Death is the ultimate joke. We spend so much time worrying about it. Avoiding it. Writing poetry and books about it. Maybe, If your a Religious being, even shaping our entire life around it because of the “ultimate judgement” in the end.
Death is a construction to make sense of our physical reality.
Another perspective is that we're like an ML model that takes tons of raw data and extract features from it, and infer stuff like "x is alive" and "y is dying". We insist that the features we extracted are the real thing, instead of a summarization that enables us to understand the world.
that the physical reality around you that you perceive through your mind might not be the end-all-be-all and death is just a small part of it all. I don’t know. You’ll find out sometime.
I don't know what he or she meant, but I wrote a comment elsewhere on the thread about a Buddhist perspective that touches on this. Ctrl+f Buddhism.
The tldr is that all our experiences are constructions of our mind. It's our mind that assigns meaning to stuff. Being alive or dead isn't a pre-existing concept, it's something we constructed.
An exercise is to imagine some beings very different from ourselves looking at Earth and not recognizing life. Perhaps because they exist in a different timescale, or they structure data differently. They wouldn't be able to see we dying.
Death is a construction to make sense of our physical reality.