Let’s say if we were to meat someone from a different universe where things never die, how would you explain death to them?
The entity you knew as yaddayadda is gone and the only thing left behind is an empty, decaying shell.
Ceasing of all functions
Where NOTHING dies? That’s going to make meal prep super awkward.
Maybe they wouldn’t need to eat
They rawdog energy from their star
I love this description of photosynthesis.
Feel free to steal it
Their star would eventually die. Flames would die, objects break, it’s not a far fetched thing to think that similar stuff can happen to living beings.
I think number 2 the next day would be a more harrowing experience.
Maybe it’s a fun 8 hour rollercoaster ride?
Just slice off a chunk of ol’ Bessie each day, and you’ll eat steak for the rest of your life!
That pile of dirt is going to walk and talk around for a while. And then it’s going back to being an insert pile of dirt.
The same way you do to a child. They go away and can never come back
I’m having trouble imagining a real universe “where nothing ever dies”. What counts as a thing? What counts as dying? If nothing ever changes then nothing dies, but if nothing changes then I can’t explain anything at all to this person.
Alternately, they’re from a toy universe, like a game with no death condition, but even those depend on outside things to continue existing. Eventually the game stops and everything in the universe “dies”, but otherwise there’s nothing in their world that ever dies. Maybe that’s close enough.
Anyway:
“You know how right now I’m talking, but eventually I’m going to stop? Imagine being like that.”
Its a world where your car or washing machine never breaks down and goes on forever. I can get on board with that.
Leaving and never coming back ever
“Like a leaf caught aflame, it’s matter converted to heat and the bonds broken down to ash. It’s not gone, it’s structure has changed to the point of no longer being ‘a leaf’, and what we see before us when looking at someone/something who has passed on is the same as ashes in the fire. Changed, but jot truly gone”
at a random time you cease to exist just because
You describe birth, youth, parental love, new beginnings, etc. first, because those things could not exist without death.
You know how right now, things are happening in other places that’ you’ll never be a part of or know about, because you can only be in one? It’s like that but with time.
You know when someone isn’t around and you can’t see them? Well imagine that someone were in a place where no one in the world could see them. The person in this separate place is sleeping but does not dream.
without death there is no end and without end there is no real beginning either since the word doesnt even have meaning at that point. And without end there is also no change, because changing enough would be also kind of an ending and also “dying” as one version of you stops and another begins. Could such being even be sentient enough to understand you? Would it want to be?
I’m going to push back a bit. Ending doesn’t necessitate death. A movie ends. You don’t need an end to have a beginning, either—the positive integers begin at 1. Your second sentence is begging the question. You assert that without death there couldn’t be endings, and change is a kind of ending, so without death there couldn’t be change. But plenty of things change without dying. I used to be a baby. My infancy ended without my infant death.
If we take OP’s question to include anything that could even metaphorically be compared to death, then there wouldn’t even be such a universe, because any instant in time could be described as the “death” of a prior instant in time
Way I see it, death is something that is in between different states, something ends and something else begins.
We can’t even explain death to ourselves.
We can. We just don’t want to believe there is an end.
