I don't know if you were including me, but either way I'm sorry and I'll stop now (just saw this).
For the record: I sincerely am not trying to annoy or provoke anyone; I've been concerned about derailing the thread, but a discussion of other emotions around death didn't seem too inappropriate. I sincerely think death is painful and difficult to think about, but that it is worth thinking about sanely, and that death is obviously a bad thing in this world. I am sincerely angry when conscious human minds are prevented by Death from exploring, creating, and loving as much as they want.
The point there is that, say humans were largely the same but instead we naturally lived a very long time, e.g. a thousand years. Then someone comes to you and says, "Hey I have this great idea with lots of societal benefits: Why not kill each person before they reach 100 years?"
We would say no, that is insane and pointless, why would we sacrifice hundreds of beautiful years off of everyone's life? Indeed, consider that environmental improvements and medical technology have more than doubled the human lifespan. Would you voluntarily choose for your children to live until they're at most 35, rather than their current "natural" lifespan?
Whether or not death is "natural" doesn't seem like it ought to have much bearing on whether or not we want it. If life is good, then loss of life is bad. A beautiful mind that ceases to shine, is something I'd just as soon untruncate.
> we're all screwed and you were born a few hundred years too early.
It's not a great option, but cryonics seems way better than nothing. (Under the assumptions that the preservation is reasonably high-quality, the storage facilities stay operational, humanity doesn't destroy itself, and advanced medical technology gets developed; see waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html )
An example of someone who wanted to live a long time but was genuinely screwed and was born a couple hundred years too early:
The rapid Progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the Height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the Power of Man over Matter. We may perhaps learn to deprive large Masses of their Gravity, and give them absolute Levity, for the sake of easy Transport. Agriculture may diminish its Labor and double its Produce; all Diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of Old Age, and our Lives lengthened at pleasure even beyond the antediluvian Standard. O that moral Science were in as fair a way of Improvement, that Men would cease to be Wolves to one another, and that human Beings would at length learn what they now improperly call Humanity!
-Benjamin Franklin
Um? Sorry for being frank, but: are you saying you would commit suicide if the world were more confusing? In any case, I doubt that our future civilization would be at a total loss to help "anachronisms" transition into a surprising world.
>Bring a formerly healthy rat back, then we'll talk.
As the saying goes: That is like a terminal ill patient refusing to get into the ambulance because "I don't want to be in an ambulance here, I want to be in the hospital; call me when the ambulance is at the hospital, then maybe I'll get in."
Does this seem like a desirable state of affairs? I think I'd rather not have anyone die involuntarily. If we put our minds to it, I bet we could figure out how to not have anyone die who didn't want to. There's no physical law that says you can't have billions or trillions of humans live awesome lives for a very long time (though maybe not literally forever).
I think most people, including myself, would like to live forever. Whether achieving that is desirable or not is a larger discussion than I have time for, but I will say that if you take a broader perspective of the self, then death is not quite as sharp and painful as it first appears.
As Peter says, "[my children] will grow up with me in their DNA, on Youtube as endless conference talks, and in writing."
I think there are interesting ideas around seeing individuals as part of a greater whole. Not even in a spiritual sense, but just in a plain biological sense. It's rare to consider things that way, but it makes me feel better about my place in the world.
> I will say that if you take a broader perspective of the self, then death is not quite as sharp and painful as it first appears.
A statement that I agree with, but which is of course meaningless to those who are filled with a total dread of death... Unfortunately this is one of those things that can't really be communicated. "You have to figure it out for yourself", etc...
I'm not sure I've successfully communicated my feeling about this. It's less like a total dread of death and more like a total dread of losing life, if that makes any sense.
Do you have any close loved ones---a younger brother, a daughter, a close friend? Anyone for whom you might consider sacrificing yourself; anyone who you believe to be a shining light unto the world. Say that person is eaten by cancer. Once they are dead, they feel no pain; this is clear to me, and is not central in my judgement.
What is central is the lost blossoming of a mind. A rich internal experience, a reflective world with joy, dreams, and curiosity, is not a thing that should be destroyed. A mind that wishes to continue seeing the world and its people, and other minds wishing that mind to continue shining its light, annihilated---don't look away from the pain! If you look away from the pain, you lose your already slim opportunity to fight back.
The human body has many enviable traits over a machine: self repair, remarkable efficiency, etc etc.
But there's one really awesome aspect of machines we should get to work on: a machine, if broken, will sit indefinitely until repaired.
Imagine! You are rent limb from limb in a horrific accident, your body ... stops. A good Samaritan happens upon it later, stitches it back together, puts in some fresh blood, gives it a bit of a kick-start, and away you go!
Screw cryonics: I want to keep indefinitely at room temperature, with no special (post-mortem) treatment.
To put it bluntly, I can think of a number of other cases where
(1) people say things to children because it is more pleasant or convenient, not because it is true, and
(2) these misleading statements have negative effects later.
In this case, it seems potentially worthwhile to keep in view that death is actually not a good thing, and that it would better if there weren't death, and that we want to keep an eye out for opportunities to prevent death. "You do not make peace with darkness!"
I can not understand this approach to parenting. I had the luck of my parents never lying to me to shut me up. Even the "hard topics" of sex were handled properly even before I started asking about it myself.
> (2) these misleading statements have negative effects later.
Yes. And I had to fix that damage in people too. You know, sharing an interesting tidbit of information with a person close to me only for her to suddenly realize it was another thing her father mislead her about. Lying to children is like placing relationship landmines - your kids will step on them many years later and it will damage your relationship with them.
Do you mean because of limited resources like food and space? Sure, but (1) these look like difficult but quite solvable problems (we are engineers, after all) and (2) the alternative is having every person who has ever lived also be dead, which sounds bad to me.
There might be more clever options, like cryopreserve everyone who dies; this does not consume many resources (the only recurring cost is liquid nitrogen, which is pretty cheap). Then we can wait to revive everyone until we have the medicine and the resources to support everyone, avoiding overpopulation.
Well, yes. According to a quick search something like 108 billion people have ever lived (compared to 7 billion who walk the Earth today). That seems like a population that would be pretty hard to keep going without having a few extra Earths.
Besides that, it is immaterial. We are all going to die someday and there is nothing we can do about it. The people seeing cryogenics are largely snake-oil salesmen. I don't believe anybody will ever find immortality (at least not in this life).
>That seems like a population that would be pretty hard to keep going without having a few extra Earths.
Do you think this problem is merely very difficult, or literally impossible to solve (e.g. because of some physical law)? I think that if a bunch of really smart humans tried really hard to solve this problem, and you predicted very very confidently that they would fail, then I would be pretty skeptical of your confidence. Just as an example, you suggest getting some more Earths. Sounds like one solid approach; expand humanity to other planets!
>We are all going to die someday and there is nothing we can do about it. [...] I don't believe anybody will ever find immortality (at least not in this life).
This might literally true, in the sense that we probably can't survive the heat death of the universe in however many bazillions of years. But do you think it is implausible that advanced medical technology could e.g. keep us alive, healthy, and sane for, say, thousands of years? This sounds both plausible and quite desirable to me, and I'm confused by your statements---for instance, I can't tell whether you are making a factual claim or an aesthetic claim.
>The people seeing cryogenics are largely snake-oil salesmen.
Eh? They seem pretty sincere; the people who run these organizations (Cryonics Institute, Alcor) are generally themselves signed up for cryonics, and speak passionately about life extension as a desirable goal. Cryonics is not exactly a get-rich-quick scheme.
Yes, I think it is extremely unlikely people will figure out thousand-year lifespans. I suppose perhaps we could somehow colonize other planets but I don't see any progress or even interest in progress there right now. As for cryogenics, check this out: http://thebaffler.com/salvos/everybody-freeze-pein
>Yes, I think it is extremely unlikely people will figure out thousand-year lifespans.
Why? Do you think this would withstand a thousand years of human ingenuity? I'm confused where you're getting this very confident prediction.
It also still seems to me that long lifespans are extremely desirable, albeit difficult to obtain, and I'm not sure whether you agree. This is relevant because if we want to decide e.g. where to put research effort, it's useful to know what we want.
The article you linked is kind of long, and looks like it mainly consists of sneering at various people; could you point to the part that's relevant? All I saw was some stuff about Alcor messing up a preservation, which is pretty unfortunate, but not really strong evidence that they have bad motivations.
This is genuinely not obvious to me. What convinced you of this? Or, what do you think the world would look like if there were people who actually had a strong, reasonable, non-insane suspicion that they could do the things that cryonics people claim to be able to? To me, it looks like we are living in that world. Have you e.g. looked through the information, studies, and arguments on the Alcor website?
Well, you don't want to read the article I linked. Why would I want to read a bunch of studies published by someone with an obvious vested interest in convincing me cryogenics is not nonsense?
If you gave modern-age people a choice: to live a short life or live a long life while limiting their rate of childbirth (or ceasing reproduction altogether), I think many would choose the former. Having a choice is always better than having none.
Also note that your current (probably?) western lifestyle puts several times more load on the environment than mine 3rd world-like one. It is the wasteful lifestyle choices made by living people that are really a problem, not the quantity of people in itself.
We don't have to, these (108-7) billions of people will (sadly) never ever come back.
We have just 7.3 bln people and a planet with more than enough resources to sustain them and then some more (I could give some practical computations regarding the limits to growth, but I won't waste our time doing that here).
So your whole argument about all people that have ever lived is basically a strawman.
I really don't think you can state as an absolute truth that death is bad and we would be better off if no one died. That may be your view, but this is a massively complex philosophical question for which I get the impression you have too hastily answered.
(Clarification: I think we'd obviously be better off if no one involuntarily died.)
I don't think I've been hasty in my thinking. What is the most central concern that you have about life as a good thing?
There are deep unsolved problems around long life. E.g., how do you grow as a mind that has existed for 4,000 years? A normal human mind would probably not be able to handle this, so we'd need some way to expand without losing the parts of ourselves that we value. Similarly, I don't know how to grow as a community of huge, ancient minds.
But, as the saying goes, those are very difficult problems, and I intend to work on solving them for as many centuries as it takes! Of course I can't literally claim to possess an absolute truth, but I think there is a very strong argument---or rather, I think most people would simply agree if they thought longer and more sanely about the question---that life can be awesome given some work, and it is precious, and we don't want to just give up on our vast adventure because, like, medicine is hard to figure out, or cryonics seems like something weird people do, or whatever.
I'm struggling to think of how to reply. This topic is both hard if not impossible to grapple and fascinating to think about. I keep going off into mental tangents about our place (and insignifigance) in the incomprehensibly huge cosmos and how you can so easily say that we humans, who have been dieing along with every other living thing for all of our collective existence, that somehow we should strive to eradicate death and live for thousands of years, much less eternity.
I don't know if hasty was the right word; I don't mean to just dismiss what you're saying. Clearly you've considered this at length.
I cannot easily accept that perpetual life is a good thing and death is something which should be avoided (obviously, in a grander sense). I don't have a concern about life as a good thing in the same way I don't have a concern about death being a bad thing. Life and death are complementary. I can't fathom anything else.
Hm, I hear people say this a lot, but I genuinely can't empathize with where they are coming from. This is a blank spot in my map. Could you say more about the intuition behind this statement, and why this makes death seems desirable or less bad?
To illustrate how I emotionally parse the statement "Life and death are complementary", I want to make a possibly distressing analogy, so apologies in advance, and:
TRIGGER WARNING...
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TRIGGER WARNING: abstract discussion of rape
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That statement reads to me like:
"Being raped and not being raped are complementary. Members of higher animal species rape each other in the natural course of life, and humans have committed rape throughout history. Rape is a part of nature, so it is foolish to think that we humans could or should eliminate rape forever."
This is an obviously abhorrent position, and I genuinely don't see much of a difference talking about death instead. Clearly horrible thing is clearly horrible.
Again, I am absolutely not trying to imply you are evil, or thinking inside my head that you are evil, or anything remotely like that; I am just trying to convey how I kneejerk-emotionally react to your statement about life and death, in case it helps you say things to me that will cause me to understand where you are coming from.
Your analogy fails because death is not something which is necessarily a conscious action taken by one against another. If we were discussing why murder was good and complementary to life then it is more applicable, but we're not.
Your inability to parse why I see life and death existing in a sort of balance is similar to my inability to have the same clarity that you do that death is inherently bad and should be eliminated. It's certainly something I'm going to think about.
Personally, I really like living, mainly because there's a lot of awesome stuff to do and see and build, stories to tell, people to be with, etc. The logical next step is that I don't want to die, at least any time soon or involuntarily. Avoiding death may be difficult, but it seems rather sad to just give up; and anyway, say what you will about humans, but we are pretty goddamn clever occasionally.
So it seems quite worth it to fight death. I don't know if avoiding involuntary death should seem so implausible---humans are machines that can be fixed when they start breaking; that's how ordinary medicine works! I think it would actually be surprising if we could extend lifespans from 30 years all the way up to 100+ years, but couldn't possibly go much further, even given massive future advances in our understanding of biology, neurology, and technology.
Except we're not machines. "You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else," as Tyler Durden would say.
Some might say the next logical step isn't to wish to live forever, but to die, and hope your genes and ideas live on. We're not the eternal ones in this universe, no matter how big our capacity to wish for that.
I only mean that we're machines enough so that medical techniques work. We are made of parts that break and can be fixed. This is on extremely solid empirical footing.
>Some might say the next logical step isn't to wish to live forever, but to die, and hope your genes and ideas live on. We're not the eternal ones in this universe, no matter how big our capacity to wish for that.
Do you say that? I wish to live a very long time, and I wish the same for my loved ones and anyone who wants. I would keep wishing this even if it were an impossible wish. Also, it happens to probably not be impossible.
But, do you agree that the part where the whole human mind (not just some cells) has to die---a soul annihilated permanently---is not really a good thing, even if it happens to be the state we find nature in?
Not necessarily. The "whole human mind" and the "soul" are very metaphysical concepts so it's tough to say.
In my estimation, the "whole human mind" or "soul" of a person is not annihilated when someone dies. Our minds are an amorphous network constantly in intercourse with and dependent upon eachother.
When a loved one dies, all of the love they gave and words they said exist in some form or another within us, within our hearts and minds which we then pass on to others in turn.
Picture a field full of one type of flowers. If that one type of flowers grows old but never dies, soon enough there is no room for newer or better flowers to grow and evolve.
So as old minds pass away, new minds are born which draw upon the old minds' knowledge but also build upon that knowledge with newer and better ideas.
“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” --Woody Allen
Some small parts of a person can be transmitted to the outside world, but this leaves out the vast, rich internal world each mind carries with it. If I picture a loved one dying, I feel pretty concerned with the part where they don't keep being alive, keep pursuing their goals and having rich experiences and exploring and loving and being loved and creating and etc. How does this compare with your thoughts?
This may be painful to think about in detail. But I think it is actually important to think about anyway, because there are actual important decisions we have to make (whether to do research in to life extension, whether to sign up for cryonics, etc.), and we seem to be making the wrong decisions when we don't have everything in view; including the most painful parts, which happen to be the most important!
I'm also pretty confused why people bring up supposed benefits of society; to be frank, it sounds to me like people are suggesting "we should kill (let die) all the old and sick people to free up floor space" or "we should kill (let die) all the old and sick people so we don't have to spend any time dealing with their backwards ideas".
It's absolutely a good thing. We need some of our cells to die as our tissues develop, society needs people to die in order to develop. A society without death would be a stagnant hell.
The problem is that in a world without aging and natural death, your racist great-great-grandparents have (effectively) all of the resources and power, and therefore no reason to listen to you at all.
Yes, this is a pessimistic viewpoint, but I think it's also a realistic one.
Do you think there's a point to be made in the detail of the distinction?
My point is that death sucks, and when I say that, I'm talking about children crying because they can't see granny any more. Talking about cell death is a distraction.
Those crying children couldn't exist if their grandparents and their grandparents down the line never died. There wouldn't be enough food or resources to sustain indefinite existence for everyone who wants it.
>would you prefer a society that kills people at a certain age, or one that limits the birth rate?
Neither. I'd prefer one smart enough to understand the demographic economic paradox and successfully raise the standard of living so that the problem of overpopulation solves itself naturally.
Well yes, obviously you'd try to reduce the birth rate nicely first, and maybe that's a complete solution (to a problem you suggested), but that doesn't answer the question.
I'm asking what you do if population growth starts to outpace food production despite your best efforts? Do you start killing old people, or do you stop letting people have babies?
I'm not from the 1st world, so it adds a bit of a darker attitude. To me it looks pretty insane that you earn so much money, have so high quality of life and yet you don't invest nearly as much as possible into life extension. Instead you buy big overpriced houses and other weird stuff.
Ok, I think I can see why that would be extra frustrating, on top of the already quite sufficient horror of death. Nevertheless, it is probably a good idea to stay civil and try to communicate meaningfully, rather than venting emotions in a forum that is about a specific person's pain and death. I think it's important to have difficult discussions about e.g. death, deathism, etc., but being combatative---even if it makes perfect emotional sense---does not seem likely to have good effects on most people, including yourself.
