I started reading a philosophy anthology I bought a year ago. I finally cracked it open and I’m delighted by my initial readings. I’m only into my first essay, but it has been enough to get my noggin going, hence the title. This is my very informal introduction into my very short essay on the nothingness of death.
This is a very general broad statement that I am neither entitled to make nor make the assumption without and concrete evidence, but I’m going to make it anyway. I think that we all describe nothingness as blackness. That non-existence is a place void of light, an absence of light, and a portal of nothing. This thought of nothingness has all kinds of errors. I think these types of thoughts stem from trying to imagine or picture what nothingness could be. It is a way to understand what we cannot understand. I’m not going to delve into the preposterous notions of near death experiences and the phenomena that surround it with psychic evaluations and supernatural events. I’m going to look at it from a purely scientific stand point.
In regards to death, we either believe it is to no longer exist as we were to say, human, but either people believe after this there is nothing or after this there is an afterlife. Neither need be proved one way or the other to suppose that what happens after this is an impossible feat by anyone to make. Anyone to say that they know what happens in death is a fool and only fools believe fools. The state of nothingness is not a state. Nothingness has no states or properties. It has no existence. So if you were dead you wouldn’t exist in nothingness, you would not exist at all. To think you will be existing nothingness is to assume that nothingness exists, therefore you would exist. That is true of an afterlife. It cannot be a dark place because you still exist, just not in the same physical sense you had once existed before. That being said, nothingness is not black or dark, it’s void of anything and everything. It’s really a metaphysical headache. The way the brain understands things is that if there is one thing, then there has to be an opposite, and if there is an opposite, then we can gather that there is an in between so to speak. We all know this to be true. To argue against it would be silly.
Death is not nothingness; it just is the absence of life. Although it makes sense to think that death would be nothingness, we cannot assume that to be dead is to be clouded in dark. To believe nothingness exists it to believe that nothingness it exactly what it is not. To exist means to be something that is tangible, something accessible, some place that can be visited in one way or another. And that is what takes away from what nothingness means.
The dictionary meanings are interesting. They read as follows “the state of being nothing”, “something that is nonexistent: a view of humanity as suspended between infinity and nothingness”, “lack of being; nonexistence: The sound faded into nothingness”. All referenced from Dictionary.com. The last one, the description or example to emulate nothingness is entirely wrong. Sound doesn’t fade into nothingness, there is always some remnant of its vibrations still rippling in the universe in one way or another. It’s a poor example to use. That’s the problem with a lot of things. They make sense, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily true, just that you can see the thinking behind it. That is the problem with the human brain. People say all sorts of things that can be logically understood, but not logically sound. I don’t know if that’s language, or our thought process or the combination of both. It is an interesting topic nonetheless. I should have taken logic in my third year, because I think my papers would have greatly improved by this asset I didn’t find an asset when I had first taken it. To get back to what I was saying, all kinds of people have these delusions and because they make sense they think they are right and
these people you cannot argue out of their belief because they are fools and to argue with is like arguing with a rock. I think that the human race has this informal and internal knowledge that we all seem to possess. Maybe we learned it somewhere; it just did not get added to when we could understand more intellectually deeper thought. I have no idea. I have no intention of examining this, but in philosophy you can. It is like there is some unwritten rule that if you can argue something and it is logical and logically sound it can be permitted as a truth. Technically I could explore this without any real hard science to back it up. I don’t think science could define what death and nothingness is either. If there is nothing to tangibly examine, then nothing can be learned from it. I’m boldly going to say that science is the study of events i.e. cause and effect, although Hume would say we couldn’t predict/determine nor see what really is the cause of any effect. The outcome could change at any point of time and that not all things are predictable 100% of the time. Unless its theoretical, and then it’s straight hypothesizing based on equations and physics and whatnot and then well, it’s not hard science anymore.
***This was the end of my essay which I didn't conclude. Too much time has passed to even maintain the same tone. But I'm sure what I said can be somewhat understood. Maybe not. I wrote it so it makes sense to me.***
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