I find it difficult to know what you mean by “fear”. What I mean by it is a certain physical and emotional response to danger, involving elevated heart rate, heightened alertness, and readiness for strong exertion to overcome whatever the danger is. My most intense experiences of this have been in nightmares. In waking life, all that comes close is the flash of alarm when crossing a road and I realise that a car I failed to notice is bearing down on me. And watching the “Alien” films.
In this sense, fear and my own death have nothing to do with each other. Of course I would prefer not to die, but to call mere preference “fear” is like calling a dog’s tail a leg. The dog won’t start walking on it just because you pointed and said “leg”. Despite my preference, it is very likely that I will be dead in a few decades, but to me this is just a fact about the world.
What are other people pointing at when they point at their fear of death?
What are other people pointing at when they point at their fear of death?
My mind gets caught by the immensity of the future, and the finitude of my life. I think about all my experiences ending, and an endless void not even being observed by a perspective. I think of emptiness; a permanent and inevitable oblivion. It seems unjust, to have been but be no more.
As this happens, I can feel the physiological signs of panic. I lose sensation in my fingers and toes as blood is diverted to my core. The coldness creeps up to envelop my hands, sometimes reaching to my forearms if I don’t direct my mind’s eye to other thoughts. A small stone tumbles in my stomach. I feel a slight tingling along my scalp and cheeks, and my periphery becomes dimmed.
I think about all my experiences ending, and an endless void not even being observed by a perspective. I think of emptiness; a permanent and inevitable oblivion. It seems unjust, to have been but be no more.
Huh. Your “endless void” doesn’t appear to have a referent in my model of the world?
I expect these things to happen when I die:
I probably suffer before it happens; this physical location at which this happens is primarily inside my head, though it is best viewed at a level of abstraction which involves “thoughts” and “percepts” and not “neurons”.
After I die, there is a funeral and my friends and family are sad. This is bad. This physical location at which this happens is out in the world and inside their heads.
From the perspective of my personal subjective timeline, there is no such time as “after I die”, so there’s not much to say about it. Except by comparing it to a world in which I lived longer and had more experiences, which (unless those experiences are quite bad) is much better. I imagine a mapping between “subjective time” and “wall-clock time”: every subjective time has a wall-clock time, but not vice-versa (e.g. before I was born, during sleep, etc.).
Put differently, this “endless void” has already happened for you: for billions of years, before you were born. Was that bad?
Or put yet differently again, if humanity manages to make itself extinct (without even Unfriendly AI), and there is no more life in the universe forever after, that is to me unimaginably sad, because the universe is so empty in comparison to what it could have been. But I don’t see where in this universe there exists an “endless void”? Unless by that you are referring to how empty the universe is in comparison to how it could have been, and I was reading way too much into this phrase?
I once got into a philosophical debate over whether or not “nothing” was, itself, a thing. Some of this was unmitigated pedantry (i.e. as soon as X is “a thing” it can no longer be “not-a-thing” a.k.a. “no-thing”). Can you refer to nothing? There’s nothing (heh) you can really point to in order to do so. The space in between myself and my interlocutor was filled with air. An imagined void between the stars is even filled with distance, a space that is traversed by light or any potential interstellar travelers. A lack of experience was the closest I ever got to something that is truly nothing; something that can be defined only by its lack.
Perhaps the void can only be pointed towards in contrast to an alternative. I grew up christian, and so during my youth I regularly fantasized about an afterlife of bliss. Some of those mental roadways remain, but rather than leading towards a paradise they lead towards nothing. Instead of anticipating bliss, I anticipate a lack of experience. A lack of experience is not itself unpleasant, but anticipating it scares me.
You rightly point out that I was birthed from the void. If the past void does not fill me with fear (it doesn’t), how does a lack of experience differ simply for being placed in the future? Part of it is a matter of control. I well and truly cannot alter the past, but the future feels like it could be within my grasp. I mostly acknowledge that I will return to the void, but a part of me rebels and hopes that I will continue into the future indefinitely. In addition to control, much of the meaning I ascribe to life exists in the future as well. Part of this stems from the way that I look at mathematics; that limiting behavior is the foundation of my mathematical thinking. Therefore I intuitively expect that taking the limit of human life as time progresses (both my own and that of humanity as a whole) will reveal to me the meaning of life. The statement “everything is finite, therefore nothing matters” is intuitively appealing to me, but extremely unhelpful for making the most of my time alive.
I’m not sure how helpful this was for you, after writing it I still feel like I have missed more than I’ve covered in terms of why oblivion is so terrifying to me. It feels like I’ve quibbled about the details around the edge of something instead of getting to the heart of it, but I don’t know where the heart of it lies.
It sounds like our utility functions match on this pretty well. For example, I agree that the past and future are not symmetric for the same reason. So I don’t think we disagree about much concrete. The difference is:
A lack of experience is not itself unpleasant, but anticipating it scares me.
This is very foreign to me. I can’t simulate the mental state of “think[ing] about [...] an endless void not even being observed by a perspective”, not even a little bit. All I’ve got is “picture the world with me in it; picture the world without me; contrast”. The place my mind goes when I ask it to picture unobserved endless void is to picture an observed endless void, like being trapped without sensory input, which is horrifying but very different. (Is this endless void yours, or do “not you” share it with the lack of other people who have died?)
you imagine someone is threatening to kill you now
you know you would experience fear
you realize your eventual death in 30-50 years is going to be the same now feeling as it is now
you realize fearing death now is the same as fearing it in the future
you realize if you not fear future death that would be the same as not fearing now, so are you saying you wouldn’t be scared sh*tless if someone tried t kill you now? or perhaps your imagiantion is failing, that would explain how you not see that future death is the same
I have a healthy fear of death; it’s just that none of it stems from an “unobserved endless void”. Some of the specific things I fear are:
Being stabbed is painful and scary (it’s scary even if you know you’re going to live)
Most forms of dying are painful, and often very slow
The people I love mourning my loss
My partner not having my support
Future life experiences, not happening
All of the things I want to accomplish, not happening
The point I was making in this thread was that “unobserved endless void” is not on this list, I don’t know how to picture it, and I’m surprised that other people think it’s a big deal.
Who knows, maybe if I come close to dying some time I’ll suddenly gain a new ontological category of thing to be scared of.
The word I use for what you describe is shock, or perhaps if you’re allowing something longer term, dread. I use fear to mean the emotional state I usually (but not always) experience when anticipating negative outcomes. It is characterized by a contracting feeling in the chest, racing thoughts, and what I’ll call for lack of a better phrase “negative emotional valence”. I experience this when anticipating death, which is an outcome that is quite negative indeed. I also experience this, due to my social anxiety, before talking to almost anyone, despite not actually anticipating a negative outcome, and before important tests, which I don’t expect to cause me danger but could cause something bad to happen.
Do you experience this emotion in this way? If so, what do you call it?
The names we assign emotions are, of course, somewhat arbitrary, but I find it interesting that what you call fear seems to be centered around a possible danger. What do you consider danger to be, if not a risk of death? If an assassin were hunting you with a completely painless weapon, would you experience what you call fear?
The word I use for what you have described is anxiety. I do not experience it when contemplating the diminishing amount of thread left on the reel.
Yes, danger is a risk of negative things, and death is one of those things. The painlessness of the hypothetical assassin’s weapon would be a trifling matter compared to the fact that he would be trying to kill me. But I dare say that no-one knows how they will react under fire, until the first time. I am fortunate enough to have never lived in a bad neighbourhood or a war zone, nor given anyone reason to send assassins after me.
Huh, people really do have a lot of variation between them. I’d personally call anxiety a subtype of fear, but I suspect I have coarser grained emotional labels than some or even most.
Regardless, it’s fascinating you don’t experience anxiety when thinking about death. I guess unless we ever find something to actually prevent it for it you’re certainly luckier than I.
people really do have a lot of variation between them.
Big understatement, and insanely easy to forget. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy has been common knowledge for a long time, but it keeps surprising me just how many dimensions it applies to. That said, it doesn’t surprise me at all that anxiety experience is one of the highly-variable dimensions.
Note that it varies across time as well as between individuals. I used to be much more fearful of death (and physical pain, and failure at work, and many other things) than I am now. Part of it is intentional meditation, introspection, and therapy, but a lot of it seems to be just age. I’m simply more accepting of things than I was a few decades ago.
I find it difficult to know what you mean by “fear”. What I mean by it is a certain physical and emotional response to danger, involving elevated heart rate, heightened alertness, and readiness for strong exertion to overcome whatever the danger is. My most intense experiences of this have been in nightmares. In waking life, all that comes close is the flash of alarm when crossing a road and I realise that a car I failed to notice is bearing down on me. And watching the “Alien” films.
In this sense, fear and my own death have nothing to do with each other. Of course I would prefer not to die, but to call mere preference “fear” is like calling a dog’s tail a leg. The dog won’t start walking on it just because you pointed and said “leg”. Despite my preference, it is very likely that I will be dead in a few decades, but to me this is just a fact about the world.
What are other people pointing at when they point at their fear of death?
My mind gets caught by the immensity of the future, and the finitude of my life. I think about all my experiences ending, and an endless void not even being observed by a perspective. I think of emptiness; a permanent and inevitable oblivion. It seems unjust, to have been but be no more.
As this happens, I can feel the physiological signs of panic. I lose sensation in my fingers and toes as blood is diverted to my core. The coldness creeps up to envelop my hands, sometimes reaching to my forearms if I don’t direct my mind’s eye to other thoughts. A small stone tumbles in my stomach. I feel a slight tingling along my scalp and cheeks, and my periphery becomes dimmed.
Huh. Your “endless void” doesn’t appear to have a referent in my model of the world?
I expect these things to happen when I die:
I probably suffer before it happens; this physical location at which this happens is primarily inside my head, though it is best viewed at a level of abstraction which involves “thoughts” and “percepts” and not “neurons”.
After I die, there is a funeral and my friends and family are sad. This is bad. This physical location at which this happens is out in the world and inside their heads.
From the perspective of my personal subjective timeline, there is no such time as “after I die”, so there’s not much to say about it. Except by comparing it to a world in which I lived longer and had more experiences, which (unless those experiences are quite bad) is much better. I imagine a mapping between “subjective time” and “wall-clock time”: every subjective time has a wall-clock time, but not vice-versa (e.g. before I was born, during sleep, etc.).
Put differently, this “endless void” has already happened for you: for billions of years, before you were born. Was that bad?
Or put yet differently again, if humanity manages to make itself extinct (without even Unfriendly AI), and there is no more life in the universe forever after, that is to me unimaginably sad, because the universe is so empty in comparison to what it could have been. But I don’t see where in this universe there exists an “endless void”? Unless by that you are referring to how empty the universe is in comparison to how it could have been, and I was reading way too much into this phrase?
I once got into a philosophical debate over whether or not “nothing” was, itself, a thing. Some of this was unmitigated pedantry (i.e. as soon as X is “a thing” it can no longer be “not-a-thing” a.k.a. “no-thing”). Can you refer to nothing? There’s nothing (heh) you can really point to in order to do so. The space in between myself and my interlocutor was filled with air. An imagined void between the stars is even filled with distance, a space that is traversed by light or any potential interstellar travelers. A lack of experience was the closest I ever got to something that is truly nothing; something that can be defined only by its lack.
Perhaps the void can only be pointed towards in contrast to an alternative. I grew up christian, and so during my youth I regularly fantasized about an afterlife of bliss. Some of those mental roadways remain, but rather than leading towards a paradise they lead towards nothing. Instead of anticipating bliss, I anticipate a lack of experience. A lack of experience is not itself unpleasant, but anticipating it scares me.
You rightly point out that I was birthed from the void. If the past void does not fill me with fear (it doesn’t), how does a lack of experience differ simply for being placed in the future? Part of it is a matter of control. I well and truly cannot alter the past, but the future feels like it could be within my grasp. I mostly acknowledge that I will return to the void, but a part of me rebels and hopes that I will continue into the future indefinitely. In addition to control, much of the meaning I ascribe to life exists in the future as well. Part of this stems from the way that I look at mathematics; that limiting behavior is the foundation of my mathematical thinking. Therefore I intuitively expect that taking the limit of human life as time progresses (both my own and that of humanity as a whole) will reveal to me the meaning of life. The statement “everything is finite, therefore nothing matters” is intuitively appealing to me, but extremely unhelpful for making the most of my time alive.
I’m not sure how helpful this was for you, after writing it I still feel like I have missed more than I’ve covered in terms of why oblivion is so terrifying to me. It feels like I’ve quibbled about the details around the edge of something instead of getting to the heart of it, but I don’t know where the heart of it lies.
It sounds like our utility functions match on this pretty well. For example, I agree that the past and future are not symmetric for the same reason. So I don’t think we disagree about much concrete. The difference is:
This is very foreign to me. I can’t simulate the mental state of “think[ing] about [...] an endless void not even being observed by a perspective”, not even a little bit. All I’ve got is “picture the world with me in it; picture the world without me; contrast”. The place my mind goes when I ask it to picture unobserved endless void is to picture an observed endless void, like being trapped without sensory input, which is horrifying but very different. (Is this endless void yours, or do “not you” share it with the lack of other people who have died?)
you imagine someone is threatening to kill you now
you know you would experience fear
you realize your eventual death in 30-50 years is going to be the same now feeling as it is now
you realize fearing death now is the same as fearing it in the future
you realize if you not fear future death that would be the same as not fearing now, so are you saying you wouldn’t be scared sh*tless if someone tried t kill you now? or perhaps your imagiantion is failing, that would explain how you not see that future death is the same
I have a healthy fear of death; it’s just that none of it stems from an “unobserved endless void”. Some of the specific things I fear are:
Being stabbed is painful and scary (it’s scary even if you know you’re going to live)
Most forms of dying are painful, and often very slow
The people I love mourning my loss
My partner not having my support
Future life experiences, not happening
All of the things I want to accomplish, not happening
The point I was making in this thread was that “unobserved endless void” is not on this list, I don’t know how to picture it, and I’m surprised that other people think it’s a big deal.
Who knows, maybe if I come close to dying some time I’ll suddenly gain a new ontological category of thing to be scared of.
I feel an aversion to thinking about topics related in any way to my dying. No elevated heart rate, unless my person or my livelihood is threatened.
The word I use for what you describe is shock, or perhaps if you’re allowing something longer term, dread. I use fear to mean the emotional state I usually (but not always) experience when anticipating negative outcomes. It is characterized by a contracting feeling in the chest, racing thoughts, and what I’ll call for lack of a better phrase “negative emotional valence”. I experience this when anticipating death, which is an outcome that is quite negative indeed. I also experience this, due to my social anxiety, before talking to almost anyone, despite not actually anticipating a negative outcome, and before important tests, which I don’t expect to cause me danger but could cause something bad to happen.
Do you experience this emotion in this way? If so, what do you call it?
The names we assign emotions are, of course, somewhat arbitrary, but I find it interesting that what you call fear seems to be centered around a possible danger. What do you consider danger to be, if not a risk of death? If an assassin were hunting you with a completely painless weapon, would you experience what you call fear?
The word I use for what you have described is anxiety. I do not experience it when contemplating the diminishing amount of thread left on the reel.
Yes, danger is a risk of negative things, and death is one of those things. The painlessness of the hypothetical assassin’s weapon would be a trifling matter compared to the fact that he would be trying to kill me. But I dare say that no-one knows how they will react under fire, until the first time. I am fortunate enough to have never lived in a bad neighbourhood or a war zone, nor given anyone reason to send assassins after me.
Huh, people really do have a lot of variation between them. I’d personally call anxiety a subtype of fear, but I suspect I have coarser grained emotional labels than some or even most.
Regardless, it’s fascinating you don’t experience anxiety when thinking about death. I guess unless we ever find something to actually prevent it for it you’re certainly luckier than I.
Big understatement, and insanely easy to forget. https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy has been common knowledge for a long time, but it keeps surprising me just how many dimensions it applies to. That said, it doesn’t surprise me at all that anxiety experience is one of the highly-variable dimensions.
Note that it varies across time as well as between individuals. I used to be much more fearful of death (and physical pain, and failure at work, and many other things) than I am now. Part of it is intentional meditation, introspection, and therapy, but a lot of it seems to be just age. I’m simply more accepting of things than I was a few decades ago.