Chronicles of Life and Death

Following the previous commentary on “death is the only certainty”, the following chronicles -

People fear death. Why? People die. But do they?

Yes, I understand the sadness, aloneness that is perceived from the prospect of “death” with respect to “leaving this world”, but is that really why people are so death-aversive? Is it the fear of unknown? But what about for people who have already decided what to believe in with certainty? Can they still not be quite sure? Or is it the fear of uncertainty itself? Or rather, not really a fear, but simply an uneasiness caused by uncertainty? But uncertainty isn’t all bad either, in fact it’s the best thing ever sometimes, but of course that all depends, because it is not the uncertainty itself that causes any reaction but rather the all the infinite number of unfalsifiable theories that one could create, the perception, experience, and subjective value of each of them that cause the reactions. Here are just a few, stemming from our familiar friends, life and death:

People fear death. But what they do not realize is that they assume that they are alive. Not only do they assume that they are alive, but also that everyone else around them that “looks” alive is alive, that everyone who looks alive has never died, that they themselves have never died, and that you can only die once in a single lifetime. They no nothing about death, and consequentially nothing about being alive. They know nothing about anything, including the fact that they know nothing (which is the problem). They completely unknowingly make assumptions, millions of them without ever realizing that they are assumptions. These assumptions make them feel safe and secure as if they “knew” what was going on, what went on, and what would perhaps happen, and even if they did wonder once in a long while whether they were actually “alive”, they associate “probability” with it as if they understood anything about causality, induction, or being the cat inside Schrödinger’s box. 

Well scratch all of that. This is your reality (and just one of the many many infinite infinite sets) - fascinatingly, terrifyingly, and unfalsifiably so:

1. You are not alive. You are dead. You cannot die because you are already dead. You could “die” as many times as you wanted, but you could never cease to exist. You never remember exactly what it is like to die, but every instant in time you are constantly dying and continuing to exist, in which case it would be completely meaningless to call yourself either “dead” or “alive”. No matter how much you want to or don’t want to cease to exist, you cannot because once you exist, you exist, and for all you know, was there ever a beginning? Would there ever be an end? In this universe of yours, other people die and cease to exist, in your universe, but what about you? A state that you are not in remains and can only remain in a state of uncertainty until you reach that state - but then there would remain infinite uncertainties for all the other states as well.

2. You can and do remember every single time you’ve ever died - so many so many times, but each time you still continue to exist. No one else outside of yourself will never know that you “died” except for you. The difference from the first universe is that you believe that you “remember each time what it was like to die” that is, when you ask yourself “how did I die the last time I died?” then your mind would generate an answer that the inhabitant of Universe 1 would call “just your imagination” but you, the inhabitant of Universe 2 would call “what actually happened” because you further drop the assumption that “things that randomly pop into your mind have no actual meaning and/or could not have actually happened” i.e. “what” exactly causes those “thoughts” that follow sequentially, randomly, at will or not at will?

3. All of the above in Universe 2, but now sometimes you are dead, and sometimes you are alive, you just don’t know when. You could define being dead as being in a universe perceived to be exactly the same as though you were alive, but everyone that you see in the dead universe would also be dead and experience universes of type 2. You’d never know when you were dead or when you were alive since they would be perceived to be exactly the same, and you could also never cease to exist.

4. Same as Universe 3, except when you ask yourself whether you are “dead”, you can decide to believe that the answer did not pop out randomly (or it did) but whatever you happen to believe in that moment (whether or not by “choice”) is what would be your state of being dead or alive.

(Now, the question of whether you would continue to be “alive” or “dead” in the additional universes of other people generated while you “died” of course remains uncertain and has, for all purposes, nothing to do with the state of yourself in your own universe. But that’s already assuming 1) that universes of different people exist completely separately as infinite sets freely generated and destroyed and 2) other people’s universes even exist at all. In other words, if you want to go about experiencing “dying” infinite times just because you happen to believe you won’t cease to exist, you still need to take into account the uncertainties associated with those possibly existing universes of other people if you care about the emotional impact of your “death” on others - well, unless you are able to invariably believe that they don’t and will never exist.)

As you can see, with each addition level of abstraction, a.k.a. killing of concrete assumptions, the prospect of asking additional questions and answering of unfalsifiable possibilities becomes increasingly ”meaningless”, since the bottom line would simply be that the state of anything could at most be completely dependent on “what you happened to believe in the moment”. So I suppose most people, even if they were in the habit of questioning everything, would stick to believing the assumptions that “made the most sense”. But for me? How could I possibly have the slightest clue what that meant if my only infinite set of uncertainly experienced subjective universes were my own? Or are they?