You have given reasons why death can provide utility. You have not established how these reasons comparatively outweigh the vast disutility of death, or that similar utility could not be gained without death.
I’ll give the classical rebuttal.
If you were immortal, and I mean “unaging and healing”, in a society of immortals, and reasonably adapted to immortality—would your post convince you to give death a try? I think you know the answer.
A general comment: “classic rebuttals” don’t work as well as you expect them to, because the person whose argument you are rebutting is likely already familiar with the rebuttal, yet persists in their “obvious wrongness”.
If you were immortal, and I mean “unaging and healing”, in a society of immortals, and reasonably adapted to immortality—would your post convince you to give death a try?
Yes, if the alternative is being overrun by short-lived but dynamic invaders who don’t give a damn about individual life. Whether this is indeed an alternative or just a nightmare scenario depends on many factors worth analyzing, calculating and modeling, not just yelling “shut up, deathist!”.
Yes, if the alternative is being overrun by short-lived but dynamic invaders who don’t give a damn about individual life.
In that situation, I suspect there are very, very many alternatives that would have to be tried and discarded before death as a concept even rose to your consideration. We are biased to consider it first because we already live with it. But that’s the point of the argument—imagine death really is alien to you.
You have given reasons why death can provide utility. You have not established how these reasons comparatively outweigh the vast disutility of death, or that similar utility could not be gained without death.
I’ll give the classical rebuttal.
If you were immortal, and I mean “unaging and healing”, in a society of immortals, and reasonably adapted to immortality—would your post convince you to give death a try? I think you know the answer.
A general comment: “classic rebuttals” don’t work as well as you expect them to, because the person whose argument you are rebutting is likely already familiar with the rebuttal, yet persists in their “obvious wrongness”.
Yes, if the alternative is being overrun by short-lived but dynamic invaders who don’t give a damn about individual life. Whether this is indeed an alternative or just a nightmare scenario depends on many factors worth analyzing, calculating and modeling, not just yelling “shut up, deathist!”.
In that situation, I suspect there are very, very many alternatives that would have to be tried and discarded before death as a concept even rose to your consideration. We are biased to consider it first because we already live with it. But that’s the point of the argument—imagine death really is alien to you.
That would not be this universe, where everything so far, alive or not, has a beginning and an end.
From my point of view death is not a single solution but one end of a spectrum of solutions. I thought I had made that clear enough.
Difficult to parse. Obviously you don’t mean “not knowing about death”. You might mean “not taken as unavoidable unquestioned part of life”.