Philosophical Essay on Death

Philosophical Essay on Death

What is death and why does it have to exist?

Death is one of the great ancestral mysteries to which our species It has been fighting since the beginning of civilization. And it is a mystery because, despite the fact that we have been fighting it better hand in hand with Science and technologyWe still don't really know what it is, what happens after it, what explanation it has. Maybe that's why we often don't even want to name it and we use various euphemisms, nicknames and twists.

We all know what it is to die: all living beings they must do it sooner or later, although only the human being seems to be tragically aware of it. Science defines dying as the cessation of the vital functions of an organism, that is, when its delicate balance internal is broken forever and the physical, chemical and biological processes that took place within it are seen interrupted.

In that sense, dying is nothing more than moving very quickly from a state of order (homeostasis) to one of disorder (entropy). According to this vision, living beings are systems continually threatened by imbalance, like tightrope walkers on a string that is getting thinner and thinner.

Other disciplines also have their explanation for death: according to most of the religions and doctrines New ageTo die is to undertake a journey, a transit towards other dimensions of being. This involves leaving our bodies behind and clinging to an immortal, eternal part of ourselves, which some call "soul," "spirit," or "energy."

All this can be interpreted as a form of skepticism before the idea of ​​the total and complete disappearance of the individual. How is it possible - religions ask themselves - that there is nothing left of an existence so complex, so rich in nuances, so deep as human existence is? No, there must be something in us that is eternal, as God is eternal, and that at the end of our time transcends in some way. There must be a sensesubsequent in existence.

The dilemma about the existence of death

So far we have quite successfully defined what it is to die, but not what it is to die. Is it a state? From a place? From an entity? Is there death? They are not easy questions to answer. We know that death is an observable phenomenon because we have seen it happen in others: Ideally, young people will see our predecessors die and our descendants will see us die U.S. But we know very little about our own death. Is it something that can be experienced?

An experience - let's agree - is something that we live, that we store in memory and that we can evoke, recall and transmit to third parties. Even if death is indeed something we are going to experience, it is not something we can later recall or pass on to others because we simply won't be there to do it anymore. Our social presence will be interrupted, we will no longer be able to connect with others. And that radical disconnect, even if it doesn't interrupt our psychological continuity as well (as some religions promise), looks a lot like a dead end.

The closest experience to death that we ordinarily have is sleep. That is, the action of sleeping. We have all experienced the blurring of consciousness that leads to the dream world, and we know that in Sometimes that experience of emptiness may not be full of dreams and fantasies, but simply be the any. The unconsciousness. The absence of self-perceptions. No one is aware of themselves and their surroundings while sleeping, but at the same time indulges in sleep with the full assurance that he is going to wake up again (even if he doesn't, which is often a possibility). So why doesn't sleep cause us the same anguish that death causes us?

Perhaps precisely because the dream is a temporary, communicable, narrable disconnection. When we wake up, we can tell what we dreamed or we can talk about how we fell asleep, and reconnect with that story of ourselves that is memory. But can we be sure that the person who went to sleep is exactly the same person who wakes up? What is it that allows us to overcome that period of emptiness and return to normality? The reason is that the dream does not end us, it only interrupts us: even if the person who went to sleep is not exactly the awakening, the latter has a sense of psychological continuity, of personal narrative, which we associate with being alive, with exist.

Let's do a thought experiment: Suppose we sleep for a long time — like the character in the fable, Rip Van Winkle — and wake up fifteen years from now. Things have undoubtedly changed around us: many of our loved ones will not be or will no longer be the same, and even our body will have aged during sleep, so that we will not even be physically the same as when we go to bed to sleep.

And yet, we can say that we are still ourselves, because the story of what we experienced is still stored in our memory and because we can find third parties to whom to transmit that story. We are, to a large extent, narrative beings: our idea of ​​existing depends on the possibility of telling what we have experienced.

People who suffer from drastic and radical amnesia are somehow different people, even if their body remains the same and their existence has never been interrupted. But let's do another thought experiment. Suppose that highly advanced cloning technology allows us to create bodies identical to ours and "copy" our memories and our personality into their brains. Thus, when we have to die, a younger and healthier version can emerge from the laboratory and take our place, like nothing else. Does that mean we are immortal?

The answer seems to be no, because only others will experience our immortality: successive versions of us will always be there for us. tell them what happened and to perpetuate our memory, but that singular version that we are, that unrepeatable and unique individual that inhabits our body will have dead. And in that sense, are our clones really the same person as us or are they rather different people who carry the same software, that is, the same way of thinking and the same memories?

An unanswered question

Death, in conclusion, seems to be the definitive interruption of the personal story: not the end of the plot, but the end of the story. storyteller. That is precisely how distressing it is: its lack of communicability, its inability to become in an experience, that is, his capacity to put in check the own story that organizes our existence.

Death, in the end, is an imaginary space: a mental place that we can imagine whenever we are far from it, that is, whenever we are alive. Or, at most, it could be a phenomenon that occurs behind our backs, as Epicurus stated: “death is a chimera, because when I am, it is not there; and when she is, I am not there ”.

References:

• "Essay" in WIkipedia.
• "Death" in Wikipedia.
• "The meaning of death" by Flor Hernández in the University Digital Magazine from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
• "What is Death, Exactly?" on Scientific American.
• "The Definition of Death" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• "Death" in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

What is an essay?

The test it's a literary genre, whose text is characterized by being written in prose and by addressing a specific topic freely, making use of the arguments and the author's appreciations, as well as the literary and poetic resources that make it possible to embellish the work and enhance its aesthetic features. It is considered a genre born in the European Renaissance, fruit, above all, from the pen of the French writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), and that over the centuries it has become the most used format to express ideas in a structured, didactic and formal.

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