Not even is it worth living this supposed possible future life, but even "might" it be worth living seems to be enough. This seems to be enough to stop a lot of people from ctb. It seems to be a reasonable problem that looks to be deeply ingrained in the subconscious instinct driven mind. This evidently could be no match to an overpowering desire to end an intensely painful and torture ridden experience that looks to have no solution or benefit from enough relief and therefore strongly compels to end life.
In short: We don't know our future in this life and we have a tendency of want to know no matter what, no matter how bad things look now since life seems so unpredictable and this could mean we could get a life worth having.
Doesn't matter how unlikely, we feel we have nothing to lose, something to gain, and we like to gamble, we want to keep gambling at the table of life day after day, trying to get some value from here and a little value from there, maybe today we will do this play, and tomorrow we could do that play a few times, and after that who knows. The point is we keep trying to maybe keep at it long enough to just build a bit of backup chips saved for some time so we can maybe stay yet another bit longer despite all the worry, and pain, and uncertainty.
What could be the basis, cause, or purpose? What are the fundamentals? Is there a solution?
No matter how unlikely it might seem from a rational stand point, our natural instincts seem to place a larger value to whatever chance no matter how slim to achieving or by chance somehow getting a life worth having, plus it might weight this against the possibility that if our life ends we could still exist as a person without a body in a worse life we might not be able to have as much control over.
Could we agree that the solution is accepting these two possibilities are worth facing in ending life? We would need to first reject what seems to be the default view that the possibility of having life that seems worth having has significant value, accept the view that this possibility has no value at all, or at least not to us, and that avoiding the possibility of ending in a worse or less valuable kind of existence as a person has no value at all and not worth to ponder about.
We would need to reject the notion that we have nothing to lose by continuing with life, reject giving any value to any possible chance of any kind of improvement and in doing so reject the notion that we have everything or even anything at all to gain.
This seems hard to overcome for even the average person in life that is at a net negative value now, that has been at such for a long time, and that even sees a longer future remaining on average at this overall negative value accounting for what it seems a life not worth having.
TL/DR; More Pondering
I don't know about the average person, but at least to me its almost a guaranteed fact that an eternal or even an unreasonably long life, no matter how pleasant it could be, eventually will become undesirable, even thou it could be a pleasant long life spanning perhaps even millions of years.
On the other hand it seems a lot of people feel we die too soon, or we age too soon, not being able to fulfill living different possible experiences or scenarios that could be valuable to us.
Yet it seems for most there are undesirable traits and things about the self or our environment we cannot change in order to be able to achieve certain desirable goals or to attain things or experiences worth having for their own sake, or to be able to reduce our experiences with pain enough in order to live a more pleasant or less painful life.
So then what is it, what is the dilemma that seems to hold us back from ending life after realizing we have, or would continue to have, or would eventually have in the near future a painful, undesirable, unpleasant, or unfulfilled life likely to be persistent and with little to no chance of improvement? What keeps us pondering?
I think it has to do at a fundamental level with survival instincts, but can we mentally sort of intellectually explain what we think and feel on this subject? I think there could be an answer we might on average or to some extent agree upon and could be quite simple.
We all have a tendency to derived pleasure from a perceived large degree of uncertainty in life that could lead to a better more desirable position and when we are sort of down in our accounting for the value of our life experience we ponder on how if somehow a fortunate series of events might eventually occur to us we could end up in a better situation where we could derived much value from our new and improved experience plus we could get even more value from a sense of achievement in having been able to be sustained by this survival instinct for long enough by making us make efforts in life to endure.
Our subconscious seems to store different experiences we might had with small wins and make it seem to us like they where actually much more valuable and makes us feel afraid that we could have lost valuable life experiences if we didn't endure and that similarly we could lose valuable life experiences in the future if we don't endure as we did, and that we could lose on even bigger more valuable improvement. At least that how it has felt so far to me.
So it seems that the central question we have is if the uncertainty of a possibility of having life worth living in the future is valuable enough in order to compel us to endure. In ending life then we would have to accept that we reject the value of any possibility, and accept to create and face a one hundred percent certainty of not having any chance of getting to experience life worth living in the future.
Yet in creating an ending to life it seems we would not face any kind penalty in the end since we would not exist.
So the fear seems to come from the perception of a minute possibility that we could end up experiencing life as a conscious person in a different way not involving the physical body we have and know. The different implications of such a possibility being real seem to be enormously unpredictable and maybe even more uncertain and volatile than the events and experiences in our current form of existence, and so our minds naturally seem to engage in a race from one direction to another in trying to consider all the range of almost infinite possibilities that could implicate us existing in a whole different kind of form or realm either completely disconnected from our current
more "TL/DR" at another random break
I think most of us having experienced either a majority or a big chunk of life not worth having or facing the prospects of worsening conditions mostly face a similar dilemma when it comes to consider the value of the possibility in ending life at some given point in the near future, and it has to do with the fact that life experiences seem to us unpredictable and random, and so our nature makes us consider that there is an large or even infinite amount of possibility for opportunities for experiencing positive change that could enhance the value of life enough to make it worth having for a longer time.
However this seems to be derived from a misguided innate tendency already pre-programmed in our psych and we can sort of look at how such kinds of deluded optimism permeates different sectors of society and how it sort of works together with other kinds of natural or animalistic survival instincts to create emotional and physical responses that have evolved in order to incentivize survival and at least some kind of dominance at all cost, even if its just some personal self dominance and a basic minimalist and uncertain level of survival.
Even thou we could conclude that all of this structure could be derived from millions of years of selection and gene expression, I think we could agree that we all share a common sort of intellectual or mental response that opposes the rational basis we might have to consider and defend the value we could see in ending life.
My question is, is it rational or rational enough? Could it be rational enough in some way? Or is it just simply not rational and only based on survival instincts we can't really for the most part control or change?
The course on death (phil 176) by shelly kagan posted in this forum helped me realize anyone could make better sense and do a better job at trying to solve the problem of life.
I haven't finished the lectures but so far it's a great course and maybe I could get better answers for my questions and problems with life.
In short: We don't know our future in this life and we have a tendency of want to know no matter what, no matter how bad things look now since life seems so unpredictable and this could mean we could get a life worth having.
Doesn't matter how unlikely, we feel we have nothing to lose, something to gain, and we like to gamble, we want to keep gambling at the table of life day after day, trying to get some value from here and a little value from there, maybe today we will do this play, and tomorrow we could do that play a few times, and after that who knows. The point is we keep trying to maybe keep at it long enough to just build a bit of backup chips saved for some time so we can maybe stay yet another bit longer despite all the worry, and pain, and uncertainty.
What could be the basis, cause, or purpose? What are the fundamentals? Is there a solution?
No matter how unlikely it might seem from a rational stand point, our natural instincts seem to place a larger value to whatever chance no matter how slim to achieving or by chance somehow getting a life worth having, plus it might weight this against the possibility that if our life ends we could still exist as a person without a body in a worse life we might not be able to have as much control over.
Could we agree that the solution is accepting these two possibilities are worth facing in ending life? We would need to first reject what seems to be the default view that the possibility of having life that seems worth having has significant value, accept the view that this possibility has no value at all, or at least not to us, and that avoiding the possibility of ending in a worse or less valuable kind of existence as a person has no value at all and not worth to ponder about.
We would need to reject the notion that we have nothing to lose by continuing with life, reject giving any value to any possible chance of any kind of improvement and in doing so reject the notion that we have everything or even anything at all to gain.
This seems hard to overcome for even the average person in life that is at a net negative value now, that has been at such for a long time, and that even sees a longer future remaining on average at this overall negative value accounting for what it seems a life not worth having.
TL/DR; More Pondering
I don't know about the average person, but at least to me its almost a guaranteed fact that an eternal or even an unreasonably long life, no matter how pleasant it could be, eventually will become undesirable, even thou it could be a pleasant long life spanning perhaps even millions of years.
On the other hand it seems a lot of people feel we die too soon, or we age too soon, not being able to fulfill living different possible experiences or scenarios that could be valuable to us.
Yet it seems for most there are undesirable traits and things about the self or our environment we cannot change in order to be able to achieve certain desirable goals or to attain things or experiences worth having for their own sake, or to be able to reduce our experiences with pain enough in order to live a more pleasant or less painful life.
So then what is it, what is the dilemma that seems to hold us back from ending life after realizing we have, or would continue to have, or would eventually have in the near future a painful, undesirable, unpleasant, or unfulfilled life likely to be persistent and with little to no chance of improvement? What keeps us pondering?
I think it has to do at a fundamental level with survival instincts, but can we mentally sort of intellectually explain what we think and feel on this subject? I think there could be an answer we might on average or to some extent agree upon and could be quite simple.
We all have a tendency to derived pleasure from a perceived large degree of uncertainty in life that could lead to a better more desirable position and when we are sort of down in our accounting for the value of our life experience we ponder on how if somehow a fortunate series of events might eventually occur to us we could end up in a better situation where we could derived much value from our new and improved experience plus we could get even more value from a sense of achievement in having been able to be sustained by this survival instinct for long enough by making us make efforts in life to endure.
Our subconscious seems to store different experiences we might had with small wins and make it seem to us like they where actually much more valuable and makes us feel afraid that we could have lost valuable life experiences if we didn't endure and that similarly we could lose valuable life experiences in the future if we don't endure as we did, and that we could lose on even bigger more valuable improvement. At least that how it has felt so far to me.
So it seems that the central question we have is if the uncertainty of a possibility of having life worth living in the future is valuable enough in order to compel us to endure. In ending life then we would have to accept that we reject the value of any possibility, and accept to create and face a one hundred percent certainty of not having any chance of getting to experience life worth living in the future.
Yet in creating an ending to life it seems we would not face any kind penalty in the end since we would not exist.
So the fear seems to come from the perception of a minute possibility that we could end up experiencing life as a conscious person in a different way not involving the physical body we have and know. The different implications of such a possibility being real seem to be enormously unpredictable and maybe even more uncertain and volatile than the events and experiences in our current form of existence, and so our minds naturally seem to engage in a race from one direction to another in trying to consider all the range of almost infinite possibilities that could implicate us existing in a whole different kind of form or realm either completely disconnected from our current
more "TL/DR" at another random break
I think most of us having experienced either a majority or a big chunk of life not worth having or facing the prospects of worsening conditions mostly face a similar dilemma when it comes to consider the value of the possibility in ending life at some given point in the near future, and it has to do with the fact that life experiences seem to us unpredictable and random, and so our nature makes us consider that there is an large or even infinite amount of possibility for opportunities for experiencing positive change that could enhance the value of life enough to make it worth having for a longer time.
However this seems to be derived from a misguided innate tendency already pre-programmed in our psych and we can sort of look at how such kinds of deluded optimism permeates different sectors of society and how it sort of works together with other kinds of natural or animalistic survival instincts to create emotional and physical responses that have evolved in order to incentivize survival and at least some kind of dominance at all cost, even if its just some personal self dominance and a basic minimalist and uncertain level of survival.
Even thou we could conclude that all of this structure could be derived from millions of years of selection and gene expression, I think we could agree that we all share a common sort of intellectual or mental response that opposes the rational basis we might have to consider and defend the value we could see in ending life.
My question is, is it rational or rational enough? Could it be rational enough in some way? Or is it just simply not rational and only based on survival instincts we can't really for the most part control or change?
The course on death (phil 176) by shelly kagan posted in this forum helped me realize anyone could make better sense and do a better job at trying to solve the problem of life.
I haven't finished the lectures but so far it's a great course and maybe I could get better answers for my questions and problems with life.
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