Mortality and Pointlessness

Perhaps, but it won't undermine my projects until after the point that I'll be in a position to be bothered much by it. Or to put it another way: to the extent that your proposition is true, it also undermines the point of worrying about it.

That we, and all other life forms eventually die, is true, making our deaths such an obvious given that its hard to see it as an crushing weight upon our projects. I have never met a thinking person who worried about dying--what people worry about is the timing and specific circumstances of their deaths. These worries typically don't arise, in first-world western culture, until one is 55 or 60--or, in exceptionally stable people, even later. Until this time, with reasonably good health, one has 30-40 years of good opportunity for planning and developing significant endeavors. The only common exception might be mathematicians; they seem to think best before age 40--or so they have told me. If we accept as a given that we're all going to die and that it's largely a crap-shoot whether we achieve anything truly significant in our lives, it's hard, for me, to see how anything we might achieve is undermined by our awareness of our eventual deaths. And, after we're dead...

For 21 years we only get stronger - what makes you think death is the only option?

Shapeless and Miklos,

I'm not saying we should worry about death or that we should worry that it undermines our projects. I'm just suggesting that it does, in fact, undermine them. Of course, it undermines the project (if it can be called a project) of worrying about death undermining our projects. It undermines the discussion we are having.

I'm not saying that our awareness of death makes us feel like all of our projects are pointless. I agree that that isn't necessarily true. Instead, I'm saying that the fact that we will die renders all of our projects actually pointless. This would be the case even if we didn't know we were going to die, or even if we didn't know that our projects are pointless.


Hanno,

So what if we do get stronger for 21 years? (I'm not sure that we do, but I'll accept it for the sake of argument.) After a while we start getting weaker, and then we die. Right? What makes you think immortality - especially immortality with any quality of life - is an option?

That sounds very close to saying that this knowledge has no effect at all.

I should clarify that I'm not disagreeing, per se. It's difficult to agree or disagree with a proposition that holds true given any set of circumstances--otherwise known as a tautology. It's very much like the "your-life-is-a-dream" conundrum: if you told me that everything we experience is actually a dream, nothing would change except that we'd stop calling it "reality" and start calling it "a dream that we are experiencing as reality." The consequences of the dream theory are entirely rhetorical, unless one wants to take the time to be disturbed by them. The same is true here: if you tell me that death renders our projects pointless, nothing would change except that projects we previously considered "meaningful" must now be considered "meaningful up until the moment when those involved in or affected by it are dead." The consequences are similarly entirely rhetorical, unless one wants to take the time to be disturbed by them.

bm

Good morning, Agrote. Thank you for the clarification, but I still see a number of holes in the proposition that "the fact that we shall die renders all of our projects actually pointless."

First, consider purposeful dissemination of advantageous genes. If a person who is, say, highly-gifted intellectually--a quality that has been proven to be partially heritable--decides that he will marry, not only for love, but in order to pass on his perhaps-useful-in-the-future intelligence, this project is not necessarily pointless. Oddly, when I was young, I knew a man whose parents were both children of Nobelists, who had married, to a degree, because they were interested in what their children might be able to do. The son of this union had an extraordinary facility with complex mathematical games--but, beyond that, his achievements were entirely ordinary. Perhaps, in another context, he could have been a highly-useful codebreaker. Dunno. The whole situation smacked of a Nazi breeding program to me, so I was not disappointed that the son did not grow up an amazing achiever--but he was very bright.

Also, what about the unlimited examples of cross-generational altruism that are available? For a simple example, one sets up a rather basic trust for his children. During his lifetime, he collects interest--which allows him to promote his projects while he lives--and, when he dies, his children have the means to explore their own projects. The same pattern exists in most charitable foundations. Those family members who started the Ford Foundation are all dead (as far as I know), but their foundation continues the worthwhile projects they envisioned its facilitating.

Re: Mortality and Pointlessness


But what is left behind lives on.

Appreciation of something (art, music, architecture, etc) is not pointless; the death of the artist does not render the art pointless.

Shapeless, if our whole live were a dream, we would not even know about it. We would have no concept of a dream since we would have nothing to compare it to, we would not have waking life to compare it to, so therefore we would not be aware we are dreaming.

I'd respond to this subject, but what's the point--we're all doomed.

When the dream came
I held my breath with my eyes closed
I went insane
Like a smoke ring day when the wind blows
Now I won't be back 'til later on
If I do come back at all . . .

Agrote, one of my projects is painting. I do think that if I were immortal, in about a thousand years (an arbitrary number, of course) my paintings would either lose their artistic significance by becoming so old fashion and primitive or they will become objects only of archaeological interest which is, of course, not what I intend for them.

Setanta, it's a matter of perspective, of course. You say we're doomed, I say that we are guaranteed eternal peace. We are both right and both wrong; there can't be more than interpretation.

If nothing is eternal bliss you must be beyond bliss with a ham sandwich.

Bingo. Whether or not our lives are dreams has no perceptual effect. The same, I am arguing, goes for the proposition that death renders projects pointless.

I do think that the things we do, our "projects", should have intrinsic value for us. We should do them for the sake of the doing. That certainly is true for art and friendship. Extrinsic meaning or value is "something else", something quite secondary. Indeed, our lives should be lived for the sake of living, not for some hypothetical distant goal they may serve.

What "proposition that holds true given any set of circumstances" are you referring to? There are circumstances in which my proposition that "death undermines all of our projects" would be false. Some people in this thread are suggesting that we are in such circumstances, and that the proposition actually is false. It isn't a tautology.

And if life is only a dream, then this is very significant. Just because our experience of a dream-life is indistinguishable from our experience of a real-life, that doesn't mean they are not distinct things. You might not be able to tell identical twins apart, but that doesn't change the fact that there are actually two of them, and they are different.

And the significant difference between a real-life and a dream-life isn't just that we'd be more disturbed if we thought we were living in a dream. It's an ontological difference: if my life is only a dream, then the computer I am typing at does not exist (or not in the way that I believe it to exist). The desk doesn't exist, nor the chair, the carpet, the walls, the house, the town, the earth. Maybe even I don't exist in reality. Even without being disturbed by these possibilities, they are sizeably different from what would be the case if life were 'real'. If life is only a dream, then this involves a radically different ontology from what we have as people who don't think that life is only a dream.

Same goes for pointlessness. If we pursue projects under a false assumption that there is actually some point to doing so, then we act in a sort of bad faith. You don't have to be disturbed or suffer in anyway from bad faith. It just needs to be the case that you are actually acting under false pretences, whether or not you know this or care about it. And bad faith is arguably a bad thing, rather than just a thing.

Everything being pointless is about as significant as nothing being morally right or wrong. And that seems pretty significant, since most people live as if some things are right and others are wrong. It seems to be important whether our moral intuitions are grounded in reality or not. Same goes for our intuitions that we live in a 'real' world rather than a dream, or our intuition that there is some point to what we are doing.

I don't know if this speaks exactly to what you're speaking of Agrote- but coincidentally, I was thinking about something similar- but my thoughts ran more to the motivation of why people do something rather than to whether there was a point to it or not (as in people and their projects and why they do them).

And the conclusion I came to is that all life is for each of us is a span of time we're granted. And we all find different ways to fill that time. And we all make judgments on how people choose to fill that time- some are judged to be productive and beneficial and others not so much. But however we choose to fill that time- I think we all go about filling it however we fill it for the same reason- because it's what we enjoy doing.

So the person who works for an NGO or nonprofit trying to enrich the world, is still really indulging him or herself as much as the person who does something else the people of the world look at as being more selfishly motivated- I don't know- developing wilderness into condos or something...In other words, the person who works for the NGO does that maybe not so much because they're a more virtuous person - but because that's what they enjoy doing...they enjoy being socially aware and conscious- and they wouldn't enjoy developing real estate- because if they did- they'd probably be doing that during their allotted span of time.

Given that- it's hard for me to look at it as pointless. If nothing else, our projects help to pass the time, and for those of us who are lucky enough to choose how we spend our time- it passes in a way that's enjoyable to us.
Maybe if you spoke to someone who has no choice in how s/he spends his or her time - you'd see the point in projects.

If life is a dream - I want to sleep more....