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Comment by codeboost | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with dying ? I mean, obviously people want to live longer for some (mostly selfish) reasons, but isn't dying part of the 'living' deal ?

Dying is similar to being born - your whole universe changed when you transitioned from womb to this world and the same happens when you die. In other words, they have cookies and chocolate there :).

The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal and that this life is a step of an infinity of other steps, before this life and after.

The other thing one realizes is that each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole (some call this God, but it is actually You), or in other words - We are all One.

That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia.

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Isn't dying part of the 'living' deal?

This is somewhat equivalent to saying "isn't dying from infectious diseases part of the 'living' deal?" It is, but antibiotics are really nice, and now that we have them, it's hard to imagine a world where people would happily give them up because getting infected is just part of living.

Anti-death technology sounds really similar. If we were to have this technology now, it would be a pretty big stretch of imagination to picture a world where people would happily give it away because death is part of living.

The whole deal about spirituality is that one discovers that we are in fact immortal

We're immortal once you break down duality, but that's not what we're talking about here. People want to have the option to live forever in the conventional reality, not the ultimate reality.

> "What's wrong with dying"

It's such a terrible waste. All that knowledge accumulated over years of life... gone. We don't know what the species is capable of if we could double or triple human life span. What if we could indefinitely extend the most productive years? Where might we be if we could have given Einstein the chance to live hundreds of years with his mind and body in prime condition?

> "same happens when you die. In other words, they have cookies and chocolate there"

wouldn't it be great if that were the case? Unfortunately there is exactly zero proof of any kind that this is so.

> "each individual is actually a facet of an infinite whole, in other words - We are all One"

This sentence is completely free of information.

> "That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia."

Religions and mystics have been exploiting the normal human fear of death for millennia. Science might one day give us the keys to finally dodge that inevitable final bullet.

>Unfortunately there is exactly zero proof of any kind that this is so

Oh but there is for those who seek it!

One kind of proof is called dimethyltryptamine. It lasts for 10 minutes, but when you come back, you might have a radically different view on these matters.

Other psychedelics, like LSD, also offer a different perspective on life and death and there are also different kinds of spiritual work one can do - meditation, holotropic breathing or living life in nature. They all help you realise just how fragile and transitory life is in nature and that that is a good thing.

>Religions and mystics have been exploiting the normal human fear of death

Isn't science (or rather scientists) driven by the same fear ? Isn't the knowledge that we're going to die a factor in making us go out and do stuff to survive ?

Wouldn't immortality lead to a state where we'd have to invent a simluation of mortal life in order to actually feel alive ?

How can one tell that this life isn't such a simulation ?

What's wrong with dying? I don't want to die. I don't want to see the people I love die. It's not "part of life" or some other crazy rationalization to make us feel better about it. It's just ceasing to exist. There is no other life.

We used to think there was some magical soul thing, but now we can look and see how the very neurons in your brain work. And when they stop working, that's it.

I don't accept death. It isn't part of any greater purpose. The universe isn't optimized for human values. But we can change that.

One day future humans will look back on ancient Earth and wonder how terrible it must have been to live for mere decades. If you were to try to convince them that dying was a good thing and they should give up their immortality, they would laugh at you.

> That's what all the religions and mystics have been telling us for millenia. If they have been telling it for millenia, they are probably right.

>What's wrong with dying ? This is actually a subject I speak of with my parents once in a while, they never expected to live longer than a century, so they accept death as a 'natural' part of life, whereas I see death (even of old age) as tragedy, because to me it is supposed to be (or at least to become) optional.

I was convinced death will be optional for me before my majority. It is a belief, since I have no proof of what will be, a belief in mankind's capacities.

Even being a baseless belief, it has literally changed the way I live, and the way I plan my life. I have literally all the time in the world (and hopefully quite a bit more), so no rushed decision.

It also changed the way I see knowledge acquisition, so even if I am actually a currently employed software developer, if someone have an interesting job in genetics, biology or unconventional computing for a software developer, I'm ready to jump ship.

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