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My two cents on the immortality thing
The topic of the day is immortality and whether or not it's a good thing. I tend to think it is not -- at least not if it's the sort that Spike or Angel has to look forward to, i.e. an unlimited number of days.
As a good theist, I think it is completey natural for us to desire immortality, because that is what we are built for. What I don't believe is that immortality understood as an endless succession of days is the sort of immortality that would actually fulfill our deep desire. We live in a culture that is all about desperately trying to get more. More is always better. More life. More stuff. More experiences. More sex. etc. etc. And for the last few hundred years, our culture has been quite good at churning out more. We live longer. We are more healthy. We have more stuff. We have more choices. Woo Hoo.
We're not any happier. Not by any measure we can find. We have five times more income, adjusted for inflation, than our grandparents. We are five times better off in a material sense -- across all dimensions -- bigger houses, more clothes, better and more varied food, more toys, faster transportation, etc. etc. etc. Yet it is not the case that the average person is five times happier than their grandparents. Indeed, we seem to be on average as happy with our lives as were our grandparents. You can go back a few centuries and find writers extolling the opulence of their societies, yet the standard of living they are describing would strike us as the worst kind of impoverishment. All this more-ness doesn't seem to do anything meaningful for us. Indeed, if you look at measures of psychological health you could argue that we are worse off. There's more depression, and anxiety and stress.
I came to the view that the mistake was to think of the infinite or of immortality as "more". We want life in abundance. But if that's just a long string of days do we really get abundance of life? It's not like you can add up the days and keep them in a jar somewhere. If that were the case, old people would be envied because they've experienced more days than the young. But we nowhere have that sense. We see the young as enviable because not only are they sexier and healthier, but most importantly because they have more days ahead of them than behind them. How is it that the potential for days is better than the accumulated experience of actual days? Seems to me that it's not unlike the Christmas phenonenon. All the packages are so exciting because they could be *anything*. But when you open them up they collapse into the one thing they are. And while they are often nice, even wonderful, that one finite thing is never as great as the infinite things the gift could have been before the package was opened. Days ahead of us are unopened Christmas presents. Days behind us are opened presents, finite, and wonderful -- but not satisfying. I don't see that adding in thousands and thousands more presents or days changes the underlying phenomenon.
Another way of looking at it is to notice that however long your life is, you only have that length in your memory or in your anticipation. The place where you really have life is right now. To find the abundance of life we crave, we should be as awake to *this* moment as possible. Whether we have 1 year or 10 years or 100 years or 10000 years before us, the only day we actually have is today. Be in it. If you want to be fulfilled by time or by things (both of which are real goods) don't imagine that more unopened presents is what you want. Open your present and treasure it. There is an abundance of good there. The mistake is to open the present, discard it and look out with anxious desire to make sure that there's a never-ending stream of packages to open.
I should add that one of the things I best love about Spike is that he gets it. He throws himself into the moment. Totally and completely alive now. And Spike doesn't sit around moping about how awful it would be to get staked in battle and lose the shot at a thousand years. He's not afraid of death because he's fully alive right now.
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I don't think the fear of not-being is rational. You can't fear something you will never experience and if you really end up not being, there will be no you to experience the not being.
I do think you can think that being is better than non-being. As a theist, I'm very strongly in the camp that thinks being is nothing but good.
But since you can't really add up all the days, the way to register the preference for being is to make sure you live now.
My hope as a Christian is that someday I'll have the fullness of being I am made for in whatever it is that constitutes heaven. As Augustine says, our hearts are restless until they rest in God. My hope is that it is a rest which is not stasis or boredom, but rather an overabundance of everything present in the one moment of the now. "Heaven" is a designation for "really good", yeah? really really good.
My fear is of an afterlife that is not in the presence of God. Since I'm pretty much a total schmuck, I've got no standing to say I deserve a great outcome. But as of now I get to hope in the mercy of God.
I don't think nothing is on the menu. But if it were, I don't know how to fear something that by definition I will never experience.
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I came to the view that the mistake was to think of the infinite or of immortality as "more". We want life in abundance. But if that's just a long string of days do we really get abundance of life?
It really bothers me that this is the common perception of the Christian afterlife in modern times, and I can only suppose that the people who embrace it must be of limited imagination. I'll quote David Darling on the "string of days" concept (even though I disagree with him that that's the proposed Christian afterlife): "Yes, it would be nice to be in paradise -- for a while. The problem is, it wouldn't end. Days there would stretch into weeks, weeks into years, and years into centuries. The novelty, it seems, would be bound to wear off. And the centuries would become millennia, and the millennia would become trillions upon trillions of years, because this is the life-everlasting -- the endless treadmill of the hereafter. In our desperation for a dash of excitement, a bit of daredevilry, we might almost be tempted to side with Mark Twain: 'Heaven for climate, hell for company.' The problem is -- time; there's just too much of it in eternity."
Which is one of the reasons I'm more amiable to the idea of a heaven as you described it in your third-to-last paragraph, or of the Buddhist concept of reincarnation (with a special fondness for the river metaphor Herman Hesse incorporated in "Siddhartha", if you've ever read that).
You're absolutely correct that carpe diem is where it's at, what we do in the here and now. As Siddhartha Gautama put it: "I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death. All that is dear to me and everyone I love are the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand."
I think the only thing I would disagree with is that the annihilation of consciousness is not a terrifying thought. There is nothing to be feared in non-being once you're there, but aren't you afraid of entering that state of non-being? I think it was
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My own experience was pretty much like that. I was raised in a secular family, but when I tried to really figure things out atheism made no sense to me, at least not as something that I could honestly live. I just couldn't escape the feeling that the call for us to bestow meaning on the universe was really an invitation to make stuff up.
Joss *is* an existentialist. What's interesting, though, is how much his world view resonates with me despite that. I'd have to write a lot to explain what I mean -- but maybe the simplest way to get at it is to point to his commentary on Objects in Space and say that a Thomist could hardly have said it better. A good atheist can root out flawed concepts of God, and while they think it's clearing out space for the belief that there is no God -- it's also clearing out space for a better understanding of God. So a theist can walk in his company for quite a while before having to take a different road.
It really bothers me that this is the common perception of the Christian afterlife in modern times, and I can only suppose that the people who embrace it must be of limited imagination. I'll quote David Darling on the "string of days" concept (even though I disagree with him that that's the proposed Christian afterlife): "Yes, it would be nice to be in paradise -- for a while. The problem is, it wouldn't end. Days there would stretch into weeks, weeks into years, and years into centuries. The novelty, it seems, would be bound to wear off. And the centuries would become millennia, and the millennia would become trillions upon trillions of years, because this is the life-everlasting -- the endless treadmill of the hereafter. In our desperation for a dash of excitement, a bit of daredevilry, we might almost be tempted to side with Mark Twain: 'Heaven for climate, hell for company.' The problem is -- time; there's just too much of it in eternity."
It's wacky, isn't it? A heaven that's a misery couldn't possibly be heaven. I agree with you that it's due to limited imagination.
I really like the last part of the quote from Siddhartha. Our actions are our true belongings. But notice that Joss would be right there with us on this.
I agree that the *process* of dying is scary as heck. I really am quite fearful of it. But if the non-being end really is our end, at least I could take comfort in the fact that there will be no me around to be scarred by the traumatic experience. In the meantime, my main argument is about the fear of being dead, not the fear of the process of dying. I can't help but think that our fear about the end of our consciousness is testimony to our utter inability to seriously imagine non-being as our final end. Our only idea of non-being is us experiencing nothing or maybe of us experiencing the loss of ourselves in a way that doesn't quite erase the us that experiences that loss. We just can't imagine non-being itself. So I think Stephen King is pretty much right on. In fact, the fact that the vast majority of people talk about and react to death as though there would be some experience of it, even when they are atheists, is taken as evidence that belief in an afterlife is hard-wired in us. (Whether that's because there is an afterlife or because we just have weird wiring is an open question; but there seems to be agreement that humans are overwhelmingly prone to thinking as though there will be an afterlife).
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Absolutely.
My family thought I was insane when I said that watching Buffy was making me excited about Christian faith again - but it really was!
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Same here, although my family is more atheist than secular. That one week of existentialism was the most miserable time of my life up to now, frankly, and I agree with you that it could be because we're not "wired" to think that way. Tolkien (if I'm remembering this correctly) said that imagination is of the utmost importance in one's world-view, because if you can imagine something, you can believe it. Well, it seems to work vice versa, too; I can't wrap my mind around not being, so I really can't believe it.
Joss *is* an existentialist. What's interesting, though, is how much his world view resonates with me despite that. I'd have to write a lot to explain what I mean -- but maybe the simplest way to get at it is to point to his commentary on Objects in Space and say that a Thomist could hardly have said it better. A good atheist can root out flawed concepts of God, and while they think it's clearing out space for the belief that there is no God -- it's also clearing out space for a better understanding of God. So a theist can walk in his company for quite a while before having to take a different road.
Well said. :) I would add that Joss's humanism is much more prominent than his atheism in his work, and he doesn't attempt to answer existence, he merely questions it (the absurdism of Objects in Space, the final "Where'd she go...?" of The Body, etc).
I really like the last part of the quote from Siddhartha. Our actions are our true belongings. But notice that Joss would be right there with us on this.
Yep, funnily enough, the Buddha and Sartre (whose philosophy Joss espouses) reached the same conclusion about "our actions being the ground on which we stand" even though, in action, the former is very optimistic and the latter isn't.
In the meantime, my main argument is about the fear of being dead, not the fear of the process of dying. I can't help but think that our fear about the end of our consciousness is testimony to our utter inability to seriously imagine non-being as our final end. Our only idea of non-being is us experiencing nothing or maybe of us experiencing the loss of ourselves in a way that doesn't quite erase the us that experiences that loss. We just can't imagine non-being itself. So I think Stephen King is pretty much right on. In fact, the fact that the vast majority of people talk about and react to death as though there would be some experience of it, even when they are atheists, is taken as evidence that belief in an afterlife is hard-wired in us. (Whether that's because there is an afterlife or because we just have weird wiring is an open question; but there seems to be agreement that humans are overwhelmingly prone to thinking as though there will be an afterlife).
I love you. :) One of the main reasons existentialism fails for me is summed up in these four pages from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, actually:
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This. This is what I meant by fear of non-being. It's like limits in mathematics. The fear exists up until the point of non-existence but never actually reaches that point.