Think about it this way. The past 28 years of your life are already dead, as history is not something living. The future years of your life, meanwhile, have yet to come into existence. You have already lost all of your past; and as soon as you “gain” your future, you already lose it. All you are is but an ever-changing state; the “now” that you inhabit is but an instruction pointer in the registers of a machine that is continually executing instructions.
What do you care if the machine stops processing at any point? Do you think you will notice? Does a program’s thread of execution notice when the OS swaps it out and resumes execution on another thread? Does a thread of execution notice if it is never resumed?
I’m not claiming that we are but software running on the hardware of the universe, but this is what you seem to posit; and if this is so, then death is no more terrible than it’s terrible that the sky appears blue, or that the grasses appear green, or that the Sun appears yellow.
And yet, you seem to believe that death is somehow “horrible”, so you are sad when it takes place; and you believe that other things are somehow “good”, so you are happy when they happen. This seems to be at odds with the things-just-are view that you otherwise represent, and it tells me that these feelings of yours are based on something more fundamental, something more axiomatic than reason. Reason is a consistency vehicle; but these feelings of yours, they are. Reason may help provoke them, but they exist independently of reason. And indeed, such feelings are known to distort the reasoning process in people substantially, causing them to delay validation of critical basic assumptions, thus causing them to reach and stick by invalid conclusions even though their reasoning process may be sound. Garbage in, garbage out.
This reason-distorting effect is why emotions are thought of as at odds with reason. And with good reasons. :)
Eliezer: It may be rational to (choose to) feel, but feelings are not rooted in reason. Reason is a consistency-based mechanism which we use to validate new information based on previously validated information, or to derive new hypotheses based on information we have already interned. One can reason with great skill, and one can know a great deal about the reasoning process in general, and yet one’s conclusions may be false or irrelevant if one has not validated all of the basic assumptions one’s reasoning ultimately depends on. But validating these most fundamental assumptions is difficult and time consuming, and is a task most of us do not tend to, as we instead scurry about to achieve our daily goals and objectives, which in turn we determine by applying reason to data and attitudes we have previously interned, which in turn are based ultimately upon basic premises which we have never thorougly investigated.
These are the thoughts that I get after reading your eulogy for your brother, Yehuda. I get the impression that you are too busy studying how to defeat death, to stop and think why death should be bad in the first place. Of course, to stop and think about it would mean opening yourself to the possibility that death might be acceptable after all, which in turn would threaten to annihilate your innermost motivations.