Death: Parte the Second

So I just got back from London. And by just got back I mean I got back Wednesday night and have been way too lazy to do this until now.

Anyway, one of the highlights for me was seeing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in the city on Tuesday night. Great show! Really funny. For those who don't know, it was written in the 80s or something as a kind of "what if" for two of the most significant insignificant characters in one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, Hamlet. Basically, Shakespeare says next to nothing about these two characters that play kind of a big role in the whole grand scheme of things so this guy wrote an entire play about them. It's kind of a philosophical look at issues of death and psychology and it's something I legitimately found a lot of interesting stuff in, as you would imagine.

Anyway, there was an interesting bit on death and why you should or should not fear death (this was as the characters slowly come to realize the inevitability of their own death and the hopelessness it creates).

Guildenstern quoted Socrates when he said something to the effect of: we don't know anything concrete about death, so it is therefore illogical to fear it. And that makes a ton of sense to me because a lot of my discussion of death was why it's such a crappy thing to happen to you. But it's a great point to note that if our fears are based on things we observe (through our own filter of experience) being contrary to what we value (that is, what helps us enjoy and further our own lives), then we logically shouldn't fear death because we really have no idea whether or not it's contrary to our lives other than the fact that it's the end of it. Now I understand that doesn't make a ton of sense but if you think of death as just another chapter of life (which it very well could be), it's really not the end of anything substantial. Death could be great.

Now many people say there is no God or afterlife because it doesn't make logistical or physical sense based on the world that we live in what with the laws of physics and nature and things like that. But my question is why should God or the afterlife have to abide by these rules? Why does anything have to abide by these rules? Why can't it just be that everything we know on this earth coincidentally follows a set pattern (see: Problem of Induction) and everything outside of our know earth follows a completely different set of patterns. With the limited knowledge of the earth that we humans do enjoy, why is it so hard to accept things that might not seem plausible on the surface?

I heard a quote in a movie the other day (I think it was Thor) that magic is just science we don't understand. Think about that.