Quote:
Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
What's interesting is that one can ever know that they are dead. It requires an entity outside of oneself to acknowledge such a thing. Furthermore, the death of a life form invariably leads to the possibility of life in other forms. Does this mean that one can never truly die alone?
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So we're talking about two different things so far, I think.
One is the strict biological idea of 'death', as in the negation of biological 'life' which is fairly easy to define within the confines of an organism dominated by one variety of dna. You can be really picky with regard to the death of most 'animal' organisms, at least on a scale of normal human awareness, in that biological 'life' activity never really stops, it simply moves from domination/regulation by one variety of dna to one or multiple others.
Humans create an environment for and are pretty symbiotic with a huge range of
fauna which help us to control pathological microbes as well as break down nutrients and... well, thousands, more, functions until we stop supplying them with a conducive environment and a good number of these species help to break the human form down and recycle the nutrients. (In a natural context)
The other thing that we're talking about is what it means to be a living and
sapient being and what we understand as 'death' for that or those entities might be, i think (baraka?).
So, I understand what we commonly define as biological 'death' as the negation of 'life'. "I am alive" becomes "I am not alive", or "The 'I' that was is now no more."; The functions of biological life (respiration, reproduction, etc) break down.
In this second idea of what the death of sapience may be and what it might 'mean' (death as a symbol? o_O come to think of it, life as a symbol?) would necessarily be based on the negation of a positive statement of what that sapience, the, potentially, wise 'mind' or 'soul' or 'self-consciousness would be and how it might only exist in reference to other entities would be.
Seeing as baraka brought up the idea, maybe he'd like to take first stab (my stab earlier wasn't too good i think) at the positive idea?