When I used to free solo climb, it was more about being in the zone. Putting your concious brain in the background because it will kill you. Anyone doing those kinds of sports fully knows the chances of dying & decides to take it.

I eventually decided the chances weren't worth it. I still greatly miss it.

It doesn't make any difference to her now, but I imagine it did when she was still alive.

Consider that we're all in the process of dying - it's just not as imminent for most. I imagine you still want to enjoy life, despite knowing that one day you won't be around for that enjoyment to mean anything to you.

Knowing that everyone is eventually going to die, and that fulfillment is still important, why wouldn't you wish it upon people to enjoy their life til the very end?

I think kukx's point is more that wishing isn't effective, especially when the person you're wishing for is already dead. The obvious follow up is the question of whether or not it is correct to do ineffective things, and why people would choose to do so with such frequency that it is normalized and expected. Thus the "why wouldn't you wish it" is because wishing doesn't work, and that's probably the best possible reason to not do something.

Simply rationalizing it doesn't make it a good thing.

But we ascribe special significance to the time just before dying. It is seen as much more important to be happy the last hour you are alive, as opposed to any other in your life.

Why is that? The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is that it isn't really important for the person dying, but only for the rest of us. When we remember that person we will remember their last time especially strongly, and it is nice if that is a good memory.

Or hmm. Another view that would justify it is that life is about optimizing some function. And that before we die we only have estimates of how well we are doing, so it is only just before death we get the final answer, if we succeeded in optimizing the function or not.

If you die you die. What difference does it make if a second ago you enjoyed your life. If anything it makes it even worse. Dying when you enjoy the life the most? I can understand that someone wants to die when he suffers terribly, but not this.

   > If you die you die. What difference does it make 
   > if a second ago you enjoyed your life.

I don't know if you've watched anyone die but it isn't "fun" for most people (either the watching or the dying). Many people are there with their parents when they pass, or with grandparents or loved ones struck down by accident or disease. So in general I think everyone will likely watch as at least one other person they know and care about dies.

When that happens, you may find yourself sharing the dying person's pain, and that is a heavy burden. When I am listening to, or reading about, the death of someone. I wish for them an an easy passing, with as little pain and suffering as possible, for both them and their families and loved ones, because I know from my own experience how painful it is to watch someone die and be unable to help them. So for me, the living, it makes a huge difference if the person died doing something they loved (and thus were likely experiencing joy and satisfaction at the end) then knowing someone died slowly, painfully, and inevitably spending hours, perhaps days or weeks, moving toward their own demise.

We're all going to die eventually. Does it make it worse or better to have lived a 'good' life first? I suppose it doesn't matter either way once you're dead, but all we can do is live life to the fullest, most rewarding, way before we die, right?

I think the "die doing what you love" cliché is less about the how the person died and more about the how the person lived. She was taking a risk every time she pushed her limits diving. But, apart from the last one, each of those times added to the enjoyment of her life that she wouldn't have experienced if she hadn't been willing to risk death. It's entirely plausible to think that the 53 years of life she had were more enjoyable than 80-something would have been without the enjoyment of diving. It's why people who take on these risky sports choose to do so.

People don't say that for her, they say that to convince themselves that death isn't as bad as it is.

I'm sorry to hear that you believe this. It shows a lack of appreciation for people who get out in the world and really live their lives... People who do things that have risk, but would rather follow their passions than live without it.

For people like that, dying doing what they loved really does make it better. They lived their lives, following their own choices. And those lives do end early sometimes. But all lives end. Sitting behind a desk for 40 years then cheering at how long you lived... that sounds like the tragedy to me.

Death has no valuation. It is not good or bad. It is just the progress of time and the existence of entropy. Everything must die.

Dying is scary. Death is not.

The concept is self-contradictory, and thus not possible. That is knowable. It's also incoherent, and thus not a justifiable position even if it weren't self-contradictory.

PS: Pascal's Wager can be used to justify any belief whatsoever. It's not a good argument for anything.

> The concept is self-contradictory, and thus not possible.

Ok, let me frame it this way then. We're talking about the possibility of (a different kind of) life after physical death. My assertion is that there is no way to prove its existence or its non-existence. Therefor, any assertion about its nature or lack there of is uniformly based on faith.

> Pascal's Wager can be used to justify any belief whatsoever.

Not sure I follow you on this one, but it's not central to the discussion here.

Thought about it more and I think I understand your reasoning now. But I included Pascal's wager not to justify any particular belief (although I can totally see why you came to that conclusion as Pascal does come to a concrete conclusion in terms of a particular belief).

I included Pascal's wager not for his conclusion but because it supports my assertion that one can not know what happens after physical death. Therefore, any conclusion about that is based on faith alone.

EDIT: Addition to last point.

>We're talking about the possibility of (a different kind of) life after physical death

I know what you're talking about. And it is still not possible because it's a vacuous assertion. (And there's no such thing as 'non-physical' death, so that qualifier doesn't do anything. The word 'physical' is, for the most part, useless.)

But why are you even talking about life after death? Why aren't you talking about the invisible giant crab that's eating you right now? Or the dream that you're going to wake up from? Or the existence of Hogwarts?

You simply can't argue "nobody can really know" to a rational person in a convincing way. A rational person then must conclude that it doesn't even matter -- You have to make decisions, and you can't make reliable decisions by cherry picking belief in one absurd thing over the trillions of other absurd things.

We could debate all day about the possible existence of Hogwarts, but it would be stupid: we both know that it is a fiction, even though nobody can "prove for certain" that it isn't. We know this because the world we live in doesn't change if the existence of the thing changes. Nobody can make different decisions.

And when something fundamentally doesn't matter, that means it encodes no information about (non-mental) reality, and is thus meaningless, and can't be claimed to exist by default.

>I included Pascal's wager not for his conclusion but because it supports my assertion that one can not know what happens after physical death.

We know what happens after death. Many people have died, and you can look around and see what is happening right now. If you're talking about what happens to your subjective experiences afterward, then that's an experience singularity. A "north of the north pole" kind of absurdity. I don't suppose you're willing to argue that nobody knows if there's land north of the north pole, are you?

You don't see the circular reasoning involved in claiming that someone must actually visit north of the north pole to conclude it doesn't exist? So why should anyone have to return from life after death to know that it is fiction?

Nah, people like ending on a high note. It's a general thing. Nothing to do with being in denial about death.

Most death isn't that bad, its a quiet snuffing out, rather then a violent in the throws. Death is bad for the survivors, not for the decedent.

Death is one of the worst things that can happen to you. That's a more general moral qualification, not a purely emotional one. There's a difference between how something feels and how good or bad it is for you.

If you have cancer, and have been sick for months or years, and are in great pain, is death the worst thing to happen to you? It may be bad for your family and loved ones - but for you, it may very well be relief.

Mercy and palliative care is something I think forgotten all too often in medical care in the US, we focus so much on the cure at all costs, and less on the outcome or realistic outcome rather.

I don't see why you'd infer that I will be emotionally distraught to the point of notability when facing bad things just because I said they are bad. Or why you think that changes anything about what I'd conclude is bad or not.

I'm not in the business of pretending things aren't bad just because I prefer not to deal with them.

It's not courage, it's stupidity.

To each her own.