Monday was my 46th birthday and likely my last
aaronwinborn.com
aaronwinborn.com
As a Drupal fanatic who built my career on it, and a person also dealing with a terminal illness (though I have a couple years left, if all goes well), it's upsetting to see that someone who gave me so much, now has to go through all that. I feel genuine pain and am quite legitimately upset now. I wish Aaron and his family all the best (considering).
I've occasionally asked other people what they thought the worst problem in the world was. Nobody has ever answered with my answer: that all of our loved ones are going to die. The utter inevitability of death within a few decades of birth is so thoroughly taken for granted that people are vastly more concerned about the NSA or carbon dioxide than about literally saving the lives of everyone they care about.
We need a working backup and recovery plan for people as soon as possible. How soon it will happen will probably depend a great deal on how soon a critical mass of people can be made to see it as an actual engineering problem urgently requiring a solution.
That said, in my oppinion a big part of what makes life worthwhile IS that it is finite.
[I am working with the assumption that by "backup and recovery plan for people" essentially you are talking about making people immortal by backing up their mind before the body dies and somehow keeping it working, e.g. recovering it to a different body.]
One mistake people make when discussing cryopreservation is considering it in isolation. Reviving frozen minds will likely require some form of basic molecular nanotech, and this same technology can in principle convert dirt to habitats on Earth and in space.
As for my opinion about dying: fuck that. I don't want to die. I don't see any reason for any of us to pass away. If we can fix this, then let's do it.
That's not what I was talking about.
Reviving frozen minds
Frozen. Minds. Say What?
will likely require some form of basic molecular nanotech,
Wild assertion.
and this same technology can in principle convert dirt to habitats on Earth and in space.
Wild speculation.
To sum it up - you have nothing. Asserting "OH the tech we will have by then will magically fix it and we will live in space" is not a solution. It's not relevant to you and me anyway because we will likely not be able to backup and restore minds during our lifetime.
Additionally, bodies frozen today will NEVER be revived because the body and brain are utterly damaged in the process (http://www.skepdic.com/cryonics.html).
I was refering to the "backup and recovery plan for people" part of your comment, following the best idea about it we nowdays have.
> Frozen. Minds. Say What?
Yup.
>> will likely require some form of basic molecular nanotech,
> Wild assertion.
It's not a wild assertion, it's the basic assumption of this concept. Cryonics by definition is "let's freeze dying people 'till we crack nanotech". See also [0].
>> and this same technology can in principle convert dirt to habitats on Earth and in space.
> Wild speculation.
If we get nanotech (even just by reprogramming nanotech that is already around us) then this is the consequence. It's not a speculation - this comes straight from the premise. Actually, cheap construction abilities should come much earlier than revival. Notice that we already made some progress in reprogramming viruses and bacteria, as well as using protocells to construct structures (there was a TED talk about it some time ago).
> To sum it up - you have nothing. Asserting "OH the tech we will have by then will magically fix it and we will live in space" is not a solution.
The thing I was arguing is that if we get the tech to escape death, then the same tech will solve overpopulation problem earlier, as it's much easier. Therefore, we don't have to consider overpopulation when discussing whether or not we should freeze people.
2) Explain to me what a frozen mind is. Explain to me how a mind can be frozen, present evidence. Present evidence that the mind is present and intact in a frozen brain. Explain how the mind can be restored, present evidence.
3) That is not the definition (even if it was, my point would still be valid), it is an obvious ruse to get around a problem with he whole concept of freezing and reviving people that is obvious to anyone who has ever eaten frozen broccoli. Also "reprogramming viruses -> nanotech that can do everything": Non sequitur.
4) Again, you are just asserting things. You are making a positive claim and you need to present evidence.
5) I understand that you claimed that before. But you are just pulling that out of the air without evidence or even a good explanation or any reasoning.
6) I have a canvas with the original painting of the mona lisa that was made before the one we can now see at the museum. You're lucky! I would like to sell it to you! Please note that you can not see the painting at the moment because it has been preserved by a sophisticated technique called "meh". So the canvas might look empty at the moment but future nanotechnology will be able to restore it. Interested?
Name any other that could work for people dying now.
> 2) Explain to me what a frozen mind is. Explain to me how a mind can be frozen, present evidence.
Frozen mind is a frozen brain. Unless you believe mind is somewhere else, if you freeze the brain you freeze the mind.
> Present evidence that the mind is present and intact in a frozen brain. Explain how the mind can be restored, present evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation#Temperatur... Worked with dogs so far. Just for a very short time (3 hours), but it's a start.
> Also "reprogramming viruses -> nanotech that can do everything": Non sequitur.
Why? Reprogramming viruses is a start and a way to possibly bootstrap our own nanotech. There is nothing blocking us in principle except "it sounds too crazy to be true".
> 4) Again, you are just asserting things. You are making a positive claim and you need to present evidence.
Evidence that nanotech works? Every single living thing around you. Evidence that we already can use it to build stuff? Just google around. Some random things I was refering to in previous comment:
http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_belcher_using_nature_to_grow...
http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_armstrong_architecture_that_...
> 5) I understand that you claimed that before. But you are just pulling that out of the air without evidence or even a good explanation or any reasoning.
The line of reasoning is like this: we will most likely need some form of nanotech to repair damages done to brain cells by freezing, unless you can think of another method that would preserve the structure. This technology is based on manipulating stuff on molecular level. Since dirt contains most of the things we need to build pretty much anything (what do you think living organisms are built from?), then cheap assembly of non-living things a) seems a much easier problem than fixing living stuff, and b) can be done by simpler versions of the said technology.
The detailed lines of reasoning can be found in Drexler's "Engines of Creation 2.0" (http://www.wowio.com/users/product.asp?BookId=503) and other works referenced there.
> 6) I have a canvas with the original painting of the mona lisa that was made before the one we can now see at the museum. You're lucky! I would like to sell it to you! Please note that you can not see the painting at the moment because it has been preserved by a sophisticated technique called "meh". So the canvas might look empty at the moment but future nanotechnology will be able to restore it. Interested?
Explain to me how "meh" method works. How it preserves information contained in the painting. If it makes physical and information-theoretical sense, then maybe I'll consider buying it :P.
It's hard to present examples for technology that we don't really have right now, but there's this concept of reasoning from first principles, and the said principles do not prohibit molecular nanotechnology better that the one already existing (that is, life).
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_machine#Examples_of_...
http://www.cosmolearning.com/courses/richard-feynman-lecture...
Now imagine we're talking about a time when the average life span is one thousand years (or one million, or one billion), and the vast majority of humans got to experience less than 10% of that. Well, that's what is happening now.
That's not to say life is sad. I would much rather have 30 years of life than 0 years. But life can be so much more than it is today.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.100
http://www.noozhawk.com/local_news/article/101710_hal_finney...
(I'm unsure whether Aaron got a response from Hal.)
Hal's response to his diagnosis has been defiant. He got the tracheotomy and is determined to live a long, productive, and worthwhile life.
I have great reverence for Aaron's concern for the burden he would be on his family, and I certainly don't claim to understand what it would be like to be in his shoes. But I personally am a big supporter of Hal's philosophy. I encourage Aaron and other ALS sufferers to consider this path. Never in history has an intellectually constructive and satisfying life with ALS been as technologically feasible as it is now.
[Edited to reflect the first link.]
Edit 2: It's also worth noting that ALS is what has crippled Stephen Hawking. He got a tracheotomy in 1985, at which point his "A Brief History of Time" was only partially completed. He finished it, and has made many important professional contributions since.
It also scares the crap out me knowing this is a genetic disease and two of my family members have already succumbed to it. This is known as Familial ALS. Genetically speaking, it comes down to a 50/50 chance I could get it. I can get screened to know for sure if I'll get it, but it requires you do counseling before you even take the tests, considering how it could change your life overnight.
Here's some facts about Familial ALS:
http://www.alsa.org/als-care/familial-als/familial-als.html
- Familial ALS- occurring more than once in a family and accounts for 5 to 10% of all cases.
- In 1991 a team of ALS Association-funded researchers linked familial ALS to chromosome 21. In 1993 the research team identified the precise defect, a change in the DNA for the protein called copper-zinc superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1). Researchers since have found more than 100 mutations in different places in the coded DNA instructions for making SOD1.
It's frustrating because it seems like every time they get close to finding THE mutated gene, they identify several hundred others. It's like a game where the goal posts in a game are constantly changing.
- EDIT: for clarity.
Assuming the 50-50 estimate is accurate, the OP has a 50% chance of being released of this dreadful fear by being shown not to have the gene himself, which its a huge gain. On the other hand, I doubt it'd be much worse to know for sure to be a carrier of the disease. In the best case, there is much emotional work that can be done in putting their affairs in order and being a much need grief process.
Here is a link to the inheritance chart which describes most situations and the likely hood it will passed on, and to which side (male or female) passes it on.
I remember a couple of years ago coming out a clinic where I was told I have a kidney disease and if not treated within the next half decade I could die of kidney failure in the next 15 to 20 years and remember feeling pist off and indignant about it like: "Dammit! Why me? I'm a good person. I didn't do anything majorly wrong in life!" and now that I'm 4 1/2 months into my treatment I am being humbled by amazing people who have been dealt a much, much, much worse hand in life who have a better outlook on life.
I sure hope you don't get it. And whether or not you believe in God, I say to you, God be with you, and may he watch over you and your family.
I just wanted to clarify some points. I'm not sure what you mean about "the mutated gene". SOD1 mutations definitely cause ALS. It's just that there isn't a single SOD1 mutation that's responsible. Over 100 different mutations of the same gene can lead to the disease. Other genes are also implicated in ALS, such as TDP-43 and FUS. Sure there are other genetic factors responsible for ALS, many of which are yet unknown. But these are known factors.
I would be very hesitant to sequence my SOD1 gene to be honest. Let's say it came up with a new mutation. Not all mutations will lead to disease. So while this may not cause you to get ALS in the long run, it may lead to you worrying incessantly as you get older. Furthermore, most of these 100+ mutations have only been found in a single family or even a single patient. It's quite possible there are other genetic polymorphisms in these families that make these patients susceptible to their SOD1 mutations. Also there are examples of SOD1 mutations that aren't 100% penetrant. That is if you have the mutation, you aren't 100% guaranteed to get the disease. For instance, in scandinavian populations the aspartate 90 to valine mutation is recessive.
Basically there are a lot of complicating factors. Even if your SOD1 gene comes back as the normal sequence, you couldn't know you were safe. That is unless you knew that your grandfather and aunt actually had SOD1 mutations. Of course these are only my opinions as a scientist. I am not a physician.
He lived in a Buddhist monastery at one point; life is suffering. He'll soon leave his loved ones, and he knows it's very much sooner than later.
What can you do in such a situation? Clinging to life, little time remaining, what to do? I thought something ridiculous, like go on retreat until the end, but right where he is, with his wife and kids is probably just perfect.
They're all being transformed by the experience. Yours is not to reason why rings true. Who's to say that an "early" death is not in fact a gift for the living?
You've got to be kidding. (A very dark kind of humor, I guess)
Inevitable death awaits while we throw ourselves into the business of living. When a loved one dies, that breaks you down, melts the ice block of arrogant I-know-what's-up thinking.
That is absolutely a gift to the living, and his wife and kids are getting that gift deeply, in their bones -- I've heard it called, eating Buddha's rice.
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying I don't think it's worth losing somebody you love dearly.
To each his own, I guess.
It dawned on me years later that for all of us affected (ripped apart) by his death (age 24) that we were given a gift: suffering.
Looking back, I left my comfortable box -- dropped out of college, shaved my head and entered a monastery -- trying to make sense of it.
That broke me, several family members, and his closest friends in a way that a so called natural death might not do since it was his choice and our guilt.
> That broke me
That's sad. But perhaps if you had had a more natural reaction, that the death was a bad, sad, thing. And not a good thing, you would not feel broken.
Broken, suicide does that to the living.
Mindless suffering is indeed something of no value. But mindful suffering for me has been extraordinarily valuable.
For example, I recently did my first triathlon. The training had plenty of suffering. The race was, in some ways, miserable. But because I embraced the suffering, I've grown a lot. Not just physically, but also mentally.
Losing people close to me worked similarly. The suffering was enormous. But so was the growth.
I know it would be absurd and there is a good reason we punish people who give the "gift of death" with no regards to some bizarre learning experience for the victims.
This is the assumption I'm struggling with reading these reactions to virtualwhys. There is a sentiment that death is an enemy, a veritable monster; but more to the point, there is a sentiment that anyone who does not believe this is deranged and must be attacked.
You _did_ "call to the dirt" virtualwhys coping mechanism, because you explicitly called his reaction unnatural. Can't you see that he is grieving, too? It is a quieter, more subtle thing; neither maudlin nor overwrought, and he has quietly stepped back from the emotionally charged reactions.
But if you look, other people are stepping forward and relating their own experiences of loss in similar terms.
Personally, I find the "death is bad" to be an outgrowth of our attachment to life; an impossible attachment.
At the very least virtualwhys has received double the insensitivity of the perceived insensitivity of his initial post. You're stomping all over his experience with a friend's suicide: you _know_ that, right?
I wouldn't ask you to feel differently, but I would ask you to understand that not everyone views death the same way you do.
"Since people will eventually die, it's better not to grow attached, even more, I should welcome the death since it will inevitably happen, and not only that, the death will actually benefit me."
> You're stomping all over his experience with a friend's suicide: you _know_ that, right?
It's one thing to process death and grieving by looking for the good in it.
It's another to tell people it's a good thing, and that life is suffering so welcome death - and your death will help other people.
It's like he's telling people "don't bother living", there's no point to it.
After all he was told by his monastery how to grieve, and he's telling everyone else here how to grieve (although he did apologize if his views bothered someone).
If you simply relate what you are doing OK, but once you want people to follow your views you must also be willing to accept some opinions back, and it's OK if you disagree. (And obviously actually changing is entirely the choice of the person.)
Plus, keep in mind that he is hardly the only person reading this.
But, all that said, and reading your reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5896351 I do get your point about what I am doing. It's just I VERY strongly disagree with what he said, and I couldn't just leave it unremarked.
i understand what he's saying.
to frame it in a slightly different way: there's a gift of understanding that has the potential to be far more powerful than the pain/grief/torment of the death.
So we'll have to agree to disagree that fucking death is a gift.
You should stop belittling other peoples viewpoints, just because it does not align with your own.
And in fact I find that "viewpoint" totally incomprehensible. I can asure you, I loved my mother much, much before cancer killed her at 52. That was not a gift, that was her body malfunctioning and our ignorance about how to fix it.
I have no need for death or grief to love or to value life, thank you very much.
And I don't keep my mouth shut about this because I worry about the real consequences of that philosophy. At any other moment of human history acceptance of death was perhaps the only sane thing to do, because there was no alternative. But we have now a scientific civilization and we should be fighting it, instead of rationalizing it.
I have a friend who's a very dedicated doctor, and a very dedicated Buddhist. So much so that they're arranging a version of the charnel ground [1] meditation. But rather than sit in an actual charnel ground, my friend has requested photos from the research facilities that study human decomposition.
To the average American, that sounds hopelessly morbid. But people practicing it see it as necessary to fully understanding death. And thereby, to understand and appreciate life.
I don't think you are being asked to be silent, I think this is a question of attachment to life yielding suffering through anger.
What cannot be changed must be accepted, and to you calm acceptance looks like complacency--to the extent that you insist that _no_ one could be free from your horror at death, and anyone who claims otherwise is subject to 'Stockholm Syndrome.'
I seem to hear you saying "Well excuse _me_ for being attached to life." I am of the opinion that attachment to life is readily apparent; of course we are attached to life, that is was it _means_ to live.
It's just... death is just a thing. It is. And it is an experience like any other. To appreciate its unique aspects is part of life. Even should we conquer death, we cannot change the fact that death has happened.
...Now, is it insensitive to be talking about death like this in a topic about someone's death? Maybe. But I am confused, somehow, at a violent reaction to a very contemplative perspective on death.
I really just don't know what you mean by that. I imagine a world in which no-one dies and someone asking, 'What's life?' and people still quite meaningfully pointing to living things and going 'Well, it's that.' Just as I can imagine that people who haven't grieved can still love.
Grief and death perhaps serves as a proof of love and life, I suppose. If they weren't there what would you lose? But I don't see how they're meant to have IFF relationships.
I actually worry about abolishing death, because then what are we? What would define the human existence? Would love be the same, without the fear of loss?
You said it quite well in your last paragraph actually. :)
Yeah why bother with fixing >20% infant mortality, or eradicating polio, or dying from infections we now easily cure with antibiotics. We should had accepted that as part of life and keep dying more, more painfully and earlier.
I don't think he's talking about improving the length of life, but instead not looking for the fountain of life, or anything else that would create those who live forever.
If we all lived forever, then there would be no children, or parents really. If we really lived forever, not drastically longer lives, Earth wouldn't be able to sustain any sort of birthrate.
So yes, we need to attempt to push death off for as long as possible, that's also part of living. Think about a world without babies, or puppies. Just middle aged people who don't die... It would be very different and no one can say good or bad, because humans are really bad at those kind of simulations. We are overly optimistic.
That doesn't mean I'm on death's side, or going to go rob banks for death. Life's pretty swell. But my life is much better, and each moment of it sweeter, in a way that came from experiencing traumatic, irreversible loss.
I'll grant that's weird. But, then, we're made out of meat. The whole thing's weird.
I've experienced the deaths of several close loved ones. Death wasn't a gift to them or others. It was a reminder of the importance of living life. It's life that's the gift, not death.
Everyone eventually dies. This is a meaningless sentence.
> When a loved one dies, that breaks you down, melts the ice block of arrogant I-know-what's-up thinking.
And it does a whole lot more than just that, and the cost is way too high for such a minor lesson.
> That is absolutely a gift to the living
Are you crazy? A gift? A gift is something the recipient wants. No one wants the lesson you are offering (even assuming it's something valuable, which I'm not convinced is even true).
I'm not offering anything, when I say gift I'm certainly not talking about a person doing the giving.
"the cost is way too high for such a minor lesson", a minor lesson like death?
I meant the lesson about "arrogant I-know-what's-up thinking".
Death is way too high a price to learn such a thing.
I find your sentiment downright cruel. Excuse me while I go cry and refrain from punching a wall.
ETA: Fallout from death may be construed as a "gift" insofar as some good may come from something bad, but that doesn't make the death itself a gift. Discovering that the wall desperately needed repair anyway doesn't make punching it, out of anticipatory grief, good.
But this was exactly my experience of deep loss.
Fuck you. Fuck your sanctimonious fatalism.
Okay, maybe a few more than two words.
The day I turned twelve, we found my father dead on the kitchen floor. He'd had a cerebral aneurism in the night, before going to bed. No warning signs, he was in fine shape. I sank into a deep, deep depression for about twenty years; I feel like I lost a vast chunk of time to that. I did very little beyond going through the motions of life and not quite being gloomy enough to kill myself.
It may be different if you know the end is coming. I don't know.
But I would much rather have had a father as I tried to make sense of who I'd be during my teen and early adult years than this so-called "gift".
Fuck you, and fuck Buddha's rice.
However your foul-mouthed response to another person's point of view is uncalled for. You'll probably say "F You" to me also, but if that's the case let me say I think you need some help getting over your self-pity and bitterness about the cards life dealt you. We all lose our parents at one point or another. I lost my mom to ALS. We knew the end was coming, and it was a long, slow, agonizing time. A cerebral aneurism, in comparison, could almost seem like a gift. Or at least a preferable way to go.
Fuck fatalism, fuck acceptance of the inevitable. I'm an agnostic, I don't think there's anything else beyond this life, and having it ripped away that suddenly and unexpectedly is a raw deal, not a gift. I don't know if it'd be preferable to a long, agonizing death; I haven't experienced one of those in my family. Maybe you do end up being fatalistic if you have to live through one of those. I dunno.
It's been almost thirty years. I'm largely over it.
If you think the solution to that way of thinking is for someone to die, that's like thinking the only way to learn about the dangers of a hot stove is to burn your hand on it.
I mean, I don't disagree (though I think you're mischaracterizing his post--he didn't say it was a problem in need of a solution, he was merely saying that death has that effect), but it seems like your example is counter to your point.
Well, I've never been shot either but I still think I'd rather not ^^;
Maybe, someone, let's say, a parent or guardian, telling you that touching a hot stove will burn you, and you taking this seriously.
The tone of his post seemed to me to indicate that he was generally insensitive, and only the death of a loved one could snap him out of it. If he had enough empathy, he would have learned more early on that he should be more aware and respectful of others' feelings.
I _want_ to do what this guy is doing ( http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html ), yet I am still living in the city, writing iPhone apps, rather than living on a farm building machinery. Why? Because I'm still just "thinking about it": I haven't reached a broken-down moment.
It really takes quite a powerful kick to get people to make real changes.
What if somebody you loves dies and suddenly you find that spending time with that person would have meant much more to you than iPhone apps or farm machines?
If you honestly didn't think you knew - or at the very least had a good idea - what was up, ever, then you'd be a complete social wreck; someone gibbering in the corner about how you couldn't tell the difference between a family member who wanted to kill you or hug you.
The world behaves according to rules, people do too, and we make predictions based upon our guesses as to those rules. Generally we're reasonably correct with those guesses. That's how the vast majority of the population behaves with varying levels of understanding and faith in those rules and guesses.
It's not arrogant to think you know what's up. Of course, sometimes you'll be wrong, and you probably shouldn't profess absolute certainty in your predictions, but growing up should have taught you that fairly effectively without the need for anyone to die.
my wife and i often talk of her life and death as a gift to us and as her two brothers. we see imprints of her in the bonds between us that were galvanized following her death. it's not something that words can convey, i've tried and failed many times, but her gift is an unparalleled understanding of life and a strength that has the potential to be far more powerful than the grief/pain/torment of losing her.
it's more than just a coping mechanism.
Everyone who's experienced it?
My mother's death was in many ways her last gift to me. I would not have traded her for what I have gained. But neither would I erase the experience of loss, as painful and traumatic as it was. I am a much better person, a much stronger person, a much more compassionate person.
Nothing is purely negative, and I think it's important to keep that in mind. Especially when one's attitude and reactions can amplify or diminish the good parts.
If you want to look for coping mechanisms in this discussion, consider all the denial around the inevitability of death.
It sounds like you and bcgraham are in agreement, just meaning different things by the word "gift".
Gifts are generally things given willingly. I think you might want to rephrase.
Would you apply the word "gift" to any horrible genocide/natural disaster that has happened? Perhaps you would, but for most people, "Lesson" will resonate better.
I wouldn't call suffering a lesson, it just is; that is the gift, the whole thing.
That's horrible. Life is not suffering, life is joy and happiness. Does Buddhism really believe such a terrible thing?
Or something like that.
virtualwhys: If this really is what you meant, then please, start using a different word.
He indeed meant that life is suffering. English speakers today translate the word as "suffering", "pain", "disappointment", or perhaps "striving" (a sentiment you will find echoed in Ecclesiastes).
Buddha also spoke about the cause of suffering, and suggested that if you can escape from the cause, you can escape from the suffering.
I personally disagree with this advice: Why would I want to escape from love, hate, pain, joy, and everything else? But I don't disagree with the basic teaching. Everyone has a cross to bear.
I think of it like this: when the untrained mind is enjoying something, there are two aspects to that experience: the appreciation of the beauty or pleasure you derive from it, but also the attachment, the clutching or grasping and anxiety which would follow that thing being taken away.
I think "no attachment" is advocating that you get yourself in a mental state where you can have one without the other: to appreciate something while it lasts but not clutch to it or get hung up on it when it passes.
Let's say you don't own a car, and take the bus to work. Then someone gives you a car, you are happy! A week later someone steals your car. You are back to riding the bus. Your first day back on the public transport is probably filled with quite a bit of suffering even though it is no different that the bus ride you took a week ago.
It's also possible to be too attached to joy for fear that if it ceases it will cause you pain. To goal is to be happy despite external events.
I'm not a Buddhist or an expert in Buddhism by any mean. But being born and raised in an South East Asian that is strongly culturally tied with Buddhism, I believe the phrase "life is suffering" isn't too far away from what I normally heard and read. Of course, different Buddhism sect will have different idea on the whole "what life is", but interestingly, I recalled reincarnation being considered not as a gift, but actually a curse. You should strive to live your life free of all the meaningless greeds, emotions and bad deeds so that you won't be reborn, and hence relieve from life's suffering.
Of course, I realize the whole thing might sounds bizarre with a lot of Westerners, as so does many of Buddhism's teaching (emotions is bad etc). But keeps in mind, personal happiness is specifically a Western ideal, one that has been spreading more and more to the East, but still incompatible with many of the old traditional ideals here (Note: I'm not saying either way is better or worse, I'm still trying to figure that out).
I really respect your decision to bow out of the emotionally charged conflict in the thread.
...However, I am not inclined to be so wise. If you're reading this, please try to understand my position even if you feel affronted by it; bare in mind also that there is some of my own emotion in this and I recognize I'm venting a bit.
For some people, emotions are a very public thing. They are shared with anyone and everyone nearby.
For some people, they are a quiet, contemplative thing. They are felt and shared only with those close to them.
What happens in public settings is that people that feel quietly are shunted out. They aren't heard, they don't express themselves because, by their nature, they don't have to.
Attachment to death seems immature to me. It seems like we have to trumpet again how awful death is, say the things that everyone knows.
Because that's the other thing about emotionally loud people: they have to make sure everyone's feeling the same things, that we're all on the same page.
virtualwhys experience with a close friend's suicide was criticized: he was told he was __grieving wrong__. The appalling rudeness of this is overlooked because virtualwhys, a quiet person, emotionally, stepped out rather than continue to feel like he was stepping on other people's emotions. Quietly emotional people respect other peoples' feelings.
Meanwhile, a lot of _other_ people are quietly relating their own grief in similar terms as virtualwhys.
Look, death is an experience. You can't change it. Even if we cure everything someday, that won't change the fact that we've lived and died. Wringing your hands about death is only additional suffering.
Because that's the beautiful thing about accepting death: you can make it more about life than loss. It is an experience of the vital things, the core things, the deep bonds and strong connections.
Aaron will die, with his family around him, still looking to the future and full of life. That is very profoundly beautiful. It is a gift. More to the point, it just _is_. It cannot be changed, but it can be appreciated.
Here's where I fall on virtualwhys side: to me, any other understanding of grief seems to be pretending you could possibly have control. Death forces us to see that we have no control--and when that is pointed out, _some_ of us can't handle it.
Yeah, that last part is a bit rude, and I apologize... somewhat.
So I thought I'd post a lecture from Alan Watts, on death, as observed from a western perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzZTK4SWwpg
Watts studied Zen in the 50's and tried to bring it back to the states in the 60's and 70's.
The time we get with our loved ones is the gift.
That's really where you get to experience the emotions that make you happy to be alive. Joy, love, hope, desire, anger, frustration, etc. I'll say that a NEAR death experience tends to be more of a gift, it happened to my brother and changed him drastically. Not all for the better, but much of it was good.
I think the idea of calling death a gift is bullshit. Yes, you can learn and grow from the death of a loved one, but that isn't a gift, it's the absence of their presence (the real gift) that makes you realize what you had.
To me, life without the lows and highs, is boring. That is because lows make people realize how special the high points are. But I know other people who would be content without either.
(Full disclosure: I work for PatientsLikeMe.)
[1] http://www.als.net/ [2] http://www.als.net/ALS-Research/ALS-Clinical-Trials/ [3] https://www.patientslikeme.com/conditions/9-als-amyotrophic-... [4] https://www.patientslikeme.com/patients/view/40
Imaging + Genome Sequencing + Blood Tests
Still pretty barbaric compared to what we'll see in the future, but useful while we drag ourselves forward.
Anecdote: I was bit by a tick about 2 weeks ago. To get a lyme disease/meningitis test done, I had to pay my copay ($30) at my primary doctor (for him to approve the tests) and then had to make another appointment to have my blood drawn and tested by Lab Corp (~$200). I then had to wait for my doctor to call my back because Lab Corp would not provide my results directly to me (!!!).
Like I said. Barbaric.
Because where I come from, if I was bitten by a tick I could book my primary doctor's appointment online, get the blood test done the same day at a walk in clinic without an appointment, and then phone the doctor's surgery two days later to get my test results...without paying anything.
I almost thought that once, but it's really easy to run through the facts:
1. Since the primary purchasers of health insurance are companies, the insurance companies grossly tilt their plans in the direction of companies. Individual plans are lackluster. The individual plans where I live don't even cover mental health services. Not even one.
2. Since companies are fallible, we cannot depend on them to honestly offer insurance to every worker who deserves it. For example, in Massachusetts, there is a mandate for companies with full time employees to provide a health insurance plan: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/29/companies-cut-hours-of... naturally, companies schedule for .1 less hours and leave you in the dust.
It seems that this is a total mess. Companies cannot be put in the crossfire of the health insurance debate with these unimplementable laws.
The only reasonable solution is to pay for it with the federal income tax. Competition and free markets are good, but not in this space. Would you like to find out the free market price for an ambulance after you were involuntarily hit by a bus and woke up in an ICU?
We live in a strange land of "freedom"
Pay out of property tax. Follow the money and keep the money loop as small as possible to maximize return on investment and minimize accounting losses.
99% of your lifetime medical expenses are going to be at the hospital closest to your home, most likely. Makes closing the loop simple and obvious.
If for political reasons you have to go county sales tax to pay for the county hospital, that works too.
Much like the most effective way to fund a local school system seems to be local prop tax rather than the feds or the UN or something.
"Companies cannot be put in the crossfire of ... with these unimplementable laws."
Its never slowed down any other regulation for any other reason in the past, ever, so may as well not start slowing down with health care.
If that happens my new home is going to have to figure out their property tax situation, though (NH property tax is one of the highest)
It's an empty word at this point. Freedom from what?
Unfortunately, because the Conservative party have frozen NHS funding, you'd have trouble getting that doctor's appointment, and the walk-in clinic would potentially bugger up your blood test, forget to put your NHS number on the sample, then call your doctor who would contact you a week later to tell you to go in again and have it re-done.
There's no good reason why we shouldn't be spending more to make sure that the service works properly, just right-wing ideology.
directly.
Whether it's better/cheaper to pay directly or indirectly is a separate issue worthy of its own debate, but either way TNSTAAFL.
This is the most important lesson of the whole discussion, having gone thru this. There's a direct analogy with rabies, if you know the animal is uninfected you can save yourself quite a bit of time, pain, and money. If you know its infected, well, treatment usually is wiser than waiting for death.
Bit by a dog? Eh, make it let go, and then walk away, no need to check for a rabies vaccination tag. After all, what are the odds? LOL
I don't know where you live but it is pretty standard to get a few vaccines (rabies included) when bitten by an unknown dog as a precaution.
Same reason people get tetanus shots with puncture wounds.
There's still a chance of having it even after the antibiotics. The chances of getting it even after taking a prophylaxis go down from around 3% to perhaps a little under 1%, but there's still a chance. And there are also other tick diseases that doxycycline doesn't work for. The most likely case is that mine was only attached for a little under 24 hours, which reduces the chances even further, but considering that if not treated right away it's basically as bad as AIDs it's still kind of alarming.
Do you see a doctor after every time you get into a car? Because that is far more likely to kill you than just about anything you can think of.
> If left untreated, infection can spread to joints, the heart, and the nervous system. Lyme disease is diagnosed based on symptoms, physical findings (e.g., rash), and the possibility of exposure to infected ticks; laboratory testing is helpful if used correctly and performed with validated methods. Most cases of Lyme disease can be treated successfully with a few weeks of antibiotics.
Why do they even test for it? Don't they just start antibiotic treatment for it?
To a crude first approximation, a new antibiotic gets a fixed number of uses in the environment before it becomes ineffective in the environment. Its bad medicine to "waste" a valuable use of a fixed supply of an expensive product. You can save 50 million lives of actually sick people, or just provide 50 million placebos.
Also most dr. have a huge aversion to making people sick, and there are very few antibiotics indeed (none?) that don't have a measurable chance of killing the user or making them sick. Amoxocilian makes me pretty sick. Doing a course of it "for fun" would be incredibly unwise. Of course if it were "take the amoxocilian and get sick, or the infected leg has to be chopped off" well maybe that's worth some puking and fever.
So if your odds of infection are 0.5% but the odds of horrendous digestive system meltdown are 5% and death is a 0.1% likelihood, you're better off getting tested.
This is like the old "why not remove everyone's appendix?" question. Because removing everyone's would kill more people than appendicitis currently kills for a net negative.
Except when you get bitten by a tick and have stage-1 Lyme disease symptoms like a huge swollen bulls eye, your odds of infection are more like 99.9%. If someone is getting tested for getting bit by a tick, they most likely have some sort of symptoms.
> You've just defined the recipe for developing antibiotic resistant "other things". Doxocycline-resistent... donno UTI or STD or gum disease or whatever. That would suck if STDs became resistant, now incurable.
I thought that was more likely from the hundreds of millions of pounds of antibiotics used in factory farming, not preventative medicine.
When a bunch of us were exposed to a person who 48-hours later came down with severe meningitis (coma), they dosed us all with cow pills of antibiotics. I'm sure they could have waited until we all got 105F fevers by the time the tests came back, but they took the risk of antibiotic resistance and pre-treated us all.
Labor and materials cost money. Someone has to pay.
LabCorp is not staffed with people trained to divulge and discuss your potentially serious diagnosis.
All but the smallest independent medical clinics have phlebotomists on site. If you want faster medical service, move to a more dense/develeped town. Most of us live in cities, for reasons quite like this.
A blood test is not useful for a recent tick bite. It takes 4-6 weeks for the antibodies to be present in detectable quantities. For Lyme, you observe the possible site of infection for a few days, if it is swelling or reddening (with or without the characteristic "bulls-eye" pattern), then you get antibiotics. Doxycycline is popular, but it's a long (21-day) course, so a good doc will not prescribe it casually.
Meningitis is either bacterial or viral. The true test is analysis of spinal fluid (this one goes to 11!), but it's a very fast-moving and dangerous infection. Regardless, a blood test is unlikely to be conclusive.
You can save the tick and send it off to a local lab for analysis. That'll tell you with a high degree of certainty if the tick had the spirochette. In some parts of the country, most do. It won't tell you if it has been transmitted to you, of course.
Disease transmission typically happens after the tick has been attached for 36-72 hrs.
Those of you who haven't lived in deer tick country might not realize how tiny the things are this time of year. Pinhead sized or smaller. Easy to miss even if you're diligent. No solution for it except to be more diligent, however.
Good luck with the doxycycline. I don't understand why your PCP ordered a blood test, but the meds make sense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
It's probably just a matter of figuring out how to funnel enough money and people on the problem. Smartphone advances, for example, will be incredible over the next decade. Much better graphics, CPU, batteries, etc. That's because there's a huge market for them. Another example is 4k TV's, which are out of reach. Within 5 years, they'll be cheap, and a lot better.
Figure out a way to have consumers directly spend more money on medical research/technology and great things will happen.
The dramatic advances in consumer electronics aren't just about spending. We spend a similar amount on cars, but a new car today isn't much different from a new car ten years ago. Forty years after we landed on the moon, we don't have day trips there. Consumer electronics change fast largely we've been able to make increasingly tiny patterns in silicon, but most of our other technology develops much slower.
LASIK is younger than I am, and new technologies tend to develop faster. Looking at the Wikipedia article on breast implants, the pace of development there doesn't seem remarkable: it says the latest generation date from the mid 1990s, and that seems to be mostly an incremental safety improvement. There have been more significant advances in non-consumer healthcare in that time, e.g. Radioimmunotherapy.
And again, cars: widespread consumer technology, lots of money in the industry, but mostly incremental improvements. Though Google's self-driving cars are interesting.
Do you think medical devices are closer to cars or computers? We spent $100 billion dollars forty years ago to go to the moon and stopped. Nothing really changed until SpaceX (i.e. private enterprise) got involved to drive down the cost.
That's not to say that the people practising it don't believe in what they're preaching - I'm sure many people involved in the cryonics industry deeply believe in the technology. But consider this: what value is there in reviving the dead and frozen rather than preserving the living?
As it stands today, cryonics is an act of faith, not science. And you're more than welcome to believe in it, just like any other faith, but I personally don't see why future society would put the needs of the frozen above those of the living. And unlike some other faiths, it's a very expensive option to partake in.
Science has a much better track record than organized religion: http://www.nobeliefs.com/images/DarkAges.gif
I'm not particularly religious (or Catholic), but let's not minimize the positive impact members of the clergy have had on science.
Its a metagraph where the Y axis is the number of graphs produced by humanity with unlabeled Y axis.
If I remember correctly, a lot of of the ancient knowledge was kept on the monasteries after all the destruction caused by the plague and the fall of the roman empire.
The image also seems to imply that the greek, the egyptians and the romans were not religious civilizations.
BTW, I am not even a religious person. And I totally agree that science has a better track record than religion on curing disease.
For those HN readers (not necessarily implying the poster) uneducated in liberal arts, the topics to google for are "edward gibbon" and "the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire". If you're going to talk about something complicated, at least throw the noobs a bone.
Gibbon in the 1780s is pretty much the source of this argument, or at least its strongest promoter. Not to say its universally agreed with. I'm not even going to attempt to paraphrase Gibbon's couple hundred pages of reasoning here, but a bit of google will take care of it for you.
As a life goal I finished reading Gibbon a couple years back. Its kind of long, like 3000 or so pages and took me about two seasons, reading about a half hour per night. Maybe a foot or so on a bookshelf, although I read the project gutenberg ebook version. And a bit repetitious in parts, probably because that's just how life was back then. It was worth the time, overall, and I'd recommend it.
>>http://www.nobeliefs.com/images/DarkAges.gif
Yeah, you know what, not so much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV7CanyzhZg
Not as unlikely as you'd think.
Going the opposite direction, poor icecube man might be revived only to die almost immediately due to measles or something similar. Assuming that "able to cure all diseases" must come before "defrost cycle" on the civilization tech tree is not a good assumption because there seems to be no obvious technological link other than both being kinda difficult.
Being defrosted, assuming it actually works perfectly, probably means spending some time (maybe rest of life) in a biohazard lab. Or worse, yet maybe more likely, getting defrosted to live in a bioweapon lab.
Current cryonics is perhaps too crude to work, or you can cast doubt on the long-term sustainability of the organizations, or whatever, but that doesn't make it an act of "faith", at least not any religious sense.
It's an act of decision making under some very big uncertainties, but it's not unscientific. If you accept the physicalist tenet that the brain is a machine, that the mind is the result of information processing, that there is no unmaterial "ghost" an so on then trying to preserve the "state variables" of that meat computer with vitrification is perfectly reasonable, specially compared with the only current alternative, total annihilation.
It's totally unscientific! It's pure pseudo-science.
> If you accept the physicalist tenet that the brain is a machine
...okay...
> that the mind is the result of information processing, that there is no unmaterial "ghost" an so on then trying to preserve the "state variables" of that meat computer with vitrification is perfectly reasonable, specially compared with the only current alternative, total annihilation.
Well, no. We don't know what the mind is, nor how it works. We've only recently discovered that your unconscious self does stuff before your conscious self decides to do it. (http://exploringthemind.com/the-mind/brain-scans-can-reveal-...) {With interesting video clip}.
Freezing your brain is as scientific as stitching corpse-body-parts together to create a living human.
We're pretty sure the mind is what the brain does.
> nor how it works.
We don't need to, for this purpose. This is a low-level dump of all the information stored, to enable (much) later analysis.
As I said, current cryonics is perhaps too crude. But the idea itself is not unsound. IF current procedures are not detailed enough to preserve the details then perhaps throwing a few millions into research to find better cryoprotectants or procedures could solve the problem.
> We've only recently discovered that your unconscious self does stuff before your conscious self decides to do it
I don't see the relevance. Your unconscious self is still made of neurons and other material stuff, not magic.
Doesn't it seem weird to go from "This part of the problem seems unsolved to me" to "this idea is completely pointless"? Just because you didn't immediately see a solution?
To answer the specific objection: People are curious, and people aren't jerks. Cryonics is still extremely novel, and if revival is possible the subjects of this decade will be incredibly rare individuals any self-respecting anthropologist would fund in an instant - to name one of a dozen possible solutions.
Mmmm, not sure this is a good analogy.
While cryonics isn't proven science yet, we have frozen dogs, pigs, and other animals and revived them after a few days. Granted, this isn't a human, but if I am ever in a situation where the end is there in front of me with a little bit of time to contemplate it, I'd rather take the frozen brain/body route.
I'm sorry, you are mistaken. The largest reversibly-cryopreserved chunk of mammal so far has been a rabbit kidney. The kidney was cryopreserved, re-warmed, and transplanted back into the rabbit. The untreated kidney was removed. The rabbit recovered and survived until the researchers euthanized it for autopsy 6 weeks later. Autopsy showed some areas where the cryoprotectant hadn't reached, so the kidney wasn't perfectly healthy. The whole paper is at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/
Most cryonicists agree. It's often said that getting cryopreserved is the second-worst thing that can happen to you.
How long does someone have to be dead before you say, "What value is there in reviving the dead and frozen rather than preserving the living?" Is it a valid argument after 5 minutes? A year? 100 years? If it were technologically possible to revive people from the 18th century without significantly taxing our own resources, some organization would probably be doing that right now. And the newly-revived 18th century people would probably try to revive their friends if they could.
Of course cryonics organizations don't just toss heads in dewar flasks and forget about them. If revival becomes feasible, the organizations doing it will probably be the same organizations that have maintained frozen heads for decades.
You say cryonics is an act of faith. Most people sign up not because they're convinced it will work, but because they think the expected value is positive. For someone moderately well-off, even a 3% chance at a much longer life is worth the $120/month that a typical life insurance policy and membership costs. Heck, many medical procedures are more expensive and less likely to benefit. If we were talking about an experimental cancer treatment that cost $80k and had a 5% chance of working, few would reject it due to the price.
Those who sign up are usually convinced by evidence. Which brings me to the question: What evidence would convince you that cryonics is worthwhile?
If scanning electron micrographs of cryopreserved mammal brain tissue showed intact nanostructure, would that convince you? How about reversibly-cryopreserved mammal organs? What if a team of scientists cryopreserved a bit of rat hippocampus, then warmed and re-fused it, and couldn't distinguish the cryopreserved cells from control cells?
These have all been done in the past decade. Rabbit kidney: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/ Rat hippocampus: http://www.21cm.com/pdfs/hippo_published.pdf
As it stands today, cryonics is an act of faith, not science. And you're more than welcome to believe in it, just like any other faith...
I don't think cryonics in its current form is likely to work, but I do think the probability of it working is high enough that it's worth signing up. Does this sound like a faith-based argument? If reasoning combined with scientific journal citations is faith, then call me a zealot.
There'd be lots of value in being able to revive people who died a long time ago, if only for their value as contemporary witnesses. Hell, a few years ago the scientific community went pretty crazy for some frozen dude we found in Austria, and that one was thoroughly dead. [1]
We already don't have anyone left who remembers the First World War. In a few years, we'll lose the last Holocaust survivor. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to preserve some of that first-hand experience? And come on, how cool would it be to be able to unfreeze an Ancient Egyptian, or a bunch of people from the Middle Ages?
I agree that the future probably won't have a use for a whole horde of our living dead, but I can see there being quite a bit of interest in reviving a few hundred or thousand people - and once you've gone to all the trouble to develop the technology, maybe it'll be cheap enough to go to the trouble of unfreezing everyone else.
WTF? How would you like to be revived 2000 years after you died, with everyone and everything you loved gone, in a place that looks nothing like home, only to be shown around like an animal in a zoo?
Counterpoint: if we had the technology to reanimate someone who died only 100 years ago (say, born in 1860), don't you think we'd find a hell of a lot of value in that from historical utility alone?
>And unlike some other faiths, it's a very expensive option to partake in.
If you're healthy and young, and you fund it with life insurance, the cost is on the order of $50/month. I'm not really willing to spend much time doing a rigorous comparison to "other faiths", since this line of thought is spurious, but according to one source[0], the average Protestant in the US gave about $1100 to their church in 2001.
[0] http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/religious-people-donate...
But it can't go on, this is not a stable or reliable way to fund cryonics.
Sooner or later the novelty will wear off and the money will run out, or someone just won't be sympathetic enough, and the goal will not be met.
Life insurance is the way to handle this for most people. Charity needs to be for the exceptional cases.
What's frustrating is that he can't qualify for experimental treatments unless his lung capacity is at a certain level (e.g. Min. Vital Capacity here: http://www.alsconsortium.org/trial.php?id=1). This is one reason why we need to get more money into ALS research and treatment. Please consider a donation to the ALS Association at http://www.alsa.org/. Thank you.
This is terrible disease. I know how hard it is for his family.
It has the words "skinny dipping", that might be it.
I don't get what you are trying to say with the black boxes.
I can't comment on his blog directly, so my answer to him is:
Find the nearest intelligent lifeform to our solar system, and let them know exactly where we are, and that we'd like to have a chat please.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=stephen-haw...