Part of "What does it take to believe in death" series...
1. What does it take to believe in death... Part 1
2. What does it take to believe in death... Part 2
3. What does it take to believe in death... Part 3
4. What does it take to believe in death... Part 4
All antinomies that mathematics or modern science discovers, are based on things we take for granted but we should not. After exploring some things we must have as axioms in order to believe in death, the most basic being the notion of "Change" and the notion of "Time", we must now move on... And we can do that only by denying all "truths" that we now think "are", we can only do that if we are irrational. Because "rationality" is based on axioms and only by discarding all axioms can someone reach the truth (if it even exists and this word is not another "axiom" we believe in). Truth is related to "Being" and anything like "being based on axioms" is far away from its real essense. We must base our conclusions on what we "know" and not on what we "understand" (see Harmonia Philosophica [English] for the difference between those and how all antinomies can be merged philosophically into One Reality). And what we know is that we "are". Where did the idea that we will sometime "stop being" come from? Because certainly noone "not being" could come that tip us off. And certainly noone had any experience of "not being" so as to formulate and spread the idea... Where did we learn of things that "are not"? Because certainly no person could have experience of such a thing... And certainly noone can think of something that is "not"... So where did the notion of "death" come from? In the past, primitive people burried their dead and put food with the bodies. They "knew" that life did not end with death. In the past, alchemists "knew" that everyting had a living force in it. It is important to know and understand that the distinction between "living organisms" and "things" was made on the years of Kepler by the "new" science of the days: mathematics could be applied for the first time so as to predict the movement of planets, but in order to do that a great assumption should be made. An assumption so great and so fundamendal, that actually changed the way we think for ever. The assumption was "simple": there *must* exist "living things" and "non-living things", with mathematics being applied only to the latter. This defined almost everything from thereon. Ask a modern physicist to find "man" in the Universe and he will have a hard time. Because the "Universe" is a complex set of things - there is no room for humans with consciousness in it... Ask a modern biologist to explain to you the difference between particles organized into living matter and particles forming a "non-living" object. He will have a hard time explaining, because a model which is defined as void of consciousnesss, cannot suddently "discover" consciousness... Bohr characterized Pauli's theory for the fourth quantum number as "crazy" and by that he meant "correct" (see "Yung, Pauli - The phsychoanalyzer, the physicist and number 137"). The best way out of a dead-end is to stop seeing the dead-end, as a crazy person would do. As William James said, "what we want to think is what is". And what we have hard time explaining may have a simple solution: maybe the distinction we cannot explain does not even exist... Is it a coincidence that everything related to "not being" cannot be explained easily? Time, change, the problem of identity, the problem of life... Everything is hard to explain. Everything is hard to define. But yet, our very being is dependent on those ideas... Pythagoras talked about Harmonia and one cannot find harmonia if he believes in things that entail the "end of being". What "is" cannot suddently "stop being" and vice versa, without destroying harmonia... As philosophy turned into exact science, humans turned into objects. We must stop believing we are mere objects if we are to fulfill our destiny as humans. When in a Universe void of consciousness, consciousness appears as a candle in the dark, one can stick to the fact that this light will someday fade out. But this is a very shortsighted view... Another one might stick to the fact that this candle came from somewhere, produced its flame from an energy that surrounds the cosmos and shed its light everywhere... How can such a candle die out? We must try to just listen and go with the music of the cosmos, rather than trying to "understand" everything...
