These thoughts come from a walk through desert paths outside of Las Vegas this morning, with my philosopher friend Todd (we were in Philosophy grad school together, we worked out it was 26 years ago, and have been conducting these parapatetic conversations, in some form or other, on and off, for all those years).
When I said that I thought living on forever could take the form of human memories, and that therefore there's a lot of pressure to get my stories down, although I'm starting to forget some of them (because I know that he remembers everything, in detail, because of a special way that his memory works), he countered by asking me whether I could move to an acceptance. If I can accept my mortality, because although I die my stories will live on, isn't it a short move to accept that I will die and my stories will die with me, and that's okay?
No, it was not okay. I felt a seismic emotion when he asked this, and didn't pursue the feeling too strongly because I didn't want to turn our nice walk into a bout of uncontrollable weeping. But no, this idea was not acceptable at all.
Oh, he said, I hadn't got over the idea of immortality of my soul after death, I had created a substitute?
Yes. And it's a strongly bound to the idea of the purpose of my life as the prospect of ending up forever in Heaven would be for someone who believed in that.
He suggested the other point of view is to view oneself as here to have experiences while one is here (and we were having some tremendous ones, walking around the gorgeous and endlessly varied desert landscape under a blue sky with white puffy clouds).
I can't accept that as the only thing. For me, it's essential that I can believe that I will live on. Getting meaning from that inward directional idea of the world providing me with experiences, the idea that the world is here to entertain me, is insufficient. It's important to me to leave some mark that will persist after I die. (You know, it's not that important that it actually leave a mark. If I die and all my stories get thrown away or burned or something, or the planet gets blown up and no one ever comes by this corner of the universe to sift through the wreckage, oh well, shit happens, that can't be controlled and is not up to me because I'll be gone, but I do feel that it's important to do everything I can, to do my part to ensure as much as possible that something will be left, some mark on the world will be made.)
However, now some hours later in my hotel room, I recall that the grounds of my moral philosophy is human experience. Human experience is the fundamental good at the bottom of all my beliefs about what's right and wrong to do. Anything that prematurely takes away human experience is bad - so, basically, murder. Abortion and not having all possible children are not necessarily bad because they are not taking away the experience of an existing human. My relatives with memory loss are still whole people and just as valuable people because they are still having moment to moment experiences of the world (and somehow their personalities, which appears to us as their "selves", are still completely intact). Their lives are no less valuable - they are still having experiences.
I realized the contradiction. Having experiences in the moment is enough to provide 100% meaning of their lives. Why is it not enough to provide meaning for my life, for me?
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