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Comment by ginko | Hacker News Reader

But what about generation warfare?

Imagine having to live in a world where all the positions of power are permanently occupied by people from the generation of your great-grandparents.

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You mean, that there might be a war between the 150 year olds and the 250 year olds? Sign me up! I don't even care for which side!

The base state of the world that we live in is that everybody dies. Your hypotheticals about how horrible it might be to live in a world where people might not die have to be pretty horrible to compete with what is already true.

(Mind you, this is not an unleapable bar, in my opinion, but it's much higher than you just leapt.)

If no one dies, what do we do with all those replacement people we keep making at the rate of about 300K per day?

We can stack them like cordwood for a while, but that gets messy, inconvenient and after a while, a bit smelly.

Dying isn't horrible at all. It's a part of the lifecycle.

Of course it's horrible. Life is all there is. When you die, from your perspective, that is the end of all things. That's pretty horrible. Just because it's natural doesn't make it good.

I remember discussing this in both of my philosophy courses, Intro and MetaEthics. In the intro course, the question was "Why should you fear death? When you're dead, by definition, you're not around to fear it, so why should you care?"

In meta-ethics, the question was "What does it mean for something to be horrible in the first place? How do you decide something is good or bad in the first place? If you fear your own nonexistence, why do you not fear the nonexistence of, say, unicorns?"

I never took an evolutionary psych course, but I read a bunch of their textbooks. I'd imagine the answer they'd give is "Of course you believe death is horrible. If your ancestors didn't, they wouldn't have an aversion to death, and so they would never have been around to reproduce, and so you wouldn't have been born. Therefore, we select for animals that fear death, because all animals that do not fear death never come into existence." There's something comforting about that perspective, knowing that our fears are nothing but evolutionary chance at work, but it's interesting to think that our fear of nonexistence is a consequence of our existence.

There was a book on that a little while ago by Shelly Kagan (decent excerpt at [1]). I think the evolutionary perspective is clearly "correct," but it doesn't quite answer the big questions for me. It establishes that "death is bad" is an axiom of our ethical system (and not a theorem of it,) but it has nothing to say when we ask whether we should attempt to adjust our morality.

1: http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Death-Bad-for-You-/131818/

> Life is all there is. When you die, from your perspective, that is the end of all things.

So? Why does that matter? From my perspective, before I was born and after I die are equivalent on account of me not being able to have a perspective. 13.8 billion years of the universe where I didn't exist wasn't horrible before so I don't see why it will be so horrible in 60 or 80 more years when I don't exist again.

It's weird how people get very philosophical and accepting about death form old age, but are horrified by murder, suicide, deadly airplane crashes, gas explosions, and so on. You get just as dead either way, but somehow death from old age is considered to be just a natural part of the Plan.

There's a pretty substantial body of opinion that dying of untreated cancer is, in fact, kind of horrible.

I was referring to the act of turning the lights off...the big empty. No doubt some things that precede and result in death are nasty, but those aren't death.

For example, if death was embraced and voluntary euthanasia was allowed, people could just opt-out as the nastiness started (I'm not suggesting we do that, though).

Anyway, the point is that we shouldn't fear the ending. It's the things that precede it that we should rightfully fear and combat. In other words, focus less on extending life (after a point) and more on decreasing the ratio of painful-years/lifespan.

Why aren't you suggesting voluntary euthenasia once the horrible dying process has begun? You've said that death isn't horrible at all, but the process of dying is, so if you truly believe those things, why wouldn't you want to cut the awfulness short? You don't seem terribly interested in the length of life, as such, so cutting it a little bit shorter should seem like no great loss.

If it's unavoidable, then acceptance is the right path.

If it's avoidable, then all else being equal acceptance of death strikes me as incredibly foolish. I want to live until tomorrow, and I imagine that tomorrow I'll say the same.

If we could effectively control aging and death, perhaps that would make human reproduction unnecessary or undesirable even. Perhaps that will stop all the nonsense in the name of "oh won't you think of the children?"

i wouldn't be surprised if you asked people and it turned out that the dying part was the thing they feared most about death.

> It's a part of the lifecycle.

Because something is natural (part of the lifecycle) doesn't make it good or bad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature

You're welcome to accept it - as long as you don't require me to die or hamper me from living as long as I like.

This is the naturalistic fallacy. Just because something is that way does not mean that it should be that way.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/

My aunt - who died slowly and painfully, wasting away from the cervical cancer that was eating away at her body - might disagree with you were she still here.

I think this refers to death as distinct from the process of dying.

Generational warfare would definitely be something to consider. Imagine if immortality had been discovered 400 years ago. Are the ethics and morality of the leaders from 400 years ago something you, a person born in the late 20th century, would want to live under?

Generations eventually dying off keeps the human race moving forward in many ways.

Imagine if we grew up in a world like the one you posit, where humanity advances only slowly because it's held back by the ideals held by people 400 years old.

You propose that the best solution to this is kill everyone over 80.

That would make you a psychopath.

Or, imagine that you didn't like the dominant views among the 50-60 year olds in power when you were in your twenties, and you offered up the idea that we should just withold medical treatment from people over 30 so that we could increase the speed of social progress.

> That would make you a psychopath.

If we could have just figured this out 2500 years ago, then we 'd be Spartans instead of PsychoPaths.

that would only happen if you have a world that no longer creates new value, but simply redistributes ever diminishing existing size of the pie. I doubt that sort of dystopian society ala Cloud Atlas will ever come to pass, so there will always be room for young people to disrupt existing order

I'd rather live in a world where my great-grandparents are in charge than not live at all.

It's worth considering that extended lifespans could have very well result in you not living at all - the Earth can only sustain a limited number of people, and extended lifespans would result in a necessary decrease in new lives brought into this world.

Any action of anyone could prevent somebody from being conceived. Or inaction. Simply refusing to have as much unprotected sex as you could physically have results in new lives not being brought into this world...

I don't think we need to maximize amount of new people for the sake of it.

Old generation owes to the new generation to not screw them up by using up resources/making world worse than they got it, etc. But they have absolutely no obligations to actually _make_ a new generation.

I disagree with that thought, actually. I believe current models of consumption ignore human innovation, something we're quite good at doing when survival is on the line.

Even considering human innovation, the laws of thermodynamics will eventually limit growth, not to mention the sheer lack of space.

I don't believe the laws of thermodynamics will ever come into play when talking about the expansion of the human race, at least insofar as we don't start talking about humanity as a universal mainstay for the remainder of the existence of... existence.

That would be no wose than living in a world where all the positions of power are permanently occupied by people from my generation.

Your comment is the epitome of ageism.

I wonder if inertia would mean so much in a world of such grotesque abundance.

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