Taking a minute or so out of every day to meditate upon the inevitablity of your own death is good for one's mental health - and can be motivating. If there's something you want to do, do it now - tomorrow is not guaranteed!
Taking a minute or so out of every day to meditate upon the inevitablity of your own death is good for one's mental health - and can be motivating. If there's something you want to do, do it now - tomorrow is not guaranteed!
It's also kind of misleading because they're not complaining but dying is actually pretty awful unless you're really, really lucky.
Doesn't it seem to be that death and life are mind-made abstractions of an unfathomable process of eternal continuity and change?
In our minds it's all very binary because of evolution, and we conflate our evolved perception with true reality.
If we peel back those layers then what is remaining?
A really miserable process of being sick.
The gambler fallacy talks about a gambler who has won and believes that the cause that made him win is long lasting. But a living man is right to believe that he is alive due to forces that have a lot of momentum and won't vanish suddenly. The fallacy would be assuming that the man is exempt from accidents, that are unpredictable.
That aside, you can tolerate or even enjoy life while understanding that for many it's an absolutely awful experience they had no say in partaking in.
Monoclonal antigen-free body farms. Grow human bodies in labs -- farmed donor bodies -- and get good at head transplants.
This cures most cancers, most diseases, skipping the complicated molecular biology we've yet to solve for.
Literally replace your whole body as it ages. You can renew the thymus (big!), circulatory, pulmonary system, etc. It would have a rejuvenating affect on the brain. You'd probably give humans 150-year lifespans with it. Be able to run marathons in your 70's.
We'd suck at head transplants for decades (reducing patient outcomes in the initial period), but over time could probably get quite good at it. Initial patient populations could be recruited from terminal cancer patients, where the cancers have not spread to the blood or brain tissues. Survival rates would be low, and a lifetime of paralysis would likely be the penalty for the first decade or so of patients. But in time, we'd get better. Eventually to the point where it was no longer an emergency procedure, but a preventative maintenance measure.
The ancillary tech that would spring up from this would be in the BCI domain and we'd start getting good at modeling brain states. A whole industry of related organismal-level biotech advances would arise, propelling us forward like a new space age (or AI wave, to reference a current trend of advances).
There are crazy other things you could do - race and gender changes, better than natural genes and performance (VO2 max etc) enhancements, transgenic stuff, etc. Why limit ourselves to our previous limitations?
In 200 years we could conceivably move human thoughts onto silicon and stop dying. Too late for us with present day "life extension" / "health span" prognosis, so nobody is trying.
But it's "icky" and you'd get an even worse reaction than artists take to AI art or certain greens take to nuclear. The "people should die" folks raise their pitchforks, as do the incredibly religious. It's a very tough pill to swallow.
It angers me, because it's pretty low hanging fruit. You could grow bodies as vegetables without brains. Cut them off in development genetically and surgically. Innervate and artificially grow the bodies in advanced farms that keep their muscles moving, their hormones and limbic systems pumping, etc.
If I make a billion dollars I'll put everything into it. I want to live 150 years, and I want everyone else to as well. It's way more important to me than buying stuff or collecting "experiences".
As it stands, there's little point to anything we do (despite the fact none of us behave this way). Our experiences and enjoyment are short-lived dopamine hits to decaying neural networks, which on the geologic time scale, are pathetic little flashes that will never be noticed or remembered. When our brain cells bleb and desiccate, they won't remember all the good times we had or money we spent.
My perspective is we're all already dead. We may as well be holograms of our machine descendants playing out historical recreations.
Anyway, we could solve this if we put ourselves to it. I've yet to meet anyone else that's so gung-ho about it. I just think we're too early. And to this decaying neural network, it's kind of a horror to watch how others deal with the fact.
Of course, we need to be realistic and acknowledge that everyone living will all almost certainly die one day but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive for a future without death.
I think that CGP Grey's video, Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, does a wonderful job arguing this viewpoint.
Statistically, I fully expect to die. Never dying would be a fantastic surprise.
I think acceptance is a lot healthier and more likely to produce happiness in life than thinking one may be an exception.
If we had the same stance for all the other things that never happened before and were considered impossible, we would have never went to space and achieved many other great firsts.
IMO this is still casting it in an uncomfortable way. IMO it is much healthier to think of death as the reward for life, the final rest from the toils of living. The idea is to put them on equal footing as they are part of the same process and you should look forward to death as much as you look forward to living.
Human remains of Catholics are buried until their cause for canonization calls for exhumation and examination of the relics. By the time of canonization, division of the relics has begun and they are distributed for veneration to various communities and places. This is how we treat sacred remains: by making them accessible to all the faithful for viewing, veneration, and inspiration.
What was your question again?
https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2018/11/01/respect-for...
> "Respect for dead bodies manifests itself in diverse ways in different cultures around the world.In Islamic law and Muslim cultures, burying the dead in the ground is the correct way to respect dead bodies. Cremation is prohibited under Islamic law because, unlike in some cultures, it is considered a violation of the dignity of the human body."
People from different cultures have to learn to respect one another's traditions if they're to live together in democratic societies, that's certainly true. Some people would instead destroy anything that offends their own particular views, unfortunately.
That no-cremation rule was made for a good reason, but that reason can't be explained to masses, hence the "just do what the sacred book tells you!" A dead body isn't completely dead, so it's better (more respectful, indeed) to keep it for two months, and then it can be burnt. But you can't keep the rotting corpse for so long due to diseases, so it's better to bury it, and once it's there it's silly to dig it out and burn. To skip these endless arguments, and the futile attemps to reason with common folk, the instructions are put into a sacred book.
I believe Catholicism does have a reason that is understandable by common folk: since Jesus will resurrect the faithful to be with him in the new heavens, earth, and Jerusalem (which are seen as physical, not an abstract "Heaven" like modern American evangelicals tend to see it), there needs to be a body to resurrect.
(I'm not Catholic and never sure what Catholics actually believe, so I might be wrong here)
More practically, it is a practice which unnecessarily damages the sacred bodily remains and prevents them from future veneration. So it's much more difficult, if someone should become a saint, to distribute relics of a cremated body rather than bones and significant, identifiable parts of a buried/exhumed body.
It's not like God won't find a way to resurrect bodies that have been dismembered, burned, disintegrated, destroyed, or what have you. He's God, it's no big deal. Glorified bodies are understood to be spiritual, otherworldly, and beyond our imagination, but there's also been a lot of work to describe what they're like and how they work.
Cremation also led to abhorrent practices such as scattering ashes, or keeping them on a mantle, and in modern times, turning them into personal jewelry or launching them into space. The Church didn't like that stuff either. Personally speaking, my dear uncle's cremains are on my cousin's mantle and essentially inaccessible to me, since we're not on speaking terms. I'd really like to visit my uncle's grave, but he doesn't have one!
So even today, the Church forbids cremation if it's for the wrong reasons. But it's tolerated widely because it's often cheaper and expedient.
It was a classic argument, recounted by Herodotus:
When Darius was king, he summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them what price would persuade them to eat their fathers’ dead bodies. They answered that there was no price for which they would do it. Then he summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding by interpretation what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrid an act.
Herodotus used this anecdote, rather dubiously I think, it as an argument that everyone should stick to their own customs and not think too much about what other people do. But I think Darius himself, if it actually happened, used it more as an argument for tolerance, agnosticism - and cruelty.
Because it's a bit cruel to shock the poor Greeks and Callatiae like that, isn't it? And rulers of most large (and thus multicultural) empires always seemed to be a bit on the cruel side to me.
What do you do, when you encounter people, for whom everything you consider important, sacred, meaningful, just doesn't register at all, and they care about completely different things? Do you shut it out? Or do you allow yourself to drift towards indifference and nihilism, that maybe none of that stuff matters at all?
As I recall, Popper called it "the strain of civilization", how it gnaws on people to have to deal with so many people who don't share their basic values of what's important in life. And how they can resort to isolationism and cruelty to cope with it.
The Christian church's innovation was to seek a tight core of meaningful beliefs, with divine justifications of course, but be fairly tolerant of more secondary sources of meaning, those coming from custom and culture. Like Paul, who insisted that no food was forbidden to eat, even food that had been served up to idols, but that he'd nonetheless respect the dietary customs of the people he ate with because it was important to them ("Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.")
It was really the first truly multicultural faith, since up to then, faith, customs and culture had been one and the same.
So it's not so out of character, really, that the Catholic church a few years ago ruled that the Madagascar custom of exhuming the dead and dancing with them wasn't contrary to the faith, since it was "just" a cultural practice and didn't necessarily imply any beliefs incompatible with Christianity.
Until your family stops paying for the grave. Then someone else will get the place.
But in my part of the world, remains are "permanently" housed in cemeteries, crypts, colmbariums, etc. The family pays once for the interment and the plot. The cemeteries themselves are self-sustaining businesses which typically have a large endowment so that they can operate in perpetuity, with assurances of maintenance and upkeep far beyond any family's ability to sustain payments.
I think we can all agree that it would be absolutely absurd to expect families to continue paying in perpetuity for a burial place for their ancestors. Can you imagine the exponential financial burdens that would result?!
What is this a reference to?