Appreciating Death

I'm making this an article so it can be pinned, I want people to really think about it. Everyone being around computers so much makes thinking very hard.

I’ve never liked the Momento Mori thing, at least in its modern form. It focuses too much on death. Mortality is much more than death; it’s about being finite in general. Death is really the least interesting part. Everyone knows they’re going to die.

It’s well known people who are very good programmers tend to struggle with philosophy but I don’t think many people who aren’t programmers themselves fully appreciate why. Fundamentally it’s because we don’t respect our own mortality.

To get good at programming you have to live in this world where you speak animals into existence, you can pause and replay time, inspect every minute feature of the world on a whim. You develop a powerful intuition for this world where you’re really a kind of small god (you have to so you can mentally skip through problems quickly.)

Then you take your hands off the keyboard and get zapped back into finiteness. Suddenly you’re mortal again and can’t know things the way you did when you were programming a minute ago but you still have the intuition of a god and so you try to do philosophy like one and come up with horrible ideas that don’t correspond with reality.

Mortality isn’t about death. Death is just temporal finiteness, it’s is the relief from having to be awake and sober for everyone else, not the real struggle. Mortality means much more. It means there are limits to what you can understand even if you had an unlimited amount of time.