Philosophy Now Forum

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Overcoming Death in the Third Industrial Revolution



The first industrial revolution is widely considered to be FARMING.

Man's ability to understand & control nature lead to the science of farming.

And thus, man overcame the fear of starving.



The second industrial revolution is known as the HYDRO-ELECTRIC era.

Where mankind overcame or fear of not having clothing and shelter.


Which brings us to today; 2015, where we find ourselves in the middle of the third industrial revolution.

Our two biggest industries are religion and medicine.

Both of these pursuits openly acknowledge and exploit our current biggest fear; death.



There is a Maslow's hierarchy of needs pyramid at work here.


What if, through science, mankind is able to better understand our illusions and misconceptions of a possible death.

We are about to more widely overcome our fear of death.


It seems that this is true. This is where we are at if you live in a modern industrialized society.

Welcome aboard.



...oh yeah, when the digital age touches you, when you learn that we live eternally, when we, through science, remove the fear of death, how will that change you?




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Bill Wiltrack wrote:. . . What if, through science, mankind is able to better understand our illusions and misconceptions of a possible death. We are about to more widely overcome our fear of death. It seems that this is true. This is where we are at if you live in a modern industrialized society. Welcome aboard. ...oh yeah, when the digital age touches you, when you learn that we live eternally, when we, through science, remove the fear of death, how will that change you?

Fear of a prolonged period of dying can be justified. But any resulting absence of self and world following the actual termination of consciousness and functioning body ought to almost be slotted as a type of neutered bliss. Even in eternalism, the "length" of a painful, slow dying sequence would remain part of an unlucky person's motionless life-continuum. So any alleviation of dreading its possibility would come via knowledge of still existing through all the moments up till then (albeit the "current nows" still avariciously demanding the real status due to their seeming to be the only ones experienced).

Paul Davies wrote:And what if science were able to explain away the flow of time? Perhaps we would no longer fret about the future or grieve for the past. Worries about death might become as irrelevant as worries about birth. Expectation and nostalgia might cease to be part of human vocabulary. Above all, the sense of urgency that attaches to so much of human activity might evaporate. No longer would we be slaves to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s entreaty to “act, act in the living present,” for the past, present and future would literally be things of the past. [That Mysterious Flow, Scientific American 2002]

Brian Greene wrote:In day to day life, physicists view time in the same way that everyone else does. And that makes it all the more surprising when we examine how time appears in our current theoretical frameworks, because nowhere in our theories do we see the intuitive notion of time that we all embrace. Nowhere, for example, can we find the theoretical underpinnings for our sense that time flows from one second to the next. Instead, our theories seem to indicate that time doesn't flow --rather, past, present, and future are all there, always, forever frozen in place. [A Conversation With Brian Greene]

There is no death, unfortunately.

Life is a stream, and identities are maintained through avatars, knowledge, and data.