8 ms·

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 di

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

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