Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Jul 16, 2021 11:12 am
Dontaskme wrote: ↑Thu Jul 15, 2021 9:23 pm
Belinda wrote: ↑Thu Jul 15, 2021 7:17 pm
I agree with you as far as your vision goes. But there is another question: bearing in mind that this world is full of suffering , why do people often choose to stay alive? I mean, what is it that keeps many of us us willing to do something or other?
BTW not many people still believe in the myth of Christ. You may feel safe to express post-Christian philosophy in this forum: serious philosophers have done so.
Why do people choose to stay alive is because they have no other choice, they already exist. What’s the alternative?
To take a sharp kitchen knife to the gugula vein….and what would that cause, oh yeah, more horror and suffering. It’s just the gift that keeps on giving. Once you are alive you are not choosing to live. You are life.
Yes, you can choose to die, once you are born, but you cannot choose to be born, so there is no one choosing to stay alive.
Then you choose not to deliberately end your life because you fear a painful death.
You can choose not to kill yourself because the knowledge of a chooser is there for the human.
In reality, an animal for example has no concept of choice. For an animal, there is the instinctive move away from discomfort and pain in favor of comfort and relief. There is no choosing involved, the action is already built into the programme of every particular species according to it's kind. Their actions are determined by nature itself, it's automatic. The animal cannot inform itself via knowledge like we can, that it is in danger or it's experiencing discomfort.. whereby it knows it is choosing to avoid a certain bad situation. What's happening during animal behaviour is just automatic reflexive responses. It's the same for us too, just reflexive response. But because we have invented knowledge, we say we are choosing to avoid a certain situation.
Human brain has a more complex data storage, that is aware there is a choice being made as and through the 'sense of self' whereby they are able to inform themselves via conceptual understanding, made possible via knowledge. In reality, the choices being made by a 'sense of self' are choiceless choices. The idea of chooser is only known because the concept ( choice ) is known via knowledge, which is knowing, which is what being conscious means.
Animals don't have the same conceptual awareness that humans have. animals are conscious too, but they do not have a 'self consciousness' that we do.
So yes, you are right, we do not choose to kill ourselves because it's an un-natural thing to do, we are aware of the horror of such an event. Humans KNOW that pain is bad, so they do not choose it. Just as animals do not choose to kill themselves, they do not choose because there is no 'sense of a separate self' there in the animal that can inform itself it is making a choice.
Again, because humans have developed the capacity to know knowledge, this is how the 'sense of self' is created, as and through conceptual understanding, even though there is 'no separate self' actually there, except in this conception, as a concept known. Just as there is no self in a human baby or an animal. The 'sense of self' is artificially formed as and through the conception of language itself. It's an imposition.
The irony is, we choose not to kill ourselves because of the suffering and horror that would be involved. We know it exists. And that's the problem, we know it exists. We do not choose to kill ourself, but we do choose to force pain and suffering on a new life, every time we decide to procreate new life into existence, we impose it on the unborn, knowing pain and suffering exists through knowledge.
My point is, we would never intentionally cause our own personal self pain and suffering, but we do so everytime we make the choice to bring a new life into existence. We know the new life will be subject to pain and suffering. We're imposing something we ourselves fear on the choiceless consentless unborn ... I never used to think like this, but when I became aware of it. I was really shocked at the ignorance we live by as a human species, in the sense of what cruelty we are inflicting on other sentient creatures, including animals.
Sorry this takes so long to explain, but I try to do my best to get to the point.
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