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Death is a gift. We are not built to live forever and we should never wish it so. I encourage us all to focus on increasing the quality of all of our lives and

Death is a gift. We are not built to live forever and we should never wish it so. I encourage us all to focus on increasing the quality of all of our lives and not the quantity of our days. "The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people; and so long as men die, liberty will never perish." - Charlie Chapman "The Dictator"

andylei 11y ago
http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html
rdl 11y ago
I've never understood people who believe this, but am happy to let them die if they wish.
- sangnoir 11y ago
  > I've never understood people who believe this You can think of your death as a hard-and-fast deadline to achieve all your dreams - this is pretty motivating for some people. Steve jobs had this to say in a 2005 commencement speech[1]: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important". Other people's death's can be a gift as well: tyrants don't get to rule forever, and out-dated ideas die with their generations. Immortality would be a good thing in a "Culture"-like society: i.e. if we manage to solve all the other human problems (like greed and poverty) first 1. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > You can think of your death as a hard-and-fast deadline to achieve all your dreams For it to be useful as a hard-and-fast deadline, you have to know in advance exactly when it will come. Otherwise, its just knowledge that there will be a deadline at some point in the future, which is very different than a hard-and-fast deadline.
    - photonic30 11y ago
      Furthermore, it is an impending erasure of your self. The way people talk about this "deadline", you'd think it's some sort of forced retirement after which you must be satisfied with the life career you've already had.
    - sangnoir 11y ago
      > For it to be useful as a hard-and-fast deadline I think everyone has a rough idea on their personal upper limit of their productive time (for me it's 70). There is no lower limit, just like a project with a deadline might be cancelled at anytime. I do not think baseline homo sapiens have the hardware required to cope with immortality or extended lives (all those memories, lack of the human condition). How bad is time compression experienced at age 7000? A week is a long time to a child, I bet the decades will just fly by. I can imagine the ennui. We would have to evolve into something beyond human to cope with this. It's not going to be in my lifetime, so excuse me for being comfortable with my mortality.
  - pliny 11y ago
    What an insanely bad deal: I pay my life, and I get a thing which somewhat increases the quality of my life, contingent on me having ambitions that are big enough to require a death-sized motivational tool. Why would you ever choose "dying" over "not dying"? If you live to be a million years old you have a million years to achieve all your dreams, albeit you don't have as much motivation to achieve them in the first 80 years of your life. If you only live 80 years, then you have a lot of motivation to achieve all your dreams in that timespan but (a) your ambitions might not be achievable in 80 years (b) whatever satisfaction you get from achieving your dreams runs out once you die anyway and worst of all (c) you lose 999920 years of life. It stands to reason that whoever chooses "die at 80" over "die at 1e6" or even "never die" just doesn't value living very much.
    - matt_wulfeck 11y ago
      What makes you think you'll accomplish more in 800 years than in 80? Furthermore why do you assume what you accomplish during that time is of any real benefit to society?
      - photonic30 11y ago
        Why must somebody be of benefit to society to deserve to live? Of what use are collected accomplishments if you cannot be conscious to enjoy them?
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - pliny 11y ago
        I didn't say either of those things, but I also don't see why they're relevant. I don't have to earn my first 80 years of life with any "accomplishments that are of any real benefit to society" so I don't see why I would have to earn 800 or 8000 or 8 million years, either.
    - username223 11y ago
      > Why would you ever choose "dying" over "not dying"? First, visit a nursing home. How much is "not dying" worth? Then, visit an elementary school. Given the earth's finite carrying capacity, do you want to have a world with no children?
natrius 11y ago
Your dichotomy is a false one. Do you really think anyone's trying to keep frail old people alive just to count off more days? It seems clear that the goal is to eliminate diseases and decline, which would increase everyone's quality of life. You're free to continue practicing the barbaric ritual of death if you want.
- shawn-furyan 11y ago
  > Do you really think anyone's trying to keep frail old people alive just to count off more days? I think that's a pretty good description of what's going on in the last decade of a lot of people's lives. There's a huge bias toward high risk invasive procedures that have a high probability of leaving the patient debilitated even when the expected lifespan increase is fairly modest. Our penchant for hope in difficult circumstances leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering. There is plenty in modern medical practice to consider 'barbaric'. Skepticism with regard to the current crop of medical utopists is warranted, because assuredly current barbaric medical practices were developed and implemented, overwhelmingly, with the best of intentions.
  - reasonattlm 11y ago
    There is a good technical reason for the present state of medicine for age-related disease, which is that it overwhelmingly addresses proximate causes rather than root causes. Near all treatments attempt to mess with the complex disease state in a late stage of its progression, or in some way compensate for loss of function by adjusting other processes into a higher state of activity. It is expensive, error-prone, and the gains are tiny. The underlying root causes continue to run forward unaddressed. The research community has only just started the transition into treating root causes, which is to say the aging process itself, the accumulating forms of cell and tissue damage that are fundamental, not caused by anything other than the normal operation of metabolism. There are initiatives, some of which have reached the stage of clinical translation, but they are only a tiny fraction of the overall expenditure at present. This will change over the next decade or two as the first results for fundamental damage repair (e.g. senescent cell clearance) become compelling enough and widely known enough to shift the entire field in the right direction.
agildehaus 11y ago
I'm in my early thirties and am already feeling that my memories are fragile things that will fade, change, or disappear entirely as I age. I'd imagine living forever or even just a millennia would become a very confusing mess of memory. Living a normal 60-80 year life is like a good book. Living an eternity would be like taking every page from all the books in a library, randomly shuffling them on the floor, then trying to read through it. Full of people and events, certainly, but devoid of any meaning.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
Sure, I just want to decide when to unwrap it.
agumonkey 11y ago
1 year ago I'd have said "YES", now for absurdly cynical reasons my health has plummeted and I wish medicine was many orders of magnitude better since most treatments are heavy, invasive and according to my views stuck in an obsolete era of medical thinking.
photonic30 11y ago
The disappearance of your experience is no gift, no matter how well you wrap it. I fail to understand how easily many people differentiate between near-term life extension (chemotherapy, beta blockers) and long-term life extension. The "natural" lifespan is a form of anchoring. Anything less feels like you're being fleeced, but ask for too much more, and you're being greedy. But this is nonsense. Nothing, short of religion, prescribes that a certain lifespan is the best one. If you ask for ten more years of quality, everybody thinks it's a worthwhile pursuit of medical research. Come to the end of those ten and ask for ten more, and it's the same worthwhile pursuit without end. Why, then, when we simply apply the shorthand of calling it 100 or 1000 years, does death suddenly sound like a welcome idea-- an idea we think is right to impose on the population? If the common lifespan were 40 years, do you believe you'd consider 80 to be just as silly? If 80 is not so silly under any circumstance, then why is it so special that 160 is wrong to desire?

andylei 11y ago

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

rdl 11y ago

I've never understood people who believe this, but am happy to let them die if they wish.

sangnoir 11y ago
> I've never understood people who believe this You can think of your death as a hard-and-fast deadline to achieve all your dreams - this is pretty motivating for some people. Steve jobs had this to say in a 2005 commencement speech[1]: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important". Other people's death's can be a gift as well: tyrants don't get to rule forever, and out-dated ideas die with their generations. Immortality would be a good thing in a "Culture"-like society: i.e. if we manage to solve all the other human problems (like greed and poverty) first 1. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > You can think of your death as a hard-and-fast deadline to achieve all your dreams For it to be useful as a hard-and-fast deadline, you have to know in advance exactly when it will come. Otherwise, its just knowledge that there will be a deadline at some point in the future, which is very different than a hard-and-fast deadline.
  - photonic30 11y ago
    Furthermore, it is an impending erasure of your self. The way people talk about this "deadline", you'd think it's some sort of forced retirement after which you must be satisfied with the life career you've already had.
  - sangnoir 11y ago
    > For it to be useful as a hard-and-fast deadline I think everyone has a rough idea on their personal upper limit of their productive time (for me it's 70). There is no lower limit, just like a project with a deadline might be cancelled at anytime. I do not think baseline homo sapiens have the hardware required to cope with immortality or extended lives (all those memories, lack of the human condition). How bad is time compression experienced at age 7000? A week is a long time to a child, I bet the decades will just fly by. I can imagine the ennui. We would have to evolve into something beyond human to cope with this. It's not going to be in my lifetime, so excuse me for being comfortable with my mortality.
- pliny 11y ago
  What an insanely bad deal: I pay my life, and I get a thing which somewhat increases the quality of my life, contingent on me having ambitions that are big enough to require a death-sized motivational tool. Why would you ever choose "dying" over "not dying"? If you live to be a million years old you have a million years to achieve all your dreams, albeit you don't have as much motivation to achieve them in the first 80 years of your life. If you only live 80 years, then you have a lot of motivation to achieve all your dreams in that timespan but (a) your ambitions might not be achievable in 80 years (b) whatever satisfaction you get from achieving your dreams runs out once you die anyway and worst of all (c) you lose 999920 years of life. It stands to reason that whoever chooses "die at 80" over "die at 1e6" or even "never die" just doesn't value living very much.
  - matt_wulfeck 11y ago
    What makes you think you'll accomplish more in 800 years than in 80? Furthermore why do you assume what you accomplish during that time is of any real benefit to society?
    - photonic30 11y ago
      Why must somebody be of benefit to society to deserve to live? Of what use are collected accomplishments if you cannot be conscious to enjoy them?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - pliny 11y ago
      I didn't say either of those things, but I also don't see why they're relevant. I don't have to earn my first 80 years of life with any "accomplishments that are of any real benefit to society" so I don't see why I would have to earn 800 or 8000 or 8 million years, either.
  - username223 11y ago
    > Why would you ever choose "dying" over "not dying"? First, visit a nursing home. How much is "not dying" worth? Then, visit an elementary school. Given the earth's finite carrying capacity, do you want to have a world with no children?

natrius 11y ago

Your dichotomy is a false one. Do you really think anyone's trying to keep frail old people alive just to count off more days? It seems clear that the goal is to eliminate diseases and decline, which would increase everyone's quality of life. You're free to continue practicing the barbaric ritual of death if you want.

shawn-furyan 11y ago
> Do you really think anyone's trying to keep frail old people alive just to count off more days? I think that's a pretty good description of what's going on in the last decade of a lot of people's lives. There's a huge bias toward high risk invasive procedures that have a high probability of leaving the patient debilitated even when the expected lifespan increase is fairly modest. Our penchant for hope in difficult circumstances leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering. There is plenty in modern medical practice to consider 'barbaric'. Skepticism with regard to the current crop of medical utopists is warranted, because assuredly current barbaric medical practices were developed and implemented, overwhelmingly, with the best of intentions.
- reasonattlm 11y ago
  There is a good technical reason for the present state of medicine for age-related disease, which is that it overwhelmingly addresses proximate causes rather than root causes. Near all treatments attempt to mess with the complex disease state in a late stage of its progression, or in some way compensate for loss of function by adjusting other processes into a higher state of activity. It is expensive, error-prone, and the gains are tiny. The underlying root causes continue to run forward unaddressed. The research community has only just started the transition into treating root causes, which is to say the aging process itself, the accumulating forms of cell and tissue damage that are fundamental, not caused by anything other than the normal operation of metabolism. There are initiatives, some of which have reached the stage of clinical translation, but they are only a tiny fraction of the overall expenditure at present. This will change over the next decade or two as the first results for fundamental damage repair (e.g. senescent cell clearance) become compelling enough and widely known enough to shift the entire field in the right direction.

agildehaus 11y ago

I'm in my early thirties and am already feeling that my memories are fragile things that will fade, change, or disappear entirely as I age. I'd imagine living forever or even just a millennia would become a very confusing mess of memory. Living a normal 60-80 year life is like a good book. Living an eternity would be like taking every page from all the books in a library, randomly shuffling them on the floor, then trying to read through it. Full of people and events, certainly, but devoid of any meaning.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

Sure, I just want to decide when to unwrap it.

agumonkey 11y ago

1 year ago I'd have said "YES", now for absurdly cynical reasons my health has plummeted and I wish medicine was many orders of magnitude better since most treatments are heavy, invasive and according to my views stuck in an obsolete era of medical thinking.

photonic30 11y ago

The disappearance of your experience is no gift, no matter how well you wrap it. I fail to understand how easily many people differentiate between near-term life extension (chemotherapy, beta blockers) and long-term life extension. The "natural" lifespan is a form of anchoring. Anything less feels like you're being fleeced, but ask for too much more, and you're being greedy. But this is nonsense. Nothing, short of religion, prescribes that a certain lifespan is the best one. If you ask for ten more years of quality, everybody thinks it's a worthwhile pursuit of medical research. Come to the end of those ten and ask for ten more, and it's the same worthwhile pursuit without end. Why, then, when we simply apply the shorthand of calling it 100 or 1000 years, does death suddenly sound like a welcome idea-- an idea we think is right to impose on the population? If the common lifespan were 40 years, do you believe you'd consider 80 to be just as silly? If 80 is not so silly under any circumstance, then why is it so special that 160 is wrong to desire?