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Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

Live life for its own sake. The gift of life is life itself. What's the alternative?

Twice in my life I've grasped the concept of death, and it made my heart race with an exhilarating feeling of suffocating claustrophobic for two reasons:

1. It's coming for me one day

2. Not just the lack of agency in the universe, but the lack of even the realisation of the lack of agency. All of this (wide sweeping hand gesture acknowledging "everything") is not just out of my hands but out of my awareness. Because I no longer exist. I no longer exist.

Life is preferable to the alternative because it's at least something. A chance to experience.

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In buddhism there is the four noble truths, a teaching about living life and facing death.

In short, what many people afraid in death (or in life generally) is the fear of losing, either losing their possession, losing their loved ones or how those loved ones will feel when losing you, losing your ability to do your job, etc.

In the teaching, if someone is able to overcome that fear (suffering / dissatisfaction), he / she can accept death as a cycle of living and live more relaxed life.

In a more general sense, these are all various attachments people and society drives people to have. This isn’t to say that indifference to our world is the path that makes sense - this would be a fast way toward suicide. Rather, a life of intent and choosing our attachments with wisdom and understanding finds a good balance between being enslaved by our attachments and a belief that living is itself an attachment.

Doesn't Buddhism say you can never day and you'll re-emerge in somebody else's body?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebirth_(Buddhism)

The purpose of enlightenment is to eventually not re-emerge.

Exactly. They say the Buddha was a very pragmatic man and the whole purpose of his practice was to find a way out of Samsara, the cycle of existence and suffering.

I always wonder if he would have advocated for suicide if only he didn't believe in rebirth.

It always struck me as very weird that Buddhists want to escape suffering. That's just saying you want to escape life. Suffering is beautiful and one of the best parts of life (the only thing better is momentarily overcoming it). But having neither is just sitting around waiting to die.

Well, it depends on what you mean by suffering (and some say suffering isn't the right translation for what they really mean). For buddhists, pain, sadness and grief are not suffering, they are indeed an inescapable part of life and are to be fully embraced with awareness and compassion. Suffering is an unnecessary, clingy, ego-centric (hyphenated to emphasize the buddhist concept) reaction to them.

Doesn't that also imply that life is a sort of punishment? Once you get the lesson, you are no longer forced to play the game?

I'm not a good Buddhist, so this is what AFAIK. Chance to be reincarnated as human is low, it's rare so we are lucky to be born as one. As human we have a chance to gather good karma and attain enlightenment, thus ending the cycle.

I think rather than punishment, it's more like a lesson. And dukkha is often mistranslated as "suffering", but in reality it's closer to dissatisfaction or unhappiness (sadness) rather than suffering.

I disagree that it must be seen as a punishment; once you've attained your degree you no longer need to go to school, but going to school probably wasn't a punishment in the first place.

I guess it depends on your personal outlook.

c.f. notions of transcending for other possible interpretations.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Reminds me of an experience where, my brain fully convinced itself for around 4 hours (felt much longer ofc) that I was an outdated Azure "SmartCodeCreator"[1] instance being deallocated for upgrades... it's a strange experience to embrace death. I haven't been the same since.

[1] I had no name for it at the time, but that's the gist of it

Beautiful

This is bitterly true but also profoundly, maddeningly, horrifically sad.

Death is monstrous. We can do better. We have to do better. And it's tragic that we probably will but everyone alive today will probably miss that chance by a sliver. We happened to be born 99% of the way from the beginning of humankind to the end of death, but we just barely missed it.

How did you come alive. Did it really happen, and how come it never will happen?

One of the things that has helped me get into and maintain the state of 'grasping the concept of death' is the idea of the universe existing (for billions of years) prior to my awakening to conscious existence, and returning to that state of dis-being; non-existing.

I also figure: you have only known existence. You will never know non-existence. You can sleep deeply for hours and it feels like a mere moment. For all you know, there is only existence. This is my backdoor way of getting to reincarnation.

Infinite time and universes might pass, but if you were ever conscious, why would it be impossible? Thinking people lack proper logic and perspective, but it's not even about belief systems, or even identity.

We may be close to being able to extend human life. Ending death entirely seems a bit less plausible; even a person who doesn't age can still die by accident, and I'm not sure how the probability of any person experiencing such a random accident can ever drop to zero.

My optimistic view is to look at self-awareness as a very surprising thing that doesn't make any sense. As far as we know from biology, I should be basically a biological robot that can use its brain to solve problems but without any real sensation, just reaction to stimuli. If self-awareness isn't an emergent property of complex biological machinery, maybe it isn't entirely dependent on it either. I can't imagine how self-awareness would work without a body or a brain to connect to it as an interface, but perhaps there's more to souls than is apparent and maybe those do last forever in some form.

This notion that we could be the last generation to not beat death, was the subject of a Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch that I find quite funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt6nwvGJiN8

I think death is at the heart of what makes life worth it and enjoyable. Imagine, at the extreme, we find a cure for death. What happens then? Overpopulation at the simplest. I can see how this can quickly lead to life being worse than death if played out to the extreme.

I believe that the cure for death would not be distributed evenly at first, and by the time everyone has access to it, there are two options:

1.- We haven't solved the problems caused by overpopulation, and in that case standards of living will drop and people will either have less children or choose to end their lives voluntarily.

2.- We have solved them and there is no longer any issue.

What about 3) standard of living will drop and people will have their lives ended involuntarily (ie war)?

We can't even imagine the new ethics and rituals of a human world where immortality was on offer, but it's hard to imagine something as boring as overpopulation snuffing them out.

It's kinda like who could've predicted that we'd be arguing about gender/queer theory when the first nukes fell on us.

Why do you think that an end to death is close but not close enough for the average aged HN reader

“Close” in a relative sense. They implied we’ll have the cure for death in the next 2000 years or so, with the 99% and humans having existed for roughly 200K years. Sounds plausible to me.

Lifespans many be dramatically extended, but it’s going to take a monumental change in our understanding of physics to actually end death. Second law of thermodynamics directly means the universe will eventually be completely devoid of life.

Billions of additional years is quite some time to find a solution though.

You can’t find a solution to the actual laws of physics. Our understanding may be wrong, but that’s different.

Unfortunately what humanity always found out is that physics always progress. That means that we are always at mercy of uknown physics laws or put it simply: Till now humanity had a lot of luck and everyone luck at some point ends.

There's a big difference between dying because the negentropy finally ran out, after billions of years in the height of life's power in thr universe, and being snuffed out by something as banal as biological malfunction after the blink of an eye.

If nothing else, if I got bored after x number of centuries, I'd want any useful/meaningful memories of mine to be indexed and saved on hyper-wikipedia rather than just be burned because a piece of meat rotted.

Ending death would require us to be perfect beings. We are not. Death is part of the solution to the problem of evolutionary adaptability. We are born, we mate, we die, the cycle continues with our children. If circumstances change, our genes can too but we cannot. As much as we want to stick around forever, I don't think our biology does...

Why should we care what our genes want?

Also, as tech advances, the need for slow recombination goes away, as people can alter their genes and body on the fly. Supersede natural evolution, rather than bowing to it.

> Death is monstrous.

The one thing that softens the blow for me is knowing how many other people have been through it. It's an absolutely illogical attempt at rationalisation, but, you know, Einstein died, Beethoven died, my childhood cat died. Everything that has once ever lived but is not living right at this moment in time, has died. Death just IS.

My stupid quip is: "Well, they survived it, so I guess I will too".

Just a year ago, my cat stopped eating/drinking and just perched stoically on her favorite chair outside waiting for time to pass and do her in. She would purr if you pet her, but that's where she wanted to be. After a biopsy, I found out she had advanced tumors in her stomach and I soon put her down.

Sometimes I think about how my cat accepted and stared down death.

Sorry about your loss, but that is very much like cats ! Bad-ass and sweet till the end :)

My reasoning is something like: I didn't really mind not existing for 14 billion years, why should I worry about not existing after I die.

>>Death is monstrous.

I'll be a contrarian and post this:

>>No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life<<

Steve Jobs

Also put much longer in the form of the Tolkien books. Elves have non-bound lives but Men got the gift of a bounded lifespan by the creater. The Elves think that is a strange gift, but some come to realise just that, we have a chance to live not someone elses, but our own lives, made precious by its scarcity.

>>It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Just imagine working for a boss who had been climbing the company ladder 200 years. Or trying to buy a house in a market where people had been accumulating capital for centuries. And lest we think it's just the the economic system, look at the average age of politicians. Or science, the researchers who hold the most prestige are likely past the point of embracing new ideas. Any advantage which can be accumulated over time would be held almost exclusively by the oldest, and the world would stagnate.

Death is the natural law which requires every generation to pass the torch. Without it, there'd be no life for the young.

Same thing can be said for money, that money spent moving from the baker to the record store operator in days, is people money.

Money sitting in vault is rotting food and weekends not going to a rock show.

Inflation is a way to decay the power of money and make way for the new.

I love ice cream. But if I had to eat a billion gallons of it, it would lose its appeal. Life is like that too: if we had it in infinite supply, it wouldn't have much value.

If I could extend my life by 50 years of good health I might take that offer. If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline. If I had to extend it 5000 years I'd certainly say no. 5M years of existence would be torture.

When people express the desire to live forever, either here on earth or in an imagined afterlife, I wonder if they have really thought through the consequences.

You say you’d decline 5m years of life. But have you been in love? How would your answer change if he/she was ready to live 5m years with you?

given the option of spending 5m years with another human I'd pass. A lot of other variables would need to change (ability to retain long term memories, fertility, time it takes to raise a child, how we raise our kids if at all ...) But even changing one of these variables would change things in ways we can't fully imagine (complex system so there would be lot of emergence/chaos)

While the first years of such a "long term relationship" are probably great, (I am high on my hormones imagining that I potentially will spend some millions of years with my partner) they might also be a nightmare for the same reasons.

The more successful relationship I had were all about managing each others long-term expectations, and not risk breaking promises. How would I do this over that horizon idk (more importantly I trust potential partners even less to know)

What would reality look like if we only lived twice as long and were able to retain memories along the way. Holocaust survivors, Spanish flu survivors are dead now and I wonder what they could teach us about 2020. I wonder how such a Malthusean society would feel about Tech, the environment, urbanization, wars, politics, ... Our inability to live long enough and remember things keeps coming back to bite us in the ass I think so doubling our life expectancy would be cool but 5m years is an unthinkable dystopian horror show.

Considering most people are unable to have a great relationship with themselves. Many consider their love / partner a person that "completes" them. In other words they don't love themselves enough to think they need another person that makes them whole. That's a lot of pressure in 40 years but 5m it would be hell. But maybe this would solve the actual problem and it would force people to love themselves first? 5m years isn't just a lot of time to make it a nightmare but also to get many things right we currently don't. I'm not convinced we can accurately imagine/paint this picture tho.

No offense, but long term relationships are a fuck-load of work. You don’t just stay in love with someone indefinitely. People change significantly over 10 years, let alone 100 or 1000.

Being stuck with one person for 5m years is worse than living for 5m years without a guarantee of being with someone the whole time.

Half of marriages end in divorce and only a subset of people who are “in love” get married. HARD PASS

Yes, multiple times. I'm 25 years married and we still have a great relationship. You have a very romantic notion of love if you think it could last even 5000 years.

I'am always intrigue by these "range problems / statements" I guess there are no great insight other than most timelines(ranges) are subjective.

My S.O is always complaining that we are spending too little time together( I really don't think so).

I asked her once, so if we had to spend 23.5 hours together that will be obviously too much, and spending 0.1 hour together will be too little (we could both agree on the extremes), yet somewhere between those extremes are a number we both are comfortable with and feel is correct. It's just not the same number.

On the face of it, it sounds like you have a great bargaining chip here. For the extra hours you think are "too much", come up with an activity which involves you both, but you immensely enjoy. You might both grow!

Good tip :)

In my experience, it's almost never actually about how much time but how you spend that time. TV doesn't count, doing dishes doesn't count... Walks, talking, mutual hobbies do.

> If I could extend my life by 50 years of good health I might take that offer. If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline. If I had to extend it 5000 years I'd certainly say no. 5M years of existence would be torture.

is this a thing you worry might happen? like, if life extension is developed, you're concerned it will come in the form of a 5 million year increment, take it or leave it, no possibility of suicide in the middle?

> When people express the desire to live forever, either here on earth or in an imagined afterlife, I wonder if they have really thought through the consequences.

i wonder why you interpret the desire to live forever as some enforced, not only eternal, but literally unendable existence.

i expect we'll manage to simply end aging first. that won't prevent you from walking out into rural alaska in your underwear.

The Christian idea of an afterlife that I was raised with and apparently most people in the US follow is an eternal afterlife and there is no opting out of it once you get there.

As for the hypothetical, no, I don't worry about for a microsecond because it won't become reality anytime soon.

> I love ice cream. But if I had to eat a billion gallons of it, it would lose its appeal.

How do you know? Besides, if you had to eat a billion gallons of it, but over a billion years, I'm pretty sure it would've not lost its appeal at all. It's not "too much" but "too frequent" that takes the joy away.

To counter your example: I watch more TV series than I probably should. What I've learned is that while there's no fun in rewatching the same show just after you finished your first run, rewatching after ~5 years feels almost as if you were watching it for the first time.

I think life is the same. Brains are physical objects with limited capacity for memories and experiences. A million years of life won't be a million years of memories. But it will be a million years' worth of refining your person.

> if we had it in infinite supply, it wouldn't have much value.

Maybe "economic value" under capitalism. But emotional value to the person living.

> I wonder if they have really thought through the consequences.

I know I did. I fail to see a problem with everyone extending their lives indefinitely, past the initial hurdle of rebuilding our economic system to not structurally depend on people dying on schedule, and actually getting space exploration started.

And remember, if you get bored living forever, you could always check out. Right now, we don't even have an option to live long enough to get bored.

> Besides, if you had to eat a billion gallons of it, but over a billion years

That is changing the analogy. The billion years of life would be experienced every waking minute of every day.

Why? You won't be experiencing a billion years a minute, you'll be experiencing a minute a minute.

Here is the difference. If I eat one gallon of ice cream per year, that is 0.1% of my life eating ice cream, whereas I spend 67% of my time experience my life (assuming 8 hrs sleep per day).

> If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline.

500 years sounds like just enough time to become an expert in dozen interesting things.

> We happened to be born 99% of the way from the beginning of humankind to the end of death, but we just barely missed it.

Ekhm, citation needed?

Perhaps, something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

It's just someone's prediction. Could be true, could be false. Maybe the singularity will happen in 10 years, maybe in 10000 years, or maybe it's actually impossible for us humans to accomplish.

Even if technology allows the extension of life, death is still inevitable for us all.

There is no future in which we will overcome death because we can’t overcome the second law of thermodynamics.

That’s a hell of a thing to know and so many people either ignore it or are crushed by it.

Whole religions are based around dealing with it.

My only advice is don’t live in a dream that technology will save us. Do everything now while you can. Pass on what you can while you can.

While the second law of thermodynamics might be a problem, I think that it would be a rather low priority. Perhaps we can stop or reverse cell aging but then might face a wave of suicides because people don't want to live with their worsening arthritis anymore.

We should strive for finding eternal life perhaps, but certainly shouldn't expect it. Few want to die, but even fewer want to die in disappointment.

I have never been overly afraid of death but after deep diving into meditation, math and philosophy, i have come to the conclusion that a form of "idealism" or consciousness-first is much more likely than a materialist universe. This makes a lot of "scientism"(not scientists) people very angry , but personally my best guess is that "spacetime" will be seen as an evolutionary adaptation, or much more of a morphable cultural construct that is no more real than any other human narrative received through narrow sensegates and molded by fitness filters.

This is not an escapism from death, because that prospect can be as absurd or as frightening as death itself. But i am personally leaning more to the side of "the seer keeps seeing" at the moment.

The dennet'esque "lets just explain consciousness away", western perspective and ultra reductionism has always seemed extremely silly and banal to me - there simply can be no dualism, and the arrogance and narrow mindedness is a huge blindspot. They got everything upside down, - great and useful in one context but useless in another.

My own journey started with a deep dive into mediation, then Dzogzhen meditation, lucid dreaming exploration (Dream Yoga), the realization that you can be aware even in deep sleep "like in death", very absurd, then i became intrigued at Gödels theorems (via Godel, Escher, Bach ), and lately i have found scientists like Donald D. Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup much more sane than many of their contemporaries.

That Hoffman associates (as in disagrees very much but have debated) with charlatans like Chopra is a bit annoying but looking back i think the western divide between "spirit" and science is fundamentally wrong, most, and i really mean all most all the the biggest thinkers we canonize today were into the weird and ungraspable, it has just been scrubbed from the reductionist retrospective. Also Hoffman really is doing all of the math if you go look at it and ignore the pop cultural shredding machine and even though his radical ideas might be gimmicks as Julian Janes or Hofstadter i think they point to a coming revolution where everything is going to get extremely "weird" in both math and physics.

Real insight exists in the liminal, i think.

Everything is more cyclical, warpable, field like, emergent, tantra-timelike, archetypal, perspective dependent, interpolated constantly and upside down in any paradigmatic sense.

Great insight. Thanks for posting your thoughts.

Great points, thanks.

Counterpoint: Hayflick limit [1]. Of course, the humble lobster, jellyfish and hydra [2] (along with other animals) don't seem to undergo senescence but IMO the jury is still out on whether hominids are biologically amenable to such feats of genetic engineering.

The other question besides whether such a thing is possible is whether it is desirable. Depending on one's viewpoint, one could look at immortal humans as a cosmic cancer. At least the cycle of death and birth limits the harm a bad actor can do. What would you do if your least favorite fascist were also immortal and invulnerable? And I do mean that somewhat rhetorically. It's a messy ethical subject to think about, personally. I kinda prefer life and death.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality#Organis...

Yikes! What if you die, but the fascist lives forever? That seems like the worst of both worlds.

Why does it matter if everyone else is immortal and invulnerable?

Great question. IMO, it's because it doesn't prevent the counterparty from torturing everyone else in perpetuity. The world risks turning into a Dantean inferno.

Are you talking about the counterparty taking 'physical' people hostage and torturing them? Because that sort of runs counter to 'everyone is invulnerable and immortal'.

Or about them running sentient hell-simulations for fun because they're a sadist? In which case, yes, that is a concern. If you knew it was going on, you could presumably try countermeasures (up to and including threatening to run simulations that decrease the sadist's utility function, if you know it). Otherwise, maybe engage in trades with other people where you refuse to cooperate with someone unless you both audit each other's hardware?

Death is relief from observing the continual descent into madness for the human race. Ever wonder why smart but unacclaimed elders are so bitter? We've spent our lives watching the stupid evil win over the smart evil, and the good never having a chance. I'll be glad when I'm dead, if I could be glad. To not watch the human race destroy itself is all the heaven I expect.

Why are you sticking around, then?

I help others.

Trump/Putin/Jong Un/... forever? Really? I think that would be monstrous.

No matter how unfair things are in life, in the end we are all food for the worms. Already better educated people live longer lives, but once science really 'cures' aging, who do you think will be the first to benefit. And probably the only ones as well?

Why the only ones? That hasn't been the general arc of tech-advancement. You think the rich and powerful are going to prevent companies from making money by selling life-extension to the poor by figuring out how to do it more cheaply?

There's always cryo.

I like this quote by a Greek philosopher Epicurus “Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not."

Besides, we all already have died in one way or another. I'm 24 year old, is my 15 year old self still alive, is my 5 year old self still alive? Nope. Even if I make it to my 40s, I will become a different person by then - the person that is me will die in some form.

Now imagine if you lived 500 - 1000 years. There are few this could go:

1.You will be fairly active your entire life, thus experience many of these "personality deaths" - so what difference does it make if you finally die for real

2.You will grow old mentally and stagnate. Chances are you will want to die anyway because you can't take it anymore.

3.You will achieve some degree of "enlightment" - and the forementioned quote will probably make even more sense than we can intellectually imagine

Oddly, I don't see death as something coming for me. Rather, I am heading towards it. No different than heading towards next month, in many ways. Just a time and an event that hasn't happened, yet. From today's point of view.

> Life is preferable to the alternative

Because you are alive.

If you didn't exist you wouldn't have preferences.

> If you didn't exist you wouldn't have preferences.

So if my living self prefers to live and my dead self has no preference, on average I prefer living over dying

Dying is not the opposite of living, it's its consequence and requirement (so far). If you prefer living, you also prefer dying.

It's also the inverse to being born.

Its opposite would be not living (and not being born, and not dying).

I'd say it's more that death is a price people would be willing to pay in return for getting to live for some number of years in the absence of any better options (like not dying).

Where is there to go from non-existence but back into Life?

How about just going to more non-existence?

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