[quote="The Voice of Time" post_id=151371 time=1384537930 user_id=7289]
Another:
[quote]However, death is not always harmful for the one who dies, as there are cases in which one would truly be “better off dead” after time X (if the remainder of one’s life after time X were fairly certain to be spent with a very disturbed mind)
In these cases, I feel that suicide is rational—assuming that one’s expected future
However, a disciplined mind should be disturbed only by severe physical pain or suffering outweighs both one’s subjective value of staying alive and one’s feelings of empathy (if one has them) for those who would suffer if one committed suicide discomfort
That said, I believe that it is irrational to fear either death or the state of being dead
As non-existence, the harm of death is the deprivation of future pleasant states of mind
One should not fear the deprivation of future pleasant states of mind, at least not in the same way one would fear future disturbed states of mind (such as distress or grief)
The state of being dead is not painful, as one’s consciousness ends upon death (according to afterlife skepticism)
If one does not feel horror upon contemplating one’s pre-vital non-existence, then why fear post-mortem non-existence?
As another analogy, consider dreamless sleep, which is generally not feared. As dreamless sleep is mentally analogous to the state of being dead, there is no reason to fear the state of being dead.
Regarding derivative harm from harming those for whom one has empathy, I would argue that while one may justifiably anticipate one’s death with a touch of sadness, such anticipation need not involve fear
Death is inevitable, and at best, one may have only partial control over its timing. Therefore, worrying about death serves no purpose.[/quote]
I wrote on the impossibility of death having value in and of itself in a thread about assisted suicide to the mentally ill, and I claimed further, that the desire and want for suicide is a mental illness in and of itself, as it cannot have value, and can therefore only be desired for itself by the conjuring of imaginative value. The argumenting starts with this post:
http://forum.philosophynow.org/viewtopi ... 53#p149853 and continues in a fight with "Hobbe's Choice" over the course of a few pages. I too allowed for it to have value some places, but only as an instrument for a great cause external and unrelated to it, and never for itself.
[/quote]
Suicide is a social problem, not a psychological one. Most people survive existential crisis because they have a meaningful safety net and a way to progress out of it.