At 31, I have just weeks to live. Here's what I want to pass on
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
My 17 year old daughter was already dealing with a life-altering chronic disease and losing her mom plus all of this pandemic bullshit has really made a mess. She broke down crying last night struggling over the idea of death and that everything seems to be pitted against her. It’s hard to know exactly what to say in those moments, maybe some of these words from a person at the doorstep will help her.
For what it’s worth we do have her seeing both a counselor and a psychiatrist but that only goes so far...at the end of the day it’s you and your thoughts staring at the ceiling while you’re trying to get to sleep for the 5am shift tomorrow.
thinking on something outside yourself is helpful, even empirically. You might not agree with the specific flavour, but even something as bare and nonspiritual as Seneca can help.
If you don't believe in what the Bible says, then disregard everything below.
Try reading the Bible. As a whole. And if you have, do it again. Don't let individual versus taken out of context influence major decisions. Know who wrote each chapter (if we know that), who they were writing to, and why they wrote that chapter to put everything in context. I found I was reading too fast and missing major parts. Also translation makes a big deal - some words just don't translate properly - and a good Bible will have footnotes to explain the original word. There are lots of plans out there.
Then, I think, you will realize that what those in the modern church you are referencing are saying should disappoint all of us... and it's not in alignment with the Bible and Jesus' teachings, and you can see where they don't align. Not all churches are that way. Anyways go to the source (if you haven't already).
When everything else fails, you have left only your strength of will against reason. And spirituality may be the only thing to give you that strength.
Every person has to make a different journey, and no tool is appropriate to everyone.
This rings very true for me.
My dad died of brain cancer going on five years ago now.
He was diagnosed in 2014. They were clear the prognosis was not good. One or two years at best.
They removed the tumor as soon as they found it, and he returned basically to normal. There was a weird settling in of what it all meant and treatments that were meant to stall things a while.
But since the tumor was small, he was able to function and be basically his old self.
We had our first daughter in the fall of 2015. He was there to meet her. Everything felt like it was looking up.
Three weeks later, on my first day back to work, I got a call at 10:30. "The cancer is back." I took the day off.
At Christmas, he was definitely starting to act goofy and be more forgetful. We'd have to distract him so he didn't try to go plow the driveway or do things like that.
It became a question of "do we go up every weekend, or can we take this weekend off?"
And then at the beginning of February things started getting really bad and my mom moved him into a nursing home in town. That lasted for a little less than a week I think. Then it was clear this was the end.
So we came up in the middle of the week. Sat by his bedside for hours on end. Held his hand.
My dad had two things he'd always say about dying:
1. When someone comes to die, they need someone to hold their hand.
2. People need permission to die. Otherwise they will hang on way longer than they otherwise would.
So I held his hand for a couple days. And then on maybe the third evening, it became pretty clear he was deteriorating.
So I leaned over, kissed him on the head, told him that he'd done a great job raising me and my brother, and that it was okay and we'd be here till the end.
And then we watched him die. I think it was about 4am when he finally passed.
I never remember what day it was, but I do remember that Lent had just started and he died the morning of Transfiguration Sunday. Which the internet tells me was Feb 7, 2016.
There's a Deathcab for Cutie song, "Love is watching someone die." It's the truth. You have to love someone a lot to be there through that.
Anyway, to come back around, it all just went so much faster than you think it would. Especially towards the end.
It took a little over a month for "Dad's acting funny again" to turn into "Dad died last night".
Happened to me as well, on several occasions.
My dad passed away just before New Year a few months ago. At the time I thought him going to hospital was going to be yet another scare, and he should just get his act together and eat properly and exercise. Never got around to it, and his last words were some gibberish.
I felt like maybe there should have been proper last words, but looking back there were. His terminal stage had actually started a few years before, at a bypass surgery. At the time he told me that if the surgery didn't work, he'd be happy to die. Life had treated him just fine, no big issues with anyone to report. Happy with having three kids and a couple of grandchildren. Nothing left to do.
And so the next three years passed with him not doing anything the doctors had told him to do, and we got used to periodic ambulance calls (heart attacks, blood sugar incidents). Somehow he made his life summary come true, nothing more to do.
On another occasion, one of my high school classmates passed away from cancer at 29. I knew he'd had it before, but then it seemed to pass, and being young I thought it wasn't a huge problem because he seemed chipper and full of zest. He had a girlfriend and a career. When it came back I figured I'd drop by to see him, but in a few weeks on my holiday. Ended up being sooner, for his funeral.
>2. People need permission to die. Otherwise they will hang on way longer than they otherwise would.
I wrote about this elsewhere, but my wife on a couple of occasions said 'I think it's time for you to let me go.' I didn't really understand what she meant by that. She was incredibly stoic and was happy to leave the words for me to interpret. I was still so wrapped up in trying to find a way out that I couldn't conceive of just letting go...it felt truly like those scenes in a movie where someone is hanging off of a building and your grip is the only thing keeping them alive. After she passed, her words gained new meaning to me and this was part of it. Permission to go, and permission to talk about the life that comes afterwards. Not figuring this out in time to alleviate some of her pain and let her share her dreams about the future without her is one of my biggest regrets.
I lost my mother from lung cancer so I can relate.
My dad on the other hand died without notice. I got a message on my phone one day when I was at work. It was a cop from my father's town. They didn't tell me why they were calling, but I knew something happened to my father because he was living on the edge. I took the day off and went home to call them back. He died a few days before at his home.
He was too young to die, but I think it was the best possible death, for him and for us. We didn't have a chance to "say good bye", but it doesn't really matter in the end.
The worst part of dying is anticipating death. I wish I could die accidentally.
This happened to me as well. My brother passed at age 47 in 2013. He was initially diagnosed with stage 2 colon cancer and things seemed to be going alright for about a year.
The issue was that the tumor was near a major blood vessel and surgery failed because they were afraid he would bleed to death.
Even after this failed surgery, we had hope with some experimental treatments. He lasted another year.
After a couple of rounds of chemo, he went from bad to worse within a couple of weeks. I had never experienced death like this before and it all came a a shock to me how quickly he passed away.
The worst part is that he fought the idea of death to the very end (I'm sure we all do). There were no plans for his one-man successful business and his wife had to get all of his passwords for important accounts when he was delirious from all of the drugs in his system and nearly on his death bed. He truly thought he would beat it.
The aftermath was like a bomb went off in our family.
His wife begged me to help her with his business on the day of the funeral. I realized he had been neglecting customers for 6 months+ (this is completely understandable, given his condition) and they were screaming for their money back. I spent many weeks/weekends/long nights cleaning up the business and getting the business back to a reasonable level, gaining back customers that would have been lost. This was all for free, to help her (and his kids) out. I explained to her that future work would not be free.
I also had to help her return all kinds of electronics that he bought while he was on chemo drugs. He managed to rack up $50,000 in bills because he would forget that he ordered something..and order 10 of them.
To this day, I'm not sure how she didn't notice all of these amazon packages coming to the door and thinking nothing of it.
After this was done, I told his wife that if she wanted me to continue with this business arrangement, I would need to be a partner in the business. She not only didn't want to do this, but told me I only 'answered emails' and didn't do any actual work, which was clearly not true.
She wanted to give me a free cell phone and pay me around $10/hour as compensation for future work. It was also explained that she had contacted a lawyer and it was stressed that all of the intellectual property from the business was not mine. Kind of strange to me to already assume I'm going to steal intellectual property from you when I just saved you many thousands of dollars and your business..for free.
At this point you may be thinking she's just naive and may not understand the work involved. She worked in the computer industry for a decade. This is how she met my brother. She understands the work it takes to run his business and only wanted to take advantage of me.
As an aside, my brothers business involves: tech support, software development of multiple products in at least 3 languages, and knowing the business. I have the ability do do all three, since I have been in the software/tech industry for the past 2 decades and have owned multiple successful companies. Him and I were very close and I had lots of knowledge about his business and what it entailed. We had ongoing tech discussions through email/chats/in-person for many years.
He was the one that bought me my first computer and was my mentor.
4 months later, she emailed me a contract with a proposal. I would get 5% of the profits for working on it full-time and her kids would own 100% of the business. This was a slap in my face and I declined the offer. With the declining profits in the business, this would have been like working at
The problem is that I would need to work on it full-time to actually save it from failure. If I signed the contract, only worked on it part-time, and it failed, I would be blamed. I also don't like to half-ass anything...especially when it comes to running a business.
She then proceeded to get anyone she could find to work on the business for free and started creating a wedge in my immediate family by spreading false information about the situation. She ended up roping in one of his clients, who had become a friend, to answer all emails for free.
She describes him as a 'good, christian, man'. The funny part is that she was never that religious..and I've known her for 25 years. One of her greatest traits is the ability to manipulate people. All of her friends are people that can do things for her. If she can't use you for something, you are cast off and ignored. She especially likes networking with anyone that has lots of money.
Fast forward to 2020 and the website is in terrible shape. A 7+ year out-of-date website that keeps getting hacked and badly mis-configured DNS records. I told her how to fix these on the first day, but my advice was ignored. I can only imagine how insecure the actual product is, since there have been no updates in all this time.
I also found out my other brother has been helping her for free and outright lying to me about it. I overheard a conversation a couple of days ago that they wanted to keep secret from me. He also has no idea what he's doing and badly butchered the site...but the price for his services is perfect (free).
I just wish my brother would have admit to himself that he may die and specifically write out his wishes for the business in his will. I think it would have prevented this entire situation.
I should probably thank him. It showed me that his wife is still the evil, conniving woman that she was many years ago and that she never really changed..she only got better at hiding it before he died.
But there's now these lingering issues at all family gatherings.
I now own two successful companies. I don't think I would have ever gotten to this level of success, even with a partnership in my brother's company and a business partner that would only fight me on every important decision.
I too lost my mother to cancer and was there the morning I noticed hear breathing change and could tell she was about to leave.
It's hard to fathom when someone that raised you suddenly leaves your life. To this day I remember her last moments and my own wailing at both the moment she passed and when I crumpled to my knees as she was buried.
Your daughter is 17 which may give you additional concern. My child was a few years younger but he missed all of that stressful middle-class “get the right classes, right prep and right scores”. It was simply not possible except a bit of going through the motions. But in the end none of that mattered and he ended up in a place where he probably would have been had he gone through those stressful gyrations. So my unsolicited advice is: if you can manage to support her in stepping off the treadmill and dealing with whatever is the highest priorities for her, she’ll probably ultimately be fine.
There are unfortunately no guarantees, but many people do make it to the other side, however horrible the path may be.
A friend of mine lost his wife a few months ago (she had really stepped up to help me). His three kids each reacted completely differently and I am amazed at his ability to accept the needs of each one.
It really is the most difficult part of this process. If there's a silver lining it obliterated any remaining hubris I had over being able to explain the world to them. I do it when I can of course, I'm still dad, but I have also found a way to just be with them in the human experience.
Both of my girls are incredibly strong in their own ways. They are different, though, and are working through the process of recognizing those differences in each other and how it affects their response to grief and the world in general. My one remaining hope in life is that they find a way to strengthen their bond with each other and remain ride or die for the rest of their time on this plane.
You will overcome this. Your child will too. On a long enough timeline even the most profound grief reduces to an instance. Be well my friend.
It sounds like you've been taking a lot of care of others. I don't see anyone else mentioning this in replies, but please make sure you're taking good care of yourself, too. If you haven't in a while and are able to, consider getting a good meal, taking a night off, or just doing something you enjoy doing for a couple days.
Hang in there.
Appreciate the well wishes. I am on a road of trying to take better care of myself as well, hopefully they will see that and be encouraged that the old man is here for the long haul.
often just being there for her is more important than saying anything.
Good luck to you and your family.
She was diagnosed and was dead with in a year. But she experienced symptoms for at least a year before. For about 1.5 years I don't think she really understood much of what we said to her, and of course the last 6 months she was basically a child.
Near the end I told her I loved her and she was a great mom, but I really should have told her that 2 years before. Its one of my biggest regrets.
Don't wait. Say it now.
*I can't take credit. I got it from someone else, but I don't remember who.
But it is _so_ incredibly liberating to meet it with a warm smile and acceptance.
Age is not a punishment, it's a gift, a privilege, to carry the memories we have and to wear our lives on our face like we're able to.
At a certain point living was just a horrible punishment.
Damn gut punch...
It has definitely shifted how I think about life and what matters.
If I live as long as him, I've already passed the midpoint.
Really helps you put things in perspective.
And I realized that even if I read one book a day for the rest of my life, I would only be able to read a fraction of all the books on the shelves. Right there in the same room with me was provably unattainable knowledge. I could decide to read any book, but I could not read all of them. If I decided to read this book, then that other book would remain forever unread. Years before I would be able to put the words on it, I had stumbled upon a kind of incompleteness theorem, and I started to understand how small one's life actually is. This thought never left me.
Maybe the insight is that we forget what's important too frequently, and need a better mechanism to be reminded?
• "Many people grasp and hold on to life, like those caught by a flash flood who grasp at weeds and brambles. Most are tossed about between the fear of death and the torments of life: they do not want to live but do not know how to die. Cast off your solicitude for life, then, and in doing so make life enjoyable for yourself. No good thing benefits us while we have it unless we are mentally prepared for the loss of it." — Seneca
• "Epicurus says 'It is a fine thing to learn death thoroughly.' Perhaps you think it is a waste of time to learn something you will need to use only once. But that is the very reason we ought to rehearse: if we cannot test whether we know it, we should be learning it always." — Seneca riffing on Epicurus (not to be confused with Epictetus, a Stoic; he even has a discourse titled "Against Epicurus")
• "As the water clock does not empty out its last drop only but also whatever dripped through it before, so our last hour of existence is not the only time we die but just the only time we finish dying. Death is not one event; the death that takes us is our last." — Seneca
• "Years are not given out by quota. There's no way to know the point where death lies waiting for you, you must wait for death at every point." — Seneca
• "Let death be before your eyes every day, and you will never have a base thought or an excessive desire." — Marcus Aurelius
• "The torment we feel comes about through our own agency, because we become alarmed when we believe that death is close at hand. But isn't it close to everyone, ready in place and every moment?" — Seneca
• "Think about arranging the present as best as you can, with serene mind. All else is carried away as by a river." — Horace
•••
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
Sorry, no. It is our attachment to things that determine their worth.
That is Buddhism/Daoism in a nutshell.
And fwiw, Schopenhauer knew about Buddhism very well and talks about it in length in his essays on pessimism. What he means by attachment here is in fact, the Buddhist equivalent of craving. What you own can add to your vanity, but it is what you do not have or are longing for(in this case more money) that shows your true inclination, which Schopenhauer describes as worth. It does not mean that money has no worth, it means that the money that you already own has way less worth than what you don't. Aphorisms are pithy for a precise reason ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And I go to the Buddha if I want to know about Buddhism. Schopenhauer did not understand the difference between the Hindu's denial of self and the Buddha's idea of "not self".
You wouldn't call every non-instinctive skill (from reading to playing piano to shooting a basketball) that you learn in life a "utopian enlightened state", would you?
Maybe not but, you probably had to earn it in the first place and that is why you know its value.
I think if you were born rich and never had to worry about money in an existential way, then you would not really know the value of it. Not even from observing the pain of others. I think the only way is to really experience it first hand.
Even if a rich person tried to "simulate" it by not allowing themselves to spend more than x amount of money for say a month or something it still would not be the same. At all. Because no matter how bad that month would be, they still know all along that it's not a real threat and that the money is right there waiting for them.
But if you had to go through a lot of real pain, then you know the real value of money. I wonder, however, if with time we would forget still. I dunno, I have never been wealthy yet.
The more pain and suffering I have the more I realize money is not important at all and that money might be the cause of most of the pain and suffering in the world.
(Is that not a religious soul left on the internet?)
Money is important if you want a roof over your head, your children to have uniform for school and food on the table. If you want to be able to spend time with them rather than working 3 jobs to pay your rent, or put fuel in the car you drive to work, lest you have to catch the bus and spend even less time with them.
If you're fortunate enough to live where you don't need money for these things, I'm happy for you, if you're not turn you either have more money than these people do, or you're otherwise looked after.
If you do not understand it is just you who does not understand. Misinterpretation? No, just a deeper understanding.
Sorry I interrupted the death porn. I will go now.
Yes, we all see you. You've gotten the attention you so clearly desire.
From one perspective your money can sit idle in a brokerage account, from another it is put to use by someone else.
You could take out capital gains and dividends, and spend them, leaving your starting balance the same. That starting balance could continue making you money.
In other words there are ways to imagine money never spent, sitting in an account, that isn't worthless.
I mean as the only earning member of my family the scariest post part about dying is what will happen to family.
I don't have a big life insurance and not a lot of savings. So it gives me chills that my wife and daughter will have to fend for themselves or live a lesser life should I cease to exist suddenly one day.
but then i thought: every moment in your life can be valued according to how much life you have ahead of it. the present moment is the most valuable; and the very last moment, the least -- you have nothing ahead of it. i thought: if you live your life such that the last moment, which is the least valuable in that sense, is as good as possible -- perhaps that would improve the totality of the rest of your life.
this has all been covered by the buddhist concepts on this thread but i thought it was interesting that we can come to this same idea somewhat independently. (maybe rawls was inspired by buddhism? i don't know.)
I eventually settled on "live every day as if it's your first." More of "new mind" mentality. I needed something that emphasized awe, joy, wonder, discovery. Vs the addict's group therapy cliche "today is the first day of the rest of your life."
FWIW, my first brush with death was 34 years ago. Having done the bereavement cycle a few too many times kinda moots the exercise. Needs to be done. But it's just a stepping stone.
It isn't like they are bad people, but there are other things I will inevitably end up gravitating to instead.
But it isn't like I'm alone because I have other things to occupy my time. There are times that I did wish I had other friendships but I end up putting those feelings aside when I start working on something. For better or worse I am lucky to be able to say this. Some artists say they can only survive and keep working by being able to be alone for extended periods of time.
When I don't get too attached to anyone the pain of losing them doesn't really come. And the people I do care about I've actually made miserable and angry by the number of times I've brought up that I am going to die someday and that I'm trying to live in the moment with them and acknowledge the transience of being alive with them. At some point continuing to acknowledge the fact that being alive and having known them is a miracle in front of them is counterproductive, and in the end it probably doesn't make dying any less painful.
After doing all that I don't understand what else I can possibly do but continue being alive.
However, it's just an inspiration and it must be proven in its newly applied field - proof in context of category theory is not valid in the context of inter-personal relations.
Perhaps that serves to illustrate why it is rude. If that doesn't help, then just remember that it is. Good manners don't always need to make sense to you, sometimes they only make sense to other people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Scott_Peck#The_Road_Less_Tr...
As a Buddhist we do “contemplation of death” meditation on a regular basis. It involves imagining our last few hours on our deathbed. It is a wonderful exercise to help put things in context. It makes you behave differently towards people you meet, even strangers.
Also helpful is the mediation on the 32 parts of the body to help you loosen your attachment.
https://www.imsb.org/contemplating-the-32-parts-of-the-body/
True. In other words you shouldn't do the 32 body parts contemplation if you are not yet ready to drop attachment to life enjoyments.
You don’t need to identify as a Buddhist to come to the conclusion that you are not your body.
The pattern of my mind is physically instantiated (as all the ten thousand things are), and it happens to be so instantiated on a brain. That brain is housed in a body. The pattern can direct the shape and properties of the body only to a limited extent: there are heavy restrictions which happen to constrain the power that pattern (or rather, its particular instantiation on this particular brain) has over the body. (We call these restrictions "biology".) I could no more order my body to become immortal than I could order the ocean waves to stand still: they are both governed by the same laws of physics over which I have almost no control. I could probably make my body immortal by some sufficiently clever manipulation of the world (possibly involving waves hands wildly nanobots), but the brain did not come pre-packaged with high-fidelity fine-grained control over its environment; the pattern can interact with the world only by flapping around bits of meat, and these are a very blunt instrument, highly unsuitable for difficult tasks like "reverse entropy in this region of space".
Personally, in my meditation practice, it was completely transformed and deepened when I began a dedicated asana practice and focused on giving my body what it needs to be strong and in touch with what it is saying.
I think Americans hide from death too much. We try to put boxes around it. I say this as one. I envy cultures where they're more open and public about it. I'l say that New Orleans does something right. They have parade parties when a loved one dies.
It makes me incredibly sad, and, at the same time it helps me to make better decisions in life. Choosing spending time with him instead of surfing the web for no reason for example.
I find contemplating the absence of others to be much more powerful than my own return back to the void.
Not trying to be a jackass. I think this short, sweet, spiritual song about the material world and after is poignant. All the more bittersweet considering the untimely death of the singer.
If I wrote a book with ghosts, zombies or other undead I would give the antagonists this as their reasons for hating the living.
Anyway that point about vulnerability is spot on. When I hug my SO I often reflexively blurt something among the lines of "softness is important", but what I really mean by that is vulnerability is important - this is something I had to learn from her and it's what helped me improve myself as a person.
But that's not easy. It seems to take years of thinking about death almost daily and thinking about space and time[0] and history and stuff. And maybe psychedelics, although I never tried those yet.
"Its better to be grateful than to be regretful."
Rate that stuff on Yelp so other people don't have to have regret.
What did your face look like before you were born?
"Not giving your family closure" is something you just have to discuss with your own family. I, for one, would treat cryopreservation as effectively death with a rather unusual body-disposal mechanism, for the purposes of grieving etc; there's certainly almost no chance I'll see a cryopreserved person again before my own first death. For a family made up of people like me, that particular argument holds no water at all.
Which just adds another gamble. What are the chances of the economy having enough consistent growth that those investments last longer than it takes to revive you?
Even if we actually do find a way to restore frozen near-death people to life, you'd better write a heck of a pitch as to why future humans should spend resources on reviving and healing you.
Never mind all the resources being spent on keeping you properly frozen all that time.
That's all assuming the company running your freezer doesn't just go belly-up after ninety years, leaving you to thaw and rot after all that expense was dumped into keeping your now-corpse uselessly preserved for decades.
Cryonics actually plays the role so many atheists believe religion plays for the religious - comfort in the face of The End that is inevitably coming to you.
It is false hope, a tool to help you deceive yourself into thinking you can defeat death.
Let's say someone is successfully revived, there's still heart attacks, cancer, crime (and not just "lowly" criminals, crime also happens within families for inheritance, for example), accidents (car, or just slipping in the shower), earthquakes, ... The list is pretty much endless.
Death is unavoidable, IMHO it's best to learn to cope with it, and focus efforts on reducing what most people would consider the worst deaths (infants, long and painful diseases, wars and torture, etc).
That said, as long as not many people try this (the environmental cost would be high), if many people think about this possibility and that helps them cope with their mortality, and that of their loved ones, good for them.
If you want to be safe, set up a trust that pays to you preferably and if not then to any descendants you have. That’s unlikely to work if you’re somehow revived in several hundred years, but it’s better than hopping random people will hand you money voluntarily.
If you meant this one, it should be obvious that it's not exclusively about coders. Even if it was, your argument is quite weak if you don't qualify the non zero part a bit more. Zero chance of living how much longer than you would have otherwise? under what conditions? At what cost?
Specifically, since you brought this up in the context of someone who will die of cancer, the tradeoff calculation must take into account that even if cryonics work (which is already a giant leap of faith right now), this person would also need science to advance enough so that a cancer that is terminal now will be somehow reversible in the future. Additionally, all the people he cares about would have to have survived too for this to matter. Again, this is all context, this is within the context of a dying person that says "Almost immediately I realised I just couldn’t do it. Life for me is about living, not just clocking up the years.". I don't think all of these extra constraints would be seen as noise by someone like him.
Edited to add: it’s hard to imagine a civilisation with the technology to successfully re-animate a corpse, but that is unable to treat heart disease & cancer. Not impossible I suppose, but seems highly implausible.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The trouble with what you did post is that it landed with readers as generic religious flamewar whether you meant it that way or not. I realize it's not always possible to predict how things will land, but the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate intent. Here are some previous explanations on this theme if interested:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Also, what happens if you are revived?
Where are you going to live? Your home was probably sold a long time ago, or you must share it with all the intermediate revived generations. What about money?
Where are you going to work? Imagine the frozen time was only 100 year. It is difficult to predict what will happen in 100 years, but it is easier to look at the past. Medical doctors didn't have penicillin and Electrical Engineers didn't have transistors. You must take most of your university courses again and perhaps part of your high school classes too.
You're saying life is not worth living if you're not at least middle class with no big struggles?
If you have some spare money to pay a refrigerator for 100 years, you are probably spoiled and want nice living conditions afterwards.
Anyway, imagine you live outside a city and have only a small plot of land for subsistence. After the 100 years you don't have even the small plot of land and don't have the small herd that you inherit from your parents. How/where are you going to live? Farming has changed in the last 100 years. Artificial nitrogen fertilizers have slightly more than 100 years, now there are genetically modified crops, the preferred crops have changed. (Do you know how to harvest soy?) The cattle management has also changed, antibiotics, vitamins supplements, the number of free range herds is decreasing,...
* You can invest X money for a Y% chance that you will be revived in the future.
* You can invest X money for a Z% chance that your children will survive in %W case of a problem. Like a better surgeon in a heart operation or cancer treatment, or more food stored before a famine, or a home that is not in a floodable area, or more education to get an points to get a visa to another country, some swimming classes to be more healthy, more airbags in the car in case of a collision, ...
Money can buy survival rate when it is correctly invested, the question is which one is the the one that gets more bang for the buck.
PS: Just in case you are wondering, I didn't downvote you.
I mean if we're talking about saving the life of people who are not yourself. But that would be a huge change in topic.
You'd want nice living conditions no matter what you're used to. I really don't understand your point.
Is it "nah, if I can't have netflix I'd rather just die"?
People are very adaptable. What happened more than three months ago doesn't seem to affect your happiness.
So absolute worst case you are thawed out (because you paid for it), but are now completely broke and unemployable, there is zero social safety net or UBI, and no chance for you to even steal food. You are 100% certain to starve to death. So kill yourself then? At least your got a brief glimse of how it all turned out.
I'd rather be alive and work for food in a circus as "the millennial man" than die and do nothing.
Sure, basically-everywhere-but-the-US has socialized medicine, but still everywhere if Jeff Bezos got sick he could go "I'll buy this hospital end every doctor in it. Do your best to cure me".
Freezing isn't magic. Just think of it as a better CPR. You wouldn't say this woman got "afterlife", even though apparently her blood wasn't pumping for 40 minutes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_B%C3%A5genholm
Also this: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/26/science/the-doctor-s-worl...
To an atheist, uncertainty is the source of all hope.
Isn't that somewhat backward? To an atheist, the certainty that they won't be going to an afterlife seems to be a source of hope, and for the religious person, the idea that they might is the same.
When you think that your consciousness is special, irreplaceable and irreproducible, death becomes a lot more frightening.
On the other hand, if you believe, based on empirical evidence, that your consciousness can be manufactured out of a piece of meat with some chemicals and electricity as the result of a totally random natural process (evolution), that gives a lot of hope.
Small nit but my so far amateur understanding of philosophy of mind indicates to me that there isn't empirical evidence connecting Mind to neurochemistry so clearly. Neither, of course, is there any evidence of the reverse, that a non physical Mind can magically influence the physical world through the brain interface.
As an atheist, delving into the materialism vs dualism philosophical debate was fascinating. I was always a stout materialist but learning it hadn't managed to fend off every philosophical thrust was difficult but enlightening.
It may not be scientific to propose that souls exist independent of matter (it seems a hard hypothesis to confirm or deny experimentally), but an idea does not need to be experimentally testable to be possible.
So far this hasn't happened. If it had, it would be breaking news, because consciousness would be "solved."
Correct.
> If this is the case, and you believe that every human is conscious
At the very least, I know I am conscious, but let's continue.
> then clearly the 'soul' must be derived from these physical materials
Too far a stretch.
Mind / Thought / Consciousness is a unique problem. It is the unique problem, one that was carefully separated out at the beginning of the age of enlightenment when scientists carefully defined "qualitative" from "quantitative." Before that, heat was the feeling of heat and nothing else. Now, we can describe the "quantitative" properties of heat, that is, how certain temperatures cause certain materials to react, how biological entities react to heat, etc. That isn't the same thing as saying what it is to experience heat. Even though we can put someone in an MRI and touch a hot poker to their arm and watch the entire neurobiological system react and cause the arm to jolt, we still can't quantify the "experience of feeling heat." It's entirely separate, in fact it's separate in our language and scientific systems by design, because the "experience of feeling heat" is qualitative, it is immeasurable.
This is the split between materialism and dualism. Dualists believe the qualitative and quantitative will never shown to be the same thing, that even if quantitative can affect qualitative (heat causes certain thoughts), and qualitative can affect quantitative (thoughts can manifest real-world actions and consequences), they are fundamentally separate, "made of different stuff" (if consciousness is made of anything at all).
The materialist instinct is strong. As an atheist, I feel it too. Dualism implies magic, doesn't it? And magic isn't real. Perhaps, but not necessarily. Quantum physics can at times feel magic, too.
The long and short of it is you can't assume materialism is correct until the problem is more solved. Despite all these technological advancements in brain imaging technology, the fundamental problem of what is Thought remains. Acknowledging this isn't the same thing as acknowledging the validity of religion, or the possibility of the existence of souls - for example, panpsychism is a dualist hypothesis that states that the core nature of all things is consciousness, and that the more complicated things get, the more "conscious" they get. Considering the human brain is the most complicated thing we're aware of, that is a fairly straightforward and, in my opinion, believable concept. Far more believable than the existence of ghosts.
You can predict the future?
One or two of them, maybe. Probably the most famous ones.
All of them, including ordinary people like you or I? Not a chance.
The historical gaps concern the other 90% of the population.
Imagine never being able to die. Only suffer.
No mouth, must scream vibes.
Who knows what the future holds.
But in the remote chance this is what the future holds, the AI may not even need your body. It might be able to simulate you up to the moment of your death. Or find some quirk of physics and pull you forward in time. To suffer forever.
Or maybe it's benevolent and lets us live in an eternity of bliss?
Maybe it gets bored and does this for all humans that ever lived. There might be some arbitrary criteria or some random number generator it uses to decide your fate.
I find all of this much more compelling than religion's perspective of the afterlife.
Take that, Basilisk. My machination is worse (or better).
But if we're going to give unfathomable power to such an AI, it's not much more of a leap to give it the ability to resurrect people from the past and subject them to whatever it desires.
Taking it even one step further and comparing it to the Simulation Hypothesis [1], perhaps we're already there. The machine might be making us live our lives again only at some point to surprise us with some unthinkable horror or delight.
If such a machine arises and is capable of these feats, then we might currently be living in re-simulations of our past lives that have already ended.
I've sometimes fancied that the discovery of immortality might be good for the environment, it changes the incentives for the biggest abusers. With that said, I'm not entirely confident of that in practice.
Cryonics requires the maintenance of a temperature far colder than any household freezer.
> What scale are you envisioning when you say "mass"?
I just mean that it might hardly seem acceptable to freeze more terminally ill people than just a few ultra-wealthy eccentrics.
I do agree though that we aren't ready for such a system yet, both legally (currently a frozen person counts as dead, leading to their assets being taken away) and ecologically (carrying capacity limits of our planet). One day we might, who knows.
Would you have a planned death at 75 to potentially get resurrected in 200 years? I say yes. I like how it creates death planning. Just better hope the interest keeps compounding!
Actually this would be a cool short story about someone who has to constantly go through this process, each time working deeper and deeper in the future only to be frozen again.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzvRx_johoA8ITQgxBpeJ...