So what do we do when faced with this paradox? Our desire to survive and our inability to comprehend what it is like to not exist makes us look for ways to cheat death altogether, i.e., strive for immortality. Hence the paradox: our perception of death is both inevitable (as we all will die) and impossible (since we cannot imagine the experience of death). Being dead means that there is no you to consciously contemplate these situations we have no way to experience or even imagine what it’s like to not exist. What do you see? A tombstone? A funeral? You may think that you are imagining death, but in fact you aren’t. On the other, we can’t actually imagine the experience of death, i.e., we cannot conceive non-existence. On the one hand, surrounded by deaths of animals and other people, we know very well that we’re going to die at some point. This desire to survive and knowledge of our own demise leads to something called the mortality paradox.
What makes humans unique, however, is that we struggle to survive with the full knowledge that we will nonetheless die one day. This struggle for survival is carried out through the evolutionary process of adaptation and reproduction: the individuals with the fittest genes are most likely to reproduce, thus extending its likeness into the future through its posterity.
Why is it that we suffer from these kinds of thoughts?įor starters, like all other living things, humans are “survival machines” our ultimate aim is to stay alive at all costs. why, even if we were immortal, we’d “only” live around 5,775 years.ĭo you ever lie in bed contemplating your death – the moment the Grim Reaper finally knocks at your door? We know that it will come one day, yet we still hope it never will.why immortality would turn you into an even worse procrastinator and.the strange way in which resurrection is related to cannibalism,.