we exist and then we don't, that's just how we do
December 22, 2015 8:27 PM   Subscribe

🎶the singularity won't save you, there's not a thing that you can do, and you and me and us we're all gonna dieeeeeeeeeeeeee! 🎶(SLYT)
posted by divabat (37 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
As a thing that doesn't exist in a universe that likewise doesn't exist, it only seems right of me to have conceptually impossible and directly self-contradictory metaphysics. So I guess what I'm trying to say is ontological nihilism or GTFO.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:18 PM on December 22, 2015 [4 favorites]


Hey guys, check it out! Some youngsters have re-discovered that death is a thing!
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:19 PM on December 22, 2015 [5 favorites]


ahem, as an ontological nihilist I would be quite offended (if I existed) by your going around asserting willy-nilly that death is a thing, since clearly there are no things.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:21 PM on December 22, 2015 [5 favorites]


Hank Green's 35, he's not exactly a "youngster".
posted by divabat at 9:40 PM on December 22, 2015


Really now, death is overrated. Dying is where it's at. I'm dying right now. Look at me. Do you see me? I am dying. It's not hard, this dying. You should try it, too. Don't be afraid. Get yourself out there. Take a step. Good. You see. Dying is easy. It can even be fun if you know how to do it correctly. Most people don't. We who take dying seriously know what we are talking about. Don't be afraid. Just die. Go on now.
posted by perhapses at 9:43 PM on December 22, 2015 [7 favorites]


I didn't want to like this - but it won me over.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:46 PM on December 22, 2015


Lin-Manuel Miranda should consider The Life & Times of Epicurus for his next show. I would watch the hell out of that.

2. (PD 2) Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us. -from the Vatican Sayings
posted by pjsky at 10:01 PM on December 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Epicurus! I adopted that life-philosophy as a sort of easier to understand version of Buddhism. Plus the proto-scientific worldview that emphasized evidence over pure reason, and partial knowledge rather than singular Truth, was appealing. (P.S. that "PD 2" means that item is also from the Principle Doctrines, so it has a more reliable connection to the original source than the Vatican Sayings which, who knows where they passed through on their way to being rediscovered.)
posted by traveler_ at 10:10 PM on December 22, 2015


Epicureans. rolls eyes. the legit old-school Cyrenaics are where it's at, not Epicurus and his pack of splitters. After all, if one must admit that there exists anything at all — a mistake to start with — one should only admit the existence of things contained in the present moment, and aim to maximize the pleasure within each individual moment, without the planning, moderation, and absurd assumption of the existence of future moments that one finds in Epicurean thought.1

Okay but for reals I have mild beef with that quote from Epicurus, because (long story short) it treats the lack of sensation as equivalent to the absence of existence.2 There is a distinct qualitative difference between not experiencing a sensation, or not experiencing any sensation at all, and the removal of the conditions of experience itself. Epicurus's ideas that we can think that not having any particular sensations is commensurable to not having the possibility of sensation may be soothing, but it appears to ultimately misrepresent the real situation, such as it is.

1: What about the past, you may ask? I would define memory and the other physical traces of past-ness as the past existing within the present — the only way it can exist, because the present presents the only potential field for the potential existence of things — but I think that that "the past inside the present" stuff is less properly Cyrenaic and more just something I picked up from a Boards of Canada track.
2: plz people better at this than me tell me the obvious blunders I'm making.

posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:50 PM on December 22, 2015


p.s. time is fourfold, with four simultaneous days each earth rotation, as I'm sure everyone who is not educated stupid can see.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:54 PM on December 22, 2015 [11 favorites]


ahem, as an ontological nihilist I would be quite offended (if I existed) by your going around asserting willy-nilly that death is a thing, since clearly there are no things.

Ah well - by your reasoning, since neither offense nor ontological nihilists exist, then problem (if problems were a thing) solved! Hooray for tidy thinking! Which of course is also not a thing.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:15 PM on December 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Hank Green's 35, he's not exactly a "youngster".

That's all accordin' to perspective, innit.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:17 PM on December 22, 2015 [5 favorites]


You Can't Tip a Buick: plz people better at this than me tell me the obvious blunders I'm making.

Well if you do care, Epicurus went on at considerable length about the details of these ideas, while the Principle Doctrines and Vatican Sayings are basically slogans and condensed bits. If you read the more in-depth treatments, Epicurus argued that death disassembles the atoms making up a person's soul (and eventually the rest of their atoms, too.) So just as burning a log and grinding the coals into ash disassembles anything that could be called a "tree", so the self is completely ended at death and (he believed) there is no afterlife where we might be punished for not getting it right in this world.
posted by traveler_ at 11:17 PM on December 22, 2015 [2 favorites]


Hey guys, check it out! Some youngsters have re-discovered that death is a thing!

Do you think we can get them to re-discover consumption? And opera?
posted by happyroach at 11:44 PM on December 22, 2015


I just finished watching the Adam Ruins Everything episode on death, so I think I’m covered.

I like this one better anyway: When I Go I’m Gone
posted by bongo_x at 11:55 PM on December 22, 2015


Hey, this is pretty good.
posted by Sleeper at 12:23 AM on December 23, 2015


So just as burning a log and grinding the coals into ash disassembles anything that could be called a "tree", so the self is completely ended at death and (he believed) there is no afterlife where we might be punished for not getting it right in this world.

I guess the kernel of my beef (don't think too hard about the image) is less that Epicurus in some way posited the possibility of an "afterlife" — he didn't — and more that statements that treat the absence of sensation as in some way commensurable with death can't be properly interpreted as actually pertaining to death at all. Like, the advice in the lemme look it up in the Letter to Menoeceus (which admittedly may be one of his more slogan-ey texts) to:
Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.
treats "the privation of sentience" as a removal or abstraction of something from the self, rather than a removal of the self and the potential of properties pertaining to the self, and the phrase "whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation" treats death as a thing or event or condition that can be present, rather than as a removal of the conditions required for present-ness itself, and pervasively talks about the absence of terror (a thing, like terror itself, that is experienced within existence) rather than the withdrawal of existence.

There's elements of his philosophy that are quite nice, most especially his understanding of things, including people, as composite and easily destroyed rather than as derived from perfect singular forms or whatever. But the statements about death that don't appear to me to actually be statements about death bother me; there's something about them that seem disingenuous and grasping — like, there's a bit of a desperate terrified-and-in-denial just-hanging-on-by-the-skin-of-his-teeth quality to Epicurus's outwardly sunny disposition in the face of adversity.

Okay I'm being too literal-minded here maybe; by responding to an occasion to talk about death by talking about something that doesn't resemble death, Epicurus is not making claims about the nature of death but instead pointing toward a particular manner of living and beingness-toward-death or whatever implied in the method that Epicurus uses to get to the statements. As such, it's important for people using the ideas to avoid treating them as valuable because of their meaning as words rather than as pointers to a mode of being and behavior different from the one the "meaning" of the words indicate. In short, It must be treated as a philosophy that is fastidiously silent on the topic of death and how one should think of it, and thinks you should be too. Epicurus would as such find this song very silly.

But but wait, there's the Letter to Herotodus. This isn't silent on the nature of the dissolution of the soul, but tellingly it talks in two registers. When Epicurus here talks about the soul from the outside, he discusses it as a network or lattice of atoms spread throughout the body in which it is sheathed, and that dissolves upon removal from its sheath. As he puts it: "Moreover, when the whole frame is broken up, the soul is scattered and has no longer the same powers as before, nor the same notions; hence it does not possess sentience either." Epicurus is here a dispassionate outside observer of the soul in question and its sentience and its death.

He briefly returns to discussing the experience of death and attitudes toward it from the inside, though, later on when he's discussing the anxieties that beset the minds of humans: he says, in passing, "or because we are in dread of the mere insensibility of death, as if it had to do with us." The second part of that statement is interesting, where he notes that death has nothing to do with us — though I would say rather that death instead renders the concept of "us" incoherent. But that first part, the "in dread of the mere insensibility of death," once again treats death as if it comparable to lack of awareness (a thing we know well; we lack awareness of most of the stuff that's outside of our immediate perception, and we're only a little bit aware of most of the stuff that's inside it) rather than lack of self (a thing that we as selves can't know). When he's talking from the outside, he's fine, but when he's talking from the inside, he starts implicitly admitting to the possibility of selves — a mistake, I believe, and one that I don't think Buddha, for whatever it's worth, made — and that makes him get squirrelly and start talking in terms of lack of sensation rather than absence of existence.

And If I'm going to talk about things by talking through what they aren't rather than talking about what they are, my man is absolutely Pseudo-Dionysius, who as far as I can tell — I'm speaking with more confidence here than I actually have — got the best parts of Derrida down on paper well over a thousand years before Derrida (though obv he lived and worked well after the Epicurean heyday).

p.s. apologies to anyone who actually can read the original Greek if I'm making a fool of myself by using English translations; the "removal from" rather than "removal of" language appears to be present in all the public domain English translations.

p.p.s maybe for my next trick I should annoy every Buddhist in the world by sharing my thoughts on Śūnyatā based solely on English translations.

p.p.p.s: I think maybe one place I sneakily divided by zero or whatever in is my interpretation of "insensibility" as something experienced. "I know what being unconscious is like, so I know what death is like!" you might be thinking. All I can say (and I think this may be a legit Cyrenaic approach) is that you don't know what being unconscious is like, you know what having been unconscious is like. There is a difference, thereby, in an interruption of selfhood that itself ends, and an endless interruption of selfhood; the moment to experience the interruption as something that was and is now over is lacking.

p.p.p.p.s. the moon landings were faked outer space is a myth.

posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:43 AM on December 23, 2015 [5 favorites]


I prefer to get my reminder of this from William Shatner.
posted by the bricabrac man at 1:54 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


the singularity won't save you

Oh the singularity's not going to save you. Far from it, it pretty much obviates this whole song.

The gestalt post-intelligence will probably humor-reflex at the notion it was the Industrial Revolution or some other hairless-ape social-historical event which made individuals into cogs in the machine or bricks in the wall. Won't Hank Green be surprised to find himself an immortal mouthlessly-screaming eternally-replicated ganglion-pseudopod-subprocess of the post-singularity quantum-transcendent superorganism, sentience stretched out and twisted and knotted and disassembled and delaminated and endlessly recombined as a reticulated tissue manifold organelle in a parody of what was once biology, both deindividuated asylum inmate and the asylum itself, both an alien transmogrified Hannibal Lecter and the living brain of his victim as he consumes it, whose agony-and-mortification-without-selfhood will not cease when the last star flickers out.

Merry Christmas everyone!
posted by XMLicious at 3:41 AM on December 23, 2015 [8 favorites]


Since we were doing existentialist philosophers, here's my contribution:

The Thought of Death. It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatience and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life comes to light here every moment! And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life-loving people! How everyone's shadow, his gloomy travelling-companion stands behind him! It is always as in the last moment before the departure of an emigrant-ship: people have more than ever to say to one another, the hour presses, the ocean with its lonely silence waits impatiently behind all the noise - so greedy, so certain of its prey! And all, all, suppose that the past has been nothing, or a small matter, that the near future is everything: hence this haste, this crying, this self-deafening and self-overreaching! Everyone wants to be foremost in this future, - and yet death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future! How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are the furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life even a hundred times more worthy of their attention. - Nietzsche (The Gay Science, 278)
posted by bigendian at 4:08 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


For the longest time when I was a youth, living within the blast radius of some of the biggest industrial and civic targets in the United States, I figured my demise would be simultaneous, when the air when Uranius, and we'd all be 5 billion chunks of well done steak.

Also, since we're all going to go... don't try to accumulate so much stuff that your heirs have to spend years cleaning up after you. Try to be nice to them, and yourself too... stuff pushes the joy out of your life.
posted by MikeWarot at 4:11 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


One Ze Frank in the world was enough....
posted by HuronBob at 5:45 AM on December 23, 2015


I did appreciate the "This machine pwns noobs" guitar.

Though these days, I'm not so sure we've really moved beyond the need for the classic "This machine kills fascists."
posted by Naberius at 6:34 AM on December 23, 2015


Memento mori, motherfucker!
posted by Existential Dread at 6:53 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


So this is Christmas on Metafilter. I like it. Maybe one day we will be able to discuss Game of Thrones again.
posted by Bringer Tom at 7:10 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


I did not appreciate the "This machine pwns noobs" guitar.

But that's because I'm old (and near death, which becomes less problematic the nearer you get to it). Being old, I remember Woody Guthrie--and more than 50 years of Pete Seeger--and appreciate the generosity, integrity, idealism and intensity of the original "kills fascists" slogan. "Pwns noobs..." I'm well internetted enough to get it, but it does not inspire the kind of solidarity which makes life worth living for me. (I know I'm turning an ironic slogan into a manifesto of insensitive geekery here, but what else is Metafilter good for?)
posted by kozad at 7:23 AM on December 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


Hank held up his guitar and declared that it was his "pwner." A random YouTube commenter left a comment on the video reading "This machine pwns n00bs," referencing famous photo of Woodie Guthrie holding up a guitar reading "This machine kills fascists," ... Hank wrote the phrase on his guitar by the next video and shortly afterwards decided to call his album that.
Other songs by Hank: Mother Pheasant Plucker, Oh JK Rowling, Tumblr: The Musical
posted by INFJ at 8:02 AM on December 23, 2015


Merry Christmas to you, too, Divabat. Christ what a thing to post in the Yuletide season!

Count me as another who agrees that this is some young hipster trying too hard.
posted by marienbad at 8:15 AM on December 23, 2015


I'm not the world's biggest fan of Hank's music, but I think he and his brother John are a huge force for good. The death song from the FPP is funnier in the context of the weekly podcast they do where Hank will often be his chipper science-nerd self and John (who has been pretty open elsewhere about his struggles with OCD and anxiety) will do something like listing the top ten apocalyptic scenarios he is most worried about (including of course his own personal death). John's contributions to their "humor podcast" are a running gag on the show.
posted by Wretch729 at 9:34 AM on December 23, 2015


everyone so far has died too

black swan fallacy!!!
posted by mittens at 9:41 AM on December 23, 2015 [4 favorites]


I wanted to like this song since I like both death and Hank, but alas, just can't deal with his songs.
posted by Theta States at 9:48 AM on December 23, 2015


It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all of the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life even a hundred times more worthy of their attention. - Nietzsche (The Gay Science, 278)

Nietzsche was like explicitly a big fan of Epicurus, right?

the way Nietzsche needed to get over himself and the way I need to get over myself are diametrically opposed, I think... in any case, I have trouble deeply engaging with his material rather than throwing his books across the room.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:57 AM on December 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


You Can't Tip a Buick, sorry, I have to say your questions are beyond me I think. Classical Philosophy isn't really my strong suit. But if I understand what you're saying, I think you need to interpret the context of why Epicurus was describing things this way: he was talking to people afraid of death because they were afraid of a hellish afterlife. So he wasn't so much calling death and the absence of sensation as commensurable, but connected causally: death disintegrates the self, thus there is no experience of an afterlife, thus no suffering after death. Other parts of his writings go into some depth (from a perspective of natural philosophy, mostly) trying to justify the steps here: that death disintegrates the soul, that this causes an end of sensation, that that means no suffering. In other places, in broader subjects than just death (like the possibility of other people hating you and hurting you, or the possibility of the weather causing a disaster) he's talking about how the expectation of future suffering connects to present suffering, and how to deal with that in various ways.

Secondly, I don't see him as “implicitly admitting to the possibility of selves”—rather, I interpret “as if it had to do with us” as being a mention of the version you'd prefer, that death renders the concept of “us” incoherent. I believe that, since that's a perspective he'd developed in depth elsewhere, he was referencing it. But because, again, he was talking to people for whom the fear of post-death sensation was the pressing fear (as he analyzed it), he spoke directly to that phase even though his more in-depth ‘pseudo-physics’ treatments based that lack of post-death sensation on a lack of post-death self.

“[T]here's a bit of a desperate terrified-and-in-denial just-hanging-on-by-the-skin-of-his-teeth quality to Epicurus's outwardly sunny disposition in the face of adversity.” According to the story in his Letter to Idomeneus,
I have written this letter to you on a happy day to me, which is also the last day of my life. For I have been attacked by a painful inability to urinate, and also dysentery, so violent that nothing can be added to the violence of my sufferings. But the cheerfulness of my mind, which comes from the recollection of all my philosophical contemplation, counterbalances all these afflictions. And I beg you to take care of the children of Metrodorus, in a manner worthy of the devotion shown by the young man to me, and to philosophy.
If he was faking it, he was faking it to the end.

As far as I know it's best to take Epicurus' writings literally, but also to take them all together en masse rather than digging into “well the fact that he didn't say X here, might be implicitly admitting the possibility of Y.” I kind of hate to say, well, you really have to read all of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura to trust that Epicurus isn't secretly admitting a version of the self in the way he phrases statements about the lack of sensation during the lack of self in death, but it couldn't hurt.
posted by traveler_ at 10:00 AM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


> If he was faking it, he was faking it to the end.

I think maybe "no, for reals, fake it to the end, fake it all the way to the end" really is what Epicurus was ultimately on about — this is maybe why Nietzsche was a fan — but yeah I do need to read Lucretius. I have a big gap in my knowledge w/r/t the pre-Christian Romans, cause I'm most often all "ugh this is covered in Rome get it off me" whenever I read them.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:44 PM on December 23, 2015


It is admirable, though, that Epicurus was able to cheerfully recall his contemplations of philosophy while in the throes of a literally mortal case of the shits, though, because in my experience the sensations associated with severe diarrhea and nausea are the best things in the world for convincing me of the inability of philosophy to address the human condition in any meaningful way.

(this comment is similar in form to a poop joke, but I mean it seriously).
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 1:51 PM on December 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


If there is little consolation to be had from the ancients and the Church, you could try the Cunard Steamship motto:

GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN
posted by Postroad at 1:58 PM on December 23, 2015


"Existence which does not exist, exists but not forever" - Zen Master Fa-Tsang
(via Brad Warner's fb)

posted by sneebler at 11:37 AM on December 24, 2015


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