This account does not treat mortality as a problem to be solved. The standard religious response treats death as a difficulty whose resolution requires a metaphysical appendix: a soul, an afterlife, or a resurrection. Without that appendix, existence is supposed to become intolerable. The account developed here reverses the diagnosis. Mortality is not an added affliction layered onto an otherwise complete life. It is constitutive of what a person is. A consciousness that did not end would be a different kind of structure from the one a person consists in (cf. Williams 1973b, whose Makropulos argument reaches a kindred conclusion by a different line of argument, through the exhaustion of the categorical desires that give a life its reasons to continue rather than through the structural premise used here). The deep first-person perspective opened by finite self-producing recursion is the person. To demand that this vantage persist after the recursion closes is not to demand the same person freed from a defect. It is to demand a different kind of being (cf. Parfit 1984, Part III). That death is registered structurally, as the recursion registering its own closure, does not make it any less the person's own. What the recursion is oriented toward are its categorical desires in Williams's sense, the projects and attachments that give it its reasons to continue; the closure is the closure of those, taken from the standpoint of the one whose desires they are. The structural identification names what death is without dissolving the first-person standpoint from which it is the end of my projects rather than the cessation of a structure of a certain type. How a finite life orders those categorical desires into meaning is taken up at [§8.8](<8.8 Meaning.md>).

The Epicurean argument is structurally sound, and the registration of mortality is also structurally appropriate. Epicurus's argument — that death is nothing to us because where we are, death is not, and where death is, we are not — is correct on this reading. There is no subject to whom the closure is suffered, because the vantage requires the recursion that has ceased. But the same recursion that opens the vantage also lets the person register, while still alive, that the recursion will end. The registration of mortality belongs to the living person who registers it, not to the closure that follows. Fear of death, grief before death, and the orientation of a finite life toward its ending are not category errors corrected by the Epicurean argument. They are a person's registration of their own finitude, performed while they are still alive. The argument and the registration operate at different levels; both are correct.

The denial of death is not merely a failure of nerve. It is a distortion with measurable effects. Becker's analysis (1973) and the terror-management literature (Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski 2015) show that a person's relation to their own ending shapes them whether they acknowledge it or not. Cultures and individuals that deny mortality do not escape its force. They redirect it into other channels: worldview defense, in-group purity, consumption, and hostility to the unfamiliar. Traditions that engage mortality directly — Stoic, Buddhist, Christian *ars moriendi* — do not free a person from finitude. They bring a person's relation to finitude into accuracy. That is the same kind of work this account elsewhere names as bringing a person's registrations of any structural feature into accuracy.

The grief response is veridical at the level of the surviving model. When someone dies after years of contact with the bereaved, the model the bereaved built across that relationship does not close when the other person's life closes. The model continues to run, and its outputs register as presence. The phenomenology — that the deceased is somehow still there, that the room still holds them, that they will walk in at any moment — is not delusional. It is the model's continued activity in the absence of its referent (Field and Filanosky 2010; [§8.14.5](<8.14.5 What is Concluded.md>) elaborates this in the religious case). Mourning is the gradual reworking of the model's predictions under the new condition: the referent no longer arrives. Grief is not weakness or a failure of acceptance. It is a person recalibrating after a sustained relationship has ended.

This account forecloses survival of the person past death. It does not foreclose the other work that afterlife traditions were doing alongside that doctrine. The standard religious posit is that a person persists past death as the same self in a different medium. That posit runs against what a person is. There is no structural pathway by which the person survives the recursion's failure. But the surrounding practices remain intelligible: the surviving community holds the deceased in mind, the deceased continues to affect the people they shaped, and mortality orients the life that remains. None of this requires metaphysical survival. All of it is what the medium does with the lives it has hosted. The continuity that survives is not the person's own survival. It is the medium's holding of what the person did while alive. On the reductionist consequence drawn at [§8.5.5](<8.5.5 What is Concluded.md>), this is where the sharp line between the person and their surviving effects gets its correct sense. Locating what matters in the continuation of the recursion ([§8.8.3](<8.8.3 What is Predicted.md>)), the models the deceased leaves in others, the works, and the influence are partial preservations of connectedness, real and admitting of degrees, not simply nothing; what they are not is the continuation of the recursion whose closure death is. Drawing the line there is not the residual further-fact thinking reductionism dissolves but a consequence of the account's realism about the recursion as the continuant: connectedness held in another recursion, however strong, is not this recursion carried forward. The surviving effects are not the person, then, in the one sense that bears on survival, while some of what mattered, in the degreed connectedness sense, is partially held in the structures the life shaped. And the afterlife pictured more than survival: the blessed condition it promised — a secured and unconstrained life — is not abolished here either but relocated, from a state awaited beyond the world to the one a shared structure can approximate within it (§9).

Craig's argument that life without God is not merely difficult but *ultimately* meaningless (Craig 2008) is answered most directly on its own ground. The argument responds to something real: a purpose secured only for a finite stretch and then gone can feel, from within the wish for permanence, indistinguishable from no purpose at all. But a controlled version of Craig's own comparison shows where that feeling actually originates. Hold theism fixed — God exists, creates the subject, and assigns the subject a purpose — and vary only whether the subject's own continuation ends at ordinary death or persists into the promised afterlife. If a divine ground were what secured *ultimate* significance, the two lives should come out equal: both are created, purposed, and valued by the same God on the same terms. They do not come out equal on the intuition the argument itself trades on; the annihilated life reads as the lesser one, God and purpose held fixed. What the variation isolates is that the intuitive loss tracks the subject's own continuation, not the presence of a designer — the same variable this section has identified as the structural anchor of mortality-registration, independent of any theistic gloss. A parallel case confirms the isolation from the other side: what it would mean to a subject, theist or not, that it is not presently suffering some catastrophic and final loss tracks what that subject stands to keep or lose, not whether a designer named the stakes. One reply relocates the claim rather than defending it: that a permanent God could go on loving and remembering a subject whose own recursion has closed, so that the subject's meaning is secured in God's continuing regard rather than in the subject's own continuation. But regard for someone has never required that the person still exist to receive it — the bereaved go on loving those who have died, and a person can go on cherishing a period of a life without any expectation of returning to it — so a continuing regard held on one side of a relation does not restore the *other* side's continuation. Either the regard does no more work than any love for something finite and complete already does, in which case the *ultimate* claim has become the ordinary one this account already recovers, or it is asked to stand in for the very afterlife the variation removed, in which case nothing has been isolated that was not already on the table. Run this way, Craig's argument tracks the wish for permanence rather than a dependency on a divine source — the same diagnosis this section has been developing throughout, reached this time by testing the theist's own comparison rather than assuming the structural account from the outset.

Cosmological recurrence does not restore what closes. The [§7.6](<7.6 Singularity.md>) strict claim is that a stable zero-extension terminus is foreclosed. Its abductive layer adds that the resolution takes a recurrent form. Even on the strongest reading of that abductive layer — full cyclic recurrence of macro-conditions — the result does not entail that any particular person is restored across cycles. The cycle restores T, S, and Φ. It does not restore the particular consciousnesses the previous cycle hosted. What recurs is the medium's capacity for life and consciousness, not the specific lives and consciousnesses the medium hosted last time. A reader who hoped the account would underwrite a Nietzschean eternal recurrence of the same self is reading more than even the abductive layer permits.

The orientation toward death shapes what the deep first-person perspective can do. A person who registers their own finitude accurately can prioritize what bears on the time they have: what the contemplative traditions called wisdom and the existentialists called authenticity. A person who suppresses the registration spends their time on the structures the suppression generates. The account developed here does not prescribe one orientation over the other. It identifies what each does. Traditions that engage mortality directly are doing the work finitude makes available. What follows from that engineering — the kind of orientation it produces, the kind of art and spirituality it makes available — is what [§8.13](<8.13 Art.md>) and [§8.14](<8.14 Spirituality.md>) take up.

Mortality, read this way, is not a contingent affliction added to an otherwise complete life. It is constitutive of what a person is: a consciousness that did not end would not be a consciousness of the same kind. The Epicurean argument and the registration of mortality are both correct at different levels. Denial of death redirects its energy rather than eliminating it. Grief phenomenology is veridical at the level where the model continues to run, even though the metaphysical inference religions draw from that phenomenology does not follow. Afterlife traditions did real work in registration even where their ontology overreached. Cosmological recurrence restores the medium's capacity, not the particular consciousnesses the medium hosted before. Sexuality has already been named as drive's generative counterpart at [§8.6](<8.6 Sexuality.md>); the differentiated valenced registers themselves were taken up in [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) Feeling, where fear, desire, grief, and care appear as drive shaped by specific conditions at sufficient recursive depth.


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← [8.7.4 What is Confirmed](<8.7.4 What is Confirmed.md>) | [8.8 Meaning](<8.8 Meaning.md>) →
