Death

Why is death bad? Not for the same reason life is–that it contains bad experiences; it contains no experiences. The badness of death consists in the removal of all intentionality, not its suffusion by bad intentional objects. This has the implication that a consciousness without intentionality, as may be supposed for the early fetus, has no value. It isn’t sentience as such that confers value but sentience combined with (determinate) intentionality. A kind of super-Alzheimer’s that subtracted all intentionality from the subject would be tantamount to death, so far as value in concerned. On reflection, that sounds right.

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