In ‘The Book Against Death,’ Elias Canetti rants against mortality

I think it's inevitable that such a change would cause big social upheavals. I find it highly ironic that those people who call this out as a negative often also call out how people living longer are change averse.

> I enjoy life but it's important to my enjoyment that there is a terminus.

Can I ask why, genuinely?

The fact that I will likely die sometime in the next 50 years doesn't make the evening out I have planned any better or worse. The band I'm going to see are getting older, but I'm going to see them because they're coming to my town and it'll be enjoyable. My eventual death has no bearing on it at all as far as I can tell.

A worse problem is that whatever generation is in control when immortality is achieved will rule the world forever. Falling fertility makes this even more likely.

It isn’t obvious to me that that is given. An alternative would be that the breadth of parallel ideas would expand, more competition. There could then also be more depth because individuals behind groundbreaking ideas can build on their cognitive foundations for longer.

One major change, which it thibk would be a positive is that we will be directed to thibk more long term. With extreme life extension, the cosmos also becomes smaller because we could travel and explore space and time more extensively.

Because its the end of any worry, doubt, suffering, fear, uncertainty. Because its over. And youll be dead, so you wont be able to feel what youre missing out on.

The finality of death is a beautiful and comforting eventuality in my opinion.

Some SF author here wanna pick up on this theme? This has potential, if the cryo is available equally to all comers in society, because I can't imagine how the world would look like — who'd "shape the time they're in" as some-specific-generation when people pop in and out of the progression of time liberally, century-hopping, taking a gander for a few years, then sleep through many more, then respawn once more.

Maybe one can leave specs for when to not thaw (wars, pestilence, famine, recession). No one's around for the bad times! Including whoever'd manage the cryo and thawings.

Paradoxical, someone go write that SF!

Can't relate with this sentiment. Life is what you make of it and a lot of times we overcomplicate it and worry about meaningless things.

[0] if you don't just go insane because your memory capacity is reached and you just can't organize new ideas without losing others or causing damage.

[1] that said this might be due to equal demographic waves, but in the case of immortal population, young ones would be less and less large % wise.

Not to say there is not a possible psychological problem for us when living forever, it just cannot be researched right now because, you know, we tend to die. Let alone the implications.. insurance, prison sentences, housing, population and control of it...

A fear so profound that they've reasoned themselves into a corner, that this way we live must be correct and cannot be questioned, because if we start to question whether death is necessary after a 'natural' lifespan, whether research into prolonging life might be possible and might not actually not be a ridiculous endeavour for a few madmen, then that deep dread they cannot speak of may return and consume them.

Beyond that your comment is full of odd assertions - yes, people grow and change, but no, that doesn't imply discontinuity or repeated death.

Your older relatives are living in ageing or aged bodies, including their brains. Their experience of life is not necessarily what we could expect if we were to be able to put off the effects of age indefinitely.

Edit - but I'll take your few centuries over what we have now, as a starting point :)

“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”

― Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant

You don't have to be 50+ to fit that description =)

This is such a limited perspective. I’m in my 20s and don’t bother with any of that either. The continuity is of one’s conscious experience, not identity.

Now then, if they could solve (and reverse) all the other things that come with aging (honestly of those things death scares me the least), I would reconsider my stance. But even the thought of living for another 100 years at where I am right now sounds like a pretty miserable existence.

There's continuity of consciousness which is the only thing that matters. Turn me into a mist, I don't care, as long as I can stay awake.

General anesthesia is the worst thing I've ever experienced.

Nobody wants to live forever in a decaying body. Just let me have my 23 year old body back, just for a few extra centuries. c'mon, universe.

I’d bet those relatives you mention weren’t the most curious or open people when they were younger.

How are you not afraid of death? How is anyone not afraid of death? This baffles me. I mean, I don't spend my days agonizing over the fact that I will die someday, mainly because it has no use. Chronic anxiety won't help me as long as I take the necessary actions. But I'm sure as hell scared shitless of dying overall.

If I were 100 years old and every day was a struggle, sure, I'd want to just get it over with. But I have a really hard time understanding why people won't want to stay 30 years old forever. You, your conscience, the only thing that matters, will cease to exist. If that doesn't strike fear in a person, I don't know what will.

Good points. But I think another key motivation is the simple, banal Fear Of Missing Out. How dare human life on Planet Earth continue without me?

While (of course) I would like to live forever, it is not death I fear. Rather it is the process of dying that upsets me. I'm currently in a position where my mother and siblings seem to be in a race to the grave. My mum (age: 95) still has her mind, but her body has failed her badly over the past 10 years: every movement is an effort and a pain - she no longer leaves the house, though she absolutely refuses to become bed-bound. My brothers have fought, or are fighting, cancer. My sister had her second heart attack earlier this year; she still smokes - perhaps her understanding of things is better than ours? (FWIW, I have not yet discovered the means of my demise).

If extreme extended life includes endless pain and continual loss ... I don't think I'm as strong as my mother. My hope is one day I just forget to wake up, drift into oblivion dreamless. !Cogito, ergo !sum.

> Immortality itself does not compute. It just does not make sense. You are a product of your time.

I wrote a novel[1] about a once-human entity that was born some 6-7,000 years ago, and now exists as a sort of eternal mind parasite. I had to do a lot of thinking about how such entities would think about life, time, and death. As the story developed it turned out that my main character quite enjoyed experiencing life, didn't much worry about time, but in particular was fascinated by how people die - which, as a mind parasite, he could experience almost-first-hand.

[1] - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/book/spintrap-the-lonely-...

> You are a product of your time.

Sure. If I were born 600 years ago, I wouldn't be a software engineer. Perfect statement.

> So lets say you managed to evolve entirely to become a 10000 millennium human (if that's even a thing). Then, you're not really you anymore. There is no discernible continuity.

That doesn't follow. It veers wildly off course by making the assumption that I am a static thing, with a binary identity as "me" or "not me". But! I was actually born several decades ago. I was once a small child with no understanding of how software works. How is it that I'm a software engineer now? Growth, and change. Yet I retain my first-person memories of being that ignorant child. Did I steal those memories from another entity? I find that to be a useless definition of change-over-time, so I'd rather say I'm the same person. I feel like you'd agree I'm the same person, but only because the timescale is fewer than 1000 years, but that's a completely arbitrary cutoff. A person isn't defined by an instant in time, a person exists over time. Therefore there's no reason I would cease to be me in 8000 years even though I was still me in 4000 years, or 400 years, or 40 years. What possible mechanism could account for that total loss of identity after an arbitrary time? It may be in year 10024 I have no memory of the year 2024, but I might have memories of the year 9024, and in the year 9024 I might have memories of the year 8024.

> "Immortality" only really makes sense over smaller timescales on the order of centuries, at most.

Why? How many 300-year-olds have you measured this against? How many 3000-year-olds? It seems you've just drawn a line where you feel like drawing one and started telling people the line was a natural feature of the land.

> I can tell you, I have relatives who were alive before WWII and although they are alive, they are not part of the present.

Again this doesn't support your arguments at all. Those relatives are old. Their brains and bodies are weaker every year; we can't expect them to keep up. The idea of biological immortality is not that your body would just continuously age, or else yes you would just be a braindead corpse breathing on a slab for millions of years. Immortality means stopping the process of aging. So the challenges of current old people aren't really relevant to the experience of ageless 10,000-year-olds of the future.

Except for the ones on Facebook ranting about politics.

If that's actually how you define "partaking in the present" then I truly pity you. There is far more to life than obsessing over the latest silicon valley bullshit machine.

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

The author clearly hasn't seen my ticket backlog.

Amen. I want to build dyson spheres myself. Gathering the money right now for it. Of course I know it won't happen in my lifetime but you got to start.

There should be no death. For whatever reason, it is incredibly hard to find people thinking the same, despite, paradoxially no one wants to die.

Can we chat? My e-mail is in the profile.

A world without death is also necessarily a world without birth once the whole biosphere has been converted to immortals. I'm not sure living amongst a bunch of old people is something to be envied.

I also don't think that people who think that immortality is enviable have really come to grips with how long forever actually is.

Edit: not saying we should join forces or that you should work on nanotechnology, but we are clearly value aligned and should connect.

I don't think there is anything wrong in seeking the longest healthiest possible life, but suspect that in many cases that the motivation for it comes more from fear of personal death than the love of what life is. It's great to be an agent in this incredible adventure but my take on it is that when the means (a specific localized self consciousness) become the end ("being me is the most important thing and it should be great forever") then that is where you get stuck in a local maximum and some sort of suffering is bound to follow.

Another aspect is that of how much more time do you think will be enough? 1000 years? 10,000 years? As someone has already stated, you will not be able to avoid death forever and even in the most optimistic case (at least from this myopic view of immortality) you won't win against entropy. No matter how long of a good life you are granted, it will never seem enough because from the subjective point of view it will seem to be over soon at which point personal death will again become very real and very alarming.

It seems the only way out of this is to be able to transcend the personal sense of self and see that your real immortality lies in realizing that in a very real sense you are also something much greater than just a localized version of it.

I'm not some Zen master and am probably afraid of my own personal mortality as much as the next person, but after a long time of thinking deeply about it, this seems to be the most probable conclusion.

There is even speculation that life is from a certain angle only an effect to accelerate entropy under the umbrella of the Maximum Entropy Production Principle (but I do not remember the source).

So from the standpoint of current knowledge of how nature works this seems to look dire.

I also personally disagree. I do not think that the beautiful chaos of life is strictly preferable to the requiem eternam of death. I'll go when I have to, without hesitation and regrets. It's not the things that terrify us, but our opinion of the things.

There will never be a world without death. Not, unless you have a way to reverse the laws of thermodynamics, on a universe scale. Only world where people die later.

Also, keep in mind, your most disliked people will probably remain in power for longer. Next, Putin or Xi will remain in power for centuries.

For a starter, birth rates and death rates should be about the same otherwise it’s not sustainable. If you "solve death", birth rates will need to drop a lot.

Do you want to live in a world with almost no children? Just very old people all over the place. Sounds like a nightmare to me.

You need to let go, accept your mortality and leave some room for new humans to live. At some point you’ll have had your time, death is part of life.

Alas, I wish you luck captain Ahab.

And the wealthy’s monopoly on wealth will only consolidate.

It reminds me of two quotes:

“Science progresses one funeral at a time” (paraphrasing Planck’s principle).

“[…] 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. […]”

That’s probably what worries me most, when it comes to extended or unending lives.

Dystopian as in our status quo? (Also, monopoly on violence is essentially a monopoly on whether your life continues.)

The problem with this line of thinking is that no one is ever going to eliminate death, ever. Even if you completely eliminate aging, people are still going to die at some point, whether it's from war, or natural disasters, or accidents, or murder. Making people ageless isn't going to keep them from dying when a piano falls on them.

So pontificating about humans living until the heat death of the universe is utterly pointless. Statistically, even without aging, humans aren't going to live beyond 1000 years most likely.

The aliens ask you for advice about how to live. Would you recommend that they all commit suicide at age 100, because it will be so good for them and their society?

Always flip the default and ask, will you switch back.

So you’re worrying about an impossible scenario.

So we must first know what it means to be human, which is to say, what the actualization of human nature consists of, actualization as the satisfaction and raison d'etre of human activity. It is the nature of a thing to seek to realize itself, to become fully the kind of thing it is. This does not necessarily involve conscious, purposeful act. Bacteria do the same, and this is by virtue of how they are organized and ordered, as well as their operation in accord with this ordering. For human beings, it is to become fully human, which, again, is the question posed: what is the end of a human being? Only in light of human nature can we determine the meaning of death, whether death is to be understood as an aberration needing a solution, or the natural terminus of human existence. If it is the former, then we might ask what, if anything, could or should be done about it. If the latter, then we must accept it as our natural end against which any resistance is not only misguided, but harmful.

To answer this question, we must first recognize that what is most essential and definitive about human beings is that we are rational animals. Our rationality is not some thing tacked on to us, but what it means to be human, and our organization, our substance, everything from the operations of the intellect, our ability to choose between alternatives freely, and our bodies, follows from this fact.

Then, we must determine what it most means for human beings as rational animals to attain finality. Classically, the highest good is to know and thus experience union with the Highest Good. But the Highest Good is infinite. Perhaps by human nature a certain finite degree of knowledge of the Highest Good suffices, but if the intellect is by its nature open to expansion by the act of the Highest Good, then it could, indefinitely, spend eternity coming to know increasingly better the Highest Good by first becoming indefinitely expanded. This would be transcendence, this expansion of the human person beyond what is merely given by nature, but which, by nature, is open to expansion by the Highest Good.

Of course, we cannot attain this condition ourselves, as we cannot engineer our own transcendence. If we could, we would already be in possession of the cause, and thus it would already be part of our nature and therefore not transcendent (the effect is, after all, virtually in the cause; you cannot give what you do not have). This makes transhumanism a fool's errand, as we can only cripple or deform humanity in our quixotic attempts to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, unlike medicine, which only restores what is already due by nature, but is for some reason missing and in a state of defect.

Assuming this is true, then only eternal life would suffice. Anything less, merely life extension, would not change our fundamental condition, only postpone what was always inevitable. Death would remain an obstacle. But nothing in this world attains this eternal state. As I've said, technology cannot attain this end. Only the Highest Good would have this power, and thus something beyond our power to control and use. Furthermore, there is no one on this planet who can be said to have received this eternal state, at least no one walking among us that we can see. So either this eternal state is possible only after death, which means death is not non-existence but some kind of transition, or it cannot be attained. The first gives reason for at least some hope, the latter is world-weary hopelessness, an absurd condition in which Man is condemned to seek an end he cannot possibly arrive at by any means, but must seek if he is to live.

    Will I forget holding my first child? 
    Will I have forgotten cuddling up in my mom’s lap? 
    Will I miss having forgotten these things? 
    If I can still remember all those moments ... will I still be human in any sense?

If I were able to live another hundred years, I am sure I'd forget things from my time now, forget even more details about my early life, but would still have plenty of things to keep me interested in continuing to live. There are such an abundance of things I can think of that would be worth spending decades mastering, each of which are less important than my current needs, and which I generally have discarded because "it's too late by now...". Swordfighting, glass blowing, painting, creating music, etc. Imagine being able to find something new and interesting, and being able to devote forty or fifty years to developing a (current) lifetime's level of expertise in it. That sounds like science fiction to me, but if such were possible, I'd pick it every time over not having the opportunity.

    Will I still be human in any sense?

My wife died. I get to live on with our children, smell flowers, listen to music, even fall in love again. I’m the lucky one, despite the pain.

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Enough-Love-Robert-Heinlein-eboo...

which paints a vivid picture of what somebody might do with a few centuries. It's one of the last books that my evil twin checked out from the library that I haven't returned yet.

The Last Question - Isaac Asimov - Read by Leonard Nimoy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XOtx4sa9k4&t=544s&ab_channe...

In the book consciousness does not have to be chronological in time or on any specific biological or synthetic hardware. It just has to be encoded in a physical state somewhere, and the next state can be anywhere else in time or space.

One example is a person who deliberately set their consciousness on a loop, doing his favorite activity, climbing a skyscraper too tall to see the bottom or the top. Permanent flow state, not quite sure how long he has been climbing, feeling an adrenaline high.

It may seem like a boring life, but for that person it's indistinguishable from a normal life that happens to be doing that action in the moment.

Thermodynamics makes death mandatory. Evolution set the timer to 100 to 120.

I think this shows that in species where the male does not die promptly after mating, there is good reason to live longer.

> Beyond that, off to the ice floe.

Where does the certainty come that you cannot be useful in ensuring the survival of your great-grandkids, or great-great-grandkids?

After all, if you're arguing from what evolution mandates, the only thing to do is let everyone do whatever, and see where evolution goes next. You really can't think evolution had the current situation as its target all along, and now the only remaining thing is to not disturb it.

That would surely manifest in a few generations, sans some big civilization collapse. Or artificial uterus, for sure.

There doesn’t really seem to be any plausible practical or moral imperative to do so.

"you should be/keep slaves because our ancestors were/did"

etc.

Your logic is weird and false. There's nothing holy about dying.

Immortality would be a neat trick but it can't solve war and it can't solve starvation.

If the children inherit their parents' wealth, it is likely that the ruling class will persists.

Also, stability and stagnation of social system be factored in. More dynamic society can outcompete and ultimately destabilize stagnant and morbid societies.

North Korea and South Korea came to mind. The dictator of North Korea is younger than South Korea's president who was born in the 1960 as opposed to the dictator being born in 1982. The dictator continues his family's legacy of ruling over a stagnant and increasingly irrelevant country while South Korea continues to be a vibrant and dynamic society.

South Korea definitely has problem, notably a looming demographic crisis, but it is not an inevitability in how they choose to deal with their problem.

My concern is more that the world required to keep people immortal is almost certainly one removed of all risk, danger, adventure, and dynamism. I don’t want to live in a world where people hide inside staring at screens, because they’re afraid of physical accidents ending their otherwise immortal lives.

I think it is a case of the strategy is fine (wanting immortality), but the logistics are just not there. So as much as it may pain us, focusing on not dying would mean you could spend your life not living in try to achieve said additional life.

I can think of a thousand futures on what I could do in a certain position but odds are that none of these situations will ever come up. So to have a clear mind, don't cling to things that might not happen.

I am glad that many are trying to achieve immortality, I will not stand in the way of them, but I also won't be holding my breath on it happening in my lifetime.

And still I'm fine with it today.

Is that evidence in the room with us right now?

I'm sorry but I can't see how the first sentence supports the second in any meaningful way. It's easy and pointless to shit on religion and I'm not doing that here, but "evidence" is something other than common stories.

Consider that the evidence for a non-evolutionary origin of humanity is equally abundant, in religious traditions. Would you say that evolution is still dubious because so many traditional beliefs exist that don't include it? Would you hold up "we're molded from clay, because a lot of people said so" next to centuries of living and fossil evidence for an evolutionary origin of humanity and say, "Well, they both have a lot of evidence."?

I believe the source of your confusion is that death is such a black box. But the failure of current science to pierce that veil doesn't make non-evidence-based theories any more valid. It only means, "this is still unknown." Could there be an afterlife? Sure, it's possible, but there's not yet any significant evidence for one.

Too little science leads away from God, while too much science leads back to Him". So said Louis Pasteur.

2. Please do not take HN threads into religious flamewar, or on generic flamewar tangents generally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This feels similar to the people who advocate for dictatorships because they picture themselves as the dictators, and end up having their faces eaten by leopards. Statistically, you’re overwhelmingly likely to not end up in the elite in this new deathless world.

«I'm not afraid of dying, I'm afraid of dying pointlessly.»

(Don't remember the attribution.)

really, i’m not trying to be mean here. you assert life must be finite, and all i’m asking is how finite it should be.

See also https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified "Transhumanism as simplified Humanism":

> If a young child falls on the train tracks, it is good to save them, and if a 45-year-old suffers from a debilitating disease, it is good to cure them. If you have a logical turn of mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a general ethical principle which says “Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad.” If so – and here we enter into controversial territory – we can follow this general principle to a surprising new conclusion: If a 95-year-old is threatened by death from old age, it would be good to drag them from those train tracks, if possible. And if a 120-year-old is starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore them to full vigor, if possible.

Also I don't see how it's ego driven. I want everybody (who wants) to live forever. - And while we're at it, every animal who ever lived in every ecosystem has changed things. That's kind of what it means to live in an ecosystem - no actually, that's kind of what it means to live, period.

That's exactly what it is, and that's exactly why immortality is so appealing to moderns - a sick people whose sense of purpose is informed by hedonism and mass media, a people who are more concerned with consuming pleasurable experiences and doing what their state-corporate media god deems noble, rather than serve their children, the wisdom & legacy of their ancestors, or God.

This is a really strong status-quo bias shared by many people who are pro-death.

Imagine a world where no one dies, but young people were indeed very sad, depressed, and generally unhappy because of the reasons you stated. Seeing this unfortunate situation, someone says "I have an idea. What if we killed everyone over 82?"

There is an almost infinite number of things you could try that aren't that. The fact that we happen to live in a world where an imperfect partial solution to young people being unhappy is "statistically everyone over 82 dies" doesn't make it a good world; it just means we have to fix unhappy young people in addition to fixing everyone dying.

This critique applies to most of your questions, with the exception of the finitude of resources. But if we can live just until the stars burn out, I'll call that a win over the current situation.

I just tell people it’s completely optional and move along.

Several years ago I suggested we ban immorality debates on HN

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-...

Just like today but controlling the population would be necessary. Do you want to live forever? Fine, but no children until you die. Since people would still statistically die in accidents or by suicide, new births could still be permitted. As productivity increases over time, everyone would lead a better life in a population-controlled world

> Do we really want the next dictator of XYZ to rule forever?

Overthrow him? With infinite time, you have an infinite number of attempts. Dictatorships are governed by regimes, not just one person. The dictator is merely a manifestation and representation of that regime. As history has often shown, killing one dictator may simply lead to another, if one dies of old age, a successor will take his place.

People would still die, just not from natural causes (right?). Even today, dictators have more fear of a coup than cancer. Long lived species tend to have fewer offspring as well & would have to confront the issue of limited resources head on, instead of kicking the can to the next generation. I think a society that grows up around humans with unlimited life expectancy would probably look different than ours does, maybe in ways we can't imagine (even today, ritualistic suicide like Sallekhana is hard to imagine...). This would be different from a situation where people living today suddenly make this switch.

Eat your fruit, veggies, nuts and whole grains, but don't over do it on the food! Move it or lose it. Build bridges, don't burn them! I don't say this so you can have smaller pants or live an extra decade, that would be a neat side effect, I say this so that you can live a happy fun life as much as possible.

It's material to the question of researching aging and longevity. A lot of people will come out singing death's praises.

Once humanity gets rid of this prejudice, a venue towards much healthier and longer life is open.

Tirade: > a long, angry speech of criticism or accusation.

I disagree. We absorb pain for our community/tribe or our own goals. Ideally, we don’t pass it on.

I wonder if it has to do with the fact that your current lifespan is "natural" and an immortal lifespan is "unnatural". But what's the difference between being alive in 10,000 years, and being alive currently? A person 10,000 years old may believe themself to be immortal but there's fundamentally no difference between being "currently alive" at 10,000 and being "currently alive" at 40. Either way, it's an experience of the present. So what makes living to 10,000 wrong, if living to 40 is right?

What is the other factor pushing it up?

Another useful concept is the immanent frame, which is an idea by the philosopher Charles Taylor in his book A Secular Age. The basic idea is that society is increasingly becoming focused on this world (immanent) and losing interest in things outside the "frame", like the afterlife. And so the default assumption becomes something like, "There is no afterlife and only this life matters," even if there is really no scientific or philosophical justification for that belief.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41188210

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism

3. https://ubcgcu.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/taylor-and-imm...

There is no "woo" here - and to imply that there is woo is purely religious, not philosophical.

Isn't it more the point that there is a lack of evidence for supposing that something does happen after we die?

Put another way: there is absolutely zero scientific, empirical basis for the materialist presupposition that rocks are not conscious -- other than that rocks give no sign of being conscious, and lack the neurological features that seem, as far as we can tell, to be necessary to support consciousness. Dead people also give no sign of consciousness and also lack those features, at least after a sufficient period of decay.

So if those reasons are insufficient, scientifically speaking, to justify an assumption that post-mortem consciousness does not exist, they are presumably insufficient to justify an assumption that rocks do not possess consciousness.

Personally I believe (but can't prove) that there's more to consciousness than just electrical signals in my brain, but at the same time I'm aware that my physical brain is the organ I do my thinking with, and if it's not in a good state then thinking is a lot harder. Thus it's hard to imagine my consciousness existing separately from my brain. If I didn't have access to the usual apparatus I use to do my thinking with, then what's left?

Perhaps on some level the situation is like a 2-dimensional being not being able to comprehend what it would be like to live in three dimensions.

Isn’t that itself a sign of physical decline?