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I don’t want to trivialize the positive aspects this can have on someone who otherwise might have a sad or challenging death, and to that extent perhaps it’s ju

I don’t want to trivialize the positive aspects this can have on someone who otherwise might have a sad or challenging death, and to that extent perhaps it’s just an evolved mechanism to make us accept death more gracefully. But if you’ve ever stayed awake for many days or had other hallucinogenic experiences, you’ll know how powerfully thoughts can manifest. And how deep our memory actually goes. Clearly it’s inappropriate to vividly see your memories during waking life, but as you transition to death those barriers are less necessary as the body diverts increasingly scarce resources to surviving just a few moments longer.

wutwutwat 2y ago
Please describe what makes one's death a "sad death"
- 2snakes 2y ago
  Real yoga is possible.
  - wutwutwat 2y ago
    That has what to do with this person saying a death is sad?
    - 2snakes 2y ago
      Bodies and minds can be transcended beyond suffering.
- BSOhealth 2y ago
  Of course, I’d be happy to! That would be something in contrast to all the fortunate, welcomed, gleeful, and celebrated deaths we hear about frequently in Western news and experience in our own personal lives. Instances where people are not ready to go, sorrowful, regretful, spiteful, guilty, etc.
- MomsAVoxell 2y ago
  A sudden or unexpected departure, under some circumstances that highlight the grief of passing, such as in a car accident on the way home from a wedding, or having just given birth, or some such circumstances. I think I can imagine there being ‘non-sad’ deaths, though - such as in the case of dying close to 100 years old, surrounded by ones loved ones, family, friends, with time to say goodbye. So, basically any circumstance which does not allow for the ideal departure, could be classed as a ‘sad death’ ..
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- temp0826 2y ago
  Any death of a child. Astronomical loss of potential vs someone who has lived a long life.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    Some cultures weigh the death of a child vs. the death of an old person in a way that makes the latter a much more severe loss, given the unique wisdom accumulated over years. I believe it is the opposite in developed countries today due to lower birth rate and the tendency to preserve inordinate amounts of information arguably making the wisdom of an old person seem mostly useless.
  - phantompeace 2y ago
    What's the word you call your younger self when you think you've got it figured out? Foolish seems too gentle a word. Before having my own, I would wonder why everyone spoke of losing a child as a pain beyond all others. I even had the audacity to think they were being dramatic - after all, they'd only known their child for such a short time. After having my own, I find myself breaking my own heart with the thought of loss almost like my spirit is trying to build calluses against a blow I pray never comes
  - formerphotoj 2y ago
    I've not lost a child and I don't "intend" to, so for me there's the vast investment in bringing them in, raising them up, and to lose both the past and future at the "wrong time"...astronomically heartbreaking. Never used to cry during movies when a child is lost, now I do every time.
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    I think it's less loss of potential (though that is a good rationalization) and more that people who weren't sad when they thought about their kids dying didn't become ancestors to the current set of humans, via the obvious mechanism.
- wutwutwat 2y ago
  I don't know why I was downvoted for asking a legit question, but alright. The answers still don't make any sense
  - nsxwolf 2y ago
    Your question just came off as incredibly obtuse.
    - wutwutwat 2y ago
      I literally don't understand what makes a death a "sad" death. People are acting like this should be common knowledge, but I've never heard that before. Death is death. What makes one a sad one? If there are sad ones, does that mean people are having happy deaths? What about gleeful deaths?
didericis 2y ago
> as you transition to death those barriers are less necessary as the body diverts increasingly scarce resources to surviving just a few moments longer. The more I think about survival based evolutionary explanations for NDEs, the less sense they make. Obviously evolution is true, and there's an obvious relationship between the physical degradation of the body and the brain and hallucinations. I'm not trying to make a cheap appeal to mysticism and deny these things, but NDEs are profoundly weird and difficult to explain when you think about them from that angle. Why would a body motivated to survive at all costs waste resources creating comforting hallucinations with some kind of internal coherence during catastrophic failure? Wouldn't a more logical and theoretically sound failure mode for a body trying to survive at all costs be some kind of increasingly incoherent descent into something like TV static as resources get diverted from sense making to repairing systems critical to survival? Or just pure unconscious blackness as with general anesthesia? If consciousness is purely computational, then any coherent internal experience implies the brain is spending biological resources maintaining the physical integrity of something, despite being increasingly severed from the sense input it needs to actually navigate the world to survive. And if the body is going through the trouble of maintaining some level of internal consciousness as it nears death, why wouldn't it simply create a hellish ever increasing amount of fear and pain until the moment of complete physical death to create the strongest possible motivation to avoid ever repeating the experience? Many people who experience NDEs and survive report craving a repeat of the experience and losing their fear of death. That's profoundly counterproductive from a survival standpoint. There's an argument about group related benefits and a need to offset communal panic due to our knowledge of our own mortality that's easier to ground in a purely survival based explanation, and while that definitely fits better, I increasingly get the sense we're trying to overfit evolutionary explanations that assume a purely survival oriented computational theory of consciousness to things we don't actually understand nearly as well as we think we do, and that the fear of not knowing can just as easily be used to argue motivated reasoning for appealing to things we basically understand like computation and biology as the fear of death can be used to argue motivated reasoning for appealing to things we don't. The history of all human knowledge is defined by an increasing ability to transcend and expand our theories to incorporate ever more detailed knowledge about previously unseen things. First we were convinced the world was made of unseen animal spirits, then we were convinced it was made of unseen combinations of the four elements in a world governed by a pantheon of superhuman deities, then we were convinced it was made of a hierarchy of unseen forces interacting with seen forces through God given, rationally discoverable natural law, and now we are convinced it is made of purely physical rules which may or may not be fully comprehensible given what we can observe, and those seen and unseen purely physical forces created complex biological systems that can model the world through different types of computation, some of which we understand, and some of which we don’t. I think it's extremely unlikely that we've figured out the final and most comprehensive framework for understanding reality, and I think there’s a lot about conscious experience and our ability to meaningfully perceive and categorize things that are still deeply mysterious/poorly understood. EDIT: Didn’t like my previous wording of this/changed it, and still don’t feel like I’m doing justice to what I’m trying to get across. Iain McGilchrist’s “The Matter with Things”, John Vervaeke talks about “Relevance Realization”, Freeman Dyson’s lectures/books about the importance of “heretical views” for the expansion of knowledge, Donald Hoffman’s work claiming evolved models of reality in every kind of environment never create accurate maps, and just observing how difficult the alignment/verification problem is in AI are all pointing in this same direction, and make a more compelling case for what I’m trying to say than I can.

wutwutwat 2y ago

Please describe what makes one's death a "sad death"

2snakes 2y ago
Real yoga is possible.
- wutwutwat 2y ago
  That has what to do with this person saying a death is sad?
  - 2snakes 2y ago
    Bodies and minds can be transcended beyond suffering.
BSOhealth 2y ago
Of course, I’d be happy to! That would be something in contrast to all the fortunate, welcomed, gleeful, and celebrated deaths we hear about frequently in Western news and experience in our own personal lives. Instances where people are not ready to go, sorrowful, regretful, spiteful, guilty, etc.
MomsAVoxell 2y ago
A sudden or unexpected departure, under some circumstances that highlight the grief of passing, such as in a car accident on the way home from a wedding, or having just given birth, or some such circumstances. I think I can imagine there being ‘non-sad’ deaths, though - such as in the case of dying close to 100 years old, surrounded by ones loved ones, family, friends, with time to say goodbye. So, basically any circumstance which does not allow for the ideal departure, could be classed as a ‘sad death’ ..
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
temp0826 2y ago
Any death of a child. Astronomical loss of potential vs someone who has lived a long life.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  Some cultures weigh the death of a child vs. the death of an old person in a way that makes the latter a much more severe loss, given the unique wisdom accumulated over years. I believe it is the opposite in developed countries today due to lower birth rate and the tendency to preserve inordinate amounts of information arguably making the wisdom of an old person seem mostly useless.
- phantompeace 2y ago
  What's the word you call your younger self when you think you've got it figured out? Foolish seems too gentle a word. Before having my own, I would wonder why everyone spoke of losing a child as a pain beyond all others. I even had the audacity to think they were being dramatic - after all, they'd only known their child for such a short time. After having my own, I find myself breaking my own heart with the thought of loss almost like my spirit is trying to build calluses against a blow I pray never comes
- formerphotoj 2y ago
  I've not lost a child and I don't "intend" to, so for me there's the vast investment in bringing them in, raising them up, and to lose both the past and future at the "wrong time"...astronomically heartbreaking. Never used to cry during movies when a child is lost, now I do every time.
- pfannkuchen 2y ago
  I think it's less loss of potential (though that is a good rationalization) and more that people who weren't sad when they thought about their kids dying didn't become ancestors to the current set of humans, via the obvious mechanism.
wutwutwat 2y ago
I don't know why I was downvoted for asking a legit question, but alright. The answers still don't make any sense
- nsxwolf 2y ago
  Your question just came off as incredibly obtuse.
  - wutwutwat 2y ago
    I literally don't understand what makes a death a "sad" death. People are acting like this should be common knowledge, but I've never heard that before. Death is death. What makes one a sad one? If there are sad ones, does that mean people are having happy deaths? What about gleeful deaths?

didericis 2y ago

> as you transition to death those barriers are less necessary as the body diverts increasingly scarce resources to surviving just a few moments longer. The more I think about survival based evolutionary explanations for NDEs, the less sense they make. Obviously evolution is true, and there's an obvious relationship between the physical degradation of the body and the brain and hallucinations. I'm not trying to make a cheap appeal to mysticism and deny these things, but NDEs are profoundly weird and difficult to explain when you think about them from that angle. Why would a body motivated to survive at all costs waste resources creating comforting hallucinations with some kind of internal coherence during catastrophic failure? Wouldn't a more logical and theoretically sound failure mode for a body trying to survive at all costs be some kind of increasingly incoherent descent into something like TV static as resources get diverted from sense making to repairing systems critical to survival? Or just pure unconscious blackness as with general anesthesia? If consciousness is purely computational, then any coherent internal experience implies the brain is spending biological resources maintaining the physical integrity of something, despite being increasingly severed from the sense input it needs to actually navigate the world to survive. And if the body is going through the trouble of maintaining some level of internal consciousness as it nears death, why wouldn't it simply create a hellish ever increasing amount of fear and pain until the moment of complete physical death to create the strongest possible motivation to avoid ever repeating the experience? Many people who experience NDEs and survive report craving a repeat of the experience and losing their fear of death. That's profoundly counterproductive from a survival standpoint. There's an argument about group related benefits and a need to offset communal panic due to our knowledge of our own mortality that's easier to ground in a purely survival based explanation, and while that definitely fits better, I increasingly get the sense we're trying to overfit evolutionary explanations that assume a purely survival oriented computational theory of consciousness to things we don't actually understand nearly as well as we think we do, and that the fear of not knowing can just as easily be used to argue motivated reasoning for appealing to things we basically understand like computation and biology as the fear of death can be used to argue motivated reasoning for appealing to things we don't. The history of all human knowledge is defined by an increasing ability to transcend and expand our theories to incorporate ever more detailed knowledge about previously unseen things. First we were convinced the world was made of unseen animal spirits, then we were convinced it was made of unseen combinations of the four elements in a world governed by a pantheon of superhuman deities, then we were convinced it was made of a hierarchy of unseen forces interacting with seen forces through God given, rationally discoverable natural law, and now we are convinced it is made of purely physical rules which may or may not be fully comprehensible given what we can observe, and those seen and unseen purely physical forces created complex biological systems that can model the world through different types of computation, some of which we understand, and some of which we don’t. I think it's extremely unlikely that we've figured out the final and most comprehensive framework for understanding reality, and I think there’s a lot about conscious experience and our ability to meaningfully perceive and categorize things that are still deeply mysterious/poorly understood. EDIT: Didn’t like my previous wording of this/changed it, and still don’t feel like I’m doing justice to what I’m trying to get across. Iain McGilchrist’s “The Matter with Things”, John Vervaeke talks about “Relevance Realization”, Freeman Dyson’s lectures/books about the importance of “heretical views” for the expansion of knowledge, Donald Hoffman’s work claiming evolved models of reality in every kind of environment never create accurate maps, and just observing how difficult the alignment/verification problem is in AI are all pointing in this same direction, and make a more compelling case for what I’m trying to say than I can.