The Death Blog

So, it is only 12:30 on Sunday morning and I have already had numerous near death experiences this weekend. I would elaborate on these experiences if I knew that there was no possibility that my mother would stumble upon this blog under any set of bizarre circumstances… But the details of these events are kind of irrelevant anyway, so I’ll leave you and your curiosity with that unbearable cliffhanger.

In light of these completely ridiculous events, I thought I might get all philosophical again. (I mean, I am required to get all philosophical once a week till May…) But anyways, I kind of want to be that kid that blogs about death. I mean, honestly I’ve read enough blog about “what is the meaning of life”. I’m kind of over it. I’m moving on to death.

I like to pretend that when we die, we relive the absolute best moments of our life. Like, that whole “life flashing before your eyes” thing, but it isn’t your whole life, just the good stuff. Then, once you are done reliving those moments, then you ACTUALLY die. And then you just rot and do your thing. The rotting part of death is what scares me. All my friends are like “when you die you die, then there’s nothing so you don’t have to worry” (side note, my friends are ALL atheists, weird right?) But my response to them is that “nothing” is probably the scariest thing ever. No one knows what nothing actually feels like.

One of my friends is particularly smart and obsessed with philosophy. SO while I was ranting about my fear of nothingness he just had to bring up this guy named… something. I actually don’t remember right now. But he brought up some philosopher who proposed that we should not be afraid of the nothingness after life because we pay to regard to the nothingness before our birth. This got me thinking…

If my smart friend’s point is valid, that would mean that we have all been dead before. We were all dead before we were born. Momentarily, this thought made the idea of dying a lot less frightening to me, until I really thought about it…
I feel like the nothingness before you are born cannot compare to the nothingness after you live. Before you are born no one cares about you but when you live you affect other people, you make memories, and you make friends and all of that life mumbo-jumbo. So the nothingness when you die is a lot more significant because you lose so much. This is why death still scares me no matter what my smart atheist friends tell me.

My Life is Like SO Philosophical.

By the end of this class I want to be able to spell philosophical without using spellcheck. That was an inappropriate first sentence given that it has nothing to do with what I am about to start writing about. I wanted to write a pretty BS blog about how I define myself and attempt to answer the age old question “who am i?” and whatever, but being that I waited way too long to post this blog many people have already done that. I don’t want to be repetitive or uninteresting. So here we go.

I want to discuss a philosophical question that my friends and I always seem to argue about. The idea comes from an essay written by Edmund Gettier in 1963. His paper was entitled “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” If you are unfamiliar with this piece you can read about it here ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem


I find this piece to be interesting because of how applicable it is to my everyday life. Like, ACTUALLY applicable. I think about this all the time. Anyone who knows me knows that I have severe social anxiety and I always assume that everyone hates me and that there is no reason to live and blah blah blah. However, thinking about the Gettier problem often gets me out of my anxiety ridden ruts.
I am now going to write a typical Gettier problem with my “real life” situation. (this is a sort-of stretch, but it has all the same principles… all names have been changed for protection of those in this example)

So let’s say that
-I like a boy. (this is a true statement)
-My friend “Jane” likes the same boy (this is also a true statement)
-I know that the boy thinks that Jane is pretty.
-So I come to the logical conclusion that the boy will get with the girl that he thinks is pretty.
-What I do NOT know is that the boy also thinks that I am pretty.
-The boy ends up asking me out.

The reason that this is at all interesting/philosophical is that this type of problem proves that justified true belief is NOT in fact knowledge. So next time you think that you have EVERY REASON IN THE WORLD to assume the worst, you have to know that the probability that you’re wrong is probably higher than you think.

This problem also makes me wonder about the exact definition of the word “knowledge”. If I believe with all of my being that the sky is green, then I know that the sky is green… Obviously that is an incorrect statement, but it is something that I THINK I know, so is it knowledge? Can knowledge be wrong? This keeps me awake momentarily but i usually get over it.