3 ms·

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 thos

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?

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?