Are we in a dying state?

smish

Is life really just dying ?
People say "live your life to the full..blah blah blah..all the time but it lacks substance.
Is it better to regard your life as dying ?

For me, I see it as Birth-Dying-Death.
One may take 10 years, 50 years or 100 years to die.

What is the purpous of death but to die ? what is the purpous of dying but to die for a good purpous rather than to live for yourself and your own selfishness?

MungBean

I see it as existence. You either exist or you dont and whatever you choose to do or think or the meanings you attach to things while you exist hold no value outside of that existence.

18AD

If life is all about dying, then death is equally all about living.

smish

18AD wrote: »

If life is all about dying, then death is equally all about living.

But death is not an experience in life so I dont see how it could be equal ?

Its an interesting one though. Boggles the mind

18AD

I was just curious as to why you placed such importance on dying.

Is life really just dying ?

If life is dying, then dying is life.

Neither takes precedence. If you put death first you have misunderstood the life part. If you put life first you have misunderstood the dying part.

If you judge everything by what happens at the end I'm afraid you have missed the point. The point is never just what happens at the end.

Perhaps? Who knows!

An0n

“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

One of my favourite Nietzsche quotes; and it sums up what I think about the dying state.

Living is a prerequisite for death; the converse is untrue.

b1nman

We are something that has come to believe we are alive. It is a definition, one which is an ill faithed attempt to define what it opposes. Life/death just define different aspects of the same process yo!

Priori

smish wrote: »

But death is not an experience in life

How do you know that? Understood as absolute cessation, then yes, perhaps, but I'm not convinced life or consciousness ends at the point of death of these physical bodies we don.

MisterEpicurus

smish wrote: »

Is life really just dying ?

I don't know why you phrase it as 'just dying'. You should be happy you're dying because that means your alive. Given the vast amounts of sperm and egg combinations (250 million sperm etc.) you're unlikely to be here to die in the first place. So I wouldn't call it 'just dying'.

People say "live your life to the full..blah blah blah..all the time but it lacks substance.
Is it better to regard your life as dying ?

Technically, we start dying when we're born. Nature has equipped us with the ability to pass on these genes and then die to allow a continuation of the gene. But the living vehicle of the body dies, not the passed on gene.

For me, I see it as Birth-Dying-Death.
One may take 10 years, 50 years or 100 years to die.

Hard to argue with that.

What is the purpous of death but to die ? what is the purpous of dying but to die for a good purpous rather than to live for yourself and your own selfishness?

There is no cycle of life without death. There would be no evolution without deaths, each species has to give way to provide expendable resources to the offspring. Moreover, our bodies cannot live forever, there comes an exhaustion point where processes break down. Either way, it would be horrible to live forever;

"Why will I read this book today, sure I can do it in 1,000 years" attitude.

Wanchor

I think it's more of a question of at what point does growth become decay.

EdenHazard

Living forever would be awesome, sure you could do all you need to do and then just chillax watching tv for ever on end, then break it up when you need to. Prob would suck at times but it beats not existing anyway.

Mardy Bum

Plato said philosophy is a meditation on and a preparation for death. By that he didnt mean the event at the end of life, he meant a death in life because there is no rebirth, there is no transformation without death. So we have to learn how to die and this is accomplished through examination of the self and transforming your old self into a better self. Every time you question a tacit assumption or an unarticluated presupposition there is a death of the self.

sarkozy

Lads, Heidegger had a few plum phrases. 'Dasein' or 'being-in-the-world' and, uh, something else in German which meant 'being-towards-death'.

A particular mode of being is the awareness of one's finitude, or mortality.

It's a nearly unique mode of existence in the sense that, and this can be challenged, we're one of the few species if only species that can reflect on their own existence and eventual end of that existence. In other words, we have an ability to experience being as being.

Anyway, Heidegger had a lot to say on the subject. Until him, ontology - the philosophy of being - was a very dry and impersonal thing. He integrated phenomenology and existentialism into a very complex and poetic philosophy which concentrated on unpacking the experience of being (since no metaphysician or scientist could describe that).

Pedant

Death is subjective.

CerebralCortex

MisterEpicurus wrote: »

I don't know why you phrase it as 'just dying'. You should be happy you're dying because that means your alive. Given the vast amounts of sperm and egg combinations (250 million sperm etc.) you're unlikely to be here to die in the first place. So I wouldn't call it 'just dying'.

You sound like Richard Dawkins. I'm not happy I'm dying. I'd prefer a body that had better mechanisms for maintaining the state of my cells thank you very much.

MisterEpicurus wrote: »

Technically, we start dying when we're born. Nature has equipped us with the ability to pass on these genes and then die to allow a continuation of the gene. But the living vehicle of the body dies, not the passed on gene.

Hard to argue with that.

There is no cycle of life without death. There would be no evolution without deaths, each species has to give way to provide expendable resources to the offspring. Moreover, our bodies cannot live forever, there comes an exhaustion point where processes break down. Either way, it would be horrible to live forever;

"Why will I read this book today, sure I can do it in 1,000 years" attitude.

Not necessarily true, technically we have the same metabolic processes, i.e. the same damage/faulty machinery that causes aging in human organisms exists from conception. The idea that evolution selects for aging or death doesn't make sense to me and I'm open to correction but I don't think it's accepted as the cause of aging in the bio sciences. That is to say I don't need to die to "pass on" a gene. Wtf is a cycle of life?

Procrastastudy

How we face death is at least as important as how we face life.

I thought this thread needed a Star Trek quote.

sheesh

Well we could look it from a biological point of view.

the vast majority of animals is to get food, reproduce.

Alot of animals will try to give their offspring a head start protecting them when they are young so that the maximum amount of offspring make it to adult and thereby reproducing themselves.

from a biological point of view we are reproduction machines we try to get as much of our DNA into the next generation as possible.

this can mean shagging as much as possible to try and optimise the number of off spring an individual has or it can also mean that you take care of a close relatives offspring if you cannot find a mate yourself.


So dying is not the point of life it is just the end of it.

to describe something as dying you would have to say that it has some of the attributes of death as in organ failure or at least diminshed output.
And even then the organism might have a long time before the dying process is complete.

Masteroid

I think of 'existence' as a journey through transition and change and 'life' is a 'shell' that serves to protect internal development.

And you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

The death of an egg results in the birth of a chicken and then the chicken 'dies' and becomes a hen which goes on to die and become part of my Sunday dinner and therefore 'reborn' as a metaphysical egg-shell that protects its contents which is me.

Even a single human life can be broken down into a succession of transitions through shells. The ova and the sperm die to give way to an embryo which dies to become a newborn baby which 'dies' and becomes an adolescent who 'dies' and becomes an adult. Each transition amounts to a metemorphosis, a completely changed state.

I would say that those who fear death are actually either in fear of the 'final' death or in fear of 'change', which is what life essentially is, a process of change. We generally don't see the passing phases of our lives as 'deaths' but even at an atomic level, we are different today than we were yesterday and the difference between a baby and an adolescent, in a metaphysical sense, suggests two completely different organisms.

A good analogy for this might be a rock band that has a high turnover of musicians and whose current lineup has none of the original members in it. As long as the band functions as a system with important elements remaining functional during transition then we have the illusion of constancy of the band and until the band officially disbands, we always consider it to live.

I am reminded of Trigger, from Only Fools and Horses, when he proudly announces that he has been using the same mop for many years. He then goes on to say how it had had many new handles and also many new heads over the time of its use.

Life is a bit like a mop. A lot of mops in fact and we are constantly changing handles and heads. We tend to view our lives as a single system but it is actually composed of many other systems which in their entirety, we experience as our life.

So, we could define a 'life' as being all the systems that are supported by the digestive system. Rathbornes Candles was a company founded in 1488 so therefore the only original part of the system is its name and yet it is considered to have had a continual existence as a company.

Also, it is worth remembering that change is affected at the smallest scale. Large-scale structure is the result of small-scale changes. This means that our lives are simply the outcomes of events, most of which we have no control over. Life is an evolving large-scale structure driven by tiny small-scale changes.

At a mundane level we can see how the operation of the entire universe can be viewed in terms of processes of life but equally, they can be viewed as processes of death.

But what makes life special? Well, 'consciousness' does. Consciousness, the 'I' of 'I think therefore I am' is a brief light that illuminates certain properties of systems that reveal an underlying beauty that suggests an artist's creation. Consciousness puts us in touch with the creator. Consciousness is the intersection point of all the systems that nourish life. This is where 'I' am.

And 'I' represent a small-scale change in the much larger-scale structure of society, which, in a sense, 'lives'.

But the small-scale structures are somewhat reliant on large-scale structure for nourishment or, to put it another way, energy. Similarly, 'life', a large-scale structure, is dependent on the functionality of its sub-systems, small-scale structures, but the sub-systems can only persist because 'life' makes a point of having Sunday dinner which pays the toll for the energy requirements of those systems. As long as they can attain nourishment they will persist and as long as they persist, so too does life.

Unfortunately, the act of persisting requires that change occurs at the smallest scale at the boundary where energy interacts with the sub-system and this can have negative consequences. Cholesterol is such an example which can be viewed as the exhaust of certain sub-systems's processes. If 'life' isn't careful about its diet then this can be a problem but in any event there are always going to be limits, constraints, on how long any given process can persist.

I went further than I expected with this so I will finish by saying that it stands to reason, if you accept evolution, that if there is a point to life it is to be a generator of tests for natural selection to conduct.

R.W Callaghan

Procrastastudy wrote: »

How we face death is at least as important as how we face life.

I thought this thread needed a Star Trek quote.

Now that Star Trek is over we are in a dying state

Black Swan

MOD COMMENT:
Please let's attempt a philosophical discussion of the thread topic, and reserve such Star Trek comments for less serious forums.

christmas2012

We are in a state of development up to about mid twenties,then after that its dying,dying,dying,but dying slowly,due to ionic imbalances with us and our world,our skin slowly ages,our teeth decay,there is internal wear and tear not noticed at first,cancers can occur,alzheimers and so on,or heart problems..Its a sad fact of life unfortunatley,but i wouldnt focus on it too much,think of all the time you have before you die,or at least if you die (or get killed) in even your 40's or 30's you still can say you had a good run..

stormraiser

smish wrote: »

Is life really just dying ?
People say "live your life to the full..blah blah blah..all the time but it lacks substance.
Is it better to regard your life as dying ?

For me, I see it as Birth-Dying-Death.
One may take 10 years, 50 years or 100 years to die.

What is the purpous of death but to die ? what is the purpous of dying but to die for a good purpous rather than to live for yourself and your own selfishness?

Well it is said (at least I've read it somewhere) that we are dying from the instant we are born. So in that respect I suppose life can be considered a journey towards death and the journey begins at birth). Life therefore is a process of dying but the purpose is the journey and not the arrival. The enjoyment is the travelling.