Lucretius

BW. Let's begin with Lucretius, who was right to say that if we can't mourn our loss of life in relation to the time before we were born, we can also not mourn our loss after we die, since death is annihilation, especially of consciousness. And if that is so, it is a mistake to impute consciour concerns to the experience of the deceased human organism. The mistake is imagining that consciousness will persist in death. That confuses a fear of the unknown with the fact of annihilation. That is why Lucretius concluded that "death is nothing to us, and does not matter at all.

TN. You accept, too, that Lucretius declared that it did not matter when anybody died (W 80), but you don't buy that argument, right? Surely you're not saying that it doesn't matter when anybody dies. It matters plenty. I give the example of the difference between the deaths of Keats at 24 and Tolstoy at 82. The death of the younger man deprived himself and the world of Keats poetry.

BW. Yes, but by that logic you could extend and extend and extend the argument, such that we have to be "committed to wanting to be immortal" (W 80).

TN. All I'm saying is that if we say that life is good, and even though we know that immortality is a physical impossibility, then we can contemplate "what it would be for him to go on existing indefinitely" and that "continuation [of life] would have been good" for the one who dies (N 79). You can accept Lucretius with regard to the absence of consciousness before birth, but I

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is own experience . . . does not embody this idea of a natural limit. His existence defines for him an essentially open-ended possible future" (80). That is, a man could learn from his mistakes or correct bad decisions and reorder and reconfigure his existence to seize with renewed interest the possibilities of life. BW. That brings up a new issue, which is one of identity. Luper cites the two sides of the identity coin: identity as connectedness and identity as continuity. The first refers to the persistence of a psychological profile throughout a life. The second "allows changes in one's profile so long as these are gradual" (L 3). The first leads to the idea that if the profile changes, that amounts to death because the original identity was lost. The second leads to the idea that only death, which is sudden and not gradual, can obliterate the identity. But what about cases in which the identity of the living organism is destroyed or transformed? TN. I use the case of dementia, in which I grant that "although the spatial and temporal locations of the individual who suffered the loss are clear enough, the misfortune itself cannot be so easily located" (78) as actual death. BW. We have to come back to the situation in which im

Category: Philosophy - L