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ting_bu_dong t1_iz1l26g wrote

Reply to comment by KeytiMelakh1 in How Death Can Help Us Live: a philosophical approach to the problem of death by simsquatched

A problem with no solution is still a problem.

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moirasrosesgardens t1_iz1rmbh wrote

What if the solution is to stop seeing it as a problem, though?

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ting_bu_dong t1_iz1tviz wrote

Would you take the same approach with, say, your car?

"The solution to the check engine light is to find peace with the check engine light?"

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da3astch0ppa t1_iz1x8m6 wrote

A car imo is honestly repairable and easier to troubleshoot than a human though? Unless we have the technology to bring someone back like a car.

Cant compare them.

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ting_bu_dong t1_iz205zo wrote

Only because we are more ignorant of how to fix the body than we are the car.

Which is the problem to solve.

They can certainly be compared.

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da3astch0ppa t1_iz20q48 wrote

But we can make a car Last forever , always replacing an engine, drivetrain etc. same cant be said for humans because we arent keeping humans alive 200+ years. its not a problem we can solve. But again Death in itself is not a problem. Its part of Life, we need Death.

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ting_bu_dong t1_iz27iut wrote

>its not a problem we can solve.

Yet.

Which is why we need to continue to focus on the problem.

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Funoichi t1_iz3dynq wrote

Well we won’t be able to solve death entirely because of entropy. I think most of the research now is on extending healthy years.

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KillerPacifist1 t1_j1h1rnh wrote

Realistically entropy will only start to become a problem in a few trillion years, and even after the last star dies in a 100 trillion years there are many feasible (and relatively low tech) ways to harvest energy from black holes.

I don't know about you, but I'll start worrying about the technical differences of a few trillion years and forever when I get there.

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Funoichi t1_j1h2h5v wrote

I’m pretty sure the breakdown of the human body due to aging and wear and tear would lead to organism death well in advance of trillions of years.

Even the elderly consume the same amount of energy as the young but just eating can’t extend life forever.

Entropy is at work at all times to move systems from highly improbable states like human beings into highly probable states. It’s very much a problem.

It’s at work at all times. It only needs to work once. This is why magic is impossible and why the hard problem of death will never be solved.

Heck even computer systems degrade with time if you wanna go the human consciousness in computers route. Entropy defines the limits of the possible.

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KillerPacifist1 t1_j1h5n05 wrote

>I’m pretty sure the breakdown of the human body due to aging and wear and tear would lead to organism death well in advance of trillions of years. > >Even the elderly consume the same amount of energy as the young but just eating can’t extend life forever.

This break down of the body is something encoded into our DNA, not something dictated by the nature of reality. We have found life forms on Earth that appear to be biologically immortal and can continously regenerate themselves, seemingly without end as far as we can tell.

>Entropy is at work at all times to move systems from highly improbable states like human beings into highly probable states. It’s very much a problem.

Entropy only necessarily increases in a closed system. The human body is very much not a closed system. As long as there is other entropy to increase (such as from un-fused hydrogen or un-evaporated black holes), there is no physical reason we cannot keep the entropy of a human body low over very long time periods.

>It’s at work at all times. It only needs to work once. This is why magic is impossible and why the hard problem of death will never be solved.

Again, only in closed systems. If you spill milk on the floor nothing is physically stopping you from sucking it back up into the carton. Though the action of doing so will increase the overall entropy of the universe, even if it decreases the local entropy of the milk-carton-floor system.

>Heck even computer systems degrade with time if you wanna go the human consciousness in computers route. Entropy defines the limits of the possible.

I mean, if you never repair the computer (which you totally can, no magic needed I promise), sure they'll degrade over time.

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Funoichi t1_j1kkjq0 wrote

Alright, you’ve satisfied me that you know what entropy is at least. I jest, placating gesture.😅

I decided to look into these immortal organisms, and none of them are truly immortal. Even the regenerating jellyfish have been observed to fully die source. Tardigrades too. Even you wrote appear and seemingly.

Animals can extend life through various means, but not forever, organisms aren’t built to last, species are.

>encoded in dna not nature of reality

I regret to inform you that dna exists in reality so it absolutely is bound by its nature. This can explain how copying mistakes are made, etc.

Even certain animals without telomeres can’t live forever.

Aside from all that, predation, disease, and injuries are also related to entropy and the nature of reality.

To your point about causing other entropy to increase in order to decrease our own, that goes to my point about eating.

Even the highest quality foodstuffs can’t reverse the aging process, no matter how much energy is pumped in. This has to do with more than just telomeres (although I addressed those already). Aging is a complex process that needs to be further understood.

I’m optimistic about the future of aging science and technology also, we should shoot for the stars! But we should be pragmatic about the realities of being an organism.

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elementgermanium t1_iz326qw wrote

We do not need death. One could argue that, under the right definition of “need,” that is an outright contradiction. Even an unsolvable problem would still be a problem.

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vulkanosaure t1_iz33d9o wrote

An additional benefit of longer life would be that, given a longer lifespan, individuals are naturally gonna focus on more long term priorities

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vulkanosaure t1_iz331vx wrote

Our species used to need death to evolve (death means more birth which means more genes mutations). But today, there's no longer a survival pressure that make our genotype evolve (yes there is a reproduction pressure still but it's doesn't make us evolve in an interesting way any longer).

So it's say that, no we no longer need death today

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KillerPacifist1 t1_j1h4j21 wrote

Death also isn't needed for evolution, only varying amounts of reproduction between individuals.

Specifically, death by aging is likely an unintential outcome of evolution, rather than something that evolution needs in order for it to happen. I can get into the mechanics of how aging likely evolved, but it is a bit a biology lesson.

I would also hesitate to say that we have stopped evolving in "interesting ways" (whatever that means). Evolution happens on a very slow time scale and I do not think anyone has a good handle on what our current environment most selects for or how strongly it selects for it. Seeing how it is difficult to point to any evolutionary changes in the past 5,000 years (a vast majority of which were before modern medicine and food production techniques), to say definitively we have stopped evolving in the last 50-100 years since the invention of antibiotics and vaccines and adoption of modern agriculture is jumping the gun a bit.

Especially since it isn't like we've totally eradicated untimely deaths (that is to say death before reproduction). We still have 3.1 million young children dying of starvation and 5 million dying of disease each year. Even ignoring deaths among older children/teenagers, we are losing over 1 person in 20 before they have a chance to reproduce.

Even ignoring the modern death rates among young children and babies, there is still a great discrepancy in birth rates among individuals and that is what evolution actually acts on. An adult who made a conscious decision not to have children (an increasingly common phenomenon) is just as evolutionarily unfit as a baby who died before their first birthday.

For a population to be truly evolutionary stable it needs to be infinitely large (8 billion may approximate that), each individual must mate randomly (definitely not true), and there must be no selection pressures (unlikely, as I layed out above).

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cowlinator t1_iz31xtn wrote

A philosopher-type person named Jesus of Nazareth said "The poor you will always have with you". To date, we really don't have any practical solution to poverty.

But what if the solution to abject poverty is to stop seeing it as a problem?

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speedygoonzalez t1_iz35fqs wrote

I think it would be more of a problem if we lived forever. Death is very sad and all that but its what all of us have to deal with living things will die whether it be from aging or coming into to contact with something that will make death happen.

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[deleted] t1_iz1sxmb wrote

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Zomburai t1_iz1tof2 wrote

I want the movie to end, but I'd sure like to be able to appreciate it after the fact. I'd like to leave the theater, talk about the movie with my friends, get some distance to incorporate it into my understanding, hell, I might even want to see another movie.

I don't want the theater to collapse with me in it as soon as the credits are done rolling.

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elementgermanium t1_iz32ltf wrote

At the risk of sounding callous, I don’t care about any “cycles.” In the end, boredom is a problem with many potential solutions- we don’t need death specifically. Even in the worst-case, where we’ve “done everything,” couldn’t we develop a way to modify or suppress our own memories to make experiences “fresh” again?

Arguments like these, where the problem created is so much milder than the one that’s solved, feel like philosophical sour grapes. We are mortal, and without extreme technological advances, we’re going to stay that way, so we come up with excuses as to why it’s ostensibly a good thing, so we don’t have to confront the problem.

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ting_bu_dong t1_iz1tlzy wrote

Well, I would think voluntary death wouldn't be a problem.

Like any other machine, you fix it because you want it to keep running.

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[deleted] t1_iz1vecl wrote

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ting_bu_dong t1_iz1zwg2 wrote

For the later point, it can be argued that we are already past the point where those in charge get to be in charge for too long.

Jefferson suggested a new constitution every 19 years, for example.

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[deleted] t1_iz2dws6 wrote

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ting_bu_dong t1_iz2fh0j wrote

We have to find a solution to the issue anyway, already, was supposed to be the takeaway.

Whatever system that stops people from retaining power past a certain age obviously continues past that age.

I'm thinking around 55 or 65, maybe.

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StarChild413 t1_iz494t7 wrote

> I think the perfect situation would be like the end of The Good Place, people can stay as long as they want and do whatever but they can leave when they're ready.

I always maintain that that solution was kind of a philosophical betrayal of the rest of the series's thematic setup (I'll be happy to explain if you want)

> But also would that possibly set the world off balance? Imagine being born into a world that the same people have been in charge of for centuries before you were born. Some Altered Carbon stuff. Death is the great equalizer.

then why not just have a world where the only deaths are unnatural as people are euphemism-for-euthanized when their beliefs/ideas are proven wrong so outdated views don't hang around any longer than necessary

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vulkanosaure t1_iz33muz wrote

It's a good point, but it really depends how our brain will perceive time. It might be that reducing aging also means enabling with more energy which in turns allow you to stay passionate and curious

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Failninjaninja t1_iz23sfs wrote

It’s not an either / or problem. If we could live forever we could also likely opt not to.

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StarChild413 t1_iz490hw wrote

yeah but lives don't have one arc you'd have to stretch over longer runtime like movies and I'm sure (if their basic needs were otherwise provided for yada yada yada) a lot of people would want to watch infinite seasons of their favorite shows or at least they're more likely than not to prefer the show get renewed unless not only is the ending satisfying but there's no more places the story could go that the ending leaves hanging

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