I don’t want to die now. I’d quite like to live a lot longer than 70-100 years.
But I also don’t want immortality, or to be more exact, enforced immortality.
Show me a fictional universe, no matter how Utopian otherwise where people are not allowed to die even if they want to and I immediately see it as a dystopia.
I don’t want to live forever but the choice of death, the possibility of choosing to die, the possibility of choosing to stop being has immense value to me.
If you ask people “would you like to live forever” I think many would quite rationally say “no” since without qualifiers it’s a pretty horrific concept.
If you ask people “would you like to live for 200 years”, again, without qualifiers many might imagine another hundred years of growing even more frail but being kept alive by more and more tubes.
If you ask people “would you like the choice of remaining fit, youthful and healthy for a few hundred extra years with the choice of extending that later if you want to with your loved ones being offered the same option” I believe you’d get far far more people saying “hell yes”.
Offer most people in a nursing home a pill that will fix their heart, make the pain in their back go away, sharpen their minds, strengthen their bones and give them another few decades of being able to lift their grandkids for a hug and I think a lot would say “hell yes”. Offer them another set of tubes they could plumb into themselves to get another few years of further degraded subjective experience on the other hand and many would quite rationally tell you to shove it.
I’m young, many people on this site are young and we’ve not experienced the slow degradation so we implicitly fail to frame questions taking into account that others will often view life as a slow degradation with death as a release when the degradation gets too bad, not as an enemy to be defeated.
Young people fear death, many old people are far more inclined to fear degradation, pain, suffering, loneliness. The things that death can end.
My grandmother is 90 and I don’t believe she’s terribly keen on living a lot longer but keep in mind the context: she’s spent the last 30 years watching all her friends and all her family excepting her children die. Her children are grandparents themselves and I doubt she wants to see any of them die before her.
She’s already lost her husband, her brothers and sisters and almost every friend she ever knew and has a religious belief that she’ll get to see them again after death. Now is not the time to offer her immortality. If all her friends and her husband were still alive with the same options then she might view things differently.
many people on this site are young and we’ve not experienced the slow degradation so we implicitly fail to frame questions taking into account that others will often view life as a slow degradation with death as a release when the degradation gets too bad, not as an enemy to be defeated.
I’ve seen the phrase ‘ripening’ used, supporting this hypotheses.
I think a few concepts get mixed together.
I don’t want to die now. I’d quite like to live a lot longer than 70-100 years.
But I also don’t want immortality, or to be more exact, enforced immortality.
Show me a fictional universe, no matter how Utopian otherwise where people are not allowed to die even if they want to and I immediately see it as a dystopia.
I don’t want to live forever but the choice of death, the possibility of choosing to die, the possibility of choosing to stop being has immense value to me.
If you ask people “would you like to live forever” I think many would quite rationally say “no” since without qualifiers it’s a pretty horrific concept.
If you ask people “would you like to live for 200 years”, again, without qualifiers many might imagine another hundred years of growing even more frail but being kept alive by more and more tubes.
If you ask people “would you like the choice of remaining fit, youthful and healthy for a few hundred extra years with the choice of extending that later if you want to with your loved ones being offered the same option” I believe you’d get far far more people saying “hell yes”.
Offer most people in a nursing home a pill that will fix their heart, make the pain in their back go away, sharpen their minds, strengthen their bones and give them another few decades of being able to lift their grandkids for a hug and I think a lot would say “hell yes”. Offer them another set of tubes they could plumb into themselves to get another few years of further degraded subjective experience on the other hand and many would quite rationally tell you to shove it.
I’m young, many people on this site are young and we’ve not experienced the slow degradation so we implicitly fail to frame questions taking into account that others will often view life as a slow degradation with death as a release when the degradation gets too bad, not as an enemy to be defeated.
Young people fear death, many old people are far more inclined to fear degradation, pain, suffering, loneliness. The things that death can end.
My grandmother is 90 and I don’t believe she’s terribly keen on living a lot longer but keep in mind the context: she’s spent the last 30 years watching all her friends and all her family excepting her children die. Her children are grandparents themselves and I doubt she wants to see any of them die before her.
She’s already lost her husband, her brothers and sisters and almost every friend she ever knew and has a religious belief that she’ll get to see them again after death. Now is not the time to offer her immortality. If all her friends and her husband were still alive with the same options then she might view things differently.
I’ve seen the phrase ‘ripening’ used, supporting this hypotheses.