What greater comfort could there be than learning that there is nothing to dread? Think of the good things in life: pleasure, success, happiness, friendship and love, for instance.
In order to have pleasure, happiness or love, we have to be alive. Death is not nothing to us, but something we have a powerful reason to avoid, at least in most circumstances.
That makes our aversion to death all too appropriate. We can see this in another way by thinking about the unfortunate cases where death seems a blessing. If it could never be bad to die, then it could never be good either. To be dead is not to exist at all, and just as there is nothing nasty about not existing, there is equally nothing pleasant about it. No one enjoys being dead, or feels relieved at having been released from the burden of existence.
Faced with the choice between dying now and being brutally tortured for 10 years and then dying, we ought to be completely indifferent. Even the most peaceful sleep can be bad by causing you to miss the party.
Death can be bad by causing you to miss the rest of your life. There is vigorous debate about whether people with an agonising terminal illness should have the right to end their lives, and whether doctors should be allowed to help them do it.
But according to Epicurus there would be no point in such a right, since it could never be better for any being to die, no matter what the circumstances. Not because the harms of death outweigh its benefits, but because it could not possibly have any benefit.
And since death can bring this about, there must be something good about death. It can clearly be a good thing to die. But if it can be good, then it can be bad too. These things are not bad in themselves. Still, they can have bad consequences. More precisely, death, like sleep, can be good, bad, or a mixture of the two, depending on the circumstances.
In ordinary cases it will have consequences of both sorts. Like most things, death has both a good side and a bad one. That raises our original question once more: what could make it bad? Dying today would make it impossible for me to see my son grow up, or spend time with those I love, or do any of the other things that would be good for me. It would deprive me of all sorts of pleasure and happiness. That would make it bad for me.
But if death is bad because of what it deprives us of, it will be hard to say how bad it is. What exactly does death deprive us of? But it could be that if I managed to escape the bus, I would be hit by a fire engine only the day after. That would make my death under the bus a bad thing, but not very bad. Consider a famous example. Charlie Parker, the greatest of all jazz musicians, died of pneumonia, aged It was a great tragedy, not just for those who loved his music, but also for him, who must have loved it more than anyone.
But how great? How bad was it for him to die when he did? The answer seems to depend on what would have happened otherwise. And what would have happened otherwise?
How long would he have lived? What would he have done with the extra time? It might be that his poor health and reckless lifestyle would have finished him off soon afterwards, so that surviving his bout of pneumonia would have led to another fatal illness only a few months later.
Then again, he could have had an epiphany and changed his ways. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Science News. Journal Reference : Elizabeth G. Blundon, Romayne E. Gallagher, Lawrence M. Electrophysiological evidence of preserved hearing at the end of life. Scientific Reports , ; 10 1 DOI: ScienceDaily, 8 July University of British Columbia.
Hearing persists at end of life. Retrieved November 11, from www. Turns out, it involves acrobatics as well. New research shows that a dynamic and delicate connection between two pairs of With further For the study, investigators performed continuous patient monitoring following Do Not Resuscitate - Comfort Care orders in patients with Even as death closes in on everyone in the airborne toxic event, death remains a complete abstraction.
The presence of death as something that drives the plot is an ironic trope in the novel. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies. Here Jack considers how the bank computer in the form of an ATM coincides with and corroborates his own account of his balance. He finds solace in the fact that the invisible technology is in accord with his natural sense of life.
Again, the novel deals with the unreal aspect of modern life even as we blur the lines between real life and our lives as represented by technology. The tension between what we see as real life and the technological representation of life is a central feature of what we call postmodernism.
Sound all around. How awful. The noise of the supermarket and the television becomes white noise. In this quotation Jack makes explicit the metaphor of white noise and death. Death itself becomes just another chaotic feature of the contemporary world.
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