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Comment by jwrallie | Hacker News Reader

One crazy thing is, by being a descendant of the original life form, in a huge chain of reproduction relationships, all the information we have in our DNA about death in the form of autonomous fear responses come from beings that essentially never experienced death themselves.

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Actually, it is possible that some of them experienced the death of their brain before reproducing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00904...

And, FWIW, Jesus with an after-death erection was popular enough a motive to officially get banned by the church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostentatio_genitalium

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_erection#cite_ref-Steinb...

This is the sort of random stuff that keeps me coming back to HN. TIL!

> popular enough a motive

motif

Imagine being brain-dead after a serious accident, lying in a hospital bed on life support. And your family gives the go-ahead for the doctors to zap your butthole to collect your semen so they can reproduce you.

How did this ever pass an ethics commission?

>to zap your butthole to collect your semen

Jokes on them, I don't think semen is stored in the butthole (except in some cases temporarily after sex)

I don't know whether to upvote this or downvote this.

> rectal probe electroejaculation

Rectal is your butthole.

Wooosh

"Garp".

> the death of their brain before reproducing

La not-so-petite mort.

Interesting point. But I don’t think you must experience something to be afraid of it, even as a population. Nobody experienced the terror of a world ending nuclear war, large asteroid strike, or solar flare (alien invasion if you want to go that far), etc. and they still terrify a lot of people. Sometimes even more than death itself.

To be more pragmatic, it’s now pretty common today for people to die and modern medicine brings them back. For practical purposes the person was dead, by some other interpretations they weren’t, if you consider the only “real” death to be the permanent one.

it’s fairly simple:

clinical death = heart stops = reversible, depends on circumstances

brain death = irreversible = perma-dead. no one’s ever come back.

legal death = brain dead (not clinical) or court order (missing for X years/etc)

I’m putting the current medical definition aside, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and who knows what the next centuries redefine. For the longest time in human history “clinical death” was almost always followed by permadeath.

As the person doing the dying you can’t rationalize it as “no worries, it’s just clinical, I’ll be back”. You die, it’s light out, later on, a blink for you, you recover and are told “you were clinically dead”. You experienced death for all intents and purposes because I don’t think there’s a cognitive process that allows you to differentiate the stages. Heck, deep sleep might be how death “feels” like.

Do people fear death (excluding suffering) because of the threshold itself or the FOMO? Missing on what would come next?

These days I'm rather more concerned that a lot can come next.

The cessation of my sensory experience might be a very long time, but from my perspective random chance bringing me back would be instantaneous.

Fair enough, and I had the (mis?)fortune of watching folks go through that as an EMT.

For sure when clinical death starts (even if later reversed), some processes kick in that never would otherwise activate, totally agree. The commonality of near-death-experience suggests something very basal.

I had the misfortune to make some medical professionals watch me go through this :).

sorry to hear that and glad you are here to comment :)

The medical standard for death has equated it with brain death since at least 1981, though arguably it started in the 1960s. The history of the definition of death[1] is fascinating.

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5570697/

Counterpoint: I'm happy to know there is death.

I'm more afraid of not being able to die. Like either being reborn or having to live the same life forever (same seed for the universe, no randomness, ...) or some 'god' telling me 'welcome now sit here and yeah you live forever btw.'

That is a cool thought, though you meant to say never experienced death themselves before reproducing. The fear response allowed individuals to statistically reproduce more often. Evolution works at the population level not the individual.

I’m not a biologist or particularly knowledgeable about the subject but I thought the jury is still out on that depending on who you ask. I am a noob but I thought it works on the gene level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolutio...

the true anti-memetic

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