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The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain

theguardian.com

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Re: The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain

#21

Post by xvector »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15
xvector wrote: post #10

I genuinely think death will be conquered, for all practical purposes, within this century. In our vast 300 thousand year history, we are likely in the last century of mortal humans, and in the last millennium of biological ones. Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death, and wonder why we didn't try harder, earlier. Why isn't the longevity problem our #1…

> Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death We’re on a path to curing aging. We have no clue how to cure death .

If you can cure aging, death itself becomes an engineering problem. Curing aging gives you the time you need to figure out gradual replacement, uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes in orbit or beyond, etc.

Then you have cured death for all practical purposes. You will still be vulnerable to certain cosmic catastrophes (which you can plan around) and the heat death itself, but I would still call that "cured."

Edit reply because of HN rate limit: Transfers are possible, copies aren't our only option. Consider replacing one neuron at the time with an uplink to a virtual neuron in the cloud. An implant (at the cellular scale) reflects communication back to your physical neurons - they don't even notice it disappeared.

Wait for your thoughts to normalize, rinse, repeat. This is gradual replacement. You'd do it with more than one neuron (a cluster of neurons) realistically.

Re: The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain

#24

Post by bombcar »

serial_dev wrote: post #17
caseyy wrote: post #2

I don’t fear death, it is natural. I fear the suffering society will put me through when I’m old and ill, because they can’t cope with death. It’s good we are starting to develop dignified death laws. With the world population as it is, more people will die in the next decade than any other in history (even the plagues). Just looking at population graphs, 1B might die between 2050 and 2060. Much suffering can be avoi…

I fear for the people I would leave behind, mainly my wife and two little children, if I was gone today, it would seriously impact all their lives. Similarly, I don’t really fear my death, I fear the death of others.

Some of the impact can be lessened (life insurance, for example, is income insurance and can make sure that at least financially they’re ok).

But If Tomorrow Never Comes starts playing …

Re: The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain

#25

Post by xvector »

hapticmonkey wrote: post #19
xvector wrote: post #10

I genuinely think death will be conquered, for all practical purposes, within this century. In our vast 300 thousand year history, we are likely in the last century of mortal humans, and in the last millennium of biological ones. Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death, and wonder why we didn't try harder, earlier. Why isn't the longevity problem our #1…

I'm sure various scifi authors have covered this topic to death (pun intended). But something about eternal life just feels so empty to me. And without changes to laws around euthanasia or suicide, it means being forced to stay alive forever, which is even more dystopian.

If life feels empty to you, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope it gets better soon. I feel the opposite - there is so much to do, and so little time. I am also happy and content just... existing.

I don't think a social problem (that will be solved in time, and is already solved in some countries) is a reason to prevent this from happening.

Social problems can be fixed, death is final. If euthanasia doesn't become legal before, it certainly will be after.

Re: The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain

#26

Post by caseyy »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #14
caseyy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think death being natural lends a lot of credence to the idea that it’s normal — as normal as life. And I’d say most people probably don’t fear death or non-existence itself, but rather the process of dying (suffering, stress, pain, shame, loss of agency, the grief inflicted on others, etc). In palliative care settings, where the process of dying is well-managed (physically, emotionally, spiritually), people don’t…

> now people are talking about how full of suffering life is when one doesn’t have whatever minimum of health they deem required to live, but are kept alive anyways This is more a social anxiety than reflection of reality. To the extent we’re prolonging suffering, it’s on the order of weeks, maybe months. Not years. Most people fear death. That’s natural. Some of us, due to being stupid, depressed or possibly enlight…

I disagree. There is increasing conversation in the medical community[0] about living past one’s health-span for years.

While fear of death is widely considered universal, many people (for various reasons) fear death significantly less than others[1]. Fear of death levels appear to generally stabilize to low past 60 years of age. Many philosophies reject the fear of death, including some of our very popular religions. Only about half of terminally ill patients feel clinically significant death anxiety[2]. It is normal to not fear death without being depressed, enlightened, or stupid.

I think it’s not so black and white as evolutionary psychology might suggest.

[0] https://peterattiamd.com/outlive/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_anxiety

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35609222/

Re: The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain

#27

Post by ViscountPenguin »

xvector wrote: post #10

I genuinely think death will be conquered, for all practical purposes, within this century. In our vast 300 thousand year history, we are likely in the last century of mortal humans, and in the last millennium of biological ones. Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death, and wonder why we didn't try harder, earlier. Why isn't the longevity problem our #1…

I'm not too confident that mortality will be cured this century. Even if we cure some of the big targets (dementia, muscle wasting and cancer come to mind) there will inevitably be a long tail of problems.

If it were just that, I might still be hopeful, but the latency on aging cure experiments is inevitably going to be quite long, and that won't change without massive advances in biological simulations.

Re: The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain

#28

Post by ViscountPenguin »

hapticmonkey wrote: post #19
xvector wrote: post #10

I genuinely think death will be conquered, for all practical purposes, within this century. In our vast 300 thousand year history, we are likely in the last century of mortal humans, and in the last millennium of biological ones. Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death, and wonder why we didn't try harder, earlier. Why isn't the longevity problem our #1…

I'm sure various scifi authors have covered this topic to death (pun intended). But something about eternal life just feels so empty to me. And without changes to laws around euthanasia or suicide, it means being forced to stay alive forever, which is even more dystopian.

To be honest, I've never gotten that. The creative output I can manage in a mere 80ish years has never felt sufficient to me. I would love to have the lifespan to be able to take on tasks like selectively breeding Bunya pines, or painting gigapixel collages.

Re: The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain

#30

Post by JumpCrisscross »

xvector wrote: post #21
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death We’re on a path to curing aging. We have no clue how to cure death .

If you can cure aging, death itself becomes an engineering problem. Curing aging gives you the time you need to figure out gradual replacement, uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes in orbit or beyond, etc. Then you have cured death for all practical purposes. You will still be vulnerable to certain cosmic catastrophes (which you can plan around) and the he…

> Curing aging gives you the time you need to figure out gradual replacement

Sure.

> uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes

We have no idea what the path to any of this looks like. We could easily cure aging without making progress on this for centuries, maybe millennia.

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