What is a premature death?

The one who dies is deprived of goods that this person would have enjoyed if he or she had continued living, according to the popular “deprivation account of harm.” The person who dies “prematurely” is generally thought to suffer the most harm from death. However, the concept of a premature death is unclear, as will be shown. I will evaluate various definitions of a premature death and will argue that the existing definitions are too ambiguous and unreliable to serve as the basis for estimating the degree of harm from death

Comparison of the 3.36 micrometer feature to the ISM

It has been noted that the 3.36 micrometer emission feature is not the same as that of any ISM band at 3.4 micrometer. This is documented herein. There is no convincing analog to the cometary 3.36 micrometer emission feature seen in the Interstellar Matter band. This fact suggests that if the carbonaceous material in comets came from the ISM, it was either further processed in the solar nebula or has a different appearance because of the different excitation environment of the sun and ISM

Human Extinction, Narrative Ending, and Meaning of Life

Some people think that the inevitability of human extinction renders life meaningless. Joshua Seachris has argued that naturalism can be conceptualized as a meta-narrative and that it narrates across important questions of human life, including what is the meaning of life and how life will end. How a narrative ends is important, Seachris argues. In the absence of God, and with knowledge that human extinction is a certainty, is there any way that humanity could be meaningful and have a good ending? I will distinguish between two conceptions of how humanity could be meaningful: the traditional view and an alternative view, which I will outline. I will argue that this alternative view provides a plausible explanation for how humanity could become meaningful. I will also argue that coming to terms with our mortality and other limitations would add meaning to human life and provide humanity with a good ending

The Causal Attainment Theory of Temporal Passage

Some philosophers contend that the notion of temporal passage is illusory. But if the flow of time is an illusion, what gives rise to the notion that an event is in the future and then becomes present? In this paper, I hypothesize that there is a relation between the degree to which the conditions necessary for an event to occur have been met and the perception that a future event is “distant” or “near” in time. An event is perceived to be “distant” when few or none of the conditions necessary to cause the event have been met. As the conditions necessary to cause the event are attained, the event is perceived to be “near” or “about to happen.” This hypothesis would explain the perception that an event “moves” from the future to the present, but it would not explain why an event that has occurred seems to move from the near past into the distant past

Does Death Give Meaning to Life?

Some people claim that death makes our lives meaningless. Bernard Williams and Viktor Frankl have made the opposite claim that death gives meaning to life. Although there has been much scrutiny of the former claim, the latter claim has received very little attention. In this paper, I will explore whether and how death gives meaning to our lives. As I will argue, there is not sufficient support for the strong claim that death is necessary for one's life to be meaningful. However, there is support for the more limited conclusion that our finitude enhances or upholds the meaning in the lives of some individuals in four different ways

How Human Life Could be Unintended but Meaningful: A Reply to Tartaglia

departmental bulletin pape

The 3.4 micron emission in comets

Emission features near 3.4 microns were detected in comet Bradfield (1987s) on 17 Nov. 1987 UT, and, marginally, on two earlier dates, with the Cooled Grating Array Spectrometer at the NASA Infrared Radio Telescope Facility (IRTF) (Brooke et al., 1988b). The central wavelength (3.36 microns) and width (approx. 0.15 microns) of the strongest feature coincide with those observed in comet Halley. A weaker emission feature at 3.52 microns and a strong feature extending shortward of 2.9 microns were also detected. This brings the number of comets in which these three features have been seen to three, two new (Bradfield, Wilson) and one old (Halley). It seems almost certain that the 3.4 micron features are emissions by C-H groups in complex molecules. Based on the similarity of the 3.4 micron features in comets Halley and Wilson, the authors suggest that a particular set of organic compounds may be common to all comets (Brooke et al. 1988a). The absence of the feature in some comets could then be due to photodestruction or evaporation of the organics when the comet approaches the sun, in combination with a predominance of thermal emission from non C-H emitting grains. Detection of the 3.4 micron emission feature in comet Bradfield at 4 = 0.9 AU provides support for this argument. Complex organics in comets could have been formed by particle irradiation of parent ices in the nucleus or been incorporated as grains at the time the comets formed. Since the most heavily irradiated layers of Halley would have been lost in its hundreds of perihelion passages, the authors believe the more likely explanation is that the 3.4 micron emitting material was incorporated in comet nuclei at the time of formation. The 3.4 micron comet feature resembles, but is not identical to, the interstellar 3.29 micron (and longer wavelength) emission features and the broad 3.4 micron feature seen in absorption toward the Galactic center. Detailed comparisons of cometary and interstellar organics will require comet spectra with signal-to-noise and spectral resolution comparable to that available in spectra of the interstellar medium. Such observations are currently being planned