I Love Science Fiction

The name of this group is not really accurate for me. Rather than loving science-fiction as a whole, I really like certain authors, and Polish writer Stanislaw Lem is my personal favourite.

In one of his most famous (and easy to read) books, The Star Diaries, he depicts life in a planet where all its inhabitants look exactly the same, have no name, and swift their occupations and family roles every day. When the main character in the book, astronaut Ijon Tychy, asks one of them about death, the answer he gets is that there is no identity and no individuals, death does not really exist there.

What do you think of this answer? And of such a society?

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

SatanBurger · 36-40, F

I did not know you liked Stanislaw Lem.. he's honestly one of my favorites also. I've read a lot of his books but my favorite book by him was Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. I actually get many of the audiobooks available and listen to them when I exercise lol.

For the last part, I agree. For the identity part the words of the cat in Coraline says it best 😂🤔

For the death part, animals are faced with the same mental handicaps as us (depression, loneliness, anxiety, can express grief and loss.. blackbirds do this.)

Yes animals can even get PTSD.

However in reality if you examined life and death as abstract concepts instead of literal, it actually becomes quite complicated to define. The way our brains operate are on a set of signals (even food has code that can activate certain mutations or hormones this is why they say you are what you eat, this can be taken literally.)

So with signals, how do I really know that living or death really exist? Like how can I trust myself to know the truth? Those are good questions I think. The old "what if we're just really living forever and we don't know it.."

The brain gets confused every single time it dies lmao 😂

I mean death is just a term we invented after all when we see people "not breathing anymore" so I can understand the correlation (and it could very well be true because of brain death,) but if correlation does not always equal causation (logical fallacy) then the same would hold true for the concepts of death and life.

Cierzo · M

@SatanBurger Life and death are just terms we created, but we can only create terms in life.

Personally I think our need to create needs is innate, since our need to belong in groups is too. We put names on those we care about. If that caring is intense we even make up new ones. Otherwise we accept those who have already been given.