Will You Be Remembered? Does It Matter?
It makes absolutely no sense to wish to remembered after one dies unless one believes in the communication of the diseased with the living. This is the simple, raw truth. Yet, we see many intellectuals that often aspire towards atheism to lead lives that aim towards that path while scorning the religious folk that long for paradise.
The majority of philosophers, scientists and thinkers that do not embrace any religious belief choose to reject money and common earthly pleasures and rather dedicate their lives to put their name on the spine of a book or become famous. I had this debate with quite a few philosophers and writers plenty of times. They would mention me famous people that became famous after their death while they lead poor and miserable lives when they were alive.
Being wrong and not being on time are the exact same thing. One can be too soon or too late and they will still be wrong. Whether that is an investment, idea or novel it makes little difference. Many philosophers, thinkers and scientists appear to have been "ahead of their time" but this only makes sense in hindsight. The matter of fact is that in their time they failed to address the problems they saw around them. Only after the world evolved into an unknown entropic sequence we come as judges to evaluate the whole situation. That's similar to asking for advice about winning numbers from someone who just won the lottery.
Many people fail to grasp this line of reason. The now. There is no definite past, there is no clear future there is not even a coherent now. Things change on a constant rate from our viewpoint. The past is riddled with noise, mashed up dreams and broken memories. The future is unknown and full of speculation that only makes sense once we choose to see only the "hits" and forget the "misses". Such is the tragedy of the human condition .
The religious individual and the intellectual atheist are much the same when it comes to perceiving what life is all about yet they might frown upon one another. They will both often fail to live this life, the now, and rather engage in their own way of rituals and belief about the a specific version of after life.
Both believe in the pleasure received after their biological death. The intellectual atheist will be remembered and take pleasure from this thought in the present time. The afterwards pleasure will be a demonstration of intellectual dishonesty from their part. The religious person might do the same when they believe about heaven but at least they are intellectually honest about the version of the world they believe to be true.
Nonetheless, they both invest in the hope of pleasure after they are dead. They are more alike than they think yet they will often debate with one another about the "existence" and validity of reality. Existence, obviously, does not matter for either of them. What matters is a promise that they made to themselves about the future when they will both perish.
All humans carry religiosity. Being an atheist or religious is rather irrelevant when one starts breaking down the intricacies and motivations humans have. Our brains are constantly constructing worlds that do not exist. Whether that is a memory of the past, a potential future, paradise or a longing of someone reading our things after we die of little importance. Deep down we all know the harsh truth yet we are afraid to explore it. How many of us worship the inventor of the transistor or the first developer of the led screen even if both of these inventions dominate almost everything we do daily. We are all going to be forgotten very soon and for this reason we all create our own heresies, our own religions. Such is the human condition.
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What about to leave a legacy that will inspire future generations to follow in your footsteps, to influence others to continue to work towards the same goals as you did during your life? What you said makes sense on a selfish level, but what about those who also care for humanity or the planet as a whole? Some peoples lives are interesting and inspiring to others, if not there would be no need for biographies .
You won't be able to receive the pleasure because you will be dead. So we rather say a story to our heads now. We live with a false promise. Even if it happens we won't get anything out of it other then the false hope we feed ourselves in the present.
But if someone knows that he is doing something great for future generations (including his children if he has them) that won't be understood or appreciated by other people at the present moment, if he is an altruist he can still enjoy (receive the pleasure) from just knowing that he is doing a great thing. Cheers!
The Lord loves atheists for not burdening him with their problems.
This is undeniably true. We all have a certain religiousness in all of us that may not exclusively mean believing in a deity but rather having an ideal way of life or the afterlife, and that indeed is what religious has always been about--a promise after life in this planet, something to hold on to, because who knows, there might not be really anything after this life so nothing really matters then...
I can't relate to all this "leaving something behind" stuff, LOL
Either I won't be able to get any satisfaction out of it, because I'm gonna be dead.
Or I won't be able to get any satisfaction out of it because wherever I go, I won't have an ego.
Or I will realize that none of this was real an the world I'm leaving when I "die", didn't really exist in the first place.
Sooo many possibilities... ;)
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I was thinking about this the other day. At some point in time, everyone that knows you will be gone.
My wife and my daughter will remember for a while, but I expect that will fade each passing year whatever their time remains. The few real friends any of us have in life, far quicker, pretty darn quick. Now my little dog he will remember but his life, is so very short. Does it matter to me, really matter? I do not have that expectation or want. When its over, its over. And I am at peace with that.
I loved reading this article.....In our country, people sacrifice everything family friends and all worldly pleasure for the realisation of GOD... thinkers and visionary also sacrifice a lot of things... I think both kinds are important and doing well for the mankind, people who are religious draft some kind of constitution so that people could act good and follow good, their actions are good and scientist makes the life of humanity easier through invention...
Technology and medicine may advance to the point that some humans may become immortal in the next 30-50 years. Then, for them it would matter...
It all comes down to what you primarily identify with.
Sentience, for example, is for us completely un-explainable. We all experience it, yet have no clue what it means or what it is. We are trapped in the subjective, monocular vision of the experience of life with no capacity (except for altered states of being) to employ another viewpoint and thus achieve stereo vision and perspective.
So if your primary identification is with this subjective experience of life, then of course you will try to maximize that. Hence the understandable desire to be remembered, to make this one life you have epic and the best.
But -- if we consider that sentience may be much bigger than us, that the entire universe may be sentient, that our subjective experience of life may just be the sentience of the universe resonating with the little node we call our brain, which allows the sentience of the universe the ability of acting through us -- then that leads to a different perspective entirely.
This perspective anticipates the probability of reincarnation, of absorption back into the sentience of the universe once the resonant node we call the brain dies. As individuals we are of course un-duplicatable and un-reproducible -- but that fear and motivation fades when considering that this life may be one of tens or hundreds of such unique individuals we may have the chance to be.
Identifying with the greater sentience, the greater cosmic intelligence, leads to a more thorough and authentic sense of community and society. It simultaneously allows for more empathy, yet also leads to intolerance for the ridiculous competition and selfishness of those who have not yet managed to rise above this specific instance of individuality.
It all comes down to this -- do you believe yourself to be a body who has a soul, or a soul who has a body?
A soul who has a body [sic!], which I have to work on again after delicious Christmas dinner. But after claiming my sixpack again for me myself and I, it will probably change around. Why does your interesting thoughts and the distinction of sentience and reason sound so sectarian to me? Are philosophers generally a kind of sect?
Elaborate more -- what do you mean by sectarian?
Yes, I have to open up the scope of my answer a little more. My backround is rooted in Logical Empiricism and it was quite usual to hand metaphysical questions over to music or artistic professions. Yes, I know that metaphysics is an important branch in philosophy and it led me to my second thought whether our tendency to specialize within academia can cultivate kind of "sects", a closed group of people where it's quite difficult to left the hard earned mindset which was constructed in the first place.
Sure, concepts get trapped in eddies, where they do no one any good and die a lonely death. Liberating these concepts so they can go out and procreate is the benefit of generalists, no ;-)
No reason to "hand" anything over to anyone. If you can't explain something in words that someone outside of your discipline can understand, than I would argue that perhaps you don't understand it as well as you think you do ;-)