Conventionally, death is reliably seen as either the cessation of life, or the state of no longer being alive. The specifics of its parameters, as understood between people or cultures, generally vary depending on their understanding of what life is.

Almost any definition of life and death requires firm bounds. There must be a spatial or conceptual dividing line between things in order for something to be dead or alive while other things are the opposite. But that relies wholly on privileged discreteness. When we recognize that as a fiction, we are left with two prospects:

The first is that death is similarly fictional; that, as Buddhists believe, we are all one, and death is just a small part of the universal Oneness being reconfigured. But Buddhists believe in a… sort-of afterlife. They believe in multiple versions of reality, in supernatural beings, in endless reincarnation—there is no space in Buddhist thought for an empty universe.

But as far as our best understanding goes, they are wrong about that. Because there is very little evidence for anything resembling reincarnation, or any notion that any bit of consciousness persists after body-death, and also because the universal Oneness can die, and by all indications, will. There cannot be proactive systems after heat death—the reliance on material substrate for all logic processes is also a reliance on entropic gradients. And the last proactive system ever to exist may well die long, long before that. A universe without any reactive information systems is a universe without joy, without love, without comfort; a universe without proactive information systems is a universe without any means to reliably perpetuate its own existence in the face of novel hazards, and thus perpetuate joy, and love, and comfort.

The second is that everything is death. In all likelihood, what you think of as yourself can be described as a very large number of interacting and overlapping proactive information systems. You-but-not-including-your-memories-of-elementary-school is no more or less real, no more or less a person than your conventional view of the self (assuming that view includes memories of elementary school; if not, feel free to substitute with any other memory).

When a small processor/information substrate with independent proactivity (i.e., that if it were alone in an empty universe it would still be proactive), such as a human brain, stops functioning, it’s common to privilege it as the only kind of death. But we know those bounds are invented. More than just the human dies—every relationship they had formed its own proactive system, all of which no longer exist. The child the human once was likely died a long time earlier; erased, painlessly overwritten. And this applies to every permutation of all the fundamental particles in and near your body, so long as they include enough critical regions of the brain to be proactive.

What this means, inevitably, is that when you learn something or forget something or when you cut your finger or when you breathe out a few hydrogen atoms from the membrane of an epithelial cell in your throat you are causing some of those configurations to cease to exist. Is that not death? The typical dynamic view of the self is not a single, consistent thing, it’s a three-dimensional movie, stitched together by a trillion similar images overlapping and averaging to form an approximate, blurry image, being killed and replaced by a new and very similar but far from identical set of a trillion images again and again and again at approximately infinite frames per second.

A substrate and mind ceasing to function is a sad thing, for them and the others around them who treasured their idea of the uniquely privileged and discrete self that the substrate and mind approximated, much like it is and can be profoundly, devastatingly sad to lose a relationship, or break a treasured heirloom, or to see a cultural space you once loved change in ways that make it no longer offer the same comfort.

The final proactive information system, the final person, ceasing to exist, such that there will never again in all of reality as we know it be another person? I cannot help but see that as the worst possible thing that can ever happen. That is death. That is my enemy.