"What one never encounters is an adult who says that finding out about death was what gave life meaning for them." I beg to differ. Many people have had close calls with death that have been pivitol, life-changing experiences. A friend of mine changed careers and got married after his plane nearly crashed. "I realized we don't have that much time on this earth to be wasting it in board meetings," or some such.

I still would NOT argue that this is evidence that life needs death to have meaning, but death certainly IS a strong motivator to get on with life.

I really enjoyed your post! I would say we cache things we've reasoned out ourselves as well. Say you do a mathematical proof for the pythagorean theorum. At the end of the proof, you might feel you really understand the theory, but the next year, or next day even, you have completely forgotten the steps you used to do the proof. You might be able with great concentration extrapolate them again, but you still believe the theory without recalculating it from scratch. You remember being convinced in the past, and you trust your past self's judgment. I think this is why it is so impossible to change many people's minds on highly politicized matters. They remember having been truly convinced by such and such an argument of the correctness of one position, without remembering what exactly the argument was. The feeling of being convinced is what is so hard to forget. Since most people know they are unable to argue themselves, they trust that their inability to counter your points is their failing as an debater, and that if whoever convinced them of X were here, he would know what to say, because his arguments were so convincing. I wonder to what extent we depend upon conclusions we came to long ago and trust as our own today. I've personally found that I remember my conclusions a whole lot better than my reasoning or the evidence, and need effort to remind myself. But could we function if we didn't use these conclusions? How much should we trust our past selves?

I don't think anyone is qualified to judge, based on theory alone, whether true immortality is meaningful or worth achieving, since no one has lived much longer than 120 yrs. Maybe the human consciousness would throw up its hands and scream 'to hell with it all!' after 300 years, maybe not. Maybe our children will be lacksidasical losers because they have no impetus to get off their asses and on with their lives (lord knows how many ppl get a move on because they fear getting too old for girlfriends/marriage/children). But we don't *know* that, and it's all a moot point, since nobody's done it before. What is clear is that almost everyone wishes they didn't *age*, that our bodies and minds did not decay, that our memories did not fade, that we could keep the vigor, curiosity, openess and excitement of our most productive years. Why not try for that and see what living so long is really like? What would we have to lose?

Interesting. As a child I thought I could remember everything, so lying was easy, it's own memory of having lied, and thus distinct from reality. It was only much later that I realized it was even possible for the two to become horribly confused in one's own mind. But did you lie and forget the lie? Or did you just incompletely remember and add the part about negative sums as an explanation of the behavior later on? I think the "sweeping" of our minds' corners is also prone to give us false memories. We think, "well, why did I do that? Oh yeah! Now I *remember*..." You might have just been lucky to stumble upon what you now believe to be the real memory, but introspection, especially of the past isn't always so accurate.

The article fails to take into account actual time spent on the project. Why is it that I can write just as good a paper with a one week or 10 week deadline? Is the problem underestimation of time or lack of motivation to finish before the predicted deadline? I don't think student reports are a very good model for this kind of cognitive bias.

The article fails to take into account actual time spent on the project. Why is it that I can write just as good a paper with a one week or 10 week deadline? Is the problem underestimation of time or lack of motivation to finish before the predicted deadline? I don't think student reports are a very good model for this kind of cognitive bias.