Does death exist?

[Coyotero]

Interesting stuff.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-la ... 84515.html

[T-mash]

Do you have that on any authority? Humans cannot know directly if non-human animals fear death since they do not have the language to express that fear. However, they do act at times as if they have that fear.

"Animals do not fear death as far as we know. "

[Of course humans with our larger brains, language and collective intelligence, have a deeper understanding of life, death and the universe than any animal without those traits. I just feel that it is premature to categorically state that non-human animals have no fear of death.

I have no doubt that humans fear death. However, I am less sure that it is as a result of out intelligence. It could be far more primitive than that. Could it not be that non-human animals facing the same selective pressures as we face would not develop a similar fear of death? Why not?

Can I ask you instead why you believe we fear death then? What is it exactly that we would be afraid of?

Nice weasel words. Death is the irrevocable cessation of life. Claiming that it is the end of your existence in your present form implies that there is some reason to believe that there is a possibility of your continuation after death in some other form. Religion which seems to be ubiquitous, is humans' attempts to deny what we know or should know about death.

Of course it is. But my statement was that "I'm not aware of anyone who sees death as anything but the end of your existence in your present form". I'm well aware of people who believe in an after-life. At any rate you said that we "do not really know, or pretend we don't really know what death means" and here you state that we do know what death is. My comment was on you claiming we are clueless about what death is and me asking why you believe that.

[Miles]

It comes from our instinctive want to survive. What else would force the Gazelle to run for all it's life from the Cheetah?

Gee, could it be to avoid simple harm and hurt? Your, "our animal brains are instinctively set up to fear death," implies a recognition of the physical transformation that occurs upon death: somewhere in our brain is this recognition of the death transformation sans any outside input. This means that a person who is born and matures without absolutely any experience or information about the concept of death would nevertheless fear it, which raises the question; just how would this concept manifest itself so as to arouse fear?

Fearing death is an evolutionary advantage...well, as long as you can't think about your own death in the future (as far as we can tell only Humans are able to do that - maybe some of the other apes

Of course it can be, just like the fear of being severely maimed by falling out of a four story window can be evolutionary advantageous. Any fear can operate this way, but you have yet to show why this fear of death is an instinctive one. Instinct is an inborn pattern of activity; one that occurs without external input.

The fear of death can be overpowering - it can lead people into severe depression, anxiety and other problems.

I'm sorry, when you said "literally mental" I figured you meant what you said. My understanding of English is that when "literally" modifies a subject it means that the subject should be taken in its strictest sense, without exaggeration or inaccuracy. So, mental (commonly meaning insane or crazy) taken literally, would indicate that amygdala would actually have gone insane or crazy, which is why I asked for the evidence of the craziness or insanity brought upon by the fear of death.

Also, our primitive brain has veto power over our neocortex.

Sounds like something from page 152 of An Introduction to Psychology. Then there's the matter of, so what? We were talking about some kind of innate, inborn fear of death.