Whenever I hear people refer to death as a tool that we can’t toss aside until other problems have been fixed I want to kill them, personally, and ask them if that’s what they had in mind. Well, alright, that’s an exaggeration, but I want to point out that they are thinking of death as some far-away, abstract thing that happens to OTHER PEOPLE that they don’t care about.
Scenario: You will die later today. Look at the clock. Before it hits midnight you will perish. Now stop looking at the clock, you’re burning precious seconds.
But wait! There’s a way out—yes, you already guessed it, you can cure death completely for everyone! Is it now so terribly important that all those Big Problems that you just had to hold on to Death to address be fixed before death is cured? Are you willing to die within hours because we need Death so badly to keep our Big Problems in check? Or are you ok with releasing the cure for death so you can continue breathing and get around to fixing those problems over the next few years/decades?
If you aren’t willing to kill yourself today to keep the Big Problems under control then you cannot ask others to die for that reason.
While it is FAR from the worst I can imagine anyone having to go through, my two dogs both just died within a month of each other (I literally dug the second grave a day before posting this thread), and last year my grandmother died. I don’t know whether dogs matter in your moral schema. They matter in mine, whether or not they comprehend what exactly is happening.
All three died of old age. Their deaths (all three of them) did not affect me much. What affected me was watching them suffer for the year(s) prior to their death. Watching them lose their ability to control their bodies, suddenly falling down for no reason. Having to rely on other people to help them walk, then relying on other people to feed them, and finally (in my grandmother’s case) having to rely on other people to think for them. She lost her memory, she lost her rationality, she lost her ability to even MAKE decisions at all. I could see the humiliation and horror on her face as she lost control of everything that defined her as a person. I gradually stopped thinking of her as a person, because she stopped demonstrating the traits that I associate with people.
One day, towards the end of her life, I was sitting in her hospital room because I felt obligated to. I talked a little bit to her in case she could hear me and in case it gave her comfort. She didn’t give any sign that she could hear me. Apparently she was asleep. I said “okay, I’m gonna go find Mom now. I’ll be back later.”
All she had the energy to do was squeeze my hand and say “no, please stay.” It was one of the last expressions of desire I heard her make. And I was horrified that inside her failing body and mind was a person who wanted, if nothing else, to be loved. And terribly ashamed that I had stopped believing that.
Nobody should have to experience that.
Nobody should have to die either. I didn’t say the should. I explicitly stated that I just wanted to know WHY people around here didn’t seem so concerned about the Big Problems, just because there was a Bigger Problem. And by the time you made this post, FAWS had answered my question and I said so.
But honestly, it wasn’t my grandmother’s death that moved me to tears at her funeral. I can come up with justifications for that, I dunno if they’d hold up to rational scrutiny. “She had an amazing life and did everything she set out to do” and all that jazz. It just didn’t impact me. The thing that made me cry was the horrible, creeping living death she experienced in the last years of her life. Give me a choice between ending suffering with painless deaths in sleep, or ending death, and I will choose to end suffering in a heartbeat. So long as there are new people to experience joy and fulfillment.
SECTION BREAK
(because experience tells me this post is too long to not have a section break)
Oddly enough (THIS IS IN NO WAY AN OPINION ON WHAT THE AVERAGE PERSON CAN OR SHOULD FEEL), at this specific moment in my life, I actually am only marginally afraid of dying. I’m 24. Theoretically I have my whole life ahead of me. But I feel like I just wrapped all the previous plot threads of my life, and whatever I do next is starting an entire new story that I’ve barely even thought about. The things about death that actually SCARED me was the notion that I might suddenly disappear before I got to finish the things I wanted to do. That’s what I think is actually unfair—dying without warning.
Right now I’m in limbo, and if you had a concrete, flawless proof that I could sacrifice myself to achieve a greater good… I dunno. Maybe. Some people actually ARE willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good when the time comes, and others aren’t, and I don’t know what kind of person I am in that regard. Put a gun to my head and say “end death now!” and I might. But you could also point a gun to my head and say “I’ll pull the trigger unless you agree to torture 10 random people you don’t know for 50 years” and… who knows, maybe I’m the sort of person who’d do it? (I think I wouldn’t. But I think I WOULD if you put a gun to my sister’s head). Fight or flight responses are not the same as moral judgments.
In the meantime, my solution to the dilemma is to be a good enough person that sacrificing myself would be LESS effective at solving the Big Problems.
I’m not done thinking about this. It’s a complicated issue that I’ve only recently become aware of. And in the meantime, please do not assume that these are far away issues that I’m just thinking about abstractly.
Scenario: You will suffer from malnutrition, living in painful agony, for eternity. You can end it at any time by introducing death to the world. Do you do it?
If you aren’t willing to suffer, don’t ask others to. But more importantly:
Scenario: You (or a loved one of yours) will die in the next hour. There’s a button you can press, which will delay your death by an hour but cause some random person to suffer horribly for an hour each time you press it. How many times do you press the button?
Fight or Flight responses are not moral judgements.
I read both your posts fully, and I apologize for having misjudged you. In my experience I had only run into people who hadn’t had any meaningful experience with death making this sort of “but it’s good for the world” claim. I should’ve known better than to generalize that to Less Wrong posters.
Whenever I hear people refer to death as a tool that we can’t toss aside until other problems have been fixed I want to kill them, personally, and ask them if that’s what they had in mind. Well, alright, that’s an exaggeration, but I want to point out that they are thinking of death as some far-away, abstract thing that happens to OTHER PEOPLE that they don’t care about.
Scenario: You will die later today. Look at the clock. Before it hits midnight you will perish. Now stop looking at the clock, you’re burning precious seconds.
But wait! There’s a way out—yes, you already guessed it, you can cure death completely for everyone! Is it now so terribly important that all those Big Problems that you just had to hold on to Death to address be fixed before death is cured? Are you willing to die within hours because we need Death so badly to keep our Big Problems in check? Or are you ok with releasing the cure for death so you can continue breathing and get around to fixing those problems over the next few years/decades?
If you aren’t willing to kill yourself today to keep the Big Problems under control then you cannot ask others to die for that reason.
While it is FAR from the worst I can imagine anyone having to go through, my two dogs both just died within a month of each other (I literally dug the second grave a day before posting this thread), and last year my grandmother died. I don’t know whether dogs matter in your moral schema. They matter in mine, whether or not they comprehend what exactly is happening.
All three died of old age. Their deaths (all three of them) did not affect me much. What affected me was watching them suffer for the year(s) prior to their death. Watching them lose their ability to control their bodies, suddenly falling down for no reason. Having to rely on other people to help them walk, then relying on other people to feed them, and finally (in my grandmother’s case) having to rely on other people to think for them. She lost her memory, she lost her rationality, she lost her ability to even MAKE decisions at all. I could see the humiliation and horror on her face as she lost control of everything that defined her as a person. I gradually stopped thinking of her as a person, because she stopped demonstrating the traits that I associate with people.
One day, towards the end of her life, I was sitting in her hospital room because I felt obligated to. I talked a little bit to her in case she could hear me and in case it gave her comfort. She didn’t give any sign that she could hear me. Apparently she was asleep. I said “okay, I’m gonna go find Mom now. I’ll be back later.”
All she had the energy to do was squeeze my hand and say “no, please stay.” It was one of the last expressions of desire I heard her make. And I was horrified that inside her failing body and mind was a person who wanted, if nothing else, to be loved. And terribly ashamed that I had stopped believing that.
Nobody should have to experience that.
Nobody should have to die either. I didn’t say the should. I explicitly stated that I just wanted to know WHY people around here didn’t seem so concerned about the Big Problems, just because there was a Bigger Problem. And by the time you made this post, FAWS had answered my question and I said so.
But honestly, it wasn’t my grandmother’s death that moved me to tears at her funeral. I can come up with justifications for that, I dunno if they’d hold up to rational scrutiny. “She had an amazing life and did everything she set out to do” and all that jazz. It just didn’t impact me. The thing that made me cry was the horrible, creeping living death she experienced in the last years of her life. Give me a choice between ending suffering with painless deaths in sleep, or ending death, and I will choose to end suffering in a heartbeat. So long as there are new people to experience joy and fulfillment.
SECTION BREAK
(because experience tells me this post is too long to not have a section break)
Oddly enough (THIS IS IN NO WAY AN OPINION ON WHAT THE AVERAGE PERSON CAN OR SHOULD FEEL), at this specific moment in my life, I actually am only marginally afraid of dying. I’m 24. Theoretically I have my whole life ahead of me. But I feel like I just wrapped all the previous plot threads of my life, and whatever I do next is starting an entire new story that I’ve barely even thought about. The things about death that actually SCARED me was the notion that I might suddenly disappear before I got to finish the things I wanted to do. That’s what I think is actually unfair—dying without warning.
Right now I’m in limbo, and if you had a concrete, flawless proof that I could sacrifice myself to achieve a greater good… I dunno. Maybe. Some people actually ARE willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good when the time comes, and others aren’t, and I don’t know what kind of person I am in that regard. Put a gun to my head and say “end death now!” and I might. But you could also point a gun to my head and say “I’ll pull the trigger unless you agree to torture 10 random people you don’t know for 50 years” and… who knows, maybe I’m the sort of person who’d do it? (I think I wouldn’t. But I think I WOULD if you put a gun to my sister’s head). Fight or flight responses are not the same as moral judgments.
In the meantime, my solution to the dilemma is to be a good enough person that sacrificing myself would be LESS effective at solving the Big Problems.
I’m not done thinking about this. It’s a complicated issue that I’ve only recently become aware of. And in the meantime, please do not assume that these are far away issues that I’m just thinking about abstractly.
If my epic post is too long, the short version:
Scenario: You will suffer from malnutrition, living in painful agony, for eternity. You can end it at any time by introducing death to the world. Do you do it?
If you aren’t willing to suffer, don’t ask others to. But more importantly:
Scenario: You (or a loved one of yours) will die in the next hour. There’s a button you can press, which will delay your death by an hour but cause some random person to suffer horribly for an hour each time you press it. How many times do you press the button?
Fight or Flight responses are not moral judgements.
I read both your posts fully, and I apologize for having misjudged you. In my experience I had only run into people who hadn’t had any meaningful experience with death making this sort of “but it’s good for the world” claim. I should’ve known better than to generalize that to Less Wrong posters.
Your point is well taken, thank you.
Thanks to you as well.