The Epistemology Of Death

The capacity for pain and observations of animal death, which many moderners are more likely to see than human death, strongly suggest that humans are subject to eventual deaths of their own.  While these alone are enough to persuade most people that death is a certainty of human existence, logic reveals that this is far from the case.  Evidence for the eventual death of all humans certainly exists, but the belief that one can know that death is approaching is not epistemologically sound.  All assertions to the contrary rest on some type of non sequitur fallacy.

While alive, there is no way (at least for a being with my limitations) to even prove that one is not an immortal being, capable of suffering physically and psychologically without ever actually dying.  There is no evidence that this idea is true, but it is entirely possible that it is, as is the case with any matter that could defy scientific expectations without violating the laws of logic (an impossibility).  Death is far from a logical certainty.

Even knowing with absolute certainty that one will die would still not necessarily entail knowledge of when one will die.  There are scores of logically and scientifically possible ways that any given person could die each day, yet death is often treated like nothing more than a distant outcome--even by people who commit fallacies of inductive reasoning and merely assume that an eventual death is an absolute certainty.

None of these points are themselves evidence that death is not guaranteed to come in a specific way or that it will not come at all.  However, they do logically prove that the very presence of death in one's future and the time at which it would come to oneself are, in an ultimate sense, philosophically up in the air.  Sayings like the one about the certainties of "death and taxes" are simply false, as only truths that can be fully established by reason are guaranteed.

It does not follow from this that it is rational to live without regard for potential danger.  After all, an inability to prove scientific matters beyond one's immediate perceptions does not mean that death is not seemingly probable.  Purely logical matters can be proven in full, but scientific ideas can still be supported with evidences.  There is evidence that death awaits all biological creatures, even if death cannot be demonstrated to be an inevitable, universal destination for living things.