

Death Redesigned - Thevet
https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-04-05/death-redesigned

======
fizixer
You want to "take on the end of life", you want to "redesign death"? you want
to be radical? and that means putting the metaphorial mirrors on the gurneys,
and creating an iphone app "After I Go" and "reforming end-of-life care"?

Here's how you take it on if you really feel like being a radical: you upend
the culture of pro-aging trance [1] that has gripped 99.9% of the world
population:

\- Aging/death is natural.

\- Aging/death is good.

\- Aging/death is normal.

\- Aging/death is inevitable.

\- Aging/death is necessary.

Believe it or not, everyone hates diseases, but everyone seems to love death
(including most medical doctors and researchers), except when that deathist
himself/herself is diagnosed with something terminal, or when it's too late in
any other sense for that person.

When you have a good idea about how we could change that, I'd be more inclined
to call you radical.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RITCdrOEO9Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RITCdrOEO9Y)

EDIT 1: I'm sorry if I sound harsh. I just feel very intensely about this
topic.

~~~
philwelch
I think the problem is actually exactly the opposite. People are horribly
afraid of dying and incredibly uncomfortable discussing it. No one accepts
death as part of life and everyone wastes a lot of time and money treating
terminal illnesses without actually recovering very many QALY's from the
effort. People invent religions that posit some sort of afterlife so they can
comfort themselves with the belief that they are immortal, and this is such a
powerful impulse that even the supposedly non-religious, like de Grey,
recreate this belief in the guise of science fiction.

“Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things
required by nature. Like youth and old age. Like growth and maturity. Like a
new set of teeth, a beard, the first gray hair. Like sex and pregnancy and
childbirth. Like all the other physical changes at each stage of life, our
dissolution is no different.

"So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference,
not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the
things that happen to us. Now you anticipate the child’s emergence from its
mother’s womb; that’s how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge
from its compartment.”

Excerpt From: Marcus Aurelius & Gregory Hays. “Meditations.”

~~~
MichaelGG
I read some Stoic writings and while I find some concepts useful, this is
rather horrid. You don't lump "old age" in with maturity, sex and pregnancy.
Old age is just a gross euphemism. But I guess the writing is too obviously
nonsensical when if you say "health and organ failure" "happiness and memory
loss". To take what would be, if inflicted by another person, torture -- to
call that "required by nature" and to welcome it is just vile. At _best_ it's
a grief counseling strategy, though I'm not sure on the ethics there.

You _should_ have disdain for death. It's a stupid, terrible, senseless thing.
Just because we can't fix it yet[1] makes no difference to the terribleness
that it is. Saying "death is part of nature" with a deep voice doesn't make it
suddenly profound. You know what else is natural? Getting infected with
botflies.

1: At least for fix=million year delay

~~~
philwelch
But it is required by nature. Even if you could somehow extend human life
significantly, at some point parts would wear out and faculties would
diminish. Everything in the world eventually crumbles and erodes to dust or
rust or rot, even the earth and stars. Why not us?

~~~
MichaelGG
A million years isn't that long, cosmologically. I would not attempt to guess
what computational powers we may figure out in that timespan. And even if we
never do get unlimited computation, giving people eons seems like a better
state than now.

~~~
philwelch
A million years _isn 't_ that long and if you could give everyone on earth an
extra million QALY's that would be wonderful, but it still wouldn't circumvent
mortality.

------
falcolas
Death, or rather the bits leading up to death, absolutely need to be
redesigned. <it's personal> It's shouldn't take someone's death to advance a
waiting list to get Medicaid to help pay for the proper care of someone with
Dementia. </it's personal>

Proper care for the elderly can cost anywhere between $2000 and $6000 every
month, depending on how much care they need. I can't think of a single self-
funded retirement plan capable of paying out $72,000 a year for an unknowable
number of years. This means the financial burden will be on their families.

Those without such money will become a burden on those families as they become
more and more unable to care for themselves, and where improper care can
result in tremendous pain from broken bones, infections, and open sores. If
they're scheduled to die in the next few months, the families may be able to
get some inexpensive care from hospice, which while a blessing, isn't free.[0]

Those without families, or those unable to navigate the complexities of
Medicaid(!), are relegated to nursing homes and put in the care of overworked
and underpaid orderlies.

Such is our fate, folks. We'll all die eventually, be it to accidents or old
age. What life do you want to live when you reach that period of time in your
life?

[0] Actually, that last bit isn't fair to Hospice. They take care of so many
of the details surrounding a death at home, that they make a painful passing
as simple as such a thing could ever be. Thanks for your work, folks. The
passing of my grandfather-in-law would have been so much harder without your
presence.

~~~
MichaelGG
The right way is uploading, and from there we've got literally orders of
magnitude more time. But seeing as that might take a while, if you're
certainly going to die, and are looking at a decreasing quality of life...go
out on your own terms.

More than one doctor has told me I'll be having severe mental issues in late
age. And I've seen even "normal" function decay in older relatives. There's no
way anyone in a healthy state would be OK with ending up like that. Yet since
it happens slowly, a day at a time, we let these terrible things happen.

For me, once I know I'm getting near that downward slope and uploading isn't
around, fuck it, I'm going out on my own terms. Big goodbye party, family, and
a few grams of diacetylmorphine. It's sad as shit, but I think having random
hazy visits that could each be their last, but spread out over months or years
-- that's much worse.

And for people not dying at that time, yeah, it's probably more acutely
painful to you see someone go from 50% to 0% over an hour. (And wow, how do
you even decide when it's time to end the party and go for it? "Well, it's
getting late...") And maybe it's traumatic to say goodbye to a coherent
person. But it seems a much larger tragedy to overwrite many of your memories
of that person with memories of a shade they've become.

Edit: On second thought it might be better to have a goodbye party but
actually terminate rand(2h,20h) afterwards. Less traumatic.

~~~
falcolas
I agree completely with this sentiment, but there are so many laws in place
which make this difficult, if not impossible, for someone with partial motor
function loss or mental facility losses to actually achieve.

I think it's another spot where Death needs to get a makeover, but it's going
to be a harder sell to the general public who fears interacting with death.

~~~
MichaelGG
Well I'd probably prefer to do it before I wasn't able. If it happened
suddenly, I hope I've made myself clear enough to everyone, but writing it
down is probably a good idea. I'd feel awfully betrayed if nobody would do me
that favour, legal or not.

------
plaguuuuuu
Interesting. From the perspective of a total outsider far away from the United
States, I always thought the Valley's tech scene was strangely sort of cult-
like, in a way. It seems that there's really no limit to commercialisation,
and spirituality is next in line to be 'designed' into a product and either
sold to people, or will sell users' spirituality to advertisers, insurers and
political parties.

~~~
needacig
It seems cult-like from the inside too.

------
jessriedel
Can someone provide an abstract without the fluff?

------
jbarham
Evelyn Waugh's _The Loved One_ covers the same ground but is much funnier.

Especially amusing is Waugh's invention of the "Happier Hunting Ground annual
postcard service" for dearly departed pets that predicts features discussed
for the never built "After I Go" app that features in the article. Stay crazy
California!

------
BuildTheRobots
Slightly off topic, but I find it impossible to digest the phrase "Death
Redesigned" without thinking of Tom Scott's Singularity:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E)

------
mattxxx
Elevator pitch: a social network for dead people. All interactions are created
from a machine learning algorithm trained on your once-real-life social
network data.

You guys in?

