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Comment by staccatomeasure | Hacker News Reader

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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