The hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by riehwvfbk » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 12:22 PM UTC

jajko wrote: post #89

fsckboy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

without disputing that there exists an optimal diet/exercise regiment for longevity and health, i very much doubt that we at present have a clue what it is. every day new science and medical evidence overturns old, and reproducibility fails. optimizing diet and rigorous exercise comes at some cost in the form of time spent in your precious youth. so you sacrifice youthtime for a chance at a longer better old age. eac…

Such a wrong mindset... but you do you, don't complain later when inevitable comes, its not like there haven't been hundreds of millions of folks who made similar life decisions and we can easily see what it leads to (or doesn't). One example out of sea of examples - climbing. Indoor, outdoor, bouldering, long walls, doesn't matter. Its an amazing activity, every single person I know is doing it at least occasionally…

It's curious how many athletic people fit this stereotype: they can't fathom that someone might not be like them.

For a great many of us climbing is utterly terrifying. Yeah, tried it. Yeah, aware that the belay rope is there. No, it still sucks and no extra happiness is anywhere to be found except happiness that it's over.

But more importantly the athletic people underestimate just how bad unathletic people are at exercise and just how much effort even something basic is for them.

Most people could not do the basic bouldering you are about to suggest to counter my point above: they don't have the arm strength. Building that strength would take at least 6 months of a dedicated workout program and a cure for whatever psychological issues are affecting their diet. Most will never get there and suggesting to them that they can sound like "just perform a magic ritual". Oh, and after 6 months of doing the impossible their achievement is "you can do the noob bouldering". Underwhelming to say the least.

But to you exercise is easy and fun and the opposite is inconceivable. And if we dare speak up - we'll be told we are our perspective, attitude, and indeed our very life experience are invalid and wrong. Go on, hit that downvote.

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

#122

Post by ajmurmann » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 4:27 PM UTC

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #117

ajmurmann wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse you won't see how it ends! I recently read a novel (this is a massive spoiler so I am not naming it) that drove this point home extremely well and has me thinking about it all the time since I read it. The book built up a number of enticing storylines. A huge mystery, various characters had struggles we wanted to learn about. However, the book resolves almost none of this because the protagonist dies and we jus…

Who cares? Sometimes, you don’t know everything, nor will you. You won’t be around for everything. This is the human condition. It seems unwise to spend too many brain cycles worrying about this.

Of course we don't know everything and shouldn't care about everything. However, we have lots of things we care about for good and less good reasons. It's natural and good to care about your friends and family or even your country and maybe the future of humanity. We need to make decisions based on these factors. While we stop being able to influence outcomes, it would IMO be odd to simply not care what happens after.

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

#123

Post by xvector » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #30

xvector wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, yes, if we had an idea we'd be there by now.

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

#124

Post by xvector » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 5:33 PM UTC

nonameiguess wrote: post #88

VonTum wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, likely the first immortal person has already been born. Perhaps even large swaths of the population are already effectively immortal, but they just don't know it yet. Sadly, my main fear is that immortality will only be available to the extremely rich and powerful. Generally historical progress is made when the old guard die, be it in science with the leaders clamoring to old theories, dictatorships falling…

I feel like you and the parent need to give a better operational definition of what you mean by "practical purposes." The ultimate destiny of every bit of matter out there is to become part of a black hole, evaporate to Hawking radiation, then succumb to the expansion of space gradually putting every discrete particle outside of the future light cone of all others. This should take unfathomably long epochs of time we…

I feel like the situation you describe is fairly unrealistic because you'd definitely use simulations to pass time. And I don't see any reason why you'd be the only immortal being left, either.

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

#125

Post by xvector » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

ziddoap wrote: post #93

xvector wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All medical technology developed 50 years ago is now available to the general public, so I think it'd be available to everyone.

All medical technology is maybe "available", but if you google "person dies from not being able to afford insulin", we can see that availability is only half the equation. It has to be affordable, too.

If immortality becomes as available as insulin, it will be a smashing success. Nearly everyone that wants insulin gets it.

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

#126

Post by xvector » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 5:38 PM UTC

cess11 wrote: post #96

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…

We've wrecked our habitat and keep most of humanity in some form or other of slavery, and there are exactly zero credible social movements aiming for another course. Why would we want to watch this deterioration and tyranny go on for centuries more? As for 'non-biological' humans, I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious t…

> I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory.

Actually, I would say the opposite is deeply religious territory. Nothing fundamentally restricts this unless you think the analog nature of a neuron is a pre-requisite to consciousness, and no synthetic/digital consciousness could ever exist. But you have no reason to believe this. Such a belief is almost religious.

> where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source

This is life today as well. How do you know you aren't part of some Matrix-style biological mind prison? You don't. It's pointless even trying to wonder.

> Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though

Social problems can be fixed. Death is final. Tyrants existing is not a reason to promote the death of billions of innocents. If Putin lived for another 1000 years, I certainly wouldn't kill myself. You will experience more net social progress being immortal, though it may be slower, than dying after a short 80 years.

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

#127

Post by potato3732842 » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #98

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…

My SO worked at a nursing home which had several elderly with dementia cry out they just wanted to die all day long, day after day. Yet they got their flu shots and got treated for any infections they might get. This went on for the two years my SO worked there. My dad had cancer that spread to his lungs, and then he got pneumonia. The day after being hospitalized, he asked the doctor if it was a chance he'd ever get…

And on the other side of the coin I worked at a nursing home where some guy who was in pretty bad shape and had maybe a month or so left had a DNR, keeled over, got R'd because poor process (to the great annoyance of the family), did a lap around the hospital, came back to the nursing home and months later walked out, on his own, with a cane. IDK how long he lived after that but the point stands.

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

#128

Post by Perenti » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 3:27 AM UTC

jajko wrote: post #94

Perenti wrote: post #22

I don't fear death. I've been there, done that, and it was very nice. Bloody doctors and my implanted defibrillator keep bringing me back.

Death itself is fine, but the miserable (and often long) time before that much less so

Yes. In our modern "compassionate" society the goal is to keep people alive regardless of the quality of life of the individual.

This is why the study of physics and chemistry is important, so you can exit when it's no longer worth staying, with the help of Engineering.

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

#129

Post by cess11 » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 7:04 AM UTC

xvector wrote: post #126

cess11 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've wrecked our habitat and keep most of humanity in some form or other of slavery, and there are exactly zero credible social movements aiming for another course. Why would we want to watch this deterioration and tyranny go on for centuries more? As for 'non-biological' humans, I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious t…

> I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. Actually, I would say the opposite is deeply religious territory. Nothing fundamentally restricts this unless you think the analog nature of a neuron is a pre-requisite to consciousness, and no synthetic/digital consciousness could ever exist. But you have no reason to…

I mean, you've given me an abused Russell's teapot in an attempt to mirror my position, just like a Jehovah's witness or charismatic christian would. At the very least you should hypothesise that you could anchor an argument in quarks and then pick a conceptual level of matter at which you believe you have enough control to be able to fully simulate human corporeality.

If you could it'd be very, very slow, because your machine needs to embed more than the representation of the system you aim to simulate. Among other things to correct for the different complexity, similar to how you need to juggle ten extra decimals or rounding rules just to be able to compute 0.3 * 3 in the browser console.

I know that I'm not in a Matrix style prison because I've experienced pharmacologically induced dissociation and other disruptions of the nervous system. If my brain was a tube floater hooked up to whatever machine you're fantasising about, then I'd have noticed, just like I notice that I'm dreaming if I for some reason turn lucid when sleeping. You could, of course, spend so much time being introverted and deep in your own fantasies, e.g. by stimulating your brain with screens, that you lose the ability to discern between real and virtual settings. Some might claim that this is an ideal and spend their lives practicing such techniques in cloistered, monastic environments.

I did not "promote the death of billions of innocents". I claimed that watching the current trajectory play out isn't obviously attractive, to refute the opposite position, that it should be the "#1" priority of contemporary state administrations. But if you want an argument for death, sure, I'll give you one, because it's trivial. Death is part of the human condition, it is fundamental to who we are and always has been.

If you take it away, then we are no longer human and lose our connection with human history and recorded experience. Is it better to be a human than to be a machine? I'd say yes, because machines cannot have liberty and freedom, they're dead already.

The assumption that there will be "social progress" under conditions where people no longer die would need a very strong set of arguments for me to accept it. Currently, that we are born and die exerts a pressure on our rulers and injects volatility into our societies. If they instead could just say 'alright, we'll make things better, just wait a millenium', then they would. They are already very good at erasing dissent and the memory of previous dissenters, to a large extent by substituting for it with false ideas, or 'false consciousness'.

The assumption that "social progress" is inevitable has a religious background, it has its immediate roots in Enlightenment deism, i.e. christian protestantism, which were inherited by liberalists and early marxists. This position has suffered a lot since then, mostly because of modern takes on science, but also the global effects of mass extinction, disruption of the atmosphere and so on, which is quite tangible evidence against this view.

Whether eighty years is long or short from your perspective is up to you. Perception of time is highly elastic and especially under dissociative states you can feel like you've experienced centuries pass by. This is routinely exploited in televised media.

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

#130

Post by ben_w » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 7:32 AM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #99

ben_w wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with the one-neuron-at-a-time thought experiment, I'm not sure if we are ever going to know for sure if we got uploads right — even in principle. While a sufficiently detailed copy should be conscious, we don't know what "sufficiently detailed" is — and we can't just do this by external behaviour, because (1) People are still arguing both sides of the P-zombie thought experiment; and (2) LLMs regularly fooling p…

Before you were born you didn’t have the thing you call a consciousness. But now you do. I think continuity is a red herring, realistically our whole idea of consciousness is probably off base. It might not even be a real thing, for example my pet cat doesn’t care if he has a consciousness or not because he never invented a word for it.

> But now you do.

Perhaps I do. Perhaps it's only there when I pay attention to it, and my brain smooths over the gaps like I know it does with saccades and blind spots (both literal and metaphorical). And even if it is there all the time, is it like yours?