
Living with Being Dead - haley421
https://medium.com/matter/living-with-being-dead-844b4b1e668
======
mutagen
My mother is schizophrenic and exhibits symptoms of the Cotard delusion
(claims of being dead, of having no heart, rotting inside, of having to die).
The symptoms aren't as bad as some of the described patients and improve when
she's on antipsychotics. Incidentally, she also had symptoms of the Capgras
delusion, believing that my father, me, and other. family members have been
replaced by strangers and that we're not the real family members.

------
krylon
Very interesting article.

Having struggled with depression myself, I find the idea of Cotard's patients
having no emotional response to anything quite plausible. It _sounds_ like a
living hell for sure.

------
Schiphol
"Is she one of them? Or is she one of us?"

Come on.

------
michaelochurch
This is a bizarre and unsettling condition. Just thinking about it gives me
the shudders.

I tend to assume that if there's an afterlife, it will be a positive one or at
least one with hope. The Buddhist concept of rebirth makes the most sense to
me, but of course I know that I might be wrong. So I don't fret death because
if there isn't an afterlife, I will not exist; if there is one, it will
probably be at least as interesting as this life.

The idea of being tied to a corpse while it rots, though, and fading into
nothing slowly rather than abruptly, is horrifying. Of course, no one believes
that this actually occurs; people are generally divided between those who
believe that consciousness leaves the brain at death and those who believe
that it ends at death.

Oddly enough, this delusion explains something I've always found unusual about
ancient religions. People often say that religions were founded to assuage
existential fears. That doesn't make much sense, though, because many ancient
religions had _negative_ afterlives. The Babylonians believed in an afterlife,
but it was a repulsive one. The ancient Greeks believed in the gloomy Hades
(although they later introduced the Elysian Fields and the possibility of
reincarnation). The Egyptians believed that a life of drudgery in service to
the pharaoh would continue into the next existence. Hells seem to have evolved
in religion _before_ heavens, which came into mainstream religious thought
around 1000 BC. Religions were founded to explain away uncertainty in general,
and not specifically to assuage existential guilt because most ancient
religions had gods that were total assholes (if you're using gods to explain
smallpox and earthquakes and war, it makes sense) and afterlives that were
undesirable.

It brings up an interesting question, though, which is why would anyone choose
to believe in a negative afterlife as opposed to none at all? The Cotard
delusion may explain it. Perhaps this horrible state of consciousness (which
seems to be a subtype of severe, psychotic depression) was more common in a
coarser time, and led people to the belief that to be dead was not
nothingness, and not some desirable or blissful spiritual state, but one of
constant and featureless despair.

~~~
api
Nothing changed. Bleak ideologies are still really common.

You must serve God even though he built you with sinful urges and generally
behaves like a tyrant. If you deviate you will be tortured forever in hell.
Serve or burn. Pretty miserable cosmology if you ask me.

Popular skeptical materialism is not much better. You are accidental meat.
There is no afterlife. Consciousness itself is possibly an illusion. Your
personality, intelligence, and general worth as a human being is genetically
predetermined. We understand most of physics now, and we know mostly what is
and isn't possible, so not much left to learn. Space flight is basically
impossible beyond tiny capsules here and there, so there is nowhere to go
either. Pretty soon we will all run out of resources and die out. The end. Boy
does that suck. It's like dull puritanical Calvinism without heaven.

I suspect there are cognitive biases at work here. Perhaps paranoid pessimists
tended to live longer in a violent, dangerous past, or made better warriors
and so conquered more. Or maybe it's some weird side effect from other
cognitive adaptations or some kind of runaway selection artifact.

But whatever the reason, we do seem to find it easier to be pessimistic and
paranoid. Negative emotions seem easier to feel, easier to induce through art
or rhetoric, and generally more accessible. Happy music is trite, while dark
music (that is no more musically sophisticated) sounds deep and profound. Tall
dark and handsome is sexy, while happy and carefree is not.

Take the recent spate of thought about AI that's been tossed around here. I
have yet to see any discussion of how AI might turn out well. No, Skynet will
kill us all. No other possibilities are on the table. So let's ban AI research
or something.

I see it everywhere. It's enough to make you depressed, paranoid, and cynical.

~~~
anigbrowl
I don't feel like writing an essay about it now (it's late and I have other
stuff that needs writing) but I'm very optimistic about AI.

I think there's some selection pressure to be gloomy on the internet;
optimistic people who turn out to be wrong look stupid, while pessimistic
people who turn out to be wrong merely look cautious. And then remember the
old proverb 'misery loves company' \- people assuage their anxiety about
things by kvetching. Everyone does this some of the time (it'd be a bit
unnatural if one didn't) but some people interact on line like this almost all
the time - I don't know if it's depression or some sort of dopamine rush from
getting angry about things or what, but I've terminated my accounts in several
online communities over in recent years because I just got so sick of the
sarcasm, endless negativity, and obsession with insider coding (straining to
always make hip references or recycle cool quotes). It's interesting from a
sociological perspective - you can see very similar group dynamics in interest
groups that would be horrified to be told they had anything in common with
each other - but I think it's very corrosive to participate in.

Philosopher Rene Girard has built a whole theory about this; he thinks there's
a fundamental tendency towards scapegoating in human society and that people
are never happy unless they have someone to project their negative feelings
onto. With the advent of AI, perhaps we're unwittingly trying to automate that
too. If this is so then some sort of scary AI is inevitable because we'll
invent in order to have a reliably hostile enemy that's guaranteed not to vex
us with diplomatic initiatives or socioeconomic guilt trips. I have a
suspicion that this is the basic plot of the new Avengers movie.

