Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 131 posts

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

#91

Post by jajko »

whalesalad wrote: post #87
philjohn wrote: post #50

That was a difficult read for me - after watching my father die peacefully, and with dignity in a wonderful hospice I can't help but admire the doctors, nurses and other practicioners who dedicate their life to caring for people at the end of theirs. What angers me is that not everyone gets to experience a dignified death; the hospice where my father stayed relies on charitable donations to do their vital work - a de…

When I reach that point in my life I’ll probably just put a bullet in my own head. And I don’t want a fancy burial or cremation… toss me in the ground and plant a tree on top of me.

I would prefer ie heroin overdose. Way less messy especially for those who would find me, while having what has been described as an half an hour orgasm (maybe less since its overdose after all). After all all addicts are doing for rest of their addict career is chasing that first ultimate high (at least as per some addicts words, never came even close to such things).

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

#92

Post by ourmandave »

whalesalad wrote: post #87
philjohn wrote: post #50

That was a difficult read for me - after watching my father die peacefully, and with dignity in a wonderful hospice I can't help but admire the doctors, nurses and other practicioners who dedicate their life to caring for people at the end of theirs. What angers me is that not everyone gets to experience a dignified death; the hospice where my father stayed relies on charitable donations to do their vital work - a de…

When I reach that point in my life I’ll probably just put a bullet in my own head. And I don’t want a fancy burial or cremation… toss me in the ground and plant a tree on top of me.

I plan to die at my desk. Hopefully my co-workers will be able to decipher the sql I was writing when I passed.

select * from castle_of_aaaugh where grail is not null*

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

#93

Post by ziddoap »

xvector wrote: post #77
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…

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.

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

#95

Post by ddq »

xvector wrote: post #78
ddq wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't "migrate", it will just be a copy of you. Your conscious perspective will not transfer to the copy of you. You will still be bound to the original, even if a simulacrum of your mind is created.

You can "migrate" with a technique such as gradual replacement, which in a simplified form replaces one physical neuron at a time with an uplink to a virtual neuron, and waits for your thoughts to equalize. Realistically you'd do clusters of neurons.

And how do you plan to deal with the latency of connecting the neurons of your brain to a remote virtual uplink? The speed of light limits the size of a virtual brain that is able to function in the same manner as a biological one. The truth is our understanding of consciousness and its neurological foundation is nowhere close to the level that would allow us to recreate it artificially. We don't even know how it works normally. It will not happen in your lifetime and you are going to die like the rest of us, and very likely this will not change even in the next thousand years.

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

#96

Post by cess11 »

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 territory. You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments. The digital lacks identity, which is the source of security issues in the computerised society. There is no difference between 1011011001 and 1011011001 regardless of source, it can be a biometry reader sending an encoding of your thumb print or another computer hooked into a network sending the same bytes.

If we for the sake of argument ignored the problems with the transfer, then you still propose a deeply restricted existence, a machine prison, where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source feeding digital signals into your machine. At best it is a simulacra of a dream you can't wake from. You'd be absolutely cut off from any possibility of freedom and immediate engagement with the universe.

Now, I do understand that many people enjoy living almost their entire adult lives mediated through digitally transmitted images and sounds, but at least they still have the option to look away and out of their own bodies and into the remnants of the world that birthed our and many other species. Removing that option entirely and replacing it with the most intimate and absolute form of imprisonment we have yet been able to imagine does not seem at all attractive to me.

Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible.

If you get to watch them follow through on this, how do you expect to keep some semblance of sanity? Are you hoping to be able to ignore it, sitting on a server in a bunker being fed a constant soap opera of fiction and simulated conversations, humming away at some 200 watts or so?

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

#97

Post by psunavy03 »

ajmurmann wrote: post #90
alabastervlog wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get how people can't be kinda freaked out by the universe subjectively fast-forwarding to its end, to occur at any time between this second and a few decades from now.

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…

This is highly dependent on one's own belief system and theology, because beyond a certain point, we literally can't prove what happens to a human mind when the body dies, the existence or non-existence of a soul, etc.

Believe or disbelieve whatever you like, go on about a God of the Gaps, but that's why they talk about people's religious "faith."

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

#98

Post by magicalhippo »

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 home and they admitted that no, that was not very likely. Later that day he asked them to turn off the oxygen, which they did after confirming his wish. He passed peacefully a few hours later.

I was so glad he was given the opportunity to make his choice, and that the doctors respected it.

Sure, I lost some months with my dad, but he'd be in a hospital bed struggling to breathe. I hope I get to make a similar choice when that time comes.

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

#99

Post by oceanplexian »

ben_w wrote: post #53
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…

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.

Post reply on HN