he was not very old. how unfortunate
This question motivates a different follow-up question: how should we pay attention? Our senses can be deceived, so we should also use reason and conceptual understandings to literally enrich (de-noise perhaps) our raw senses?
But some philosophies (e.g. Buddhism, or at least some variants of it) emphasizes that ‘conceptual’ understandings can distract us from reality, which is always changing.
Almost every philosophy has paradoxes — some of which have convincing resolutions. I’m hoping to hear more points of view…
I mean it's obviously sensible. In the context of binary information in a computer, for instance, we (generally) don't care about exact voltages, we group it all together as 0 or 1. And talking about genetic information, we don't (usually) care about, say, if a slightly unusual isotope has snuck in in one of the usual nucleic acids, since that "information" isn't copied in the usual way.
It's very obvious, but it's also more profound than it looks. Even for something as seemingly purely mathematical as information, there's actually teleology, assumptions about what matters, baked in every time we apply it.
Edit: You captured the idea, I am able to determine what will be my next steps in life, but once my life has ended it will be written in stone. So what's time, what is the future and what is the past? I do not care if it's some quantum many-worlds interpretation, or a spacetime slice of bread that moves with the arrow of time! In this way I am already dead, and I am still newborn.