5 ms·

What's wrong with not wanting to die?

by throw1234651234 6y ago

strofcon 6y ago
It's a pretty mentally unhealthy way to live, mostly.
- RunawayGalaxy 6y ago
  Even if it's possible?
  - strofcon 6y ago
    I mean, "won't die of old age quite as soon" doesn't equate to "immortal", yea? To be fair though, my comment was way too broad. I should have clarified that I mean a constant, overbearing dread of the prospect of death is super unhealthy. Make life suck, and effectively shortens it in the experience of the scared one. (source: did that for a long time, got healthy, stopped being scared. Sample size of 1. :-D )
- modzu 6y ago
  said with the entire world cooped up scared in their homes...
  - strofcon 6y ago
    Yup, current situation sucks massively. Doesn't change the fact that a disproportionate fear of death is exceedingly unhealthy and robs folks of some of the joy of being alive.
    - aea12 6y ago
      Except nobody said, or even suggested, a fear of dying. Only you did. There's a significant difference between wanting more time to do things and sitting around terrified, and conflating the two is problematic. Reading your siblings, you're projecting your own feelings onto a completely reasonable feeling that most people have: with another hundred years of experience, what's possible?
      - strofcon 6y ago
        Fair enough, I read fear into the parent comment, my apologies. As for projection, not so much - I've not really had any significant fear of death, aside from instinct to avoid certain demise. :-) Instead it's more that I've only ever seen "I'm at peace with the idea of dying" and "desperately clinging to anything that can prolong my life, even if only by a little." Admittedly, that's my anecdotal experience of the people with whom I interact, and I did indeed present a false dichotomy. :-\ Again, my apologies there. In the proper logical sense, "not wanting to die" is only technically negated as "wanting to die". Quite literally the definition of negation - introducing a "not" in front of whatever the thing is. So that's my oops. It's a weird place though, because the negation of "at peace with the idea of dying one day" is "NOT at peace" with the same. Which implies fear. Which... I dunno, I've reached my limit now. :-) Death is a weird concept to consider in a neutral / rational manner, eh?
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  There are some animals that don't "age" like we do. These animals can live indefinitely, until they are eaten or die in some accidental way. Aging is a set of complex bio-physical-chemical processes. We have actually made a lot of progress in recent decades understanding how this happens. There is no fundamental reason we won't be able to better understand these processes and then mitigate them heavily, if not entirely. Aubrey de Grey is one of the scientists leading these efforts and his work, along with others, is very interesting. It seems to me there is real potential here. There are many difficult hurdles, but I find it plausible we might overcome them to an extent where it is possible to significantly extend the human lifespan. If course, if this actually happens, there will be massive social, political, and economic consequences. I'm not exactly sure how that would play out. I'm a bit of an optimist, so I imagine there would be some sort of new non-dystopic paradigm that arises.
  - erpellan 6y ago
    I'm terrified. Imagine the current crop of elderly rich mostly white men in positions of political power. Now imagine they're never going to die or retire. Sounds pretty dystopian to me.
    - dwaltrip 6y ago
      Guillotines would still work, so there's that. But it's true, there is definitely potential for it to go badly.
    - FriendlyNormie 6y ago
      How are there still retards who think “elderly rich mostly white men” run anything and not Jews. Kill yourself, smoothbrain.
    - dependenttypes 6y ago
      Let's not bring race into this. It would be extremely easy to claim that for a lot of other races as well depending on how racist I wanted to sound. Anyway, once they die their children will take over, as it is usual, so nothing will change if they were to just live forever.
- twojacobtwo 6y ago
  Isn't that the way that every single organism ever has lived?
- himinlomax 6y ago
  Assuming it is, is it anywhere near the most unhealthy way to live?
ryandvm 6y ago
Being dead is basically the equivalent experience as not having been born. I'm not terribly upset about all the things I missed before 1977 AD. Not sure why I should be too worried about what I'll miss when I'm gone.
- newsbinator 6y ago
  I'm not as afraid of being dead as I am about the process of getting sick and dying.
- AQuantized 6y ago
  That seems orthogonal to his question.
- ativzzz 6y ago
  > Being dead is basically the equivalent experience as not having been born Completely untrue. Maybe as an individual, but your impact on other humans is the biggest difference. Particularly if you have children, there is no equivalence.
- pstuart 6y ago
  I would miss my children, and I believe they would miss me.
- c1ccccc1 6y ago
  Sure the experience of being dead isn't too bad, because there is no such experience, but consider this: Thanks to the arrow of time, you can know what happened in the past, even if you weren't personally there. Many details are forgotten, but important events are typically recorded in historical documents, or fossils. The same is not true of the future. If I died tomorrow, I would die not knowing the answer to P vs. NP, not knowing whether humanity would last another hundred years, or another million, not knowing if we were alone in the universe. Wouldn't you be disturbed if you had to live in a world where all of human history before 1977 was forgotten? If people knew that there had been such a history, but had no memories or records of it?
- rossnordby 6y ago
ohyes 6y ago
You ask a valid question. Not wanting to die is fine, I think more importantly, not wanting to age and gradually become a burden towards end of life is also natural. Not wanting to be lost and missed (nevertheless hoping that you've done well enough to be missed). The idea of being bedridden and helpless is more scary to me than death. But not wanting to die __ever__ can be driven by narcissism. If no one dies or gets old then we never make way for the next generation. If the cure is widespread you get overpopulation, if it is limited you get a class divide, never aging fantastically rich immortals and a semi-permanent underclass. Neither seems fantastic. What are the rules? Do you give something up to be in your 20s forever? Generational change seems like a strong force for good in a lot of ways, to me at least. It can be harder to rewire a neural network than it is to start fresh. Note that any non-magical intervention will likely be 'increasing longevity' not granting immortality. And even if that were the case, there's always the heat death of the universe. There's no escape from reality closing, you'd probably have a difficult time sustaining biological life-forms long before the universe is dark and cold. I doubt it would be pleasant. What is the storage limit for a brain anyway? Personally I find some cold comfort that everything I do is meaningless and will be forgotten. I will once rest and be gone. So will everything.
- rossnordby 6y ago
  >If the cure is widespread you get overpopulation, if it is limited you get a class divide, never aging fantastically rich immortals and a semi-permanent underclass. Neither seems fantastic. At the risk of repeating myself: imagine a world where everyone was ageless by default, and they started to experience issues like inequality or overpopulation. What would that world's top scientists come up with? Would it be "kill everyone above a certain age"? I doubt it, because that would be very silly, and anyone seriously suggesting it in that world would be considered obviously insane. There are a lot of better options that don't require mass early death; these problems aren't inevitable. >there's always the heat death of the universe. There's no escape from reality closing, you'd probably have a difficult time sustaining biological life-forms long before the universe is dark and cold. I doubt it would be pleasant. This has always struck me as a very, very odd argument. Assuming protons decay, we're talking ~10^37 years until physics starts getting in the way. That's 10^27 times longer than the age of the universe. An entity observing those timescales would have time to see entire solar systems grow, mature, and die a billion billion times over, without exhausting even a billionth of that duration. Sure, such an entity would run out of stars to observe, and biology would get tricky, but computation wouldn't cease, and fundamentally that's all that's needed for a rich existence. It's an eternity nested in an eternity nested in an eternity. And if protons don't decay... It's not infinite, but as a human, the distinction is completely irrelevant. Whatever a human would become on those timescales can decide what it wants to do later- for now, I'd just like more than a measly 100 years. It's not like we're wishing on a monkey paw.

What's wrong with not wanting to die?

strofcon 6y ago

It's a pretty mentally unhealthy way to live, mostly.

RunawayGalaxy 6y ago
Even if it's possible?
- strofcon 6y ago
  I mean, "won't die of old age quite as soon" doesn't equate to "immortal", yea? To be fair though, my comment was way too broad. I should have clarified that I mean a constant, overbearing dread of the prospect of death is super unhealthy. Make life suck, and effectively shortens it in the experience of the scared one. (source: did that for a long time, got healthy, stopped being scared. Sample size of 1. :-D )
modzu 6y ago
said with the entire world cooped up scared in their homes...
- strofcon 6y ago
  Yup, current situation sucks massively. Doesn't change the fact that a disproportionate fear of death is exceedingly unhealthy and robs folks of some of the joy of being alive.
  - aea12 6y ago
    Except nobody said, or even suggested, a fear of dying. Only you did. There's a significant difference between wanting more time to do things and sitting around terrified, and conflating the two is problematic. Reading your siblings, you're projecting your own feelings onto a completely reasonable feeling that most people have: with another hundred years of experience, what's possible?
    - strofcon 6y ago
      Fair enough, I read fear into the parent comment, my apologies. As for projection, not so much - I've not really had any significant fear of death, aside from instinct to avoid certain demise. :-) Instead it's more that I've only ever seen "I'm at peace with the idea of dying" and "desperately clinging to anything that can prolong my life, even if only by a little." Admittedly, that's my anecdotal experience of the people with whom I interact, and I did indeed present a false dichotomy. :-\ Again, my apologies there. In the proper logical sense, "not wanting to die" is only technically negated as "wanting to die". Quite literally the definition of negation - introducing a "not" in front of whatever the thing is. So that's my oops. It's a weird place though, because the negation of "at peace with the idea of dying one day" is "NOT at peace" with the same. Which implies fear. Which... I dunno, I've reached my limit now. :-) Death is a weird concept to consider in a neutral / rational manner, eh?
dwaltrip 6y ago
There are some animals that don't "age" like we do. These animals can live indefinitely, until they are eaten or die in some accidental way. Aging is a set of complex bio-physical-chemical processes. We have actually made a lot of progress in recent decades understanding how this happens. There is no fundamental reason we won't be able to better understand these processes and then mitigate them heavily, if not entirely. Aubrey de Grey is one of the scientists leading these efforts and his work, along with others, is very interesting. It seems to me there is real potential here. There are many difficult hurdles, but I find it plausible we might overcome them to an extent where it is possible to significantly extend the human lifespan. If course, if this actually happens, there will be massive social, political, and economic consequences. I'm not exactly sure how that would play out. I'm a bit of an optimist, so I imagine there would be some sort of new non-dystopic paradigm that arises.
- erpellan 6y ago
  I'm terrified. Imagine the current crop of elderly rich mostly white men in positions of political power. Now imagine they're never going to die or retire. Sounds pretty dystopian to me.
  - dwaltrip 6y ago
    Guillotines would still work, so there's that. But it's true, there is definitely potential for it to go badly.
  - FriendlyNormie 6y ago
    How are there still retards who think “elderly rich mostly white men” run anything and not Jews. Kill yourself, smoothbrain.
  - dependenttypes 6y ago
    Let's not bring race into this. It would be extremely easy to claim that for a lot of other races as well depending on how racist I wanted to sound. Anyway, once they die their children will take over, as it is usual, so nothing will change if they were to just live forever.
twojacobtwo 6y ago
Isn't that the way that every single organism ever has lived?
himinlomax 6y ago
Assuming it is, is it anywhere near the most unhealthy way to live?

ryandvm 6y ago

Being dead is basically the equivalent experience as not having been born. I'm not terribly upset about all the things I missed before 1977 AD. Not sure why I should be too worried about what I'll miss when I'm gone.

newsbinator 6y ago
I'm not as afraid of being dead as I am about the process of getting sick and dying.
AQuantized 6y ago
That seems orthogonal to his question.
ativzzz 6y ago
> Being dead is basically the equivalent experience as not having been born Completely untrue. Maybe as an individual, but your impact on other humans is the biggest difference. Particularly if you have children, there is no equivalence.
pstuart 6y ago
I would miss my children, and I believe they would miss me.
c1ccccc1 6y ago
Sure the experience of being dead isn't too bad, because there is no such experience, but consider this: Thanks to the arrow of time, you can know what happened in the past, even if you weren't personally there. Many details are forgotten, but important events are typically recorded in historical documents, or fossils. The same is not true of the future. If I died tomorrow, I would die not knowing the answer to P vs. NP, not knowing whether humanity would last another hundred years, or another million, not knowing if we were alone in the universe. Wouldn't you be disturbed if you had to live in a world where all of human history before 1977 was forgotten? If people knew that there had been such a history, but had no memories or records of it?
rossnordby 6y ago

ohyes 6y ago

You ask a valid question. Not wanting to die is fine, I think more importantly, not wanting to age and gradually become a burden towards end of life is also natural. Not wanting to be lost and missed (nevertheless hoping that you've done well enough to be missed). The idea of being bedridden and helpless is more scary to me than death. But not wanting to die __ever__ can be driven by narcissism. If no one dies or gets old then we never make way for the next generation. If the cure is widespread you get overpopulation, if it is limited you get a class divide, never aging fantastically rich immortals and a semi-permanent underclass. Neither seems fantastic. What are the rules? Do you give something up to be in your 20s forever? Generational change seems like a strong force for good in a lot of ways, to me at least. It can be harder to rewire a neural network than it is to start fresh. Note that any non-magical intervention will likely be 'increasing longevity' not granting immortality. And even if that were the case, there's always the heat death of the universe. There's no escape from reality closing, you'd probably have a difficult time sustaining biological life-forms long before the universe is dark and cold. I doubt it would be pleasant. What is the storage limit for a brain anyway? Personally I find some cold comfort that everything I do is meaningless and will be forgotten. I will once rest and be gone. So will everything.

rossnordby 6y ago
>If the cure is widespread you get overpopulation, if it is limited you get a class divide, never aging fantastically rich immortals and a semi-permanent underclass. Neither seems fantastic. At the risk of repeating myself: imagine a world where everyone was ageless by default, and they started to experience issues like inequality or overpopulation. What would that world's top scientists come up with? Would it be "kill everyone above a certain age"? I doubt it, because that would be very silly, and anyone seriously suggesting it in that world would be considered obviously insane. There are a lot of better options that don't require mass early death; these problems aren't inevitable. >there's always the heat death of the universe. There's no escape from reality closing, you'd probably have a difficult time sustaining biological life-forms long before the universe is dark and cold. I doubt it would be pleasant. This has always struck me as a very, very odd argument. Assuming protons decay, we're talking ~10^37 years until physics starts getting in the way. That's 10^27 times longer than the age of the universe. An entity observing those timescales would have time to see entire solar systems grow, mature, and die a billion billion times over, without exhausting even a billionth of that duration. Sure, such an entity would run out of stars to observe, and biology would get tricky, but computation wouldn't cease, and fundamentally that's all that's needed for a rich existence. It's an eternity nested in an eternity nested in an eternity. And if protons don't decay... It's not infinite, but as a human, the distinction is completely irrelevant. Whatever a human would become on those timescales can decide what it wants to do later- for now, I'd just like more than a measly 100 years. It's not like we're wishing on a monkey paw.