and in what manner(s) are life and death opposites?
Seriously, that may sound like a dumb question, but I think of organic matter in one form, and ask myself whether it’s its opposite when it’s in another form.
Or, I ask whether eternal nonexistence is the opposite of my unimaginably fleeting consciousness/awareness (if comparisons can be made).
Birth is active, death is attractive. Life is the function that unites these poles. What is the result?
Any chance you can translate that into rational?
Seriously. It sounds like you just happened to net some random synaptic activity and translated it into language, otherwise completely unprocessed. Those of us not inside your head with you need a bit more processing to make that comprehensible.
(i.e.: Yeah, I’m fucking with you a bit, but ... oh come on!)
Absolutely (using “death” in the sense of “Not alive.” rather than “The transition between being alive and being dead.”).
I think the fact that death applies to both the transition and the state of being dead causes some confusion, or maybe just some slightly muddled thinking (not an error of some kind, just one of the inherent vagaries of having to rely on language to communicate thoughts ... particularly, it seems, English). It forces us to distinguish between death and dying, or to just presume we’re in agreement (or, of course, we may just plod along, oblivious—again, a vagary, not necessarily an error).
At any rate, yeah—not being alive is most certainly the norm, and life exceptional ... from the perspective of individual life forms anyway. However, we’re not sure yet whether the presence and development of life is the norm where the necessary conditions exist or not. In any case such environments are astronomically exceptional, and individual lives within them still more so.
Melancolin:
In my pretty vision of it, life is energy condensing into matter and death is matter transforming into energy.
Or, to put it another way, life is a pattern of matter and energy which dissolves into another pattern of matter and energy, which is death. And the cycle repeats.
I can’t reduce it to numbers or put it into a mathematical equation (although there might be some people on this forum who maybe could). I can only offer the way I imagine it.
If you’ve been pondering death, I can recommend a really fun book which I just picked up on a lark and enjoyed called ‘Exit Strategy’ by Michelle Cromer which is about various fun ways you can arrange to have your body disposed of when you are dead… including my two favorites: being shot off in a fireworks display, and being turned into a diamond. How cool is that?
Melancolin:
In my pretty vision of it, life is energy condensing into matter and death is matter transforming into energy.
Or, to put it another way, life is a pattern of matter and energy which dissolves into another pattern of matter and energy, which is death. And the cycle repeats.
so what does that energy become after death?
does this mean rebirth would make sense, scientifically speaking?
If you’ve been pondering death, I can recommend a really fun book which I just picked up on a lark and enjoyed called ‘Exit Strategy’ by Michelle Cromer which is about various fun ways you can arrange to have your body disposed of when you are dead… including my two favorites: being shot off in a fireworks display, and being turned into a diamond. How cool is that?
I dunno if i wanna go out ala Hunter S. Thompson.
I’m banking of Kurzweil’s predictions. I like the idea of death being nothing more than an engineering problem. I could think of plenty of reasons to hang around for at least a couple of hundred years.
