Good Labor Day party at Fay and Ezra's tonight. First I had a good talk with an otherwise delightful fellow from the PhD program who has regretfully decided to vote for Ralph Nader this fall. I tried to talk him off the bridge, but I don't know if I did. Mostly we got to talking about how the two-party system is irredeemably broken and how the entire apparatus of information dispersal in our society is aligned against the anti-corporate left.

Structural critiques of society make me want to get a PhD in English.

Then I butted in on a conversation between Fay, Angie, and the Incredible Mr. Slease, which began as a discussion about mind/body dualism as it relates to alcohol -- as I said, this was a party -- but quickly segued into the usual death/existentialism/nihilism philosophical three-way-dance.

We talked about the usual stuff I talk about when I talk about death -- the sad unlikelihood of life after death, the obscure argument-from-phenomenology that I've been working on since I was 12 which almost convinces me that there's an afterlife after all (I'll talk about this someday, I swear).

Then we got into the experience of death itself: what it actually feels like to die.

I mentioned something I'd read recently (I don't remember where) that suggested that some neurologists believe that it's possible that the subjective experience of death in the last seconds of conscious experience could appear to last forever; that is, it's possible we experience a subjective eternity of life after death in the last second before we die.

This got us talking about Marcus's Mormon upbringing. You see, he's thought about this before, and he wonders if the eternity his mind will construct for him won't be straight out of Mormonism, the religion he was raised in but has now effectively abandoned (an action for which, by Mormon standards, has earned him a permanent spot in Mormon Hell). Mormon Hell is basically "separation from God" -- roughly eqiuvalent to laying at the bottom of a deep well, unable to reach the ring of light at the top. He's afraid that no matter how consciously he may have rejected Mormonism, when his time comes, that's what his mind will construct.

It's a fascinating problem, and one there's no easy solution for. Can we ever overcome the imprints of our youth?

Talking about stuff like this makes me want to get a PhD in Philosophy.

The last thing we talked about, right before I left, was how we think we'll handle the moments of our own deaths. I've been certain since I was young that I'll die consciously, rather than in my sleep.

Sometimes I think I'll be able to handle it. After all, that's what this has all been building up to. You've got to figure that by then I'll be ready.

Other times I think that in the moment of my death I'll be flooded with a certainty that there is simply nothing after life, that this is it, and that now it's ending -- and the final conscious experience of my life will thus be nothing less than pure existential terror.

Have a good night, everybody!