Suicide, death, and the destruction of the world:

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Cat’s Cradle illustrates through Bokononism the idea that one’s concept of the world is limited to the experiences of the individual, and not based on a real-world objective reality. When Bokononists commit suicide, they say “Now I will destroy the whole world.” This refers to the fact that by committing suicide, the whole world from the perspective of one’s self is destroyed. In being born, one creates the world (insofar as the fact that despite the propaganda, we are all biased toward a self-centred world-view because of the problem of other minds). In suicide, one destroys the world.

I should note here, that I'm not talking about subjective idealism, but rather, an individualist frame of mind in which the universe's beginning and end relative to one's own experience is equal to birth and death.

As I have written in earlier works, suicide is an act, merely an event. There is intention, there is movement in it.

An alternative reading is that when one thing changes all things are changed in totality. This is a challenge to common conceptions of conservation of identity. For example, in death, one’s consciousness leaves this world, and the result is a changed and remade world. If one conceives of the universe as a unity, then the removal or addition of any part is a complete remaking; a complete destruction and reconstruction.

Every individual’s own birth and death is their own personal experience of world destruction and remaking. (Granted, if the Universe is an infinite unity, nothing can ever be truly added or removed from it, but that is not to say that its contents cannot be rearranged).

The universe is, of course, in a state of constant flux, and committing suicide is a conscious way of taking control of that constant change. It is exerting the will in such a way as to cause a remaking of the universe that is free of you. However, this is neglectful of one’s responsibility to remain in the world, and use the will to exact smaller changes than killing oneself. Using the will to remove one’s own will is counter-intuitive.

On Suicide as a transformative act, and on Suicide as a cowardly act:

Literature rarely represents suicide as an act of despair or defeat. While a character may feel despair and defeat before committing suicide, the narrative will often portray the act as one of meaninglessness or wastefulness, rather than a legitimate act. That said, death and especially suicide are always transformative events. Suicide in literature and art can be taken as symbol for self actualization, wherein self recognition and strength of will allow one to take a “great leap of faith,” as it were, achieving an unknown, ambiguous result.

Examples of creative media in which suicide is transformative: 

Donnie Darko, Persona 3, Fight Club, Cat’s Cradle

Sucide in creative media is a symbol of hope for a change of self or surroundings; an acknowledgement that the end of a life full of 'wrongness' is potentially the start of a new life. However, such themes belong in the realm of fiction. The symbol, metaphor, or allegory is simply demonstrative of a theme or moral. No real life is so wrong or backward that the transformative death used symbolically in literature and art is required. It is simply an extreme metaphor which encourages the death of a way of being that is not life, but living badly.

Hopelessness is a disease with one cure, and that is its opposite: hope. The transformative suicide is in effect the opposite of the cowardly suicide of this real life. It is not an escape from responsibility and hardship, but an embrace of the responsibility to escape the pull of societal norms through the death of bad living, and to effect changes through attitudinal shifts and revaluation.

Albert Camus depicted suicide as a rejection of freedom. The freedom afforded by this life is far more valuable than the escape afforded by real-life suicide. As Sartre said, those who have free will are burdened with the responsibility of it - but the ability to choose what one is responsible for (the consequences of our decisions) ought to make that responsibility a given, and hardly such an inconvenience as to warrant suicide.

Particularly in the faithless life, suicide squanders the chance that life provides. That said, suicide exemplifies a variety of wimpiness that borders on laziness. Plato described it as an act of sloth and unmanly cowardice.

Furthermore, the responsibility of free will correlates with the use of suicide as a symbol for self actualization. The metaphor represents suicide as a freely willed act of shedding mundane, worldly values, and one’s attachment to them. It shows a way beyond mass-illogic and ideology to an individualistic view; a relation between the creation and ascription of values and the responsibility to take part in that process, using free will.

A will that is bent or determined by a group or even just one other’s will is not free, and the acquiescence to such a force is a lazy, cowardly rejection of one’s own responsibility for self-determination.

On the experience of death and dying:

“Every one regardeth dying as a great matter: but as yet death is not a festival.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

The claim that every man dies alone is accurate in as much as none but he who is dying can experience it. While a person can die surrounded by family and friends, the experience of that death cannot be shared with anybody – not even those who are dying simultaneously. The death of each person is their own to experience, and each is intrinsically unique by virtue of the individuality of each human being.

Heidegger suggests that death is not even available as an experience, because experience requires life. I do not presume to suggest that death is the end of all experience, but Heidegger’s position underlines the uncompromising finality of death in terms of experience and sharing that experience with others.

In death, none can recount that experience to the living. Even as we lie on our death beds explaining the experience to others, those others have only the experience of our death from their perspective. More accurately, others have the experience of watching someone dying; the process and not the result.

To further that idea of sharing in dying, Heidegger represented dying as what really matters, rather than death (by virtue of its possibility for experience), going so far as to point out that the process of living is synonymous with the process of dying, saying that as soon as we are born, we are old enough to die. This is what he called being-towards-death.

From this perspective, it is necessary to orient oneself towards death such that dying is an emotional investment in possible ways of being; one with a necessary agency and awareness – an authentic way of being-toward-death (note that ‘dying’ is the same as living, by this interpretation). More on this later.

As I said, dying and life cannot be mutual, identical experiences between individuals. Each person’s death and dying are his or her ownmost experience, but through reflection, communication, and shared experience – a state of what I call intersubjectivity - the living can share in a facsimile of another’s life, albeit a flawed and incomplete one.

“To many men life is a failure; a poison-worm gnaweth at their heart. Then let them see to it that their dying is all the more a success.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

**I should probably note that those Nietzsche quotes were taken out of context and I'm using them in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way to illustrate my points.**

On energy, entropy, death, and the afterlife:

Required Reading: How death increases entropy,

Before broaching a more subjective and less theoretical approach to the idea of death, I thought I'd tackle some potential links between physics and death.

On energy and entropy:

 
Entropy can be described as the total of all displaced, and therefore unusable energy (however it is ultimately a much more complex topic, relating heavily to thermodynamics). It is well known that all matter requires some form of energy to move, operate, or otherwise live. 

Einstein’s law of the conservation of energy requires that any energy that is used in a process can not be caused to disappear or degrade. While the consumption of food provides energy, and sleep stores it for later use, such energies are expended through physical and mental activities, however strenuous. However, expended energy cannot be retained, reused, absorbed or lost entirely. Theoreticians have posited that entropy remains as a formless reserve of used and evermore useless energy.

On entropy and death:

    The concept of entropy is applicable to death if one considers that all of the elements of life require the consumption of some kind of energy, whether it is kinetic energy for movement, or electrical impulses within the brain for thought or body awareness, etc.

In death, all of these energies seem to be dispersed. Indeed, it appears that no energies are animate or expendable in death beyond the decomposition process - a final outlet for any remaining energy in the body. Presumably, in death those once animate energies of the body are transposed into entropy. As entropy can not be accessed, its existence can not be verified, nor can its significance be made obvious, should it exist.

For a short and amusing explanation of the link between death an entropy, I encourage you to read  the brief article by Dr. Crystal Cooper that I linked at the top of this post.

On entropy and the afterlife:

At the risk of leaning too much toward Judaeo-Christian views, the process of energy converting to entropy in death can metaphorically mirror the passage of souls to heaven (in any number of limited or minimal interpretations thereof), or it could be that process in fact. Though unverifiable in its supernaturalism, it could be that a form of energy taken to be the soul - or merely the energies expended by the life process - could live on in a different way for a different means, through entropy.

My intent is not to posit any kind of definitive afterlife interpretation, nor even to posit an afterlife at all. Rather, my intent is to foster some hope for a reconciliation of science to common faiths, without casting aside logic. It is my experience that parallels often signify either extreme similarity, or perfect identification of events. This is to say that two things which have potential to parallel in such a way could easily be one and the same thing, though perhaps in less fantastical or logical ways.

On Lying:

The best way to avoid being caught in a lie is to have nothing to lie about. The best way to keep a secret is to have no secrets to keep – alternatively, never, ever tell anyone.

Lies are a dangerous sin to commit because they threaten and distort perceived reality. To tell a lie and be believed is to convince the believer that what is real is unreal, or that the unreal is real. While a lie may never be found out, any unreal event housed within the real necessarily calls attention to itself by having no referent.

Because of the natural chain of events that is cause and effect (that same chain which necessitates that all events be the same infinite event), any false or unreal event introduced into that chain is easily traced backward to its source – the liar. A thorough, deductive investigation of the chain of events which led to the unreal event, will inevitably uncover the liar because the unreal event seems to have an inappropriate cause or no cause at all. In order to conceal a lie well, one must then concoct further lies which support it, masking the flaws in the chain of events.
Naturally, the more lies one tells, the more unlikely that the chain of real events will cohere with the lie, and then it will be discovered. However, some will not delve as deeply into the chain as others, leaving the lie to persist.

As such, there are cases where a lie cannot be easily discovered by deductive reasoning, and the person who believes it will continue to live as though the lie were true. This is dangerous, because it introduces a false or unreal event into the chain of future real events, such that the unreal event becomes a factor in determining what will be real in the future.

This is all not to mention the emotional effects of a lie. For the liar - if the liar is not a sociopath - there will nearly always be pangs of guilt for having told the lie, which may or may not be bearable. There is guilt for having lied, and further guilt for having done or been involved with whatever thing caused the lie. Even in cases where no guilt is felt, it is highly likely that the liar will experience paranoia with regard to being found out. 

For the person lied to, there is more often than not suspicion, and in such cases suspicion is sufficient cause for feelings of betrayal, regardless of whether those suspicions have been validated. If the lie is discovered, the feelings of betrayal and suspicion are validated, turning to anger, disappointment, and depression. This is before whatever truth that the lie replaced is discovered, and in some cases, the discover of the truth will cause further anguish.

As it is rarely advantageous to be the receptor of negative emotions (least of all, one’s own), it is rarely advantageous to lie. As stated, the lie is almost inevitably discovered, making the negative response and effects of altering the chain of events just as inevitable. In this sense, lies are in almost every case as much a self-destructive behaviour as they are an outwardly destructive behaviour.

Furthermore, the act of lying in conjunction with the true event which seemed to require the lie has an additive effect, which results in more negative response than would originally have been encountered were the event alone discovered. To an extent, this relationship mirrors western karmic theory, because in lying, negativity is visited back on the liar two-fold.

On faith, belief, and offense:

There is no injury to the non-believer in the believer’s continued belief. 

The positive statement “I believe in x, which is opposed to your views” is inoffensive. However, the statement “the belief in x is a false belief” is offensive, because it denies the potential verity of an unverifiable thing. While faith-based beliefs are unverifiable by nature, believing is a form of subjective truth, and to deny it is to call the believer a liar.

The point being that faith-based belief in a thing and faith-based non-belief in a thing are equally unverifiable, and as such, all faith-based beliefs or non-beliefs can co-exist logically, because blind faith is illogical in the first place. It is just as likely that an idea or object that is not readily apparent exists as it is that it doesn't, so long as it remains apparently not.

There is no contradiction in the simultaneous existence or non-existence of that which can not be proved or disproved with certainty. God may or may not exist just as unicorns or aliens may or may not exist. These things all possess potential for existence but lack any apparent evidence to that existence. That said, it is still illogical to assert belief in any such thing, because it is illogical to believe in anything that is not apparently so. Furthermore, it is illogical to believe in logical contradictions; absolutely non-existent objects, such as a round square or a highly populated desert isle.

There are three ways that people respond to the unverifiable: 

1. Blind acceptance, due to misrepresentation of the subject as having evidence of being absolutely true or false

2. Doubt or rejection of the subject as false in the face of such a misrepresentation

3. A rejection of the subject as a non-issue; as that which can not provide evidence of itself has no effect on the perceivable world, because it either does not exist or works in such a way as to be imperceptible or undiscovered. 

Obviously, the third response is the one that logic prefers, because blind acceptance as true and based on a lack of evidence is illogical, while doubt or rejection as false based on a lack of evidence is also a form of blind acceptance. To suspend judgment, to refuse to take a stance is most logical because it allows for existence or non existence, and places no particular value on either.

On challenging faith:

On the subject of using what is readily apparent as evidence of existence or non-existence, it would follow naturally that these principles be applied to issues of faith; whether it be faith in the existence of a thing, or faith in the non-existence of a thing.

It is unreasonable to provide a fully-formed antithesis to a faith-based thesis. (It is, of course, never reasonable to provide an unformed or partially formed anything). This is because that antithesis is as much a faith-based claim as the thesis, in that any evidence to its truth is based on the apparently not; something for which no evidence can be found. Countering a conclusion that is based on the not at all apparent with a conclusion that is based on the apparently not provides no evidence to the truth of one’s own assertion, and as such cannot disprove the opposite.

Simply, to state “your faith-based claim is false” is no more or less verifiable than to state “my faith-based claim is true.” Those who make conclusions based on the apparently not are effectively making a claim based on their own blind faith that what cannot be seen does not exist.

Conversely, it is just so that those who make conclusions based on the apparently so have faith that what they perceive is what is real – but, importantly, the perceivable world is an integral part of interaction and existence in the world, real or not. That is, it is not blind faith, as it is in the other two cases.

The application of this discourse is that in discussion about religion, outspoken atheism is as much a blind faith-based belief as theism. So, for those who would prefer to avoid blind faith in anything (which, as I have said is the most logical approach to belief) a careful agnosticism – with an open mind to emerging evidence - is the only option.



I have lots more to say about what's wrong with atheism, like its name, for example. We'll see what I do next time.