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Except it's blatantly unrealistic. Death is not 'a part of life', but a nuisance. Not all species 'die' (e.g. jellyfish, hydra, possibly lobsters, flatworms).

by azatris 10y ago

Except it's blatantly unrealistic. Death is not 'a part of life', but a nuisance. Not all species 'die' (e.g. jellyfish, hydra, possibly lobsters, flatworms). And 'the Force' is fictional and does not apply to Carrie Fisher. As long as we have our species, it is enevitable we will be achieving immortality. My point being - every death is a tragedy.

coldtea 10y ago
>Except it's blatantly unrealistic. Death is not 'a part of life', but a nuisance. The two notions are orthogonal. Nuisances of every kind are regular parts of life.
cle 10y ago
Death is change. Anyone who's witnessed the slow mental decline of a loved one knows that death is not black and white. Death is no more tragic than any other change--what was, is no more, and has transformed into something new. It is tragic only insofar as we resist accepting its ineluctability.
- inopinatus 10y ago
  Sorry, it has not transformed into something new. Life has stopped and any residual potential has been lost. Death is nothing but pain and loss. If we can overcome it someday, it'll cause massive social disruption but massive long-term benefit.
  - secstate 10y ago
    I have to respectfully disagree with you here. Death is most definitely NOT nothing but pain and loss. For those living in chronic pain, it is release. For those of us who manage to live our lives forgetting those who have hurt us as a coping mechanism, death provides an opportunity to grieve properly, when it was not possible in life. Residual potential lives on in the survivors ability to find inspiration in the lives of those long-since dead. Would you argue that Einstein's residual potential has been lost, if his work and his legacy is still inspiring people to explore the limits of human knowledge? Our triumph over death will be met with a similar awe as our successful invention of the hedonovat, a device that suspends a living creature in goo while supplying everything it needs to live forever and supplying sensory inputs of nothing but pleasure and happiness.
    - inopinatus 10y ago
      Einstein's residual potential has been lost, because he is dead. He was still writing papers in 1955, when he died. If he was still alive, I hope he would still be publishing. The idea that "residual potential lives on in others" is irrelevant - there should be no need to die to inspire someone else. Moreover, even if inspired by Einstein, no-one will not produce exactly the same work as Einstein would have, had he lived. So that notion is refuted, and would become ever more definitively so over the accumulated years and contributions of an indefinite lifespan. Solving the problem of death includes removing the overwhelming preference for death in cases where it is the only relief from a terrible quality of life, so your chronic pain example gets swept aside. The is no such thing as a "hedonovat" and your depiction of it sounds frankly ridiculous. Hoping to enable an indefinite human lifespan with a high quality of life is not ridiculous. Death is only loss and pain.
      - secstate 10y ago
        The hedonovat was a construct of the American pragmatist John Dewey to understand at a relatively simple level, what motivates people. Why would you want to live forever? The human condition is predicated on birth and death. As an academic exercise, I think birth without death would be a bit like moving from a northern climate to a southern climate, where work ethic goes out the window because there is no season in which work cannot be done (winter). If we live forever, at what point do we taste the urgency of living?
  - wnkrshm 10y ago
    While relative immortality (i.e. no death of natural causes) holds many opportunities for positive change (such as eliminating a short-sightedness and 'repetition'[0] of history due to our individually limited perception of history with a ~70-year horizon), I can only seem to imagine a world where death can be overcome as a dystopia rather than an utopia. The same forces that drive human conflict now will still exist and I think worsen. If it's a procedure and not inherited, either it goes along with technology supplying humanity with cheap nigh-unlimited energy and thus space travel, uploading of minds or it's a two-caste world in which the same immortal persons hold the mortal masses at bay with any means necessary. If it's immortality for all (say through a virus that spreads naturally), it's a world where people have to be naturally sterile and only the priviledged get to have children, you get to wait thousands of years before you can procreate due to a place being free because of accidental deaths or no one gets to have children (but a governing body through technical means, arifical wombs). Also, I can imagine relative immortality would render global nuclear war an inconvenience, with proper protection you could maybe wait out the aftermath and start again? [0] "history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes"
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
>And 'the Force' is fictional and does not apply to Carrie Fisher. Its a metaphor for spirituality, and its pretty obvious that the strict deterministic materialist worldview is far from proven and that many people have spiritual beliefs that they feel 100% justified as having. Not everything is horrible because we don't have immortality. If anything, we'll hit our extinction event well before then, assuming its even possible for complex mammals to have. No, we're not flatworms and can't have the aging solutions of flatworms. I think its okay to feel comforted by death. When my dad died, it hurt, but I was happy his suffering has ended. I was happy he had a long life and raised three boys who loved him. You absolutely can accept and even welcome death in some ways. Life isn't all roses and chocolates. Death is currently the only solution we have to terminal suffering, for example.
- gonvaled 10y ago
  Science (I will use "science" as shortcut for "deterministic materialist worldview") is not "proven": it offers (falsifiable) explanations to observable phenomena, and it does not concern itself with as-of-yet non explainable phenomena. It accepts, and happily adopts, corrections. People have spiritual beliefs when they try to explain things that they can not understand. Other people abuse this by telling them that they have special knowledge and that they can explain those phenomena, or even more subtle, that there is somebody out there who can explain it to them, at some point, in some manner. All this without providing the slightest chance of falsification, meaning basically they can assert whatever they like. So in my eyes, no, people are not really justified in having those beliefs: they could just as well accept that certain things are (now, and possibly forever) unknowable.
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    Except science doesn't support a basic Newtonian deterministic world. When you factor in relativity and quantum mechanics your worldview can't be purely a deterministic machine anymore.
    - gonvaled 10y ago

by azatris 10y ago

coldtea 10y ago

>Except it's blatantly unrealistic. Death is not 'a part of life', but a nuisance. The two notions are orthogonal. Nuisances of every kind are regular parts of life.

cle 10y ago

Death is change. Anyone who's witnessed the slow mental decline of a loved one knows that death is not black and white. Death is no more tragic than any other change--what was, is no more, and has transformed into something new. It is tragic only insofar as we resist accepting its ineluctability.

inopinatus 10y ago
Sorry, it has not transformed into something new. Life has stopped and any residual potential has been lost. Death is nothing but pain and loss. If we can overcome it someday, it'll cause massive social disruption but massive long-term benefit.
- secstate 10y ago
  I have to respectfully disagree with you here. Death is most definitely NOT nothing but pain and loss. For those living in chronic pain, it is release. For those of us who manage to live our lives forgetting those who have hurt us as a coping mechanism, death provides an opportunity to grieve properly, when it was not possible in life. Residual potential lives on in the survivors ability to find inspiration in the lives of those long-since dead. Would you argue that Einstein's residual potential has been lost, if his work and his legacy is still inspiring people to explore the limits of human knowledge? Our triumph over death will be met with a similar awe as our successful invention of the hedonovat, a device that suspends a living creature in goo while supplying everything it needs to live forever and supplying sensory inputs of nothing but pleasure and happiness.
  - inopinatus 10y ago
    Einstein's residual potential has been lost, because he is dead. He was still writing papers in 1955, when he died. If he was still alive, I hope he would still be publishing. The idea that "residual potential lives on in others" is irrelevant - there should be no need to die to inspire someone else. Moreover, even if inspired by Einstein, no-one will not produce exactly the same work as Einstein would have, had he lived. So that notion is refuted, and would become ever more definitively so over the accumulated years and contributions of an indefinite lifespan. Solving the problem of death includes removing the overwhelming preference for death in cases where it is the only relief from a terrible quality of life, so your chronic pain example gets swept aside. The is no such thing as a "hedonovat" and your depiction of it sounds frankly ridiculous. Hoping to enable an indefinite human lifespan with a high quality of life is not ridiculous. Death is only loss and pain.
    - secstate 10y ago
      The hedonovat was a construct of the American pragmatist John Dewey to understand at a relatively simple level, what motivates people. Why would you want to live forever? The human condition is predicated on birth and death. As an academic exercise, I think birth without death would be a bit like moving from a northern climate to a southern climate, where work ethic goes out the window because there is no season in which work cannot be done (winter). If we live forever, at what point do we taste the urgency of living?
- wnkrshm 10y ago
  While relative immortality (i.e. no death of natural causes) holds many opportunities for positive change (such as eliminating a short-sightedness and 'repetition'[0] of history due to our individually limited perception of history with a ~70-year horizon), I can only seem to imagine a world where death can be overcome as a dystopia rather than an utopia. The same forces that drive human conflict now will still exist and I think worsen. If it's a procedure and not inherited, either it goes along with technology supplying humanity with cheap nigh-unlimited energy and thus space travel, uploading of minds or it's a two-caste world in which the same immortal persons hold the mortal masses at bay with any means necessary. If it's immortality for all (say through a virus that spreads naturally), it's a world where people have to be naturally sterile and only the priviledged get to have children, you get to wait thousands of years before you can procreate due to a place being free because of accidental deaths or no one gets to have children (but a governing body through technical means, arifical wombs). Also, I can imagine relative immortality would render global nuclear war an inconvenience, with proper protection you could maybe wait out the aftermath and start again? [0] "history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes"

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

>And 'the Force' is fictional and does not apply to Carrie Fisher. Its a metaphor for spirituality, and its pretty obvious that the strict deterministic materialist worldview is far from proven and that many people have spiritual beliefs that they feel 100% justified as having. Not everything is horrible because we don't have immortality. If anything, we'll hit our extinction event well before then, assuming its even possible for complex mammals to have. No, we're not flatworms and can't have the aging solutions of flatworms. I think its okay to feel comforted by death. When my dad died, it hurt, but I was happy his suffering has ended. I was happy he had a long life and raised three boys who loved him. You absolutely can accept and even welcome death in some ways. Life isn't all roses and chocolates. Death is currently the only solution we have to terminal suffering, for example.

gonvaled 10y ago
Science (I will use "science" as shortcut for "deterministic materialist worldview") is not "proven": it offers (falsifiable) explanations to observable phenomena, and it does not concern itself with as-of-yet non explainable phenomena. It accepts, and happily adopts, corrections. People have spiritual beliefs when they try to explain things that they can not understand. Other people abuse this by telling them that they have special knowledge and that they can explain those phenomena, or even more subtle, that there is somebody out there who can explain it to them, at some point, in some manner. All this without providing the slightest chance of falsification, meaning basically they can assert whatever they like. So in my eyes, no, people are not really justified in having those beliefs: they could just as well accept that certain things are (now, and possibly forever) unknowable.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Except science doesn't support a basic Newtonian deterministic world. When you factor in relativity and quantum mechanics your worldview can't be purely a deterministic machine anymore.
  - gonvaled 10y ago