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.
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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.
Periodically in discussions of cryonics and related issues, people bring up "the overpopulation argument, and the counterarguments that respond to it" without actually describing those arguments in detail. Overpopulation was a big concern of mine prior to exposure to anti-deathism. And so far, it still is. I have no philosophical problem with eliminating death, but it seems to me that getting rid of death BEFORE we eliminate all the other major problems facing humanity is going to make those problems much worse. Death is an enemy that should be vanquished, but it's not an enemy I'm prepared to destroy until I'm satisfied that we'll be able to handle the consequences.
If death is solved via uploads running at high speed, I'm not too concerned. (Still a little concerned, since computers still take up space, but the issue is close enough to negligible that I'm fine ignoring it).
If we're dealing with physical humans taking up physical space requiring physical resources, then I'm worried. Either we're growing exponentially, or we've eliminated childbirth, or we have strict rules in place about people who have children being willing to die. (The latter might work but modifying central aspects of the human life cycle that we are hard-wired to value seems.... challenging, to say the least)
The sense of I've gotten around here is that "exponential growth is okay, because Space is Big". Space certainly is big, and I imagine we could expand for a long time without running into conflict. But if there's even one other alien race who solves their problems the same way (expanding whenever they run out of space or resources), then eventually there's going to be conflict. And the longer we go BEFORE that conflict, the more human suffering it might entail. I'd prefer to have achieved equilibrium as a species beforehand.
I want to expand into the universe, but I think we should do so out of *curiosity* rather than *necessity.*
I assume there's been a lot of discussions about this and I don't want to rehash them. But if someone could summarize the issues at hand and explain what the community consensus is, I'd appreciate it. ("Community Consensus" might mean "there are a few dominant schools of thought here").
Edit: FAWS pointed out that as long as, on average, each person reproduces slightly less than once, growth will not continue exponentially. That's pretty much the answer I'm looking for. The logistics are still significant, but in the long run I think such a law would be enforcible. (Each person only gets to reproduce once, and some people will choose not to. I think there'd need to be an additional disincentive, because over the course of an immortal lifespan, people are likely to try out childrearing at *some* point).
I still think that the issues surrounding overpopulation should occupy at least as much of our attention as ending death (basically ensuring that people are given adequate resources to live healthy, productive lives).