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 avoided.
People are different. For example, my fear of death is in the from existential dread. It's an occasional thing.
We should probably try harder to make people healthier in general. Much of the frailty of the elderly can be avoided with rigorous exercise. Maybe heart disease and dementia doesn't have to be your fate. I don't know how much longer people will be able to live if they optimize the hell out of their biomarkers.
But I do know...I don't want to be in pain and frail when I die. The best way to do that is making health my priority.
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. each hour of exercise does not make you live an hour longer, so you are net negative from the get-go. (if you love exercise, it's not a loss, but in that case you would do it anyway even if it shortened your life because you love it, no need to spend time extolling its virtues)
i optimize for doing what i love to do all the time.
Being "natural" doesnt mean anything on relation to fear. Being eaten alive by lions is 100% natural too. Death is inevitable. So there is little to gain from being too afraid of it, but i would never suggest that anyone not fear the unknown. That fear is what has kept us alive and evolving. The fear is natural.
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 seem to be that afraid. Many make peace. Or at least that’s the image painted by popular science articles on the matter. And speaking for myself, N=1 and all, I really do fear the process only, and not the conclusion.
That’s why I think dignified death laws for these settings are important. And why I say I fear what society will put me through when it’s my time, if such laws aren’t passed.
I am concerned in general about me living past my health-span. It’s a new concern for many, as medicine traditionally focused on prolonging lifespan. But 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. Sometimes agains their wishes. It’s just a macabre prolongation of the process of dying — something that really is scary.
Or that’s what I’m afraid of, anyways. But I understand it’s a difficult and somewhat taboo topic in society, so apols if it offends.
> 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 enlightened, don’t. But these fears evolved for obvious reasons.
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.
> increasing conversation in the medical community[0] about living past one’s health-span for years
Sure. This doesn't reflect the popular discourse, which is more concerned with fantastical edge cases.
> fear death significantly less than others
Totally agree.
> Only about half of terminally ill patients feel clinically significant death anxiety
Massive difference between death anxiety, which crosses into dreadful anticipation of a future state, and fear, which is more of a present concern. I fear getting hit by a car. I'm not really concerned with it most of the time. (And when I am, it's fleeting and limmited.)
When you say fearing death, I think you mean obsessing over death. That, I agree, is unhealthy. Fear, more generally, is an unpleasantness that results from dangers or threats. Death is very clearly a danger and threat. Contemplating it doesn't need to be uncomfortable. But it's dedidedly unnatural, if alluring, to consider one's own death monotonoically. (For what it's worth, this is closer to my experience. But I also know I have a high risk tolerance, and have to consciously keep an eye on that.)
Quality of life is often gone long before there is any imminant chance of death. Chronic pain, loss of mobility, memory, visikn, and hearing deteriorating. Drugs and all their side effects.
There is a very large gradient. Even all of those symptoms, while lower quality of life than when they were in their prime, are a far cry from being in a hospital/nursing home, with random people poking needles into you all the time, and that is a best case scenario.
I know from seeing my grandparents, who lived into upper 90s. At home, they were still happy. Being poked and prodded in a hospital is a material step down in quality of life. On top of that, imagine having a breathing tube/catheter/etc.
"If the tiger attempts to eat you, remember that you yourself are simply composed of atoms, and it is simply attempting to rearrange some of them for you."
Fear of death can be healthy (esp when one is young)! That said, courage is the first virtue, don't pay attention to people who complain about its signalling
You can’t honestly say you don’t fear death until you face it directly. Tell someone they’ll be executed tomorrow, then ask if they fear death, some people lose their minds when told they’re terminally ill. It’s not as simple as just saying, “I don’t fear death.”
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 death like this should be table stakes for an advanced economy, but alas, it's not.
(Edited to add: Sorry, too long of a post here. I didn’t bother to renew my domain this year)
A timely piece I can relate to. currently starting my second week in a (US) hospital oncology ward after my 11th cycle of chemo. I was first diagnosed with stage iv colon cancer and after chemo, surgery, resections and stubbornness was NED from 2018 to 2025. The return is inoperable and I was given “six months to a year”.
I asked if I’d be in pain when death came, and he said that I wouldn’t likely be - it would just be feeling more and more tired. That’s basically what’s been happening.
The chemo itself hasn’t given me direct side effects like skin lesions or mouth sores, nor much nausea. The secondary effects on my kidneys (which were already doing poorly before this started) and liver (cirrhosis) plus the metastases in lymph nodes and lung leads to edema. Diuretics helped but flushed out my potassium, so there several months where they trying to balance those electrolytes.
Anyway, a lot of my swelling was reduced (and they took 4L from two rounds of draining my lungs) but for some ungodly reason my scrotal sack decided it wanted to play too, and became the size and consistency of one of those half size basketballs you can win at fairs. it’s so bad that I actually requested a catheter. The swelling makes walking or anything else really painful.
The oncology wing I’m in doesn’t seem soaked in the kind of depressing, institutional green malaise of slightly older hospitals but it isn’t a “nice place” to die (I don’t expect to do that this visit in any case). The older woman (70?) two doors down though - seems to be in constant pain and in and out of lucidity, shouting at everyone. Usually a phrase gets stuck on repeat for a few hours - the most heartbreaking was “mommy get my mommy I’m sorry mommy I’m a bad girl mommy stop it” yelled loudly for hours.
This is a generic hospital though. Memorial Sloan-Kettering in NYC has a patient day lounge and lots of projects for child patients and patients families. Still not even approaching the quality described
Sorry, rambling. Probably my way of compartmentalizing the anxiety.
The other thing I wanted to say is that I really liked Christopher Hitchens “Mortality” and that Terry Pratchett’s very relatable death character shows up in all of his books. My favorite quote is from “Small Gods” as Death comes for the protagonist at the very end:
> “Ah. There really is a desert. Does everyone get this?” said Brutha. WHO KNOWS? “And what is at the end of the desert?” JUDGMENT. Brutha considered this. “Which end?” Death grinned and stepped aside.
Maybe I’m not afraid of death because as a devout atheist - well yea, we all get to do that at some point.
The quote that really has stuck with me was also from Pratchett:
"What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?"
This caught me in two ways:
1. Death is the release. Whatever suffering you're undergoing, it won't follow you into whatever comes next, even if that is absolute oblivion. The relief would be welcome, I assume. So that's at least one positive way to look at it.
But moreso:
2. Everyone's death is individual and special. The process of getting to it is different for everyone, and the journey is just as much a part of the process as the destination. It isn't something to fear, because you cannot stop it, but it is something to consider as you move through your life.
Cancer is the fucking devil. I, myself, have been lucky enough to avoid it for now, but we spent the last year with my father and lymphoma. It's a fucking nightmare of cancer treatment and chasing side effects from the cancer treatments until the end. He chose to die with hospice on the family farm; it wasn't the most dignified death due to the symptoms of his cancer, but it was peaceful and with family/friends. So that's something.
His treatment didn't really bother me, and his process didn't really depress me; it was the people like the older lady in your write-up that really stuck with me. In his first month on the cancer floor, his across the hall neighbor was just like that. Her only lucid moments were either screaming in pain, or nonsense phrases on repeat from what I assume was her childhood.
Terrifying.
I hope that your life goes well all the way to the end. I genuinely do not know what to say other than that.
I suppose that Catholic hospitals were in the business of "treating fear of death" effectively through evangelization of all patients. At this point in history, hospitals, whether secular or religious, stand between us and death at all times. They are practically the only portal to the other side, whether or not we are willing.
For me, perhaps I do not fear death so much as infirmity. Dying, for me, would be entrance into glory and bliss (at least that beginning of that process), but to live with illness, to be incapacitated, to suffer helplessly, that's a terrible and frightful thing.
So being admitted to a hospital, the beginning of that infirmity or incapacitation, that is definitely a traumatic experience for me that requires accompaniment and soothing. Unfortunately, modern hospitals are woefully equipped to allay our fears, but instead just run us through a meat grinder of paperwork, finances, poorly-informed decisions, and disappointment.
So it's laudable that palliative care and hospices are making efforts like this one.
On my own part, I'm gradually overcoming a visceral fear of hospitals and facilities by just waltzing in while I'm perfectly healthy. There are a couple nearby and so I've taken to eating in their cafeterias when it's convenient (very cheap, great selection of healthy food!); and the chapel where the Eucharist is reserved is a focus of peace and prayer; and there is actually a lot of art and history to admire in them, so it's become an interesting and unexpected diversion.
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 tax expense? Because the culture believes the problem is insurmountable, inevitable, and not worth solving. Our parents try to hide their grief and dread at the inevitability, telling us it's okay, but the tears at a funeral disagree.
As an aside, I would pay vast sums of money (millions of dollars) to live my final days at an old folks' home that was capable of monitoring my health on a frequent basis, catching things early, and integrated SOTA cryonics facilities to maximize my chance of revival in case LEV doesn't become a possibility in my lifetime.
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.
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.
I have a very strong metaphysical prior against consciousness uploads being possible, but I hope to live in a universe structured in the right way to make me wrong.
It's not the difference in substrate that makes me doubt it's possible (I'm a very strong believer in panpsychism), but I doubt the transfer could ever be "continuous" in a way that my monkey brain was satisfied with.
The continuity flaw is a reasonable concern; I have it as well. (I don't want a copy of me to live on; I want to live on, myself.)
However, I do think it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible. It's harder than the alternative, but theoretically possible.
I've come to believe that the copy will seriously believe it's me, similar to a virtual machine being halted and moved to different hardware, how would "I" know I'm not me? My copy will have my memories, if it's an exact copy it'll have the same ways of thinking, maybe after the transfer it'll remember "Ah, I have a date tonight with my wife, geez I remember this morning she drank all the juice except for a sip, and then put it back in the fridge, that always makes me irrationally angry.".
Sometimes we even feel "out of body", even in our own consciousness, so why would it be so different when we are copied?
One easy way to tell the difference: if you do the full upload non-destructively, such that there's a full uploaded copy that thinks it's you, and your full original biological self, would the latter then happily get disintegrated? (There are people who say yes to that question, which genuinely baffles me.)
The thing I'm talking about, of attempting to build a "move" operation that isn't "copy then delete", is exactly what I meant when I said it seems harder but possible to solve.
Both the copy and the original wouldn't like to be destroyed, would they, it's like volunteering to end one's consciousness.
What if there's hardware to wirelessly combine the minds, and you can experience what your clone^W other-self experiences. A bit like having someone be in e.g. Iceland and facetime you a low quality sight and sounds experience of Iceland... would you then say "Ok, I don't mind having one of my input devices go offline".
> it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible
The fundamental gating discoveries are all around the nature of consciousness. Is it emergent? Is it empirically detectable? Is it quantum magic? We have inklings around this. But our understanding of it hasn't fundamentally changed since, arguably, Descartes.
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 people into thinking they're discoursing with a human, even though I think most people think LLMs aren't conscious.
There's something like 40 different definitions of "consciousness"; some are easy to test for, some are provably impossible, but I don't know if even one of them is actually what we want.
I remember my dreams, but was I really conscious, or was it an unconscious experience whose memory was available to my conscious mind when I woke? It's conceivable that I am fully conscious right now, that an upload of my brain would change and grow and report conscious throughout, that you could then download it into a new brain in a new body and that new mind would also report having remembered conscious experiences while uploaded — all without the upload having ever experienced anything that would match the hard-to-describe thing we often try to grasp at with the word "consciousness".
We have altered states of consciousness. People can have conversations and drive cars while sleepwalking. Am I only truly conscious while actively engaging in self-reflection, or all the time? Is my consciousness like your consciousness? Did my mother loose hers at some point during the course of her Alzheimer's, or did she keep it until the very end? When a Buddhist trains themselves to let go, do they lose theirs?
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.
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.
I think they meant eternal life much more in the “I have no mouth, and I must scream” sense.
Much has been said and written about the cruelty of immortality, since the myth of Sisyphus and probably before.
“The Mortal Immortal” is a story about prolonging lifespan but not healthspan, and also not emotional fulfilment in life — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Immortal. There are also TV shows (“Altered Carbon”, “Black Mirror” USS Callister and other episodes, “Twilight Zone”) and video games (“Nobody Wants to Die”) about it.
What your parent comment speaks about (the vanity of endless life) is particularly explored in Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Affair”. Endless life could mean no regard for quality of life and endless trivial pursuits.
Yes, I've read/watched most of those and I believe they are just entertainment. I can perfectly envision people living happy, long lives. These books and shows have manufactured conflict for drama.
With our current lifespan I already see lots of people intentionally killing themselves with alcohol or drugs or food. I cannot imagine most people would be happy with eternity.
I know most people aren't happy with how long they live now. The idea is that you'd get to choose how long you want to live instead of having it forced on you.
Smallpox was not meant to be cured anyway, but we did, and we're better for it. One of the defining qualities of humanity is the ability to better ourselves and overcome challenges.
Never going to happen. We don't have the technology, we're not going to get the technology, and nobody benefits by having wealthy people around forever. Your body parts will eventually wear out regardless of what you try to do to mitigate the situation, and everybody will get terminal cancer sooner or later regardless of anything else. And even if THAT doesn't get you, an accident eventually will. Doesn't matter if it's a car wreck, a plane crash, someone coughing on you at the wrong moment, or you sneezing and bursting a blood vessel in your head.
The big assumption in this counterargument is that we stay biological forever. I see biological "immortality" (anti-aging) as a temporary stopgap while we develop gradual replacement and migrate to a synthetic/digital consciousness, hosted on nodes distributed throughout Earth orbit or beyond for fault tolerance and availability.
I'd be shocked if this didn't happen in the next thousand years.
Needing air/water everywhere we go is incredibly limiting as well.
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.
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 avoided.
People are different. For example, my fear of death is in the from existential dread. It's an occasional thing.
We should probably try harder to make people healthier in general. Much of the frailty of the elderly can be avoided with rigorous exercise. Maybe heart disease and dementia doesn't have to be your fate. I don't know how much longer people will be able to live if they optimize the hell out of their biomarkers.
But I do know...I don't want to be in pain and frail when I die. The best way to do that is making health my priority.
Unfortunately, in the end, bad health is likely to come get you anyways, you just have a higher likelihood of more and more healthy years.
A good friend of mine lived healthy, and still went hiking in their 90s. Yet, they had a stroke and are now bedridden.
If you just drop dead after having had a nice live or go through months or years of frailty and bad health, it's all in the cards.
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. each hour of exercise does not make you live an hour longer, so you are net negative from the get-go. (if you love exercise, it's not a loss, but in that case you would do it anyway even if it shortened your life because you love it, no need to spend time extolling its virtues)
i optimize for doing what i love to do all the time.
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 …
Agreed. Planning well can lessen this fear.
Being "natural" doesnt mean anything on relation to fear. Being eaten alive by lions is 100% natural too. Death is inevitable. So there is little to gain from being too afraid of it, but i would never suggest that anyone not fear the unknown. That fear is what has kept us alive and evolving. The fear is natural.
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 seem to be that afraid. Many make peace. Or at least that’s the image painted by popular science articles on the matter. And speaking for myself, N=1 and all, I really do fear the process only, and not the conclusion.
That’s why I think dignified death laws for these settings are important. And why I say I fear what society will put me through when it’s my time, if such laws aren’t passed.
I am concerned in general about me living past my health-span. It’s a new concern for many, as medicine traditionally focused on prolonging lifespan. But 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. Sometimes agains their wishes. It’s just a macabre prolongation of the process of dying — something that really is scary.
Or that’s what I’m afraid of, anyways. But I understand it’s a difficult and somewhat taboo topic in society, so apols if it offends.
> 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 enlightened, don’t. But these fears evolved for obvious reasons.
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/
> increasing conversation in the medical community[0] about living past one’s health-span for years
Sure. This doesn't reflect the popular discourse, which is more concerned with fantastical edge cases.
> fear death significantly less than others
Totally agree.
> Only about half of terminally ill patients feel clinically significant death anxiety
Massive difference between death anxiety, which crosses into dreadful anticipation of a future state, and fear, which is more of a present concern. I fear getting hit by a car. I'm not really concerned with it most of the time. (And when I am, it's fleeting and limmited.)
When you say fearing death, I think you mean obsessing over death. That, I agree, is unhealthy. Fear, more generally, is an unpleasantness that results from dangers or threats. Death is very clearly a danger and threat. Contemplating it doesn't need to be uncomfortable. But it's dedidedly unnatural, if alluring, to consider one's own death monotonoically. (For what it's worth, this is closer to my experience. But I also know I have a high risk tolerance, and have to consciously keep an eye on that.)
Quality of life is often gone long before there is any imminant chance of death. Chronic pain, loss of mobility, memory, visikn, and hearing deteriorating. Drugs and all their side effects.
There is a very large gradient. Even all of those symptoms, while lower quality of life than when they were in their prime, are a far cry from being in a hospital/nursing home, with random people poking needles into you all the time, and that is a best case scenario.
I know from seeing my grandparents, who lived into upper 90s. At home, they were still happy. Being poked and prodded in a hospital is a material step down in quality of life. On top of that, imagine having a breathing tube/catheter/etc.
If you offer euthanasia by hungry lions, you'll have takers.
Not after i play them that tape of a man being eaten alive by a grizzly.
They like those videos.
> The fear is natural
To be fair, we have evolved stupid eras, e.g. male adolescence, when that fear seems to be purposely tamped down.
"If the tiger attempts to eat you, remember that you yourself are simply composed of atoms, and it is simply attempting to rearrange some of them for you."
There is nothing more natural than fear of death itself
Fear of death can be healthy (esp when one is young)! That said, courage is the first virtue, don't pay attention to people who complain about its signalling
You can’t honestly say you don’t fear death until you face it directly. Tell someone they’ll be executed tomorrow, then ask if they fear death, some people lose their minds when told they’re terminally ill. It’s not as simple as just saying, “I don’t fear death.”
[dead]
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.
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 death like this should be table stakes for an advanced economy, but alas, it's not.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory
life is so beautiful and so tragic
(Edited to add: Sorry, too long of a post here. I didn’t bother to renew my domain this year)
A timely piece I can relate to. currently starting my second week in a (US) hospital oncology ward after my 11th cycle of chemo. I was first diagnosed with stage iv colon cancer and after chemo, surgery, resections and stubbornness was NED from 2018 to 2025. The return is inoperable and I was given “six months to a year”.
I asked if I’d be in pain when death came, and he said that I wouldn’t likely be - it would just be feeling more and more tired. That’s basically what’s been happening.
The chemo itself hasn’t given me direct side effects like skin lesions or mouth sores, nor much nausea. The secondary effects on my kidneys (which were already doing poorly before this started) and liver (cirrhosis) plus the metastases in lymph nodes and lung leads to edema. Diuretics helped but flushed out my potassium, so there several months where they trying to balance those electrolytes.
Anyway, a lot of my swelling was reduced (and they took 4L from two rounds of draining my lungs) but for some ungodly reason my scrotal sack decided it wanted to play too, and became the size and consistency of one of those half size basketballs you can win at fairs. it’s so bad that I actually requested a catheter. The swelling makes walking or anything else really painful.
The oncology wing I’m in doesn’t seem soaked in the kind of depressing, institutional green malaise of slightly older hospitals but it isn’t a “nice place” to die (I don’t expect to do that this visit in any case). The older woman (70?) two doors down though - seems to be in constant pain and in and out of lucidity, shouting at everyone. Usually a phrase gets stuck on repeat for a few hours - the most heartbreaking was “mommy get my mommy I’m sorry mommy I’m a bad girl mommy stop it” yelled loudly for hours.
This is a generic hospital though. Memorial Sloan-Kettering in NYC has a patient day lounge and lots of projects for child patients and patients families. Still not even approaching the quality described
Sorry, rambling. Probably my way of compartmentalizing the anxiety.
The other thing I wanted to say is that I really liked Christopher Hitchens “Mortality” and that Terry Pratchett’s very relatable death character shows up in all of his books. My favorite quote is from “Small Gods” as Death comes for the protagonist at the very end:
> “Ah. There really is a desert. Does everyone get this?” said Brutha. WHO KNOWS? “And what is at the end of the desert?” JUDGMENT. Brutha considered this. “Which end?” Death grinned and stepped aside.
Maybe I’m not afraid of death because as a devout atheist - well yea, we all get to do that at some point.
The quote that really has stuck with me was also from Pratchett:
"What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the reaper man?"
This caught me in two ways:
1. Death is the release. Whatever suffering you're undergoing, it won't follow you into whatever comes next, even if that is absolute oblivion. The relief would be welcome, I assume. So that's at least one positive way to look at it.
But moreso:
2. Everyone's death is individual and special. The process of getting to it is different for everyone, and the journey is just as much a part of the process as the destination. It isn't something to fear, because you cannot stop it, but it is something to consider as you move through your life.
Cancer is the fucking devil. I, myself, have been lucky enough to avoid it for now, but we spent the last year with my father and lymphoma. It's a fucking nightmare of cancer treatment and chasing side effects from the cancer treatments until the end. He chose to die with hospice on the family farm; it wasn't the most dignified death due to the symptoms of his cancer, but it was peaceful and with family/friends. So that's something.
His treatment didn't really bother me, and his process didn't really depress me; it was the people like the older lady in your write-up that really stuck with me. In his first month on the cancer floor, his across the hall neighbor was just like that. Her only lucid moments were either screaming in pain, or nonsense phrases on repeat from what I assume was her childhood.
Terrifying.
I hope that your life goes well all the way to the end. I genuinely do not know what to say other than that.
My dad chose hospice over dialysis and constant potassium problems. I feel you there.
Thanks for your comment. Wishing you the best, especially a life free of pain.
I suppose that Catholic hospitals were in the business of "treating fear of death" effectively through evangelization of all patients. At this point in history, hospitals, whether secular or religious, stand between us and death at all times. They are practically the only portal to the other side, whether or not we are willing.
For me, perhaps I do not fear death so much as infirmity. Dying, for me, would be entrance into glory and bliss (at least that beginning of that process), but to live with illness, to be incapacitated, to suffer helplessly, that's a terrible and frightful thing.
So being admitted to a hospital, the beginning of that infirmity or incapacitation, that is definitely a traumatic experience for me that requires accompaniment and soothing. Unfortunately, modern hospitals are woefully equipped to allay our fears, but instead just run us through a meat grinder of paperwork, finances, poorly-informed decisions, and disappointment.
So it's laudable that palliative care and hospices are making efforts like this one.
On my own part, I'm gradually overcoming a visceral fear of hospitals and facilities by just waltzing in while I'm perfectly healthy. There are a couple nearby and so I've taken to eating in their cafeterias when it's convenient (very cheap, great selection of healthy food!); and the chapel where the Eucharist is reserved is a focus of peace and prayer; and there is actually a lot of art and history to admire in them, so it's become an interesting and unexpected diversion.
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 tax expense? Because the culture believes the problem is insurmountable, inevitable, and not worth solving. Our parents try to hide their grief and dread at the inevitability, telling us it's okay, but the tears at a funeral disagree.
As an aside, I would pay vast sums of money (millions of dollars) to live my final days at an old folks' home that was capable of monitoring my health on a frequent basis, catching things early, and integrated SOTA cryonics facilities to maximize my chance of revival in case LEV doesn't become a possibility in my lifetime.
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.
> 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.
I have a very strong metaphysical prior against consciousness uploads being possible, but I hope to live in a universe structured in the right way to make me wrong.
It's not the difference in substrate that makes me doubt it's possible (I'm a very strong believer in panpsychism), but I doubt the transfer could ever be "continuous" in a way that my monkey brain was satisfied with.
The continuity flaw is a reasonable concern; I have it as well. (I don't want a copy of me to live on; I want to live on, myself.)
However, I do think it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible. It's harder than the alternative, but theoretically possible.
I've come to believe that the copy will seriously believe it's me, similar to a virtual machine being halted and moved to different hardware, how would "I" know I'm not me? My copy will have my memories, if it's an exact copy it'll have the same ways of thinking, maybe after the transfer it'll remember "Ah, I have a date tonight with my wife, geez I remember this morning she drank all the juice except for a sip, and then put it back in the fridge, that always makes me irrationally angry.".
Sometimes we even feel "out of body", even in our own consciousness, so why would it be so different when we are copied?
One easy way to tell the difference: if you do the full upload non-destructively, such that there's a full uploaded copy that thinks it's you, and your full original biological self, would the latter then happily get disintegrated? (There are people who say yes to that question, which genuinely baffles me.)
The thing I'm talking about, of attempting to build a "move" operation that isn't "copy then delete", is exactly what I meant when I said it seems harder but possible to solve.
Both the copy and the original wouldn't like to be destroyed, would they, it's like volunteering to end one's consciousness.
What if there's hardware to wirelessly combine the minds, and you can experience what your clone^W other-self experiences. A bit like having someone be in e.g. Iceland and facetime you a low quality sight and sounds experience of Iceland... would you then say "Ok, I don't mind having one of my input devices go offline".
"Combine" is a tall order. But "transfer in a continuous fashion, with continuity of consciousness throughout the process" is somewhat less so.
> it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible
The fundamental gating discoveries are all around the nature of consciousness. Is it emergent? Is it empirically detectable? Is it quantum magic? We have inklings around this. But our understanding of it hasn't fundamentally changed since, arguably, Descartes.
The Ship of Theseus has questions.
> 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.
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 people into thinking they're discoursing with a human, even though I think most people think LLMs aren't conscious.
There's something like 40 different definitions of "consciousness"; some are easy to test for, some are provably impossible, but I don't know if even one of them is actually what we want.
I remember my dreams, but was I really conscious, or was it an unconscious experience whose memory was available to my conscious mind when I woke? It's conceivable that I am fully conscious right now, that an upload of my brain would change and grow and report conscious throughout, that you could then download it into a new brain in a new body and that new mind would also report having remembered conscious experiences while uploaded — all without the upload having ever experienced anything that would match the hard-to-describe thing we often try to grasp at with the word "consciousness".
We have altered states of consciousness. People can have conversations and drive cars while sleepwalking. Am I only truly conscious while actively engaging in self-reflection, or all the time? Is my consciousness like your consciousness? Did my mother loose hers at some point during the course of her Alzheimer's, or did she keep it until the very end? When a Buddhist trains themselves to let go, do they lose theirs?
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.
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.
I think they meant eternal life much more in the “I have no mouth, and I must scream” sense.
Much has been said and written about the cruelty of immortality, since the myth of Sisyphus and probably before.
“The Mortal Immortal” is a story about prolonging lifespan but not healthspan, and also not emotional fulfilment in life — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Immortal. There are also TV shows (“Altered Carbon”, “Black Mirror” USS Callister and other episodes, “Twilight Zone”) and video games (“Nobody Wants to Die”) about it.
What your parent comment speaks about (the vanity of endless life) is particularly explored in Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Affair”. Endless life could mean no regard for quality of life and endless trivial pursuits.
Yes, I've read/watched most of those and I believe they are just entertainment. I can perfectly envision people living happy, long lives. These books and shows have manufactured conflict for drama.
With our current lifespan I already see lots of people intentionally killing themselves with alcohol or drugs or food. I cannot imagine most people would be happy with eternity.
I know most people aren't happy with how long they live now. The idea is that you'd get to choose how long you want to live instead of having it forced on you.
Death from aging maybe. But as we saw, the next most dangerous things are each other and the systems that push toward people to death.
Psychological health and well being are going to be key to resolving the problem of peaceful coexistence between humans.
Funny that we've gotten to the point where we can imagine an end to aging but not war.
Me and my partner always lement that we didn't evolve from capybaras instead.
Mortality is not meant to be cured. Quality of life on the other hand..
I'm not sure any disease is "meant" to be cured. The fact that we can cure any diseases at all is a lucky accident.
Is this a religious conviction, or something else? I've heard that viewpoint a lot, but I've never heard anyone really explain where it comes from.
Smallpox was not meant to be cured anyway, but we did, and we're better for it. One of the defining qualities of humanity is the ability to better ourselves and overcome challenges.
Never going to happen. We don't have the technology, we're not going to get the technology, and nobody benefits by having wealthy people around forever. Your body parts will eventually wear out regardless of what you try to do to mitigate the situation, and everybody will get terminal cancer sooner or later regardless of anything else. And even if THAT doesn't get you, an accident eventually will. Doesn't matter if it's a car wreck, a plane crash, someone coughing on you at the wrong moment, or you sneezing and bursting a blood vessel in your head.
The big assumption in this counterargument is that we stay biological forever. I see biological "immortality" (anti-aging) as a temporary stopgap while we develop gradual replacement and migrate to a synthetic/digital consciousness, hosted on nodes distributed throughout Earth orbit or beyond for fault tolerance and availability.
I'd be shocked if this didn't happen in the next thousand years.
Needing air/water everywhere we go is incredibly limiting as well.
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.
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Dont think about death too much, or you will manifest it
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