Death is not acceptable to @JasonSilva in a way I cannot quite connect with. Death, for him, is "heart-wrenchingly, paralyzingly, depressingly sad beyond all measurable limits." I fail to see how, in a world in which EVERYTHING dies, including the very universe in which we live, saying any philosophy that admits death is "unacceptable." What one finds unacceptable is irrelevant when compared against reality. "The fact that we can ponder the infinite cosmos but are ultimately food for worms" is exactly what makes us extraordinary. Everything ends. Dying gives us size. We exist and we matter even if we are not eternal. More so, perhaps, precisely because we are not. Life is NOT anti-entropic, at least not on the individual biological level, where it matters most--to the biological individual.

There is a naiveté here, hubristic to be certain and yes, also splendidly optimistic, and even, I'll admit, 100% human. But it is irrational nonetheless. However, I guess Jason wouldn't deny that. For him, I suppose, reality is something that can be changed. And why not? People have done it before. My thinking may be "old guard." Great men and woman have radically altered how we live throughout history by ignoring people like me and bending so-called reality to their wishes. Is death one day going to be subverted too? And if so, would I not almost certainly partake? I'm completely for the sort of singularity event of which Jason speaks, even while admitting that it is likely centuries away.

I guess, for me, the thing that sets me on edge is how these sorts of monologues borrow religious language and tone to communicate a secular notion. Then again, that vocabulary is pervasive and new words need to be invented to remove ideas like this from all-too-easy-to-misinterpret spiritual conversation. For me, it rests uncomfortably beside Jason's other "We are the gods now" motif. By dressing the new in the skin of the old, how am I to tell them apart? And if the new starts thinking of itself as the old does of itself, how, exactly, are they different at all?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odwW8XlTD1I

Reply · Report Post