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When I had children I experienced a significant drop in fear of death. Now if, say, someone were pointing a gun at me, my greatest emotion would be fear for how
by api 11y ago
When I had children I experienced a significant drop in fear of death. Now if, say, someone were pointing a gun at me, my greatest emotion would be fear for how it would hurt them.
Fear of death is just a piece of hard coded programming to make sure we successfully reproduce and raise healthy offspring. It's not an intrinsic part of being sentient or conscious. It's possible that intelligences that reproduced in some other way would lack it entirely, e.g. AIs that explicitly create their offspring or hive like aliens. For ants only the queen might fear death, and we indeed see ants behaving this way.
I think this explains why radical life extension tech is underfunded. Even being a billionaire doesn't change this. Bill Gates has kids.
- abstractbill 11y agoI've had the opposite experience. I remember being very young and starting to think about death, and thinking it the most horrible thing imaginable. That the beautiful experience of life as a human should end in annihilation. That we would just stop existing at some point. Now I'm watching my oldest daughter suffer the same realization. I tell her that there are a few people who are working on solving the problem, that I hope they can figure it out fast enough, that I understand and share the same fears she does. I tell her to live each day to the fullest anyway, and to enjoy life and not dwell on death too much. I don't know what else to say. I've been in extreme pain, and I've been pumped full of enough morphine that I've been pretty incompetent. At least I still existed! And even in all the pain and incompetence I still found my own existence precious and worth hanging on to. Assuming we don't solve death in time for me, I have an eternity to not exist. Why would I be in a hurry to get started? (Still, I found the article interesting and respect the decision of anyone who decides they actually prefer annihilation to pain and incompetence, even if I don't understand them).
- Aleman360 11y agoI don't have kids, but I find it curious when parents have that mentality. If you're kids feel the same about their kids, and so on, then we're not much different than apples, existing only to spread our seed.
- prawn 11y agoSave for the very few who do something significant to advance the species, how are we that different to apples?
- api 11y agoWe are sentient but we emerged from a system that works exactly that way. I do think we will eventually transcend the limits of our origins, but I was speaking to the reality of what we still very much are.