zlacker

>>patric+(OP)
"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

- Steve Jobs

>>kristo+42
"Death is very likely the single best invention of Life."

Quotes like this get me thinking back to my fascination reading about Cognitive Dissonance in Psych 101.

>>jquery+F3
What do you mean?

>>Helian+T5
Death is not good; it is very bad. If given the opportunity to live "forever" (and not age), you'd take it. In a world without death, nobody would think introducing it was a good idea. But because we currently can't do anything about it, we try to tell ourselves it's a good thing.

>>orange+27
That's only cognitive dissonance if you're hopelessly egocentric. Death is obviously bad for you as an individual, but is crucial to the long-term survival on a species. Without death, you can't have evolution or adaptability. The only thing wrong here are the people responding with the fallacy of composition.

>>wtalli+38
I cannot even begin to conceive the kind of confusion that has legitimized the "species over the individual" narrative. Just because something is natural doesn't mean that it's good. If you consider it "hopelessly egocentric" to think of death as a bad, bad thing since it's necessary for natural selection, do you also consider it ethically acceptable to kill an individual once he has stopped procreating, since he's no longer relevant to the evolutionary game?

>>icando+r9
The species over the individual "narrative" exists because it is a fact of evolution. Life is a pattern of self-replication, and it is at the level of the gene that natural selection works to make this pattern more robust. The whole concept of having an individual "over" a species is so quaintly human. The universe, and the physical processes within it that are life, have no concern for such silly concepts. To put so much stock into the individual (and such people are always really talking about themselves), is completely egocentric. We tell ourselves stories about how important and special we are to validate our own existences, and that's fine, it makes some of us feel better. But we ignore the macro-processes that even allowed our existences at our own peril. Guess what, with no species, there are no individuals to glorify.

>do you also consider it ethically acceptable to kill an individual once he has stopped procreating, since he's no longer relevant to the evolutionary game?

The evolutionary game is much more complicated than you imagine it to be. Humans have evolved to be social animals. Someone who is too old to procreate can still watch after young, pass knowledge on to them, etc., which increases their fitness. This is such a fundamental misunderstanding, you have no reason to be so confident in such matters.

>>elemen+Zh
Evolution is a vehicle for genes, bodies are just incidental to this process. We are, however, more than bodies that breed genes. We are persons, we have minds. We have developed into something that goes beyond the substrate from which we came and we owe it to ourselves to some day outgrow the need for that substrate completely.

Imagine what our minds could do if they had centuries to develop. Imagine what our culture could be like if we didn't have to start from scratch every 70 years. Imagine a society without loss and scarcity. I know it's not an idea that appeals to a lot of people, but it does appeal to me. And I do believe it's an inevitable next step. In the end, it doesn't matter what most people think of this idea. It's not a development that the majority of humanity has to sign off on - we'll just move along without you, no harm done.