about the possible existence of Hogwarts, but it would be stupid: we both know that it is a fiction, even though nobody can "prove for certain" that it isn't. We know this because the world we live in doesn't change if the existence of the thing changes. Nobody can make different decisions.

And when something fundamentally doesn't matter, that means it encodes no information about (non-mental) reality, and is thus meaningless, and can't be claimed to exist by default.

>I included Pascal's wager not for his conclusion but because it supports my assertion that one can not know what happens after physical death.

We know what happens after death. Many people have died, and you can look around and see what is happening right now. If you're talking about what happens to your subjective experiences afterward, then that's an experience singularity. A "north of the north pole" kind of absurdity. I don't suppose you're willing to argue that nobody knows if there's land north of the north pole, are you?

You don't see the circular reasoning involved in claiming that someone must actually visit north of the north pole to conclude it doesn't exist? So why should anyone have to return from life after death to know that it is fiction?

Nah, people like ending on a high note. It's a general thing. Nothing to do with being in denial about death.

Most death isn't that bad, its a quiet snuffing out, rather then a violent in the throws. Death is bad for the survivors, not for the decedent.

Death is one of the worst things that can happen to you. That's a more general moral qualification, not a purely emotional one. There's a difference between how something feels and how good or bad it is for you.

If you have cancer, and have been sick for months or years, and are in great pain, is death the worst thing to happen to you? It may be bad for your family and loved ones - but for you, it may very well be relief.

Mercy and palliative care is something I think forgotten all too often in medical care in the US, we focus so much on the cure at all costs, and less on the outcome or realistic outcome rather.

When you say "you," you are failing to properly account for the dynamics of human identity. I am not just a brain in a body. I am a fully engaged social being. The "me" that dies is not the whole me. I identify as part of a human culture.

And yes, if that human culture dies -- if humanity goes extinct -- then that is just about the worst thing I could imagine. You can scale that down any number of ways, but at no point will I agree that death isn't bad. I don't care if it's a single cell, a single organ, a whole person, or a whole room full of people. It's only as good as the value it produces for the whole, and my personal suffering is not a factor to that insofar as it doesn't disable my contribution.

And I didn't say death is the worst thing that can happen to you.

If you think that death is so bad, you are either going to be a very sad senior, or a suicide as aging gets more and more ominous. That said, I don't know what "general moral qualification" means.

I don't see why you'd infer that I will be emotionally distraught to the point of notability when facing bad things just because I said they are bad. Or why you think that changes anything about what I'd conclude is bad or not.

I'm not in the business of pretending things aren't bad just because I prefer not to deal with them.