This seems like such an absurd conclusion to this, as though the opinions of other people of you are what matter when you functionally lose your personhood and then die.
Maybe a better focus would be that there often isn't a good way for a community to manage a person who suddenly becomes irrational because of an illness.
There may be others reading in the thread who also can relate to the personality of the teacher and may care about their affect on others when they are "not themselves".
For myself: I hope for assisted suicide before Alzheimer’s. I value me for me. Not-me I don’t value, and Alzheimer’s does not improve not-me over me. But people who cannot separate me from not-me (with whom not-me loses status for me)… I don’t care about them! (Philosophical mood.)
IMHO it is important to see which context people are coming from. Different culture, social acceptance, historic treatment options, etc. influence the response.
Also, dementia is not the only disease with a strong degenerative impact on character and behaviour e.g there is schizophrenia et al. What is common with many of these conditions that there is a strong individual component of progression and morbidity.
It is great that you have the option to make a choice for yourself. Others might decide to make other choices.
I don’t want to go that way either. If I start losing my mind to Alzheimer’s or dementia I don’t want to slowly turn unrecognizable to those who love me, fuck that shit. Give me something suitable and I’ll do it my damn self if needs be.
I know there are medical directives that can be put in place but they don't cover everything and they can't compel anyone to end my hypothetical misery, the most they can do is withdraw care.
I'm grateful for this story - it's powerful to see examples of autonomy at end of life - and contrasts starkly with the experiences many of us have with aging parents. End of life, at least in the US, can be deeply flawed and misery for all.
Sure, it is nice to be remembered well, if you deserve it, but I do not live for the opinions of others. This is slave mentality and pathetic. I care about being good, and if I am hated for that, then so be it. Sad, but better to be hated for being a good person than loved for being a mediocrity or a knave.
And to off yourself out of concern with how people remember you is a condemnation of our society, our lack of charity, our lack of magnanimity, and our selfish prioritization of convenience. Full throttle consumerism.
Jesus, Socrates, anyone who stands up against an immoral hierarchy. Rethink your thought
Or there are others trying to do good things and being hated for taking a courage to challenge things.
Care to name even a single objective good, and explain how exactly it is objectively good?
There's a world of difference between something being objectively a certain way, and between feeling really strongly some way about something and thinking that everyone else reasonable would feel the same way too. There are things that are encoded into (most of) our very instincts, things we (for the most part) find absolutely common sense, but this doesn't make them objective. I wish language was able to succinctly express these different levels of "being on the same page", but alas I don't believe it does at the moment, and abusing the word "objective" I can't say I love as an alternative.
If at any point we’d have stopped doing that, we wouldn’t be here to be arguing about it.
The devil’s advocate would probably also ask how it would be objectively good to protect baby Hilter, knowing that protecting his innocent infant life would lead directly to the deaths of millions.
Objective good does not exist, context is king.
If you observe any animal or living thing, you will generally see it behaving in ways that seek to actualize it as the kind of thing it is. The nature of a thing bounds the potentials it has, and so circumscribes the limits of what can be actualized; this is a basic feature of all things, living or not, that they are "causally composed", as it were. In any case, this activity is not necessarily conscious. No squirrel is thinking "Gee, I need to collect nuts to grow and nourish my body and avoid predators so that I can produce offspring and actualize X, Y, and Z." In such cases, the squirrel is moved by various inclinations and appetites whose proper satisfaction actualizes certain ends of "squirrelness". A good squirrel (not in the moral sense, but in the sense of it exemplifying squirrel nature) is one that is able to actualize these potentials and does so to realize its squirrel nature. A bad specimen is one that cannot or does not. So, if you get a squirrel addicted to meth, and all it does is do things that get it more hits of meth while neglecting or impeding the realization of its squirrel nature, then you have a failure or deviance opposed to the good of the squirrel. The same could be said of a squirrel that is lethargic or one that lacks limbs.
Human beings are no different in this general sense, save that human beings are able to a) comprehend their circumstances, at least somewhat, and b) choose between apprehended alternatives. This means human beings are moral agents. So, here, a human being bears a certain responsibility for his choices and actions. If he chooses to act against his nature, especially as a rational, moral, and social agent, then he is acting against his nature and thus against his good. And if he is acting in such a way while understanding that he is doing so, then he now also has moral culpability for his defective actions.
In short, to be the kind of thing you are by nature is what is good. The act in accord with your nature is what makes good actions. Death is not good per se, and to act to destroy yourself is opposed to your being human and thus to your good. To intentionally do so is morally evil. (This must distinguished from self-sacrifice for another, which can be in accord with human nature under certain circumstances, but it is not the case here with Kahneman.)
Quite the opposite - I agree with that, and that's why I think goodness is not an objectively evaluable property. At the risk of making you feel I'm twisting your words, you pretty much said it yourself: what the human good is, is at the very least subject to human nature. Therefore, your evaluation of goodness cannot be objective. You're at best speaking from the subjective perspective of a human being.
But if you now say this doesn't get to the heart of your overall reasoning, I agree.
Consider then if goodness is even more subjective than just being a human value - for example, imagine that individuals might have (if even just slightly but) differing natures and so differing values. This would mean that your evaluation of what's good and what the human nature is like is not going to be durable across people. Worse still, you may even consider scenarios where the nature of a person changes over time, or they may value different things given a specific context. This would mean that your evaluation of what's good and what's bad is no longer durable not just across people, but across contexts, situations, and even time itself.
Notably of course, this is logically indistinguishable from other people simply making a measurement error of the same supposedly objective property. So this all hinges on whether you (can) believe that instead of there being an ontic, fundamental property of goodness, one that you're properly accessing and others disagreeing aren't, your access is the same as anyone else's. And that regardless of whether such a property objectively exists, it may either not hold an observer invariant value, or you may never be able to tell to have learned that value.
The end point being that with the parents I have there was nearly a guaranteed outcome of only objectively bad things happening for me, for them, for people around me. During that state I saw my plan as honorable and wrote it down in what I was to leave to explain my actions.
The subject receives the object in the mode of the subject, yes, but this does not mean that knowledge of the objective is impossible.
You might enjoy “the unique and its property” by Max Stirner. An excellent philosophical book and especially relevant given that Alzheimer’s takes away the self…
> Maybe a better focus would be that there often isn't a good way for a community to manage a person who suddenly becomes irrational because of an illness.
Yes, this is the focus. Science has stalled when it comes to neurological disorders. But the response is love and understanding. I do not understand how someone would "sour" on a person because they have an illness. A very absurd conclusion indeed.
If I am ever diagnosed with one of those, I absolutely want the chance to end my life before I reach a stage I become a burden to my loved ones and can't give a trustable consent. I'd rather go too soon than too late.
If you think you’ll be a burden on your loved ones can we really say they’re your loved ones? This is a serious question. If you’re thinking that you’ll be a burden do you think that these people really love you?
At least I would want to let them use experimental drugs, or do anything to further the cause of curing Alzheimer’s.
But again, this is all far from the original article about an old man who decided to die because well, we don’t really know, he just didn’t see the point of living anymore.
And, just to make everything as heartwrenching as possible, in this series of short reels their mind is swiping through, they occasionally become the person you had loved, for some minutes. And you know that these moments will never get more common, only rarer, but you can't help but think that they're "still in there".
It is my firm belief that any sense of "me" would be long dead by this time. Keeping my body and scraps of my consciousness alive only to torment my loved ones, caregivers, and neighbors would be a cruelty that would serve no purpose. I hope that I don't ever have to make this choice, but I also hope that, if I am ever diagnosed, I will have the chance to make this choice and avoid such suffering.
Yes.
Did I say that it was easy? Did I say that the spiritual way through all this was just pretending like everything is OK? No, it’s a very difficult process.
Avoiding suffering is impossible. Choosing to die to avoid suffering does not guarantee non-suffering. Only understanding suffering and where it originates can get rid of suffering, and you don’t do that by avoiding it.
For many other neuro-psychiatric diseases, we know that moments of psychosis are reversible, at least to some extent, with drugs and therapy and the kindness of others. The same is manifestly not true, tragically, for dementia: everything lost is gone forever.
A person with late state Alzheimer's, are they conscious? Do they still have "spirit" ψυχή? Is it the same person, or the person moved on? Are they human anymore?
Sorry I have no answers.
It’s because we associate so much with our experience as memories that makes us think that that is what we are. Are people with Alzheimer’s the same person? No, they’re different people. This is why we’re not allowed to just go around killing people with Alzheimer’s and dementia.
The thing that makes us alive is the constant change and activity in the body. If you say, someone does not change, that someone is the same throughout their whole life. That amounts to calling something dead, still, unchanging, lifeless.
These people with dementia, they still have a personality don’t they? I know my friend’s mother does. And my friends, father who died a few months back with Alzheimer’s. Yes, he was angry and had outbursts that were 100% uncharacteristically not like his old behavior. But behavior does not dictate who you are is signals that we still have a consciousness. And that is who we are. We are not our memories. We are not our current form of expression. We are our consciousness. Because our consciousness loses the function of accessing memories does not make us any more us.
You are not your memory. You are consciousness. You are the thing that reads memories.
But again, this drifted so far from the point of the article. This man killed himself not for his current suffering, but for his perceived future suffering. He was afraid of change he was afraid of what that change meant. He wanted people to see the same dead person That people saw him in life. A constant unchanging perception.
Alzheimers destroys this stream. All of a sudden, key formative experiences that made me me disappear irreparably, and so what survives is not me, it is a new consciousness formed of other experiences (mostly a subset of the ones I had, though Alzheimers can also sometimes create fake memories from pieces of real memoeies, conjectures, maybe even dreams or old desires etc). And while this is a consciousness, it is not a regular human consciousness, since it doesn't have anything similar to the regular human uninterrupted stream of experience, it is a consciousness made up of fragments of the consciousness of another person. And it is uniquely well positioned to hurt the people that the original person loved the most in the world, without realizing they are doing so. Plus, the life of the new person inhabiting your mind will be, inevitably, horrible. Because, again, they will be in constant shock and confusion because of their missing, incomplete, disordered memories.
So yes, the person we're talking about took a choice to avoid this horrid change. He was afraid of change, yes, because he knew well how horrible said change is, entirely inevitably so. It's normal to be afraid of horrible change. If someone is about to cut your leg without anesthesia, it's normal and good to be afraid of said change, and try to avoid it if you can.
Either it does or you’re claiming to be religious and implying you know for sure what happens after we die.
Do you know what happens after we die? If you do, can you tell me how you know it?
It is quite simple actually, you are dead and you as a whole only exist as a memory in other people's brains and your identity as paperwork, tombstones and for those that couldn't refrain from attracting attention history books, old journals artworks and memorials. Your molecules and atoms are disponible for anything else the cycle of nature needs. Expecting anything else is at best delusional.
The other poster responded to what happens, but here is the how do we know part. We understand very well how physics works, up to some small gaps that are irrelevant here. We know that information about the contents of your mind can't be transmitted outside your body in a way that would not be picked up by some of our sensors. People have tried to actually measure if there is any emanation from the body as a person dies, and there simply isn't any, in any spectra. So, there is no possibility of a soul living the body. Plus, any concept of an afterlife has no place where it could happen. There is no place on earth, in the clouds or underground, for an afterlife to take place in.
So, unless you think all of science is dramatically mistaken, we know with very good certainty that an afterlife is not a real possibility.
I think it’s a pretty fuckin dumb question.
Gatekeeping “love” behind service of ceaseless emotional toil with a smile is ridiculous.
Acknowledging that the things you love are a huge pain in the ass sometimes and keeping on loving them is perfectly healthy.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Maybe people are able to answer that question by themselves and don't need the judgement of other people answering differently.
It is extremely exhausting to try and be ‘understanding’ of someone that does everything to sabotage themselves.
you don't want dementia because it damages and hurts you and everything and everyone around you
(my grandpa physically attacked grandma multiple times in his last year)
They do matter.
Being concerned with how your behavior affects your family or your community, and the opinion they have of you, above your own self-interest, is how good parents, good friends, good citizens, and so on, are made.
You've changed the meaning behind the original comment in a subtle but important way. The original commenter wasn't concerned about their effects on other people, they were concerned about how the disease would ruin their public image. Maybe they didn't mean that but it's what they wrote.
This distinction matters because those people whose top priority is their public perception (i.e. social status) are never "good people". It's normal to care about your social status to some degree but it shouldn't be the first thing you consider.
Whether we should care about that or not is a philosophical conversation, I suppose. I would take the side of if we care about what people think about us when we are alive, surely we should care what they think of us when we are dead. Otherwise, we only value their opinion of us as a function of what they will do for/to us, which seems not great.
I really don't want my family's last memories of me to be that. Yeah my wife remembers when her grandma was of sound mind, and has some good memories with her back then, but they stopped due to the disease.
Everyone should be entitled to their own opinions on how they want to be remembered. I would rather be allowed to pass in sane mind.
The important point is this: are you causing emotional, psychological, physical distress in the real world to those you care about when you have this disease? Yes or no. That's what I care about. Whether they are able to remember me well despite that, or poorly because of that should be completely secondary.
Sure, we can think about how the burdens of caring for our family can be lessened as they age, or how we may help reduce that burden for our family, but family does have the duty to care for its members, and to place such considerations above the intrinsic value of human life is very sad indeed.
This is equally true of conditions like paranoid schizophrenia or psychopathy. Sometimes a person is just born with wiring that makes you dangerous to others. Does this mean that everyone around them must have the magnanimity and charity to them attacking people at random?
Paranoid schizophrenia have lower compliance rates and fairly large collateral damage. Psychopathy is a trait not a disease, but again, issue is that they do not cooperate and dont want to "cure". Psychopaths are fine as they are from their point of view.
It is just their victims who mind.
I watched both of my parents deteriorate in the end. The morphine blotted out my father's ability to form long term memory, if it wasn't in front of him things were like they had been before so much morphine was needed. There can be no value in such "life".
As far as I'm concerned not allowing people to end the suffering is a form of sadism.
I suspect this thread will go like many have in the past: there are two camps. The first has never seen a bad death and has a lot of opposition to people choosing to end their life. The second has seen a bad death and a lot of people would choose suicide before reaching that point. If it is a contempt for human life that means people have contempt for their own life and that doesn't make much sense. I can look at myself: I have been dealt a presumably genetic killer, I saw what it did to my mother and I will not allow that to happen to me. Do I have contempt for my own life because I expect the end to be suicide?
I think clinging to life is partially rooted in an egoist/solipsistic metaphysics that you yourself are all that matters (to yourself at least, of course). Relax, we're just a small part of the cosmos. Ancient and immortal :)
But we should put guardrails around if the reason for assisted suicide is not pressure from relatives, depression, etc.
But it being a hard topic does not imply the easy solution of banning it.
(Although there are cases I would be ok with it without--to me, what's important is the mind. To me personhood extends from first consciousness to last consciousness. Once you are sure the last consciousness has passed I attach no value to the body that remains.)
The relevant word during our fascist rise is schadenfreude. People not only want to see them drop dead for having the audacity to be dirty and unhoused - they want to see them suffer, hard, the entire time.
You gotta find a way to stop making the inflicting of pain on others pleasurable.
But even at aface value, more rational long-term approach would be to treat it, surely