More Thoughts Flood into the Breach

Sam weighs in on the death question.

And he accuses me of cheating:

However, I think Emery is cheating here. He dismisses the work done by 'cognize' and 'experience' so that he can then go on to 'conceptualize' death by offering us this very nice metaphor. But conceptualizing death is not cognizing its experience. The work cognize is doing is to make the link to epistemology. This means we're not just saying what death is like (as Emery's quote does), but saying something about knowing death.

I'm not sure, again, what work a lot of these terms are doing. For example, what does it mean to "know[ ] death"? The phrase seems to import all kinds of meaning into the term death, when death has a rather simple meaning: it means that one is no longer alive. One cannot know anything once one is dead because . . . well, that sentence is complete without the "because." The premise of the (unstated) question seems to be that there is something knowable about death, epistemologically. I offer up, from a scientific point of view, what is knowable, i.e., the absence of life. Science does not speak in personal terms--from the scientific point of view, whose death this is, that we are speaking of, is irrelevant. I can speak as to what it will mean when I am dead. But I won't know anything then because . . . I'll be dead. What else is there to know?

The premise seems to be, yet again, that we as human beings (or Beings, or Being) have some special relationship to the Cosmos that, somehow, grounds our experiences and, again, somehow, validates our anxieties. To believe that, it seems to me, you need to have an explanation for that special relationship. If you reject supernatural beings (or a supernatural Being) with a particular interest in the doings of human beings, then it seems to me you're stuck with consciousness. But if you think that concisousness is better explained physically, then you are, again, making quite a leap going from the natural, material world to the supernatural, metaphysical plane.

I don't think that this is cheating. I start from, and work with, materialistic, naturalistic, and scientific premises. I reject any approach that posits a special relationship b/w human consciousness and Reality, the Universe, and whatever else you want to put in that position. I am up-front about these things. At the same time, I know that peope find the prospect of dying unpleasant. So do I. trust me. But that doesn't mean that there's some special, hidden meaning in the things that we find unpleasant. Those things simply thwart human desires.

I may be missing something. But I need to know, in rather concrete terms, what that is. I understand the appeal of mystification, of enveloping unpleasant (or unseemly) aspects of human existence in a shroud of mystery . . . but it seems to me that one must fight the urge to fudge these things. I also understand the urge to move the discussion up a level of abstraction, to go from anxieties about death to positing a cause for those anxieties, or a deeper meaning, that grounds or validates those anxieties. But again, it seems to me that if we're always honest about what we're doing, honest with ourselves, we can tell when we start telling tales to comfort children.

And I'm as much a child as anyone else, when it comes to this subject.