23 ms·

A neuroscientist prepares for death

• goobergoo 5y ago
  I really wish he would keep riffing on the neuro-scientific fundamental principles that always assume "the future will continue to exist, of course it will" as a way to explain and describe religions and how and why they exist, he was about to come up with a Grand Unifying Theory that could "solve" religion... he was so close....
• anarbadalov 5y ago
  A deeply moving and wise piece. Just what I needed to start the year. "The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation."
  • mensetmanusman 5y ago
    ‘The deep truth is that there is no truth’ type quotes are some of my favorite.
    • guerrilla 5y ago
      That's not what it said. It said we don't see truth, nothing about whether there is one or not.
      • mensetmanusman 5y ago
        That’s the point, somehow the truth is that our brains are incapable of seeing truth (except for this statement… :))
        • guerrilla 5y ago
          Touché
        • nyokodo 5y ago
          > our brains are incapable of seeing truth Perhaps we’re unable to see absolute truth, but we are able to see bits of the truth as it were. Nor is sensory experience our only or even primary way to see truth. Professor Linden has wandered into Epistemic Philosophy but he’s not qualified to give the lecture.
          • nefitty 5y ago
            We can keep inventing and looking for new lenses to apply to our mind's eye, but for some reason, we find that every lens we try is slightly warped in different ways. There are people who tire of the search, settle on one lens, and then think the world is fisheye-shaped.
        • skissane 5y ago
          Put so bluntly, it is self-refuting: if we cannot know the truth, we cannot know that statement to itself be true-if a statement is self-refuting, how can it be rational to believe it? The “except for” may save the statement from being self-refuting, but only at the cost of becoming an instance of special pleading, which is equally irrational.
        • samhw 5y ago
          I can easily comprehend truth. 2 + 2 = 4, there ya go. "We don't have direct access to external reality, but instead it's mediated through our senses and cognition" is closer to what people are getting at. It's much the same way a Unix process can 'perceive reality' via serial ports and processors managed in kernelspace.
          • postalrat 5y ago
            2 + 2 = 4 is no more true than saying water is wet.
      • vixen99 5y ago
        Defining a 'favorite quote' doesn't necessarily mean one agrees with its sentiment.
  • bobthechef 5y ago
  • monopoledance 5y ago
    I think that depth has been more widely recognized in neuro-biology before, but has fallen from grace in favor of a naive mechanistic enthusiasm at the beginning of that early neuroimagining euphoria. You may look into constructivism, especially the biological foundation (e.g. the work of Maturana and Valera). It offers the (somewhat forgotten) hard science link to modern philosophy and psychology, like post-structualism/-modernism and systems theory. As far as I know, it's not very popular, because it presents a little crisis and is "not very fun"... or at least that's what the criticism comes down to IMO. (I suspect, it's kinda similar to Gödel's assault, but much easier to dismiss.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_constructivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_constructivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberto_Maturana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberto_Maturana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis
  • RapperWhoMadeIt 5y ago
    As someone who grew up and continues to live between a Western European country and a developing country in the so-called "third world", I have been intensely thinking lately about how "relative" our sensations and experiences are. In one of the countries, people get really mad and their days get spoiled because a train arrives 5 minutes too late, on the other side of the globe, people have never experienced such a good train service and they wouldn't mind arriving 5 minutes too late, they would be intensely grateful for being able to get such a cheap, safe and comfortable transport service. To name one of too many such examples. I find it so difficult to relate to such "first world problems" lately...
    • overview 5y ago
      I experienced this at heightened levels while watching this video last night: https://youtu.be/8NTIY8Qy2f0 https://youtu.be/8NTIY8Qy2f0
      • thiago_fm 5y ago
        watching a video doesn't make you experience it
        • samhw 5y ago
          And in other news, the Pope is a Catholic
        • overview 5y ago
          Don’t worry, Meta is solving this one
    • jhgb 5y ago
      > people get really mad and their days get spoiled because a train arrives 5 minutes too late A state of affairs immortalized in the famous sentence "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy".
      • citizenpaul 5y ago
• axiosgunnar 5y ago
  Sorry dumb question, but could he not get a heart transplant?
  • Anunayj 5y ago
    I'm not a doctor, but maybee yes, thought that itself does not really move odds in his favour, infact heart transplants are themselves very notorious for becoming cancerous. Here's a study on a very small group (of 8 patients), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7779860/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7779860/ Now you'll probably need to get the insight of a real doctor to know the risk-effort-worth of going through such a invasive procedure.
    • rbanffy 5y ago
      Are there any full artificial heart replacements that can be permanently implanted?
      • mrtweetyhack 5y ago
  • foxyv 5y ago
    In this case, his cancer would be an absolute contraindication for a heart transplant. In addition, 20% of candidates do not receive a heart and there are many other factors that will disqualify a person from becoming a candidate: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/transplant/referring-physicians/heart-transplant-criteria.html https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/transplant/referring-physici... If you ever want to convince a smoker to quit, you can mention it is an absolute disqualification from receiving a transplant for at least 6 months after they quit.
    • dwohnitmok 5y ago
      > In this case, his cancer would be an absolute contraindication for a heart transplant. Oof, I totally understand why it's an absolute contraindication (the hit that cancer gives to expected lifespan just seems too strong to justify such a scarce transplant), but it definitely feels like a double-whammy. To a future with long-term viable artificial vital organs!
• TedShiller 5y ago
  In our culture, we seem to think (or want to believe) that neuroscientists know more about things than other people. But they're just normal people like you or I.
  • anarbadalov 5y ago
    Do people really believe that? A neuroscientist is (i hope) more knowledgeable about the brain than you or me. But I don't think people see them as omniscient. We all have a unique perspective. This particular piece could have been written by any thoughtful person diagnosed with a terminal illness. In fact, there is a whole genre of these stories. And each one of them gives me pause and helps me refocus, if not for just a little while.
    • TedShiller 5y ago
      I think neuroscientists know more about the brain than you or I, but not in any way that helps them in life outside of the laboratory.
  • tux3 5y ago
    Related: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
  • turing_complete 5y ago
    They are the highest priests of scientific materialism. If brain activity is all that is to life, they know more than anyone.
• L29Ah 5y ago
• bobthechef 5y ago
• jarenmf 5y ago
  If I was ever to know of my upcoming death, I hope to have that courage and clarity of thought to face it with such dignity.
• UncleOxidant 5y ago
  > Heart cancer? Who the hell gets heart cancer?! Yeah, this kind of cancer seems exceedingly rare. But of course, being a hypochondriac I will worry about this for the next week or more.
  • at_a_remove 5y ago
    A close friend's father died of a cancer around the heart, to the best of my knowledge.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • odiroot 5y ago
    Why is heart cancer so particularly rare? Not many fast dividing cells or so?
    • Out_of_Characte 5y ago
      Yeah, heart cells expand rather than divide to repair damaged tissue, which is why primary heart cancer is very very rare. The author had synovial sarcoma which is a metastatic cancer. we live everyday as if theres a tomorrow while playing a cosmic lottery
• unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
  New years brings forward thought of life and death, all the more so with the wave of Omicron so many people are dealing with. I diverge from the author's understandably unhappy perspective. Death isn't an end of the literal energy and parts that make up people, only in our ability to perceive and act on them. It's the end of counting minutes or years, in essence. The human mind can conceive of that, that upon death time ceases to be a crawl and zips forward seamlessly and limitlessly until or unless something ... reconstitutes the parts, energy and pattern that makes each of us human. It's hard preparing for death, I sympathize with the author, but it's also hard living with some understanding of how limited and temporary our lives and worlds may be.
  • KronisLV 5y ago
    > ... only in our ability to perceive and act on them. Personally, i think that our consciousness is all that matters, therefore i cannot agree with this. > The human mind can conceive of that, that upon death time ceases to be a crawl and zips forward seamlessly and limitlessly until or unless something ... reconstitutes the parts, energy and pattern that makes each of us human. What about the heat death of the universe and entropy? If that were to be the eventual outcome of the universe, there are no guarantees whatsoever about anything of the sort.
    • nerbert 5y ago
      > What about the heat death of the universe and entropy? A romantic take is that human evolution will ultimately solve this.
    • marton78 5y ago
      The time has come again to recommend Asimov's "The Last Question" in case you haven't read it.
  • kmtrowbr 5y ago
    The human mind is designed to solve problems, and so this is its mode. It perceives death as a problem & in doing so, sets itself an unsolvable problem. Also, consider that human language can describe things and situations which are nonsensical. Yet we have a very hard time imagining "not existing." There is no experience associated with nonexistence. Time will not "zip forward." If we are "reconstituted," as imagined here, we will have no memory of any prior existence. Or if, in the infinite permutations, we do remember, how odd and what a perverse reality that would be. This all may have already happened many times. These are the boundaries of our experience. You can have any attitude you like towards this, but why not a positive attitude which will lead you to enjoying this existence as much as possible, and also helping others to do the same? Lucretius laid out The Nature of Things very well in 79 A.D.: https://philosophybreak.com/articles/why-death-is-nothing-to-fear-lucretius-epicureanism/ https://philosophybreak.com/articles/why-death-is-nothing-to...
• colordrops 5y ago
  This reminds me of The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker [1]. David Linden gives a biological explanation for the psychological idea presented by Becker. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death
• elpakal 5y ago
  Similar read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Breath_Becomes_Air https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Breath_Becomes_Air
  • fotta 5y ago
    Yep. I read this book last year. I really liked it, but I was crying like a baby at the end.
    • elpakal 5y ago
      Same here. His message to his newborn daughter immediately gave me tears.
    • monopoledance 5y ago
      I honestly don't understand why people seek that. Doesn't that sadness and devastation hang with you afterwards? I gave it a try, but now I am trying to avoid these stories at all costs (thanks for the warning) and firmly believe everything important in life can be told with humor, as well. 1 in 5 people dies of cancer, and usually it sucks, no happy ending. I really, really don't see the need to bring more tragic death into your life than what's likely coming your way, anyway. Do you "enjoy" the sadness and crying? (Honest question.)
      • elpakal 5y ago
        I only read it because it was the only book available on my vacation
      • op00to 5y ago
        I think some of us (myself included) feel things more intensely.
        • monopoledance 5y ago
          Maybe. At least I can not switch off easily and those stories stay with me. I also don't like horror movies. Maybe it's more pleasant, or enjoyable, when you feel differently, or "less".
• TedShiller 5y ago
  I wonder why he put his job title in the title of the article. There’s actually nothing specific to neuroscience in the article.
  • woleium 5y ago
    for credibility
    • TedShiller 5y ago
      Credibility for a topic unrelated to his profession?
      • woleium 5y ago
        Yes, that's how social credit works.
• abdel_nasser 5y ago
  i feel like most people assume people are dead when we really dont know. there could be flashes of experience after death due to mechanical agitation/disturbance. or maybe something else. and maybe the part of the brain that is needed to produce "experience" is a tiny little section that goes un-noticed when they look for brain death. its not very important so i havent looked into it. but i am afraid that if i die and i appear to die before my brain is inactive then i will have a captive body experience -- unpleasant on its own and very unpleasant if i make it to the autopsy. i dont think they even check for brain death or electrical activity before they start cutting you open. i simply dont understand people who choose to freeze their heads -- its literally the worst idea. i would pay for the opposite service where they take posession of your body and make sure you dont have a captive-body experience and make sure that your brain is destroyed so it can never be resurrected and tortured. i saw a youtube video where this young woman recounted a near death experience that she had. she was in her car and somehow the car became airborne and was headed straight towards a thick traffic sign pole or something like that. in any case, she saw the pole coming toward her and she knew without any doubt that she was going to die. and she said that she saw flashes of every time she was terrible to someone. and she hadnt realized how terrible she had been in all these instances. and she said she was angry at god in that moment for showing her these terrible things right before she was going to die. i think its fascinating because the body is watching the situation and when the situation is right, the body deploys the mechanism that it thinks is useful. you can look at a picture of a bear and you wont be affected but if your encounter a bear in real life, you wont just go into fight or flight; you will be having a frame of mind and motivations that are unique to that situation because your body is giving those to you. and here, when the body believes with enough certainty that it is going to die, it deploys these memories? maybe the body allows you to see what its been hiding from you for your own sake in a last ditch effort to produce some kind of advantage. the human mind is very mysterious. but my point is that there is some mechanism at the bottom of that. it could show you anything. it could make you experience anything. there is this mythology of having happy experiences on the way to death, walking into the light, etc. but we have no idea what these experiences are other than the fact that they exist. its possible that most people have a terrible, awful experience on the way to death. its something that i think is just underappreciated.
  • 5y ago
• howmayiannoyyou 5y ago
  Something I read that resonates: "Even if all that happens is that you vanish out of existence into eternal darkness, you'll also vanish from time. Hundreds of billions of years will pass but for the dead it will be instantaneous, the universe can reach the end of its lifespan yet for those now outside of the linear passing of time, it will feel like less than a blink. The universe could begin and end hundreds of trillions of times, but this time scale is nothing to a dead man. Statistically, you're simply bound to pop back into existence no matter how long it takes. Besides, it can't even be that unlikely if you're here now, right?"
  • whimsicalism 5y ago
    > Statistically, you're simply bound to pop back into existence no matter how long it takes. The implication of this argument is that innumerable terrible torturous things also happen to you "no matter how long it takes."
    • phoe-krk 5y ago
      So do countless aeons of immeasurably heavenly and pleasurable experiences. It's hard to try and pick just a chunk out of something that's, for all practical purposes, infinite; even harder to try to judge it out of that infinite context.
      • whimsicalism 5y ago
        Yes, I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I really am just recreated in infinite permutations, I become somewhat apathetic to whether this life is my last or not - the alternative doesn't seem all that better or reassuring.
        • worldsayshi 5y ago
          Why is apathy a more relevant feeling? Sure you may have countless experiences in the future or perhaps just a few but you're here now. The only relevant feelings about yourself ought to be about what's going on in your perceptible life?
• jamespwilliams 5y ago
  > it wasn’t a benign teratoma after all, but rather a malignant cancer called synovial sarcoma [..] Heart cancer? Who the hell gets heart cancer?! Is this some kind of horrible metaphor? For context: https://academic.oup.com/icvts/article/11/4/490/652739 https://academic.oup.com/icvts/article/11/4/490/652739. Fewer than 20 cases described in the literature of this particular kind of cancer.
  • moneywoes 5y ago
    Is this similar to what happened to Virgil?
    • actually_a_dog 5y ago
      Slightly different. He died of a cardiac angiosarcoma. https://www.medpagetoday.com/popmedicine/celebritydiagnosis/96217 https://www.medpagetoday.com/popmedicine/celebritydiagnosis/...
      • samhw 5y ago
        I thought they meant Virgil the Roman poet, and I thought it was pretty funny that he was categorised under '/celebritydiagnosis'. Now I realise I'm probably out of touch with celebrity culture...
        • jhgb 5y ago
          That thought never occurred to me since I know him as Vergilius.
• NKosmatos 5y ago
  How come educated people aren’t accustomed to the idea of dying? Is it only me that thinks of it most nights? Sometimes I feel like our lives is like a finished computer game, a watched movie, an old pc we had, a dream of a past life… our short lives are going to end soon and we can’t avoid it. Ok, I get it that there are some unlucky/bad situations, like the one described in the article, where the end is nearer that the normal case, but this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be aware of our ephemeral lives. Just don’t get obsessed with the idea of death and try to live a better life (in whatever way makes sense for you).
  • trustfundbaby 5y ago
    > Is it only me that thinks of it most nights? yes
    • marton78 5y ago
      No.
  • type0 5y ago
    Probably an anecdote but in the medieval times people often had a human scull on their desk to remind them of their own mortality, sometimes it's good to be able to think: live now while you can.
    • metadat 5y ago
      I didn't know medieval folks had many desks, given they couldn't read or write. https://www.google.com/search?q=midieval+desk+human+skull https://www.google.com/search?q=midieval+desk+human+skull Doesn't come up in search.
      • type0 5y ago
        monks and feudal elites
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• quitit 5y ago
  The thing that stuck out to me: the length of time before getting an MRI. I notice this is something that changes from medical system to medical system. Where I am, I could get an MRI tomorrow if the doctor requested it, the matching report would be finished on the same day and this would also be free. (Speaking from personal experience as I’ve had a few now.)
• SpikeDad 5y ago
  I have nothing but sympathy and sadness for the plight of the author. It's terrible and unfair. I would certainly rather be snuffed out instantly than have to suffer with a long and incurable illness. However I found his last point a betrayal of his life and intelligence. Commenting about afterlife for which there is isn't a scintilla of evidence nor mechanism is a poor way to leave his very moving piece.
  • tartrate 5y ago
    The mind has such a hard time comprehending death that it tries to escape through other views of reality. This can happen regardless of your scientific knowledge or religious beliefs. That's the most interesting takeaway from this piece in my opinion, as I experienced the same while losing a parent to cancer.
  • killingtime74 5y ago
    Even the best among us have weaknesses
    • oh_sigh 5y ago
      The fear of nothingness also got to Von Neumann in the end, much to the shock of his friends and family.
      • tomrod 5y ago
        The recognition of the Absurd is the beginning of existential wisdom.
        • oh_sigh 5y ago
          Unfortunately Camus chose the most absurd way to die. It would have been informative if we could see how he lived out his last days with imminent death clearly on his horizon.
      • maroonblazer 5y ago
        I've never understood this fear. We experience nothingness every time we fall asleep, or go under anesthesia. The only difference with death is we never wake up. I find that comforting.
• marco_craveiro 5y ago
  This article reminded me of The Last Lecture [1] by Randy Pausch - one of the best books I've ever read. Highly recommended. [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Lecture-Printing-Publisher-Hardcover/dp/B00SLSWEQ6/ref=sr_1_2 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Lecture-Printing-Publisher-Har...
• alextheparrot 5y ago
  Listened to "Tuesdays with Morrie" [0] over the break, which is a series of interviews and reflections by the author as he interacts with his professor dying of ALS. That and "When Breath becomes Air" [1] are both pretty astounding long-form explorations on impending death. Hard topic, but I suppose that's the nature of it. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6900.Tuesdays_with_Morrie https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6900.Tuesdays_with_Morri... [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25899336-when-breath-becomes-air https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25899336-when-breath-bec...
  • collin128 5y ago
    Great book, definitely one that brought tears to my eyes. Another along a similar theme is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E Frankl. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Meaning https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Me...
• grouphugs 5y ago
• tomrod 5y ago
  One of the best books on death I have read was A Social History of Dying by Allan Kellehear: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4332920-a-social-history-of-dying https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4332920-a-social-history...
• _8j50 5y ago
  Something to think about: If the essence of you is your conscience and that in turn much like how software is to hardware is applied information, and if information cannot truly be erased, only removed from the storage and processing medium then who you are cannot destroyed, only the medium you reside in. Is there a state or dimension where information can be processed without a medium of mass and energy to store and process it? Can your consciousness be backed up and restored? Neuroscience does not go beyond the medium for consciousness and soul(or OS if you prefer).
  • andrei_says_ 5y ago
    Is the brain an apparatus which produces consciousness and physically stores information or one which connects consciousness to meat and senses? Or both and more? Also is this thing we’re looking at information or is it the essence of perceiving and differentiating? Where exactly is it? In molecules in physical space? Neuron configuration and firings - signal patterns distributed in time? Spontaneous, responding to environment, a combination or more? I don’t know the answers, these are questions I find myself curious about after exposure to different viewpoints and experiences.
    • warent 5y ago
      These are some of my favorite questions. Is death an abyss of nothingness, like going to a dreamless sleep and never waking up? Maybe! Do we die and live in an afterlife? Perhaps! But what an amusingly and ironically simple, easy answer either would be! Look at anything in life and the universe. In this reality, is there anything so simple and clear cut? Yet somehow this process of consciousness we call "death" is reduced to such a profoundly simple and binary thing. Consciousness and death, two fundamentally undefined things, frequently given a conclusion so simple it can be explained to a child. Not that we can be blamed for doing this. Given the complexity of everything else in this apparent infinity, it seems far more likely that whatever happens is complex beyond our Comprehension. Something far greater than nothingness or an afterlife.
      • vaidhy 5y ago
• bigbluedots 5y ago
  We're all terminal, but I can't help but think that a terminal diagnosis gives people a clarity that the rest of us lack. It's easy to be on autopilot when how much time you have is unknown.
  • colordrops 5y ago
    Very wise comment. Furthermore this autopilot has gradations, where one may consciously recognize that nobody gets out of this alive, but the changes made are of differing levels of determination depending on how intense the sense of the inevitable.
    • nefitty 5y ago
      I welcome the feeling that I may be the first person in history to not die. I've tried the opposite, holding my mortality close to my chest. The crippling existential terror was not worth whatever "authenticity" it came along with.
  • beardedman 5y ago
    Very true.
  • MrDresden 5y ago
    My partner got diagnosed with early stage lymphoma in '19 and it had a drastic effect in our outlook on life. After treatment and full remission in '20 we shifted some aspects of our lives as a result. Some of those changes would have fairly significant long lasting outcomes over the rest of our lives (started trying for a child, became more open and true to our most intimate inner selfs and more). But mostly we stuck to the normal routine. Working too much. Stressing over trivial things. Having time and energy be sapped away by the thousand cuts one has during a working week. Then she had a second cancer diagnoses in august '21. Completely unrelated to the prior one and the treatment she received. It was also in its early stage, but turned out to have metastasized to a lymph node. That triggered a full protocol of chemo and radiation. Our future is now permanently changed. We will not be capable of having children together due to the effects of the treatment. Even though we are very hopeful, there is a considerable risk of recurrence in the next few years. Which according to the doctors would be untreatable due to the amount of radiation she has now already had. The autopilot is completely turned off by now. We are updating our bucket lists and planning to quit or changing to jobs that will allow us to live a slower more adventurous life where more of our time is spent together rather then in an endless pursuit of material goods (or commuting to an office space devoid of all creativity and inspiration). We may even try out life in a van for a few months. And the thing is that while all this is going on, we are both extremely sad about the lost opportunities of starting a family, while also being incredibly glad that the treatment went well and that the prospects for the future are good (her odds of having a recurrence are among the lowest for the type of cancer she had given numerous parameters). We are now focused on truly living this life to the fullest, which to be honest wasn't so much the case mere 6 months ago.
• cmurf 5y ago
  Man's Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
• m3kw9 5y ago
  What if.. after a few million years given humans still survive, they have the tech to bring back all the consciousness that ever existed in some form. All your memories thoughts intact?
  • totetsu 5y ago
    What if, that's already happened and what you're experiencing is the playback
    • overview 5y ago
      Then at some point in the future I must’ve made a lot of money to be able to afford whatever tech enabled that. Or, it’s cheap and affordable because of a future capitalist economy with large companies competing, driving prices down. In this future, do we do it for enjoyment or is it to escape the predicted unpleasant times ahead?
    • m3kw9 5y ago
      That wouldn’t matter because it would always feel like the first time and no way to prove otherwise
      • totetsu 5y ago
        A difference that makes no difference is no different
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • shostack 5y ago
    Have you read the Riverworld series? That's basically the plot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverworld https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverworld
  • Claude_Shannon 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorovich_Fyodorov I'll tell you some thinkers already thought of that ;) (also this was a theme in Dukaj books, if someone read them - I really recommend if it's translated to your language)
• cercatrova 5y ago
  A sad story to read. It reminds me of a similar story, a neurosurgeon (who also was a postdoc neuroscientist) had lung cancer and wrote a memoir of his experience, When Breath Becomes Air. The book wasn't published until about a year after he passed. If you ever get a chance, you should read this book.
  • simplezeal 5y ago
    I am reading that now. For reference- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kalanithi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kalanithi
  • 2457013579 5y ago
    Could not recommend that book more.. I listened to it on audible: https://www.audible.com/pd/When-Breath-Becomes-Air-Audiobook/B0191YTGI2 https://www.audible.com/pd/When-Breath-Becomes-Air-Audiobook...
• ctoth 5y ago
  C-f "Cryonics" 0 hits. Guess this person isn't really preparing then.
  • vore 5y ago
    I feel like cryonics is a techbro meme that is a whole lot of money for basically very questionable and unproven benefit, and just because they choose not to opt for it doesn't mean they're "aren't really preparing" in the way that you personally think people should prepare for death.
    • ctoth 5y ago
      Not so much the way that "I think" people should prepare. Just the way I would expect a person who knows how the brain works to act. But then they finish off the thing like this: > as I prepare for death, I have a renewed respect for the persistent and broad appeal of afterlife/reincarnation stories Aaand I guess that's just another poor person with the pro-death memecomplex.
      • mlyle 5y ago
        You can believe improbable tales that your frozen popsicle-brain is going to survive intact enough to where unlikely regenerative technologies exist and then they still think it's worthwhile to "restore" you. I mean, it's slightly more probable than tales of sky-fairies reincarnating you, but still effectively no chance. If you want to make ripples in the future world, there's far better ways to gamble your resources than this... In any case: you can ditch the explicit judgment of those who don't share the views as you, and you'll more likely get heard and get reasonable responses.
  • GilbertErik 5y ago
    'Backups' ain't backups if you don't have a reliable 'Restore' process.
    • ctoth 5y ago
      I mean we could use the untested backup system or we could backup to /dev/null. Also we ship tomorrow. Your call boss!
• CryptoPunk 5y ago
  We have 7 billion people on Earth, more than half of whom are connected via an instantaneous global communication network. Can we not combine our analytical powers / crowdsource an effective treatment plan for terminal illnesses like this one, and save people like Linden?
• ChicagoBoy11 5y ago
  The last line hit me like a ton of bricks, but I think only because all of the writing that preceded was equally good. I'm often taken aback when I read really nicely written prose by "random" (i.e. not professional writers) online. To me, more than anything else, really great writing has always seemed like the mark of a superior intellect. It is the one skill I truly wished I had focused on more in my youth; the ability to convey ideas in this way that is both concise but draws the reader in seems like a remarkable gift! Just in the small chance the author runs across this, I'm grateful to him for writing this piece -- a wonderful bit to reflect on for all of us.
  • goldenkey 5y ago
    It may not be what you are in search of, but your comment itself is a deft display of linguistic aptitude. I reckon if you did take up writing, you'd only need to learn the thematic principles, not so much vocabulary or verbosity. Remember, most lurkers just view and don't comment. And even fewer folks of those who comment post cohesive prose. I've found the best way to become good at writing is simply by..well, writing. I think you've done a good job in that, even if you currently think comments don't translate to long form. Perhaps an actual writer can elucidate the subject for us.
• robaato 5y ago
  I found this book to be very educational and though provoking. Coping with the death of loved ones too, let alone yourself. https://www.amazon.com/Final-Chapters-Hospice-Workers-Stories/dp/B089M4343J/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1641382279&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Final-Chapters-Hospice-Workers-Storie...
• SneakyTornado29 5y ago
  On beautifully written piece
• fajarsiddiq 5y ago
  this scares me
• Slade1 5y ago
  Assuming they could afford to do so, is it not possible to buy an artificial heart and schedule surgery? A quick online search shows there definitely are companies that make artificial hearts even if only to bridge the gap till a donor is found. Obviously it doesn't guarantee the cancer hasn't spread, there won't be potential complications during surgery, or any other complications down the road... but there can't just flat out be zero options, right? I know certain organs just can't be replaced, but the heart? There's really no mechanical alternatives?