"I like to believe she died doing something she loved doing", like it makes any difference for her.
Consider that we're all in the process of dying - it's just not as imminent for most. I imagine you still want to enjoy life, despite knowing that one day you won't be around for that enjoyment to mean anything to you.
Knowing that everyone is eventually going to die, and that fulfillment is still important, why wouldn't you wish it upon people to enjoy their life til the very end?
Simply rationalizing it doesn't make it a good thing.
Why is that? The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that it isn't really important for the person dying, but only for the rest of us. When we remember that person we will remember their last time especially strongly, and it is nice if that is a good memory.
Or hmm. Another view that would justify it is that life is about optimizing some function. And that before we die we only have estimates of how well we are doing, so it is only just before death we get the final answer, if we succeeded in optimizing the function or not.
> If you die you die. What difference does it make
> if a second ago you enjoyed your life.
When that happens, you may find yourself sharing the dying person's pain, and that is a heavy burden. When I am listening to, or reading about, the death of someone. I wish for them an an easy passing, with as little pain and suffering as possible, for both them and their families and loved ones, because I know from my own experience how painful it is to watch someone die and be unable to help them. So for me, the living, it makes a huge difference if the person died doing something they loved (and thus were likely experiencing joy and satisfaction at the end) then knowing someone died slowly, painfully, and inevitably spending hours, perhaps days or weeks, moving toward their own demise.
For people like that, dying doing what they loved really does make it better. They lived their lives, following their own choices. And those lives do end early sometimes. But all lives end. Sitting behind a desk for 40 years then cheering at how long you lived... that sounds like the tragedy to me.
You really think a chainsaw juggler is going to have more fun getting mutilated by a chainsaw than dying in their sleep? Or that drowning is somehow not unbearably frightening just because you like water? Have you never heard of post traumatic stress? When you almost die doing something, it can make you not like it anymore. So why would you assume dying doing something you love isn't actually a good way to die losing the thing you love most?
Because you don't want to believe it.
Dying is scary. Death is not.
Yes, I'm talking about life after death here. I think it's relevant to the OP's comment because what happens after death (good, bad, nothing) logically effects the valuation of death.
Since it is inherently very difficult if not impossible to scientifically evaluate what the probabilities are in terms of life after death, it's pretty much a crap shoot and what we choose to believe about it is based on faith (in nothing, God, etc). Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager
PS: Pascal's Wager can be used to justify any belief whatsoever. It's not a good argument for anything.
Ok, let me frame it this way then. We're talking about the possibility of (a different kind of) life after physical death. My assertion is that there is no way to prove its existence or its non-existence. Therefor, any assertion about its nature or lack there of is uniformly based on faith.
> Pascal's Wager can be used to justify any belief whatsoever.
Not sure I follow you on this one, but it's not central to the discussion here.
Thought about it more and I think I understand your reasoning now. But I included Pascal's wager not to justify any particular belief (although I can totally see why you came to that conclusion as Pascal does come to a concrete conclusion in terms of a particular belief).
I included Pascal's wager not for his conclusion but because it supports my assertion that one can not know what happens after physical death. Therefore, any conclusion about that is based on faith alone.
EDIT: Addition to last point.
I know what you're talking about. And it is still not possible because it's a vacuous assertion. (And there's no such thing as 'non-physical' death, so that qualifier doesn't do anything. The word 'physical' is, for the most part, useless.)
But why are you even talking about life after death? Why aren't you talking about the invisible giant crab that's eating you right now? Or the dream that you're going to wake up from? Or the existence of Hogwarts?
You simply can't argue "nobody can really know" to a rational person in a convincing way. A rational person then must conclude that it doesn't even matter -- You have to make decisions, and you can't make reliable decisions by cherry picking belief in one absurd thing over the trillions of other absurd things.
We could debate all day about the possible existence of Hogwarts, but it would be stupid: we both know that it is a fiction, even though nobody can "prove for certain" that it isn't. We know this because the world we live in doesn't change if the existence of the thing changes. Nobody can make different decisions.
And when something fundamentally doesn't matter, that means it encodes no information about (non-mental) reality, and is thus meaningless, and can't be claimed to exist by default.
>I included Pascal's wager not for his conclusion but because it supports my assertion that one can not know what happens after physical death.
We know what happens after death. Many people have died, and you can look around and see what is happening right now. If you're talking about what happens to your subjective experiences afterward, then that's an experience singularity. A "north of the north pole" kind of absurdity. I don't suppose you're willing to argue that nobody knows if there's land north of the north pole, are you?
You don't see the circular reasoning involved in claiming that someone must actually visit north of the north pole to conclude it doesn't exist? So why should anyone have to return from life after death to know that it is fiction?
Mercy and palliative care is something I think forgotten all too often in medical care in the US, we focus so much on the cure at all costs, and less on the outcome or realistic outcome rather.
And yes, if that human culture dies -- if humanity goes extinct -- then that is just about the worst thing I could imagine. You can scale that down any number of ways, but at no point will I agree that death isn't bad. I don't care if it's a single cell, a single organ, a whole person, or a whole room full of people. It's only as good as the value it produces for the whole, and my personal suffering is not a factor to that insofar as it doesn't disable my contribution.
And I didn't say death is the worst thing that can happen to you.
I'm not in the business of pretending things aren't bad just because I prefer not to deal with them.