Do you fear oblivion?

Oblivion definition:
1. The condition or quality of being completely forgotten.

Questions to throw around:
1.Do you believe it is healthy to fear oblivion?
2.Does fear of oblivion drive you in your life?
3.Do you believe those who don't are less motivated to work hard?

Important: You must ignore any belief in the afterlife in answering this question.

I long for oblivion. Not only to be forgotten, but to forget as well. I'm tired of existing.

Generallyimpaired wrote:Oblivion definition:
1. The condition or quality of being completely forgotten.

Questions to throw around:
1.Do you believe it is healthy to fear oblivion?
2.Does fear of oblivion drive you in your life?
3.Do you believe those who don't are less motivated to work hard?

Important: You must ignore any belief in the afterlife in answering this question.

1. I have never thought about it really.....I have wished I would just fade away. Too Tired and the Winds of life keep blowing.
you know whatever................
2. no
3. no

With what I have carried on my shoulders all my life: oblivion is kinda nice in a way now that I think about it.

I hope I have not given to long a post. Your poll is interesting.

I fear death. It is a natuarl suvival trait that has been programed into us by our genes in order to asure their continued existance. If you think about it logically it is really nothing to fear. Before you were born you didn't exist. It was no big deal.

Everyone will be completely forgotten if you give it enough time. Unless you somehow make your way in history.... and even then, in 1000-3000 years you'll be completely forgotten (if your achievement is not high enough and if humans haven't destroyed themselves from their own stupidity, that is)

Time erases everything...

dbx wrote:Everyone will be completely forgotten if you give it enough time. Unless you somehow make your way in history.... and even then, in 1000-3000 years you'll be completely forgotten (if your achievement is not high enough and if humans haven't destroyed themselves from their own stupidity, that is)

Time erases everything...

That's what I'm getting at. Isn't that frightening? That every single moment is ultimately meaningless?

Even those who do make their way will eventually have their names lost to time.

Is their any reason to have morals within such an existence? Any reason to keep your feral impulses in check?

The question came to me when I was thinking about the difference between those depressed people who jump off buildings screaming versus those who simply swallow pills and fade away without a note.

Generallyimpaired wrote:That's what I'm getting at. Isn't that frightening? That every single moment is ultimately meaningless?

To me it isn't. I've thought about this for a very very long time and came to the realization that even though it may be frightening, fear won't take away the fact that one will be forgotten at some point. The only thing fear will cause is more distress and pain about something that you very well know you won't be able to change no matter how hard you try. So for me, it's much more useful to not fear this.

I wouldn't say that every single moment of your life is meaningless due to the fact of getting forgotten in time. A human as a single person is useless and meaningless (in this case, single person means that only one of its kind exists on this planet, no others are around) but we are a collective. Every single action you make, it has an effect (either local or global) on the collective, which in turn helps shape the future. If your actions are mostly local like in most humans (meaning they only impact a (very) limited amount of people), even then they will propagate in time and have an effect on the future - how much depends, but they will have an effect. If actions are global (like a president of a country decides to go to war) they will have a much greater impact on the future of the collective.

As a collective, we carry every single action of every person, even if he is long gone and forgotten, but his actions made an impact and changed the direction of the future, even if it may be not noticeable to us due to the complexity of our world and the inability of humans to retrace every single action in the past to understand the present and why things are like they are now. This is how every dynamic system works and our collective is a dynamic system too which depends on past action to shape its present and future course as a whole.

Even those who do make their way will eventually have their names lost to time.

not necessarily. If the collective keeps track of its past, the chance gets minimized (though it could happen - no system is perfect). Take the old Egyptian pharaohs which lived 3000-4000 years ago. They may have been long gone and no one living today has ever met one of them personally, but their actions and what they did are well known and had an impact on the collective. Today, people enjoy some of their artifacts like pyramids and tombs. Although they didn't build them themselves, they were the ones responsible for them by telling their own people to build them. Information preservation (like history records) are very important.

Is their any reason to have morals within such an existence? Any reason to keep your feral impulses in check?

yes there is, read above. Also for me personally, I'm a moral person due to my character and nature. I can't just get up one day and switch everything off and start behaving like an asshole all the time. Some things (natural or otherwise) are "programmed" in us and are not so easily changed.

The question came to me when I was thinking about the difference between those depressed people who jump off buildings screaming versus those who simply swallow pills and fade away without a note.

That's a good question but also one that can't be answered easily. There could be many reasons why one behave like this and another person behaves like that in a similar or the same situation.

Is their any reason to have morals within such an existence? Any reason to keep your feral impulses in check?

An excellent question, and one which all philosophers since the beginning of time have struggled with. I think one of the "benefits" of religion is that it keeps us from having to ask (and attempt to answer) this very difficult question (and other questions like it). With a supernatural being around to put everything into clear categories of right and wrong, we can rest easy not having to think about such things ourselves. It's really easy to see how religion developed as a result of the uncertainties of human existence. With science and reason to cast light upon our ignorance, the notion of God no longer had the power to keep our minds at ease anymore. And so Nietzsche told us: "God is dead"--and he was right.

Anyway, here's my own take:

Is there really any reason to be moral, to keep our impulses in check? Possibly not, which is why society has evolved as a force to keep such things in check for us. Since we recognize that others' impulses can harm us, we recognize the value of society despite having our own impulses limited by it. So it's easy to see why, when some people decide to take their own lives, they have no problem with taking out a bunch of other people just for the hell of it because they have no punishment to fear from society if they are killing themselves anyway.

But the way I see it (and this is where it gets really deep), all existence seems to be tied together in ways unimaginable, which should give pause to anyone thinking about inflicting harm upon another without good reason. What's to say there is any real separation between, say, my existence and your existence? The only real thing separating our individual existences is the perception by both of us that we exist individually. Take away that perception and what are we left with? Well...

We have a physical world in which the atoms and subatomic particles that make up our bodies are constantly intermingling, have been part of other things before we were around, and will continue to be part of other things after we are dead (think: laws of conservation of matter/energy). So there's physical interconnection.

We have a mental/spiritual world from which our consciousness dwells, and which seems to be highly connected to the physical world if not a part of it entirely. We understand even less about this then we do about the physical world, but again, there seems to be interconnection.

Interconnectedness implies to me that there is a oneness to existence that goes beyond our individual lives and the (temporary?) perceptions life binds us to. Perhaps all existence is one in the same: a massive jumble of perception of which we only have partial access to at any given time. So if you do harm or cause undue suffering to someone, it might only be another facet of your own existence to which you are causing pain.

In any case, from being on the receiving end of pain, I feel that the mere knowledge that there is probably some entity feeling the pain I cause to be reason enough to try not to cause any. The thought that this entity could be myself only reinforces this feeling for me.

Asuka wrote:It's only a game...

A game we play with ourselves perhaps? To keep ourselves from realizing that we are truly alone in the cosmos...

No I do not. I dont fear it, I dont long for it. It is coming and I accept it.

When I was a kid I almost choked to death in a diner. I remember everyone panicking, and I remember wondering why I didnt get scared.

It`s a bit of a cliche, but death is a part of life and to be honest, I dont know if I want to be remembered by anyone else then my wife, family and friends.

Sucks dying young though, dont want that, but not to old either.