Fear of Forever
The fear of falling encompasses the anxieties accompanying the sensation and the possibly dangerous effects of falling, as opposed to the heights themselves. Those who have little fear of falling may be said to have a head for heights. Studies done by psychologists Eleanor J.
Gibson and Richard D. Walk have further explained the nature of this fear.
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- Fear of falling;
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One of their more famous studies is the " visual cliff ". Below is their description of the cliff:. On one side of the board a sheet of patterned material is placed flush against the undersurface of the glass, giving the glass the appearance as well as the substance of solidity. On the other side a sheet of the same material is laid upon the floor; this side of the board thus becomes the visual cliff. Thirty-six infants were tested in their experiments, ranging from six to fourteen months.
Gibson and Walk found that when placed on the board, 27 of the infants would crawl on the shallow side when called by their mothers; only three ventured off the "edge" of the cliff. Some would pat the glass on the deep end, but even with this assurance would not crawl on the glass.
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These results, although unable to prove that this fear is innate, indicate that most human infants have well developed depth perception and are able to make the connection between depth and the danger that accompanies falling. For a long time, the fear of falling was merely believed to be a result of the psychological trauma of a fall, also called "post-fall syndrome". Fear of falling has been identified as one of the key symptoms of this syndrome. Since that time, FOF has gained recognition as a specific health problem among older adults.
However, FOF was also commonly found among elderly persons who had not yet experienced a fall. Prevalence of FOF appears to increase with age and to be higher in women. Age remains significant in multiple logistic regression analyses. Studies of nonhuman subjects support the theory that falling is an inborn fear. Gibson and Walk performed identical experiments with chicks, turtles, rats, kids, lambs, kittens, and puppies.
On going on and on and on
The chicks were tested less than 24 hours after birth. It suggested that depth perception develops quickly in chickens, as the chicks never made the "mistake" of walking off the "deep" side of the cliff. The kids and lambs were also tested as soon as they could stand on their own. During the experiment, no goat or lamb ever stepped onto the glass of the deep side. When placed there, the animals displayed typical behavior by going into a posture of defense, with their front legs rigid and their back legs limp. In this state of immobility, the animals were pushed forward across the glass until their head and field of vision crossed the solid edge on the opposite side of the cliff; the goats and lambs would then relax and proceed to spring forward upon its surface.
Based on the results of the animals tested, the danger and fear of falling is instilled in animals at a very young age. The postural control system has two functions: Studies have shown that people afraid of heights or falling have poor postural control, especially in the absence of strong visual cues.
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The Triumph of Death , anonymous, early Renaissance. He is the author of The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith Edited by Nigel Warburton. But from a table laid out with many false grails, he foolishly picks the most glittering cup of all. Donovan drinks his fill, but rather than receiving the gift of eternal life, he rapidly starts to age: As the immortal knight who guards the True Grail quips to Indy: Grasping for the prize of immortality, she attempts to reach the Grail before it falls into the bowels of the earth.
But are they wise to do so? The Last Crusade suggests not. After all, not only are the two people who throw their lives away villains, but the knight who guards the Grail explicitly warns that the cost of living forever is having to stay in that very same temple, forever. And what sort of life would that be? Immortality — the film is suggesting — might be a curse, rather than a blessing.
Such a conclusion will not come as a surprise to philosophers who have considered the issue. This was because after a certain amount of living, human life would become unspeakably boring. We need new experiences in order to have reasons to keep on going. But after enough time has passed, we will have experienced everything that we, as individuals, find stimulating. The former is a contingent, the latter a categorical, desire.
A life devoid of categorical desires, Williams claimed, would devolve into a mush of undifferentiated banality, containing no reason to keep on going.
The antidote to fear has been found
Born in , Elina drinks an elixir that keeps her biologically speaking at age 42 forever. However, by the time she is over years old, Elina has experienced everything she wants, and as a result her life is cold, empty, boring and withdrawn. There is nothing left to live for. Accordingly, she decides to stop drinking the elixir, and releases herself from the tedium of immortality. Imagine that the natural biological lifespan of a human being was 1, years. In that case, in her s, Elina would have died comparatively young. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed even if usually unknown time limit.
We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death. In turn, Scheffler argues, everything that we value — and thus can coherently desire in an essentially human life — must take as given the fact that we are temporally bounded beings. Sure, we can imagine what it would be like to be immortal, if we find that an amusing way to pass the time.
But doing so will obscure a basic truth: A desire for immortality is thus a paradox: You might think you want to live forever, but reflection should convince you otherwise. But is it quite so clear? What is interesting in this regard is that, when we return to wider popular culture, instances abound of immortality being presented not as a blessing, but a curse.
Initially thinking that these must be the happiest of all beings, Gulliver revises his view when he learns that Struldbrugs never stop ageing, leading them to sink into decrepitude and insanity, roaming the kingdom as disgusting brutes shunned by normal humans.
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It seems, then, that both philosophers and popular culture keep trying to tell us the same thing: And yet, if this is ultimately true — as philosophers and popular culture seem to want to say that it is — then another question arises: There is something both deeply and persistently appealing about the idea of immortality, and that cannot be dispelled by simply pointing to examples where immortality would be a curse.
To see this, we have to think a little more carefully about what a desire for immortality might in part be about. O n the face of it, a desire for immortality most obviously seems to be a response to the fear of death. Most of us are afraid to die. If we were immortal, we could escape both that fear and its object.
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Hence, it seems, a desire for immortality is simply a desire not to die. In the face of this, what philosophers, poets and novelists remind us of is that there are fates worse than death. Immortality might itself turn out to be one of them. If so, we should not desire to be immortal. No sane person, after all, wants to be a Struldbrug. But when we look more closely, we see that fear is not the only important response to the fact of death. Unamuno is imagining the situation that most of us do when we are contemplating our own deaths: