The thing is, if you were dead, even a different kind of dead, you wouldn't care. How can you fully deny a world in which you will never again be troubled? Paradise is not happiness, but freedom from suffering. There is no happy paradise.

This reminds me of an old Calvin and Hobbes strip, in which Calvin creates a snow sculpture titled "The horrors of nonexistence, weighed against the terrors of living." Calvin and Hobbes has a lot of existential themes :)

But back on topic, my logic is the same as Shinji's: I'd rather be in a world where I can be happy, even if it means a return to pain, and uncertainty.

Would you choose happiness even if you had no recollection of what it meant to be happy?

Hexon.Arq wrote:Would you choose happiness even if you had no recollection of what it meant to be happy?

If my mind's reserve contained only that of sadness and pain? Well that's not much of a question, more of a situation where the only possible answer could be "yes."

This is some good stuff.

I do understand the notion that a place without human contact could be paradise.
Mankind, is after all, fundamentally alone. However, if you where alone as a human. What could you live for? What would you lose? Would life be worth living without some kind of companion? Without any human contact is utter solitude, something all of us crave.

But how does one remain truly happy alone? We can not seek approval from others, we can not associate with anything, we can not love, we cannot feel the warmth of another's touch, physical or mental.

For me, absolute solitude is hell.

Hexon makes a ood point I think saying there is no such thing as a truly happy paradise, to be truly happy we can no longer be human.

This is what SEELE realized thus tried to create another existance, one were we are all alone, but alone as one, we lack nothing...Because we don't really exist there.

Shinji chose a human choice, he would rather risk the pain and rejection, in hiopes of discovering his own happiness. It is the only way, I belive, a human can be happy as a human.

Would I risk this same pain if I had no prior knowledge of happiness?
I can't really say, however I think I woud have chosen to return the AT field, after all, if I've never been happy before, then I have something very amazing to look forward to.