It’s good we are starting to develop dignified death laws. With the world population as it is, more people will die in the next decade than any other in history (even the plagues). Just looking at population graphs, 1B might die between 2050 and 2060. Much suffering can be avoided.
Yet they got their flu shots and got treated for any infections they might get. This went on for the two years my SO worked there.
My dad had cancer that spread to his lungs, and then he got pneumonia. The day after being hospitalized, he asked the doctor if it was a chance he'd ever get home and they admitted that no, that was not very likely. Later that day he asked them to turn off the oxygen, which they did after confirming his wish. He passed peacefully a few hours later.
I was so glad he was given the opportunity to make his choice, and that the doctors respected it.
Sure, I lost some months with my dad, but he'd be in a hospital bed struggling to breathe. I hope I get to make a similar choice when that time comes.
We should probably try harder to make people healthier in general. Much of the frailty of the elderly can be avoided with rigorous exercise. Maybe heart disease and dementia doesn't have to be your fate. I don't know how much longer people will be able to live if they optimize the hell out of their biomarkers.
But I do know...I don't want to be in pain and frail when I die. The best way to do that is making health my priority.
A good friend of mine lived healthy, and still went hiking in their 90s. Yet, they had a stroke and are now bedridden.
If you just drop dead after having had a nice live or go through months or years of frailty and bad health, it's all in the cards.
optimizing diet and rigorous exercise comes at some cost in the form of time spent in your precious youth. so you sacrifice youthtime for a chance at a longer better old age. each hour of exercise does not make you live an hour longer, so you are net negative from the get-go. (if you love exercise, it's not a loss, but in that case you would do it anyway even if it shortened your life because you love it, no need to spend time extolling its virtues)
i optimize for doing what i love to do all the time.
Pretty much all science on exercise's impact on both physical and health can be loosely summarized by "doing anything, anything at all is likely to have significant short and long term benefits". Similarly, nutrition can be summarised as "try eat a balanced diet, but at the very least just avoid hyper UPF, and don't eat red meat every day". You might decide that's worth it, but "walk your kids/dog/partner/self twice a day and only eat red meat on the weekends" is probably enough to make a significant impact for a very significant number of people.
One example out of sea of examples - climbing. Indoor, outdoor, bouldering, long walls, doesn't matter. Its an amazing activity, every single person I know is doing it at least occasionally becomes much happier during&after a session. Massive health benefits could be just a side effect and it would most probably still be the best and most memorable thing you did on that day.
Plus people in community are generally very positive, welcoming, helpful and happy to talk to. Its sort of sport that changes you in many ways for the better (healthier, happier, better life perspective and so on). How much time it takes is sort of irrelevant, ie coming and commenting here costs you probably more time than continuous amateur climbing career would do.
Change climbing for many other sports and it would still be true.
For a great many of us climbing is utterly terrifying. Yeah, tried it. Yeah, aware that the belay rope is there. No, it still sucks and no extra happiness is anywhere to be found except happiness that it's over.
But more importantly the athletic people underestimate just how bad unathletic people are at exercise and just how much effort even something basic is for them.
Most people could not do the basic bouldering you are about to suggest to counter my point above: they don't have the arm strength. Building that strength would take at least 6 months of a dedicated workout program and a cure for whatever psychological issues are affecting their diet. Most will never get there and suggesting to them that they can sound like "just perform a magic ritual". Oh, and after 6 months of doing the impossible their achievement is "you can do the noob bouldering". Underwhelming to say the least.
But to you exercise is easy and fun and the opposite is inconceivable. And if we dare speak up - we'll be told we are our perspective, attitude, and indeed our very life experience are invalid and wrong. Go on, hit that downvote.
Sometimes, you don’t know everything, nor will you. You won’t be around for everything. This is the human condition.
It seems unwise to spend too many brain cycles worrying about this.
Believe or disbelieve whatever you like, go on about a God of the Gaps, but that's why they talk about people's religious "faith."
Hoping I get to see my grandkids. Hell, even see them start to marry off, come to that. But I'll spend what time I've got trying to enjoy the things that are here, now. You should do the same.
Similarly, I don’t really fear my death, I fear the death of others.
But If Tomorrow Never Comes starts playing …
Is anything better or worse if 2B people die instead of 1B with the same aggregate amount of suffering? Average suffering reduced by half! What about 100,000 people instead of 1B? Those people presumably die horrific, painful, suffering deaths but now there a lot more people alive. Is that better or worse?
There's also average utilitarianism which says: maximize the average happiness per person.
Separately, some years ago spent a good amount of time listening to what Atul Gawande thought about medicine and doctors and dying. He wrote Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End and there's a Frontline documentary (Being Mortal) about his experience and his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQhI3Jb7vMg. I've not yet read the book.
Assisted death--one with dignity--is rare recent development about which I'm genuinely and wholeheartedly happy.
What unsettles me--as rational as I think I'm--is the thought of being born again (duh!). I lead a very comfortable life, but far from "perfect". I can say I'm content. What are the odds that I'll be content in my next life? How likely is it that I'll be born in the right country, to good parents, follow the right religion, and have a brain wired in the right way to make a decent living? I'm not hopeful. So, I've "decided" that I want to be a rock in all my next lives. No emotions, no feelings, no struggle, no pain, no indignation. Just a fricking rock.
Fear of death is not just natural, it is the most fundamental instinct of any creature besides reproduction. Those who don't have it, don't last long. Perhaps society's attitudes towards it could profitably be improved, but don't make out like it's an irrational personality flaw.
And I’d say most people probably don’t fear death or non-existence itself, but rather the process of dying (suffering, stress, pain, shame, loss of agency, the grief inflicted on others, etc). In palliative care settings, where the process of dying is well-managed (physically, emotionally, spiritually), people don’t seem to be that afraid. Many make peace. Or at least that’s the image painted by popular science articles on the matter. And speaking for myself, N=1 and all, I really do fear the process only, and not the conclusion.
That’s why I think dignified death laws for these settings are important. And why I say I fear what society will put me through when it’s my time, if such laws aren’t passed.
I am concerned in general about me living past my health-span. It’s a new concern for many, as medicine traditionally focused on prolonging lifespan. But now people are talking about how full of suffering life is when one doesn’t have whatever minimum of health they deem required to live, but are kept alive anyways. Sometimes agains their wishes. It’s just a macabre prolongation of the process of dying — something that really is scary.
Or that’s what I’m afraid of, anyways. But I understand it’s a difficult and somewhat taboo topic in society, so apols if it offends.
This is more a social anxiety than reflection of reality. To the extent we’re prolonging suffering, it’s on the order of weeks, maybe months. Not years.
Most people fear death. That’s natural. Some of us, due to being stupid, depressed or possibly enlightened, don’t. But these fears evolved for obvious reasons.
While fear of death is widely considered universal, many people (for various reasons) fear death significantly less than others[1]. Fear of death levels appear to generally stabilize to low past 60 years of age. Many philosophies reject the fear of death, including some of our very popular religions. Only about half of terminally ill patients feel clinically significant death anxiety[2]. It is normal to not fear death without being depressed, enlightened, or stupid.
I think it’s not so black and white as evolutionary psychology might suggest.
[0] https://peterattiamd.com/outlive/
Sure. This doesn't reflect the popular discourse, which is more concerned with fantastical edge cases.
> fear death significantly less than others
Totally agree.
> Only about half of terminally ill patients feel clinically significant death anxiety
Massive difference between death anxiety, which crosses into dreadful anticipation of a future state, and fear, which is more of a present concern. I fear getting hit by a car. I'm not really concerned with it most of the time. (And when I am, it's fleeting and limmited.)
When you say fearing death, I think you mean obsessing over death. That, I agree, is unhealthy. Fear, more generally, is an unpleasantness that results from dangers or threats. Death is very clearly a danger and threat. Contemplating it doesn't need to be uncomfortable. But it's dedidedly unnatural, if alluring, to consider one's own death monotonoically. (For what it's worth, this is closer to my experience. But I also know I have a high risk tolerance, and have to consciously keep an eye on that.)
I know from seeing my grandparents, who lived into upper 90s. At home, they were still happy. Being poked and prodded in a hospital is a material step down in quality of life. On top of that, imagine having a breathing tube/catheter/etc.
To be fair, we have evolved stupid eras, e.g. male adolescence, when that fear seems to be purposely tamped down.
Idealism can cause so much suffering in this way.
What angers me is that not everyone gets to experience a dignified death; the hospice where my father stayed relies on charitable donations to do their vital work - a death like this should be table stakes for an advanced economy, but alas, it's not.
select * from castle_of_aaaugh where grail is not null*
tl;dr do it yourself before it’s too late
I need to die so that there's room for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
A timely piece I can relate to. currently starting my second week in a (US) hospital oncology ward after my 11th cycle of chemo. I was first diagnosed with stage iv colon cancer and after chemo, surgery, resections and stubbornness was NED from 2018 to 2025. The return is inoperable and I was given “six months to a year”.
I asked if I’d be in pain when death came, and he said that I wouldn’t likely be - it would just be feeling more and more tired. That’s basically what’s been happening.
The chemo itself hasn’t given me direct side effects like skin lesions or mouth sores, nor much nausea. The secondary effects on my kidneys (which were already doing poorly before this started) and liver (cirrhosis) plus the metastases in lymph nodes and lung leads to edema. Diuretics helped but flushed out my potassium, so there several months where they trying to balance those electrolytes.
Anyway, a lot of my swelling was reduced (and they took 4L from two rounds of draining my lungs) but for some ungodly reason my scrotal sack decided it wanted to play too, and became the size and consistency of one of those half size basketballs you can win at fairs. it’s so bad that I actually requested a catheter. The swelling makes walking or anything else really painful.
The oncology wing I’m in doesn’t seem soaked in the kind of depressing, institutional green malaise of slightly older hospitals but it isn’t a “nice place” to die (I don’t expect to do that this visit in any case). The older woman (70?) two doors down though - seems to be in constant pain and in and out of lucidity, shouting at everyone. Usually a phrase gets stuck on repeat for a few hours - the most heartbreaking was “mommy get my mommy I’m sorry mommy I’m a bad girl mommy stop it” yelled loudly for hours.
This is a generic hospital though. Memorial Sloan-Kettering in NYC has a patient day lounge and lots of projects for child patients and patients families. Still not even approaching the quality described
Sorry, rambling. Probably my way of compartmentalizing the anxiety.
The other thing I wanted to say is that I really liked Christopher Hitchens “Mortality” and that Terry Pratchett’s very relatable death character shows up in all of his books. My favorite quote is from “Small Gods” as Death comes for the protagonist at the very end:
> “Ah. There really is a desert. Does everyone get this?” said Brutha. WHO KNOWS? “And what is at the end of the desert?” JUDGMENT. Brutha considered this. “Which end?” Death grinned and stepped aside.
Maybe I’m not afraid of death because as a devout atheist - well yea, we all get to do that at some point.
"What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?"
This caught me in two ways:
1. Death is the release. Whatever suffering you're undergoing, it won't follow you into whatever comes next, even if that is absolute oblivion. The relief would be welcome, I assume. So that's at least one positive way to look at it.
But moreso:
2. Everyone's death is individual and special. The process of getting to it is different for everyone, and the journey is just as much a part of the process as the destination. It isn't something to fear, because you cannot stop it, but it is something to consider as you move through your life.
Cancer is the fucking devil. I, myself, have been lucky enough to avoid it for now, but we spent the last year with my father and lymphoma. It's a fucking nightmare of cancer treatment and chasing side effects from the cancer treatments until the end. He chose to die with hospice on the family farm; it wasn't the most dignified death due to the symptoms of his cancer, but it was peaceful and with family/friends. So that's something.
His treatment didn't really bother me, and his process didn't really depress me; it was the people like the older lady in your write-up that really stuck with me. In his first month on the cancer floor, his across the hall neighbor was just like that. Her only lucid moments were either screaming in pain, or nonsense phrases on repeat from what I assume was her childhood.
Terrifying.
I hope that your life goes well all the way to the end. I genuinely do not know what to say other than that.
Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death, and wonder why we didn't try harder, earlier.
Why isn't the longevity problem our #1 tax expense? Because the culture believes the problem is insurmountable, inevitable, and not worth solving. Our parents try to hide their grief and dread at the inevitability, telling us it's okay, but the tears at a funeral disagree.
As an aside, I would pay vast sums of money (millions of dollars) to live my final days at an old folks' home that was capable of monitoring my health on a frequent basis, catching things early, and integrated SOTA cryonics facilities to maximize my chance of revival in case LEV doesn't become a possibility in my lifetime.
If it were just that, I might still be hopeful, but the latency on aging cure experiments is inevitably going to be quite long, and that won't change without massive advances in biological simulations.
And without changes to laws around euthanasia or suicide, it means being forced to stay alive forever, which is even more dystopian.
I don't think a social problem (that will be solved in time, and is already solved in some countries) is a reason to prevent this from happening.
Social problems can be fixed, death is final. If euthanasia doesn't become legal before, it certainly will be after.
Much has been said and written about the cruelty of immortality, since the myth of Sisyphus and probably before.
“The Mortal Immortal” is a story about prolonging lifespan but not healthspan, and also not emotional fulfilment in life — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Immortal. There are also TV shows (“Altered Carbon”, “Black Mirror” USS Callister and other episodes, “Twilight Zone”) and video games (“Nobody Wants to Die”) about it.
What your parent comment speaks about (the vanity of endless life) is particularly explored in Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Affair”. Endless life could mean no regard for quality of life and endless trivial pursuits.
We’re on a path to curing aging. We have no clue how to cure death.
Then you have cured death for all practical purposes. You will still be vulnerable to certain cosmic catastrophes (which you can plan around) and the heat death itself, but I would still call that "cured."
Edit reply because of HN rate limit: Transfers are possible, copies aren't our only option. Consider replacing one neuron at the time with an uplink to a virtual neuron in the cloud. An implant (at the cellular scale) reflects communication back to your physical neurons - they don't even notice it disappeared.
Wait for your thoughts to normalize, rinse, repeat. This is gradual replacement. You'd do it with more than one neuron (a cluster of neurons) realistically.
It's not the difference in substrate that makes me doubt it's possible (I'm a very strong believer in panpsychism), but I doubt the transfer could ever be "continuous" in a way that my monkey brain was satisfied with.
However, I do think it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible. It's harder than the alternative, but theoretically possible.
Sometimes we even feel "out of body", even in our own consciousness, so why would it be so different when we are copied?
The thing I'm talking about, of attempting to build a "move" operation that isn't "copy then delete", is exactly what I meant when I said it seems harder but possible to solve.
What if there's hardware to wirelessly combine the minds, and you can experience what your clone^W other-self experiences. A bit like having someone be in e.g. Iceland and facetime you a low quality sight and sounds experience of Iceland... would you then say "Ok, I don't mind having one of my input devices go offline".
The fundamental gating discoveries are all around the nature of consciousness. Is it emergent? Is it empirically detectable? Is it quantum magic? We have inklings around this. But our understanding of it hasn't fundamentally changed since, arguably, Descartes.
Sure.
> uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes
We have no idea what the path to any of this looks like. We could easily cure aging without making progress on this for centuries, maybe millennia.
While a sufficiently detailed copy should be conscious, we don't know what "sufficiently detailed" is — and we can't just do this by external behaviour, because (1) People are still arguing both sides of the P-zombie thought experiment; and (2) LLMs regularly fooling people into thinking they're discoursing with a human, even though I think most people think LLMs aren't conscious.
There's something like 40 different definitions of "consciousness"; some are easy to test for, some are provably impossible, but I don't know if even one of them is actually what we want.
I remember my dreams, but was I really conscious, or was it an unconscious experience whose memory was available to my conscious mind when I woke? It's conceivable that I am fully conscious right now, that an upload of my brain would change and grow and report conscious throughout, that you could then download it into a new brain in a new body and that new mind would also report having remembered conscious experiences while uploaded — all without the upload having ever experienced anything that would match the hard-to-describe thing we often try to grasp at with the word "consciousness".
We have altered states of consciousness. People can have conversations and drive cars while sleepwalking. Am I only truly conscious while actively engaging in self-reflection, or all the time? Is my consciousness like your consciousness? Did my mother loose hers at some point during the course of her Alzheimer's, or did she keep it until the very end? When a Buddhist trains themselves to let go, do they lose theirs?
I think continuity is a red herring, realistically our whole idea of consciousness is probably off base. It might not even be a real thing, for example my pet cat doesn’t care if he has a consciousness or not because he never invented a word for it.
Sadly, my main fear is that immortality will only be available to the extremely rich and powerful. Generally historical progress is made when the old guard die, be it in science with the leaders clamoring to old theories, dictatorships falling when their leader does, companies setting a new course when their founder/CEO retires.
I shudder at the thought of living in a world where everyone still dies like before, except an entrenched immortal powerful elite.
This should take unfathomably long epochs of time well beyond the current age of the universe, but it will still inevitably happen. This is even putting aside possibilities like proton decay and false vacuum collapse.
Don't get me wrong. Given the choice between a 100 year lifespan and a quadrillion year lifespan, my first instinct is to take the quadrillion year lifespan, but even then, it seems like you're incurring the very real risk that you'll eventually remain "alive" but in complete isolation with no matter to interact with that isn't part of your body, waiting for thousands of times longer then the Milky Way will exist for the attraction of a supermassive black hole to finally pull you in and end it. Given whatever sort of brain you might have has to have a finite storage capacity for information, you also open up the possibility that you'll spend the last few trillion years of your life with no memories except that complete isolation and experience of utter nothingness.
These are all sci-fi scenarios and there is no way to know for sure what will actually happen or what it will be like, but we do know for sure that a functionally immortal being would not just be living a normal life doing things animals typically enjoy doing, but forever. There are plenty of possible fates worse than death.
Psychological health and well being are going to be key to resolving the problem of peaceful coexistence between humans.
Me and my partner always lement that we didn't evolve from capybaras instead.
Is this a religious conviction, or something else? I've heard that viewpoint a lot, but I've never heard anyone really explain where it comes from.
As for 'non-biological' humans, I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments. The digital lacks identity, which is the source of security issues in the computerised society. There is no difference between 1011011001 and 1011011001 regardless of source, it can be a biometry reader sending an encoding of your thumb print or another computer hooked into a network sending the same bytes.
If we for the sake of argument ignored the problems with the transfer, then you still propose a deeply restricted existence, a machine prison, where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source feeding digital signals into your machine. At best it is a simulacra of a dream you can't wake from. You'd be absolutely cut off from any possibility of freedom and immediate engagement with the universe.
Now, I do understand that many people enjoy living almost their entire adult lives mediated through digitally transmitted images and sounds, but at least they still have the option to look away and out of their own bodies and into the remnants of the world that birthed our and many other species. Removing that option entirely and replacing it with the most intimate and absolute form of imprisonment we have yet been able to imagine does not seem at all attractive to me.
Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible.
If you get to watch them follow through on this, how do you expect to keep some semblance of sanity? Are you hoping to be able to ignore it, sitting on a server in a bunker being fed a constant soap opera of fiction and simulated conversations, humming away at some 200 watts or so?
No it's not. If you accept "mind is brain" (i.e. consciousness is a phenomena within known or knowable laws of physics), a digital virtual environment that simulates the laws of physics (to arbitrarily good precision) could have brains (and therefore minds) running inside it that are indistinguishable (to arbitrarily good precision) from the real thing. [1] [2]
> currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible.
I'd sure as hell rather be alive now than in the 1800's, or the 1700's, or the 1600's. Or the Middle Ages, or classical antiquity, or ancient times, or pre-history. Life sucks for billions of people compared to Western standards but life's also better for billions of people than it's ever been before. Humanity's mostly made forward progress over the long arc of time, and I'm skeptical of claims that such progress is doomed to permanently halt anytime soon.
[1] I could replace "to arbitrarily good precision" with a proper mathematical formulation. But the technical details of the epsilons and deltas don't affect the thrust of the philosophical argument. I'm happy to leave a more precise epsilon-delta phrasing of my idea as an exercise to the reader(s).
[2] Of course the equivalence goes both ways; I hardly need to explain to HN that it's possible to build digital computers in our analog universe!
I'm also not a fan of crypto-christian conceptions of historical "progress". Life was interesting and worth living in the past.
I'd be shocked if this didn't happen in the next thousand years.
Needing air/water everywhere we go is incredibly limiting as well.
For me, perhaps I do not fear death so much as infirmity. Dying, for me, would be entrance into glory and bliss (at least that beginning of that process), but to live with illness, to be incapacitated, to suffer helplessly, that's a terrible and frightful thing.
So being admitted to a hospital, the beginning of that infirmity or incapacitation, that is definitely a traumatic experience for me that requires accompaniment and soothing. Unfortunately, modern hospitals are woefully equipped to allay our fears, but instead just run us through a meat grinder of paperwork, finances, poorly-informed decisions, and disappointment.
So it's laudable that palliative care and hospices are making efforts like this one.
On my own part, I'm gradually overcoming a visceral fear of hospitals and facilities by just waltzing in while I'm perfectly healthy. There are a couple nearby and so I've taken to eating in their cafeterias when it's convenient (very cheap, great selection of healthy food!); and the chapel where the Eucharist is reserved is a focus of peace and prayer; and there is actually a lot of art and history to admire in them, so it's become an interesting and unexpected diversion.