Posted: Nov 13, 2014 12:31 pm
Thommo wrote:So you're saying that someone who isn't suffering (any living person who you would not say is suffering) is suffering more than someone else who is not suffering (a dead person).
I think that's a straightforward self contradiction. Clearly two people who are not suffering are suffering the same amount (not).
No, again, what I am saying is that living people experience while dead people do not, whereas what you seem to have understood me as saying is that if someone is not suffering at all at one point in time, they are still suffering more than a dead person. To restore some context to the picture - in the passage you replied to, I specifically referred to the case where a loved one dies and the one who goes on living suffers -
Quite clearly then, the living experience more suffering by virtue of the fact that the dead do not experience at all, and it is therefore worse for the one left alive when a loved one dies, simply because the loved one no longer 'is', and the one left behind is suffering.
Unless there is a way that a non-existent, non-experiencing person can experience something so that it is 'worse' for that non-existent, non-experiencing person than it is for the extant, experiencing person that I don't know about, obviously.
So again, my point is that dead people don't suffer, and that TMB is acting like this is somehow in dispute when he says 'if we assume that dead people do not suffer as do the living'. It is not in dispute - we can fairly safely say that dead people do not suffer 'as do the living', unless we decide to entertain unevidenced and unfalsifiable assertions about life after death, because dead people lack the capacity to experience full stop, while living people - although not being constantly in a state of suffering - have the capacity to experience various sensations and emotions, including suffering.