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I personally like posts like this; a sobering reminder of our own mortality: memento mori. It hopefully motivates us to thrive, flourish, and cherish what reall

• xvector 5y ago
  Hopefully it also starts us on a path of treating death as a problem to solve, so we can die on our own terms instead of being forced to do so by a cruel reality. https://www.sens.org/ https://www.sens.org/ https://www.lifespan.io/ https://www.lifespan.io/ https://www.buckinstitute.org/ https://www.buckinstitute.org/
  • GreenWatermelon 5y ago
    I would rather we change our view on death. Death has always been a constant since life became a thing. Even the mightiest stars in the skies are destined to die one day. After you die, your consciousness fades, and so do all your desires and regrets. To me, death is the ultimate respite.
    • nitrogen 5y ago
      To me, death is the ultimate respite. To me, this makes a virtue of necessity. We have deep philosophies around death only because it's inescapable. But if we could change that, then we could also change those philosophies.
      • Barrin92 5y ago
        death is more complex than just being inescapable. Death is also a change agent that wipes the slate clean and makes place for the new. It's how all organic life adopts collectively. The first thing that's going to be immortal when death isn't inescapable is Kim Jong Un. No thanks, if you want to see a world without death read Altered Carbon
        • kelnos 5y ago
          Altered Carbon is just one fictionalized, dystopian account. It doesn't have to be bad. Knowing humanity, though, it probably would be.
        • xvector 5y ago
          Stuff like that is really easy to say until you are actually on your deathbed.
          • oleander73 5y ago
            I have incurable cancer and let me tell you, talking about curing death is laughably absurd at this point. We don't even have good pain killers.
            • xvector 5y ago
              What's absurd is that we aren't even really trying. Curing death and causes of ought to be the singular paramount goal of our society, but it's not, because we have been trained to accept it as inevitable ever since we were capable of thought.
      • saulpw 5y ago
        Everything passes. This is not something that can be conquered; it is an inevitable part of the fabric of existence. Maybe it will one day be possible for people to live indefinitely. Maybe egomaniacs would live for thousands of years if they could. But it is not possible to live forever; the universe itself won't last (at least, in form hospitable to life) forever. And so the cessation of our consciousness is inevitable. We can't change this any more than we can change the value of pi.
        • kiba 5y ago
          Inevitable doesn't mean good.
    • fossuser 5y ago
      "At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don't recall exactly what. And I said: "You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn't being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no."" [0] [0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-seem-and-be-deep https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see... There's no (physics based) reason we have to die, just like there was no reason for all the deaths in child birth in early human history. It's a failure of our current capabilities. I don't know if any of the claims in Lifespan [1] hold up, but if they do stopping aging may be easier than people previously thought. Either way - I'm hoping we figure it out sooner rather than later. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nXop2lLDa4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nXop2lLDa4
      • glitchc 5y ago
        Actually there is a physics based reason. It’s entropy. Entropy can only increase over time in an isolated system. The human body is a complex multicellular organism largely isolated from the environment and largely in homeostasis once fully grown. Increasing entropy over time is inevitable. It would require increasingly larger amounts of energy to counteract its effects on our body, which over time would become impossible to supply. If stars cannot sustain themselves forever, how can we compete? We are far more complex with a far smaller energy budget.
        • fossuser 5y ago
          When the human lifespan is on the order of a star's - I'll be a lot happier.
          • 8note 5y ago
            Do you really want to see everyone you care about burn up in a supernova?
    • kelnos 5y ago
      That's fair; you are of course welcome to your own views on life and death. But I don't think there's a "we", here. Some people are accepting of death, and aren't interested in the idea of immortality, or even a significant amount of life extension. Others... are. Neither viewpoint is wrong, or bad. I don't think I'd want to live forever, but I think the time we get is far too short. I want to see an end to scarcity and poverty. I want to see thriving colonies on Mars. I want to see us figure out superluminal travel and visit other star systems. Sure, we may also annihilate ourselves in the next century, but I'd rather be optimistic about these things, and it bums me out that I almost certainly won't be around to see them. I've spent a lot of time on Alcor's website, reading about cryopreservation, and have considered signing up. But I'm worried about what could happen if it works. The culture shock of waking up even a century after your death sounds difficult to handle, let alone many centuries. Aside from being a small window to the past, what of value would I have to a future society? Would I feel without purpose, and wish I hadn't done it?
      • fossuser 5y ago
        I think a lot about Alcor too - I think it's probably worth doing. Hopefully you can get someone you care about to do it too. In the unlikely event it does work, there'd at least be a handful of people - it'd be pretty unlikely to be the only success story I think. Downside risk seems small?
        • xvector 5y ago
          Downside is virtually nonexistent if you can afford it. The upside is potentially everything.
      • mLuby 5y ago
        Humans are generally adaptable and resilient. Permadeath means you don't get to try adapting to that future.
        • 8note 5y ago
          On the other hand, natural selection runs on death and reproduction. Humanity's genetics will naturally deteriorate without death.
    • soheil 5y ago
      Let me remind you that you had been dead for 13.7 billion years before being alive for only 1/1,000,000,000 of that time and you call death a break?
      • dash2 5y ago
        But he's been alive for 100% of his life, which is all that he had to experience.
        • lycopodiopsida 5y ago
          And he will be alive for 100% of his life - until he is not.
    • morpheos137 5y ago
      Death is neither good nor bad, nor permanent, in my opinion. Given eternity arbitrary close combinations of matter in space and time that composes you will arise again and again. My opinion is that when we die we pretty much begin a life extremely similar to the life we just lived except maybe some infintesimal thing is different. Thus if you want a better life then start creating it because you have been living variations of the same script forever.
      • dash2 5y ago
        But presumably you've also then been living very different variations of the same script, since there have been infinite combinations of matter that were close enough to give rise to you, but different enough to have very different outcomes. Also, doesn't physics and the Big Bang rule out this eternal recurrence idea? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
        • morpheos137 5y ago
          For your first point I disagree. Once a life in a different aeon becomes sufficiently different from yours it is no longer fair to consider it you. For your second point, I don't think physics rules out the big bang "recurring" because it does not deal with time before time. The big bang theory is not at all in conflict with cyclic conformal cosmology or eternal expansion.
    • thelittleone 5y ago
      I agree with you. In a way, death can be viewed a kind of birth. In some cultures a well-liked persons passing is comparatively celebrated. The grim black traditions of my culture are almost self centered by comparison.
    • kiba 5y ago
      Sounds like a rationalization. There is no permanent solution to the problem of preventing death, so people try to make it a good thing. This is especially true when you looked at some of our oldest myth such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
    • acje 5y ago
      If humans could live to 200, imagine the wealth and power the top leaders, political or corporate, could accumulate. Now pray it never happens?
      • fennecfoxy 5y ago
        Meths
  • JackFr 5y ago
    > treating death as a problem to solve I think that's a poor framing. Yes, cure diseases, absolutely, but mortality is intrinsic to humanity. Suffering is a problem to solve. How we should live, knowing that we will most assuredly die is a problem to solve. Treating death as a problem to solve I think is a conceit and ultimately a fools errand.
    • hallway_monitor 5y ago
      Are you sure you don't just feel that way because you consider death an inevitability? I agree completely that fixing death from old age would fundamentally change people's worldviews and would indeed change what it means to be human. But that doesn't mean it's not a cause worth devoting effort to.
      • JackFr 5y ago
        > But that doesn't mean it's not a cause worth devoting effort to. Why? Ultimately you need to address what is the meaning of life, and what is your purpose. I think if you offered immortality to me tomorrow I wouldn't take it.
        • xvector 5y ago
          > I think if you offered immortality to me tomorrow I wouldn't take it. I think if we offered it to you on your deathbed, as you are seconds away from it, you would.
          • DoreenMichele 5y ago
            Only if it cured what ailed me. I would personally be skeptical of such an offer. I would think "Yeah. Sure. And live like this forever without relief or escape. No thanks, buddy." Not everyone frames such problems the same.
            • xvector 5y ago
              To be clear, I'm not discussing a "monkey's paw" sort of scenario, but a legitimate good-faith offer of immortality. A cure for your ailment is almost certainly implied by an offer of immortality. If we are capable of such a feat we will almost certainly have solved the problem of making humans youthful and healthy indefinitely. And realistically speaking, death would still be optional, just not forced upon you and your hopes and dreams by random ailments.
  • the__alchemist 5y ago
    I'm with you on your core point, but in a way, it's orthogonal: Death will continue to be an inevitability, and can arrive at any time - even after we solve senescence. (Accidents, murder etc)
    • xvector 5y ago
      The endgame (a few hundred years from now) would be virtualizing consciousnesses and distributing them across space so only a cosmic disaster could end a being.
      • jacquesm 5y ago
        You've arrived at heaven and the afterlife through non-religious ways.
        • morticiansflame 5y ago
          There's an episode of Black Mirror for this - "San Junipero".
          • xvector 5y ago
            Definitely my favorite episode, and beautifully optimistic. I like how they flipped the script on the generic and easy "immortality bad" hot-take.
            • mLuby 5y ago
              Also a brilliant subversion of expectations, given how bleak the rest of the series is.
      • fossuser 5y ago
        Basically Permutation City: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
      • 5y ago
  • sriram_malhar 5y ago
    My approach to death is this: I am an insignificant drop, and will eventually merge into an ocean of molecules, to be rearranged into other drops. In that sense, there is nothing to fear, nothing to solve. If the manner in which one is dying is painful, then I should have a means of getting to a quick end.
    • xvector 5y ago
      You won't merge into anything, you will become nothing. No rest, no respite, nothing. Your body might "merge", but that's irrelevant. Your consciousness - who you are - will end, truly, once and for all. You will never again experience hopes, dreams, memories, or love. You won't experience anything at all for the rest of eternity.
      • 8note 5y ago
        You sound a lot more confident than you should be, considering the lack of data.
        • xvector 5y ago
          As far as we understand, consciousness is an emergent phenomenon based off of your neural activity. We can state with certainty that your consciousness ends when your brain does.
  • jcfields 5y ago
    "And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away."
    • xvector 5y ago
      This sounds like a desperate attempt to cope with death. We can find better ways to encourage change than literally dying. If people lived indefinitely but society was a bit stagnant, and you pressed a button to kill 100M random people a year to "encourage change", you'd be regarded as insane, and rightfully so. Death is not the solution to our problems, just like throwing your computer in the trash isn't a solution to a crashing program.
      • 8note 5y ago
        Death is the only working solution we've got. Once you've solved the other problems, you can work on death
        • xvector 5y ago
          My example > If people lived indefinitely but society was a bit stagnant, and you pressed a button to kill 100M random people a year to "encourage change", you'd be regarded as insane, and rightfully so. highlights that it's baseless to put off solving death or even using it as a solution.
  • ljm 5y ago
    Death isn't a problem to solve...it's just the end of what we know and the start of everything we don't. I don't know what comes after death but I'm not scared of it.
    • xvector 5y ago
      Alternatively, and more likely, (given our current understanding of the universe), it is the end of everything and the start of nothing.
      • 8note 5y ago
        Given our current understanding of the universe, you are already immortal since there continues to be minute probability that you didn't die, and events can be entangled to that.
  • codetrotter 5y ago
    > so we can die on our own terms instead of being forced to do so by a cruel reality Step one would be to allow euthanasia. Until we allow that, we cannot pretend that anyone is ever going to be allowed to die on their own terms.
    • xvector 5y ago
      Definitely agreed. Death should be a personal choice.
    • SavantIdiot 5y ago
      Portland represents! That's why I moved here. I have a genetic disease that will eventually take me out slowly and painfully, and from the day I was diagnosed I've wanted to live in Oregon so that I could be in control of my own death. Some would argue that this is denying my loved ones (and our society in general) a natural death, which is supposed to be difficult because that is part of life. However, I believe two things separate us from the animals: our ability to accessorize, and efficiency.
    • perilunar 5y ago
      Whether it's "allowed" or not, you can still die on your own terms if you wish. You just need to organise and do it before you are incapable of doing it yourself.
    • nradov 5y ago
      Even when euthanasia is legal it's generally only an option for people of sound mind. Once you have dementia that option is closed off.
  • mjn 5y ago
    As relevant to the linked post (written by someone who later died of ALS [1]), there are a lot more mainstream medical research organizations who treat "death as a problem to solve". Treating deaths caused by ALS, cancer, heart disease, strokes, covid, etc. as a problem to solve is the focus of a huge amount of research. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyotrophic_lateral_sclerosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyotrophic_lateral_sclerosis
  • TriNetra 5y ago
    When we understand that we have an eternal essence within – an immutable part of us that neither bourns thus nor dies, death becomes no longer something to be afraid of. And when we realize this eternal aspect of our existence with direct experience, we also gain the luxury to die (leave the body) at our own will.
  • joelbluminator 5y ago
    Its not really a problem to solve. Its a pretty much guaranteed end we can only delay by so much.
    • xvector 5y ago
      When we are looking at deaths on the cosmic timescales you're implying, we can return to that point. For now, our lifespans are pathetically short. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
      • joelbluminator 5y ago
        > For now, our lifespans are pathetically short. If you count healthy years I agree, sometimes it's too little for certain people. But in general 90 years seems like more than enough to me, what would you want to accomplish you couldn't in the 70 years form your 20s to your 90s? People peak quite early. Also seeing your values, beliefs and lifestyles being ridiculed by the new generations isn't that much fun...who knows how people 80 years from now will view our generation that messed up the climate (and countless other things we do now that we think are normal but are really not). Probably how we now see slave owners. It's mostly about our fear of dying, I'm sure when the average life span becomes 120 or 200 everyone will yell it's too damn short. If you're scared of dying your'e scared of dying, in fact the more you fight it with treatments probably the more scared you become.
        • mLuby 5y ago
          > People peak quite early. Also seeing your values, beliefs and lifestyles being ridiculed by the new generations isn't that much fun. Implicit in this is that people can't change. More time alive to experience different cultures, form relationships with different people, and perform different roles in society are all likely to encourage people to be more accepting and adaptable, not less. Put another way, I don't have to change if I'm just running out the clock, but if I'm going to be around a while then it's worth staying engaged with my community.
      • 8note 5y ago
• monktastic1 5y ago
  A family member recently introduced me to an app called WeCroak that's supposed to send periodic reminders of your mortality. You just reminded me to give it a spin!