I don't know if it's just me, but I tend to shy away from reading these sorts of articles here. On HN I'm able to recapture some of that child-like joy that goes along with building things, so it feels extra-painful to be reminded of my mortality.
That's perfectly understandable. Death is terrible, the debilitating effects of aging are arguably even worse, and it's natural to want to avoid thinking about them. The problem is when that avoidance impulse becomes so strong that it prevents people from seriously considering solutions, instead rejecting them with thought-free soundbites like "death is part of life".
We're the first generation that actually has a chance to do something about the annihilation of billions of sentient beings, and the immense suffering caused by the physical and mental effects of aging. But in order to solve the problem, we have to be willing to acknowledge that there is one.
And now that I'm sufficiently inspired, it's time for another SENS donation.
People should be taught to accept mortality, instead of the opposite. We'd have a lot more happy people.
Death is natural. It happens, that's all. It's not a bad or good thing. It's just part of everything else. If you know that before hand, you don't have to "deal around it" or feel any pain.
It's no more a "bad thing" than gravity being "bad" because I tripped and fell down instead of floating. It is what it is, and the sooner you accept the current realities the better off you are.
You also ignore the obvious results of death, one of which is reproduction and birth of new life and the resultant new thought patterns that emerge from a divorce from the constraints of past experience.
No one in good health looks forward to death but the lack of it means that we aren't commenting on HN, we're all at best simple eukaryotes swimming in the paradise of primordial ooze until we consume all non-organic resources and then suffer an eternity of starvation.
Sheesh... come on, think about what you are saying. Firstly you say that "if something exists, it cannot be judged to be bad"...? Second, death is necessary for new thought patterns...?
Sorry, it is YOU who needs to accept the current reality: death IS bad. Unfortunately we feel so powerless about this right now that people think up justifications to cope with the fact.
Me, I'm in favor of acknowledging death as a problem and spending significant resources to try and solve it.
Instead of spending billions of dollars on finding new ways to bring it about.
We are now living in the age of biopolitics, claims University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Jonathan Moreno in his new book The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America. “Biopolitics is the nonviolent struggle for control over the actual and imagined achievements of the new biology and the new world it symbolizes,” he writes. “The stakes are about as big as they can get.”
The reminders will come, sooner or later. As (I believe) Steve Yegge put it: I've got a limited number of 5-year projects in me. As I've got less of those, it becomes more important to choose which one you pick.
When you're twenty, it feels like you can tackle everything. As you grow older, you realize that you can't even begin to learn enough to know all the things you'd like to tackle :)
