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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Death is a medical failure

No. A thousand times no. Death is part of life. All composite things decay.

Imagine a kindergartener on an ocean beach. They spend hours building a sand castle. They wail as the tide claims it, feeling the sting of failure. Do you agree, telling them that they screwed up in their construction?

I say no. The error isn't in the building, it's in expecting the castle to last through high tide.

For the skeptical, I'd encourage you to watch this documentary: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0307385/ It really solidified my view that the transitory nature of all things makes them more beautiful, more poignant.

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And yet your codebase for needfeed is likely homed on separate redundant storage devices to ensure continuity in the inevitable event of the decay of the composites that store it. You'd probably be aghast at the suggestion that you put it all on one single point of failure and just let fate decide because the transitory nature of the project would make it more beautiful.

Yet how much more valuable is our consciousness than our accrued digital data? I don't understand how people can simultaneously understand that it is extremely unwise to leave their data to the fate of mechanical failure and yet not only accepting death but actually perceiving it as superior in many cases.

Defeating death is a worthy project. Embedding consciousness in a digital substrate or backup to genetically engineered bodies, or nanotech / biotech strategies for preserving existing bodies beyond what is natural are worthy pursuits.

Sometimes I wonder if the reason that this is not accepted is because of religious people in the world who feel like accepting that death is the end of their consciousness would be betraying their faith.

The codebase for my current project is well protected. For the moment. Most of the rest are gone. Their time came and went; this one will go too. As will I, and as will you.

I'm entirely in favor of research into extending human lifespan and maximizing the quality of human life. But this "circuits will save us all" stuff is not materially different than all the people who believe Santa-in-the-sky will let them live forever in happy-shiny-fluffy land. It's pure wish fulfillment, with no significant evidence.

Sure, and maybe some day if you've lived as long as you care to you may choose to allow your consciousness to fade away too, and that is all very well and good. It's the inability to do otherwise that is a problem.

With regards to possibility; it's the difference between hard science fiction and simple fiction, there's nothing ruling out that any of these things as possible, and in light of that fact I think pursuing them is an undeniably good idea.

We know the origins of Santa, we know the origins of god and religion, we understand why they're false and why that's a waste of time. Theoretical future advances in technology allowing fundamentally new paradigm shifts are something completely different.

Our very being, not just consciousness, is inseparable from our physical body. One day you maybe able to create an exact clone of the body to house the mind, but what good that would be? The body would be an exact clone with all its flaws. If you move the mind to a body that does not have those flaws, the mind is bound to change. We experience everything through our bodies and those experiences make our minds what they are. At least IMO.

I surely doubt that we know the origins of religion. And they surely are not a waste of time. Something that has been part of the human culture for as long as we know is bound to have some meaning. And pleas, take a look at some of the proofs for gods existence and nonexistence, some of them are quit elegant.

There's nothing ruling out the possibility of an afterlife either. Ergo, by your logic pursuing them is an undeniably good idea.

As I said before, extending lifespan is worth pursuing. Living longer is technically achievable. But eternal life is pure fantasy. Death comes for us all, and unless we face that fact squarely, we won't use what time we have as well as we could.

Sure, in the same sense that pursuing magic space unicorns (nobody proved that they don't exist) is equal to pursuing pulsed nuclear rocketry as a means of interplanetary transport is an undeniably good idea.

I hate this view so much. How are we better off not having people like Tesla, Newton, Einstein, etc. anymore? They had to give way so we could have Dragonball Z and reality TV? The notion that we gain something by people dying is beyond nonsensical.

The only benefit death will bring is when everyone who has this ridiculous view point is gone and out of the way.

There's no way to know how many of our advances are made because of our mortality.

If you took away the ticking clock and each person had thousands of years to write his novel, prove his theorem, or complete his masterpiece, would we continue to advance--or would we stagnate?

You also assume that a 1000 year old Einstein would still be Einstein. We have no idea what the impact on the brain of living that long would be. More than likely at some point previous memories would begin to fade away, and at some point you've replaced so many parts (memories) that there's nothing of the original left.

Additionally, society changes in large part because the people who make up society change. Would slavery have ever ended if older people hadn't passed away and younger ones with new ideas taken their place? Would we still be ruled by a thousand year old tyrant with a medieval morality?

I agree that we don't know the answers to these questions, but I don't agree that they outweigh the awful, terribly sucky thing which is death. I don't want anyone to die ever again. That people have died a few times since I started typing this is really, really bad!

Look, if you were designing a society and were trying to make the tradeoff of whether people should die or not, how would you weigh the arguments for and against death? "Hmm, on one hand, old ideas die off, so society might progress faster. On the other hand, we will snuff every conscious being out permanently, and they and their family go through years of suffering. Which should we choose?" Are you seriously arguing we would choose the former?

This. Plus "let's have everyone's body and mind gradually deteriorate over several decades before they die".

I don't think they allow, expect, or calculate an unbounded positive as t->infinity. I don't expect we'll get caught in a local minimum - we've done a decent job breaking out of them when the individuals involved haven't had nearly as much at stake...

Well if we want to take it to it's extreme end, death is a certainty. At some point all nature will decay and the universe and all energy will stop, it will all be used up. Nature will be used up and gone, barring the supernatural we will be too, so at that point even if we become naturally immortal we will die, because nature and more importantly energy will be no more. At this point Tesla, Newton et. al. will not matter, not a thing will matter, because the universe will be dead. So if we die in 85 years or x billion of years the final result is the same. Death is part of life and at some point even our contributions, no matter how great they are will be of no value. The old wisdom nothing last forever is true.

Now that I think about it, even this viewpoint is invalid. Perhaps we simply have an insufficient understanding of the universe. In 5000 years, they might ridicule the people of their past (us) for ever thinking that the end of the universe is inevitable. Just because we can't conceive a workaround yet does not mean that there isn't one.

"travelling faster than 40 miles an hour is impossible" "communicate with someone on the other side of the world instantly? Impossible!" "fly to the moon?" "end death?"

I'm sure that if we sat down, we could come up with thirty things that we have daily today, but were 'impossible' a hundred years ago.

This isn't correct. You're falling victim to a fallacy sometimes known as privileging the hypothesis. When you look back and say, "Look at all the things people thought were impossible but are now possible!" you're ignoring all things that people thought were impossible and are still impossible. Moreover, you're looking over all the things people thought were possible but are actually impossible.

The entire frame of your questions shows the fallacy because you explicitly abandon all other notions to just come up with things that were thought impossible but are now mundane.

It's true that we don't know everything, but implying that because we don't know everything we know nothing is absolutely ridiculous. All current knowledge of physics points towards entropy, and moreover the second law of thermodynamics, as being one of the most important and consistent laws of physics. It's so important that one of the most well-known physicists in the world is so well-known because he created a theory of black holes that meshes with our existing theory of entropy, proving that the second law still holds. The idea that we should abandon this knowledge because, well, it's inconvenient strikes me as being disingenuous in the highest order.

Anyone can say, "Well, you don't know everything, so you may be wrong." That doesn't make it an informed or useful comment.

Haha, I guess I wasn't clear enough there; my bad.

In my defense, I was not saying "since we achieved all these awesome things, we'll surely eventually avoid the heat death of the universe". Instead, I was claiming that right now, we're probably still to ignorant to know that with confidence. Perhaps we will find a way to escape into a different universe.

Thanks for the reminder (and good username!)

I can't find any examples of privileging a hypothesis in the grandparent comment. Could you clarify that?

Personally I chose to ignore this point of view as it would imply that absolutely everything is completely without a point. What's the value in following such a line of thinking?

Why? Because one eventually realizes that your conclusion here is incorrect. You have constructed "meaning" as a very particular thing here. There are other ways to see meaning in the world.

And also because it's true. The best science we have tells us that everything decays in the end. If you're going to start ignoring facts just because you don't like them, where do you stop?

>Because one eventually realizes that your conclusion here is incorrect. You have constructed "meaning" as a very particular thing here. There are other ways to see meaning in the world.

But what you're describing sees no meaning in anything ever. Simply because you can say that eventually the sun will burn out and we'll all die anyway doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make things as good as we can while we are here.

>If you're going to start ignoring facts just because you don't like them, where do you stop?

No, I'm ignoring facts that have no relevance or no useful action to take. If everything is going to end in a trillion years, what should I do about that exactly? Does that mean I should try to cure aging now?

Do you have a job? Why, the universe will end in some billions of years. Oh, you want to have as nice a life as you can while you are here? So do I.

You've got me wrong. I agree entirely that we must make the most of what we have. Which is why I think it's important to face the inevitability of death. If you aren't realistic about what you have, you can't make the best use of it.

Which is exactly what this article illustrates. Death comes for us all, and not facing that yields waste and suffering. Not in some abstract sense, either. As the author writes, "At a certain stage of life, aggressive medical treatment can become sanctioned torture." And the amount spent on futile end-of-life care is staggering.

I think you have me wrong as well. I'm not for making deteriorating 90-year-olds suffer in bed for another 10 years to bump some stats. I'm talking about eliminating aging and natural death.

As things stand today, of course it doesn't make sense to hang on when you're only going to get a few more years of agony. But more research could be done in eliminating the effects of aging, etc. We've already lost many great minds but if we can stop this trend or even slow it down then it's worth persuing.

Personally I chose to ignore this point of view

I don't think this is an issue of point of view, entropy and thermodynamics are very real and as of now, the best models of reality point to it being a certainty.

imply that absolutely everything is completely without a point

I personally don't subscribe to that philosophical position, I brought up the topic of the eventual end or the universe as a thought experiment about the acceptance of death and at that point all relevance will be gone, but in saying that, I personally feel that, even if nature is temporal, things can have a point and have meaning now even if they don't have permanent meaning in this nature. Further we cannot rule out the existence of a higher natural order in which there is further purpose. That being said, meaning, point and the eventual lack of both have little to do with the reality that this nature will end, until it does end. Even if purpose is absolutely temporal it is significant in that temporal space, which is enough to give it a point. Acknowledging that a temporal space will end, does nothing to minimize the point of that temporal space and the actors within it. Rather it is a realization that it is a self contained system and that the point or meaning exists within that system, the value is within the system not external to it. Once the system is gone it has no value, but that does nothing to diminish the value inside of the system.

Personally I chose to ignore this point of view as it would imply that absolutely everything is completely without a point.

Who told you there was "a point?"

And why did he tell you that?

The fact that the destination is the same does not mean that the journey doesn't matter. Most people are not indifferent to dying in 6 hours or in 60 years.

Yes, I agree that thinking that we gain by people dying is nonsensical. Which is why I didn't say that.

We live in a universe where all things decay. There is no known exception. Species go extinct. Stars die. As best we know, the universe itself will die: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

You and I will die as well, and pretending otherwise causes a lot of harm. The best we know how to do now is to extend life a little; but we don't even do that as well as we could because we waste fantastic sums on futile end-of-life care. And that money also doesn't make it to the medical research that could help the next generation, or the one after that.

But I think the harm is deeper than that. Who do you think is more likely to be fully aware of how short life is? The next Einstein now toiling in a lab? Or somebody watching their third hour in a row of reality TV?

>Or somebody watching their third hour in a row of reality TV?

Don't throw out the Einsteins because of people like this. People who throw their lives away will end up killing themselves anyway (e.g. through horrible eating habits, smoking, etc.), and even if they don't, they'll be in their living room out of our way.

I find it highly amusing (if sad) that people who argue pro-death always like to point at people they don't think deserve to live...

It's ridiculous to think about surviving the heat death of the universe when 50 % longer life spans would be pretty cool.

In the coming decades, We may or may not be able to significantly extend life, but it's not clear why it's unlikely, or why it causes harm to even think about.

You are completely and utterly missing the point. The point is not "y'kno, death is actually not that bad, maybe we shouldn't try to get rid of it". As you point out, there are a lot of reasons to get rid of death, if we could.

The point is that fantasizing about "curing" death is harmful to people making difficult decisions about their life and that of their loved ones. People need to face the fact that death is inevitable and part of life, and like everything else unpleasant that is part of life, they must handle it like an adult.

It currently is, that doesn't mean it's theoretically impossible that it ever could be otherwise. It's not fantasizing to point that out.

Have you noticed somebody objecting to neutrally pointing out something that might be a theoretical possibility?

Because what I see people objecting to is not the raising of a possibility. It's the indulging of a fantasy that lets people avoid thinking about an empirical certainty.

What about people like Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler or Joe McCarthy? Et cetera?

The belief that personal death cannot be good for society is just as ridiculous as the belief that it always is.

If the people who lived through the first evil dictator were still around they'd recognized the signs of the next one.

I think in your scenario everyone lives through the evil dictator, including the dictator, and all the people who believed in the word of the dictator as a god. You wouldn't really need to recognize any signs, because the evil dictator would still be there. Dictating.

Or is this a world where only nice people get to live forever?

the evil dictator would still be there. Dictating.

Neither Hitler nor McCarthy were still 'dictating' when they died. Lack of death doesn't mean that everything would remain the same forever.

Hitler wasn't dictating at the time of his death, but Stalin was.

Stalin's death lead to a good change.

When somebody stay in power for too long it leads to stagnation.

Human civilization has other measures against such stagnation (such as 2 terms limit for presidential position).

However limited life span still adds extra protection against society stagnation.

It's not obvious if benefits of unlimited lifespan outweight potential problems.

I think that doubling life span would probably be beneficial overall, but it's hard to say if further life span increase would.

>I think in your scenario everyone lives through the evil dictator, including the dictator

No, I'm talking about the elimination of aging and natural death. People would still be able to kill themselves and others.

That's even worse. No rational person would risk their life in warfare if they otherwise stood to live forever. The only people who would even try to kill someone else, chancing death themselves, would be fanatics and psychotics.

The legions of true believers would be able to dictate terms to enlightened society with the mere threat of violence.

I really don't think you've thought this through.

>That's even worse. No rational person would risk their life in warfare if they otherwise stood to live forever.

Think about what you're saying here. You think no one in Germany was rational? They would have had the same risk of dying we would. Hitler was only powerful because there were people willing to follow his orders.

And there was no shortage of true believers on the Allied side either (think patriotism), in any case.

>>That's even worse. No rational person would risk their life in warfare if they otherwise stood to live forever.

You would have to be pretty damn patriotic to want to give your life to preserve a nation-state you expect to outlive anyway. If I'm going to die anyway, it doesn't make much difference; it makes sense to risk my life for some things. If my life is eternal, what principle could I possibly, rationally put ahead of my survival?

Eternal life gives the insane an advantage over the sane, and the idea that the insane are as likely to be good as evil seems like a risky bet to me.

I don't get it. Why would we want people to wage war to preserve a nation-state? We want people to wage war to protect their own lives and the lives of others. That doesn't stop making sense just because your life expectancy is much higher.

Something about death being a motivator or something like that...

We have Dragonball Z because 15 (25) year old punks don't realize that they're going to die some day...

And with that, I'm going to stop scanning HN.

Death is nature's way if ensuring change.

Death is nature's way OF ensuring change.

Feel free to die then, but don't presume to speak for me. Death is a medical failure, and life doesn't stop being valuable after 75.

That people are starting to view death as a medical failure is one of the best things that could happen. I personally don't expect to die of old age.

I personally don't expect to die of old age.

Something said, I suspect, by every young person since the time of Hammurabi. I suppose that expecting to live forever in this world is no more irrational than expecting eternal life in another world.

Feel free to die then

Do you honestly think that was my point? That I'm looking forward to dying?

Probably not. But then, you're not being very consistent. First, do not conflate the current state of affairs with the desirable state of affairs. Second, if you wish for something for everyone, you wish it for yourself as well.

The current state of affairs is certainly abysmal. Some live over a century, while others die in their childhood. We age before we die. I'd rather die at 75 with a healthy body rather than dying at 75 with 10 years of senescence behind me.

So, a better system (should it be possible), would be to get rid of senescence. Even better, we could get egalitarian about death: no involuntary death before age X, at which point you die instantly. Sounds horrible? But it would be much better than the current system, where we let chance decide on the number of years we can live. Plus, you can actually make preparations for your departure.

So, what value would you chose for X? And of course, it would apply to you as well.

As far as I can tell, I'm being totally consistent. My point is that people are failing to distinguish between what they want (to live forever) and what they can achieve, and that by doing so they are causing a lot of waste and suffering, not achieving as much as they could.

I agree that a world without aging would be better. I also think it would be a better world if the moon were made of cheese and I could get there by building a tall enough ladder. But if I spend all my life building ladders in service of that desire I'm a fool.

We don't live in a world where people live forever or can avoid old age except by dying young. All composite things decay. There are so far no exceptions, and no solid theory that suggests otherwise.

I am entirely in favor of medical research that seeks to improve and extend human life. But by not coming to grips with our impending deaths, we aren't living as well as we could. Take the guy upthread who thinks he will live forever. People like that check into hospitals every day unprepared for the reality they face. As the article makes clear, that wastes a lot of money and causes a lot of suffering.

The article talks about extending suffering, not life. Few people who think they will live forever expect to do so wheezing with every breath.

Shakespeare's sonnets are artfully composed, and I'd say we've done a decent job of keeping them around and finding uses for them.

Let's review the bidding here. Somebody said "death is a medical failure." I said that it isn't; when you fail to achieve an impossible goal, the failure is in the goal, not the work done. I went on to say that all composite things decay, and that to expect that one is going to be the first exception is folly.

I agree that few people imagining they can have eternal life think that they will suffer. But that's exactly the problem. They haven't thought it through. They don't yet understand what life is. Which is why they are so woefully unprepared to handle the parts that don't match their fictions.

The bit about Shakespeare's sonnets I take to be a counterargument to "all composite things decay". That we have managed to keep 100k of text around for less than half a millennium seems like poor evidence that immortality will soon be ours. People die. Species die. Planets and suns die.

Okay. You do not value death, but you do not believe we can defeat it either. Note that in a strict sense, the second law of thermodynamic says you're most probably right. All there's left is a hope of a very long life. (Which you probably don't think we can achieve either, right?)

It's a long way to go, or at least a very long shot, but a long life is possible in principle. Things decay, but they can be fixed or replaced (even the brain: current physics says that copy-paste transportation actually works —in principle). We just don't know how to do that yet. Now, about my personal immortality, I see little hope short of Friendly AI or cryonics, and even those are a long shot.

I agree that a long life is theoretically possible. I personally suspect that even if we overcome the body problems, neither human brains nor human minds will be able to cope with that, so that anything truly long-lived will be a post-human organism.

I also agree with you that the various theoretically possible techno-miracles likely won't mean much for us than a modestly longer old age. So I think everybody should really come to grips with what dying means. E.g., by filling out a living will and discussing end-of-life issues with family. If it turns out that preparation is wasted, I don't think anybody will complain too much.

I'd rather die at 75 with a healthy body rather than dying at 75 with 10 years of senescence behind me.

The first part of this sentence seems strange.

If you assume your healthy 75yr young body doesn't die of external forces (drowning, fall off cliff, etc.), which you don't seem to be implying, isn't this a contradiction?

In this context, the "senescence" is a precondition for death, right?

Human life length is not totally up to chance. A person's choices affect how long that persons lives quite a lot.

Being able to get rid of senescence might be nice, but making everyone die at age X does not make sense.

>> I personally don't expect to die of old age.

> Something said, I suspect, by every young person since the time of Hammurabi. I suppose that expecting to live forever in this world is no more irrational than expecting eternal life in another world.

One could argue that this is the crux of the world's oldest story, "The Epic of Gilgamesh".

Most societies had a better connection to death than modern era societies. Death was seen as a necessary part of life and signs of mortality were presented to encourage people to do better in their lives. Death is inevitable. Even if you somehow gain true immortality our sun will burn out, our galaxy will split apart, our universe will accelerate towards c and render time meaningless.

You cannot escape true death. Nothing you could say, do or know will ever change the fact that your life will end. You need to come to terms with that before the inevitable happens. Once you are aware that you will die it becomes easier to really live.

Most societies had a better connection with slavery and torturen then we do that dosen't make it a good thing. If I can cheat death by a billion years I'll call that good.

Well, there are some species that do not age (at least one specie of turtles is extremely slow to age). Some tiny life forms that do not age and do not die. I may agree to say that "death is part of our paradigm" but that does not mean it should be so. Saying "death is part of life" may be true FOR US, but humans have always tried to reach out to impossible things. And sometimes, succeeded. There's no reason not to keep trying to solve what is, in the end, a technical issue when you consider that everything around us is based on a set of rules and interactions.

There are no animal species that do not age. Some age slower than others.

I agree we should try to improve human lives, now and in the future, and extending healthy lifespan is certainly part of that. But there is plenty of reason to face the fact that we will all eventually die.

About your sentence : "there are no animal species that do not age".

Well, I hate to use Wikipedia for that, but current observations seem to disagree with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long-living_organisms

You'll see in that post that there are several species for which we find that mortality does not increase with age, i.e. they do not appear to age.

Now, I am not a specialist on the subject, so I will not be able to go into debate whether this is truth or fiction, but I have heard/seen this mentioned in several sources.

You realize that's a forest of [citation needed], right?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090130-immor...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/4357829/Immortal-j...

It is inevitable that a time will come where it will be possible for humans to stave off aging to a significant degree. Whether this is in 100 years or 10,000 years, it is difficult to tell. What measures should be taken because of this is for the future to decide.

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