When I felt my conscious fading away from a heart attack two years ago, I thought "Ah, I guess I die now. Too bad I can't tell my friend to clear the cache as a last joke."
It confirmed I'm not actually afraid to die, just regretting for a moment before the void that I can't witness what'll happen to the world in the future.
> just regretting for a moment before the void that I can't witness what'll happen to the world in the future.
If I may ask, were you regretting about the decisions made in past or decisions that you won't see in future and jokes aside, what was the most important thing in that moment, was it about family, (does anything like random-thing-we-worry-about-for-too-long/work/tech/whatever-else even runs through the mind)?
I don't worry about decisions. Once they're made, they're made and life continues unless there's a good reason and possibilty later to change it. I just like to know where the world as a whole is headed to (before the inevitable supernova event, I'm just curious).
There was also nothing important coming to mind. Family and friends is a small group and I have every bit of confidence they'll do just fine without me. I just hope they'll have a fun party as a final goodbye to me. :-)
Besides, death is the ultimate "What, me worry?" as there is nothing left. Can't even experience the void we enter ( unfortunately because I'd like to experience my brain not thinking about anything at all for once :-p ).
The sun won't go supernova, but it will become a red giant in about 5,000,000,000 years, which will have roughly the same consequences for life on earth.
To be honest, I can't quite predict if humanity truly survives within the next decade or two/three or a century. Let alone millions of times more than that amount.
We humans are very likely to be our own worst enemy. I would wish for the world to exist till the 5_billion year date that you mention.
> I'd like to experience my brain not thinking about anything at all for once
You can! While you’re alive and everything! I’ve had this experience of few times of it being very quiet, and overall my brain is a lot quieter since then (and I see reports from people who’ve gone further/deeper; I get the sense the path is never-ending).
There’s a ton of resources and people out there that basically point to the same thing in different ways. Meditation is one of the ways but it’s not the only one. Some keyword soup if you want to go searching: jhana states, Jhourney, Art of Accomplishment, Joe Hudson, Zen, Buddhism, awakening, Michael Singer, Loch Kelly
There are varying levels of “woo” in this, and if you’re on the woo-averse side, Joe Hudson’s stuff is a good way in.
One crazy thing is, by being a descendant of the original life form, in a huge chain of reproduction relationships, all the information we have in our DNA about death in the form of autonomous fear responses come from beings that essentially never experienced death themselves.
Imagine being brain-dead after a serious accident, lying in a hospital bed on life support. And your family gives the go-ahead for the doctors to zap your butthole to collect your semen so they can reproduce you.
Interesting point. But I don’t think you must experience something to be afraid of it, even as a population. Nobody experienced the terror of a world ending nuclear war, large asteroid strike, or solar flare (alien invasion if you want to go that far), etc. and they still terrify a lot of people. Sometimes even more than death itself.
To be more pragmatic, it’s now pretty common today for people to die and modern medicine brings them back. For practical purposes the person was dead, by some other interpretations they weren’t, if you consider the only “real” death to be the permanent one.
The medical standard for death has equated it with brain death since at least 1981, though arguably it started in the 1960s. The history of the definition of death[1] is fascinating.
I’m putting the current medical definition aside, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and who knows what the next centuries redefine. For the longest time in human history “clinical death” was almost always followed by permadeath.
As the person doing the dying you can’t rationalize it as “no worries, it’s just clinical, I’ll be back”. You die, it’s light out, later on, a blink for you, you recover and are told “you were clinically dead”. You experienced death for all intents and purposes because I don’t think there’s a cognitive process that allows you to differentiate the stages. Heck, deep sleep might be how death “feels” like.
Do people fear death (excluding suffering) because of the threshold itself or the FOMO? Missing on what would come next?
Fair enough, and I had the (mis?)fortune of watching folks go through that as an EMT.
For sure when clinical death starts (even if later reversed), some processes kick in that never would otherwise activate, totally agree. The commonality of near-death-experience suggests something very basal.
That is a cool thought, though you meant to say never experienced death themselves before reproducing. The fear response allowed individuals to statistically reproduce more often. Evolution works at the population level not the individual.
I’m not a biologist or particularly knowledgeable about the subject but I thought the jury is still out on that depending on who you ask. I am a noob but I thought it works on the gene level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolutio...
They grind up your skeleton, remove the dental gold, then re-name it "ashes?" That's not very "green."
Why not add this to your will:
1. place my body on a pile of dynamite on an Oregon beach, and blow it up (first issue umbrellas to the funeral party.) Or, failing that...
2. Freeze my body in liquid nitrogen, sharpen my head in a giant pencil-sharpener, then drive me into the ground as a fertilizer-spike.
3. Do #2 above, but throw my sharpened body from a plane flying over farmland. Add fletching to my legs to guarantee pointy-end-downwards.
4. Cast my body in a block of solidified transparent polyester resin, then use it as a large tombstone. People visiting can watch the slow decay, until years later it's a me-shaped bubble. (Leave a little drain-channel to prevent explosion from gas pressure.)
5. Once I saw a button-mushroom entirely take over a live eggplant. Do that to my body, but with psilocybe species. Then dry, grind, and smoke me up.
I've thought about #2 a lot (well, with less hilarious-in-my-mind iconography), but the issue with becoming fertilizer is human->human diseases. Also if you normalize the behavior, it comes back to bite you during plagues where the crops will become diseased.
Ultimately I land on: there's enough 'gotchas' with decomposing human remains where I think a graveyard will do. Though, I wish the casket wasn't necessary.
This just reminded me of a friend who explicitly requested to be placed inside of a glass cube and then blown up, his body becoming an instant art project/memorial.
I don't have a problem with the process. Is it common knowledge there? Maybe try aksing people what ashes are. I know it can be a touchy subject but I was pretty old when I found out in America.
Most town museums of any size will have an Iron Age cremation urn full of burnt bone fragments on display. The ashes weren't exactly ground up back then.
Some people are so afraid to live or go out that they may as well be dead. Particularly when their entire life consists of taking orders from someone else and making none of their own decisions.
One of my jobs is taking funerals in the UK. (It's always useful for a project manager to have access to a number of deep holes). As the article says, things are different in Europe, and even between the constituent countries of the UK. In England, where I am, probably 90% of funerals lead to a cremation rather than a burial. There was a revolutionary change from "illegal and heretical" to "absolutely fine and normal" in a short period of the 19C. I've taken a service at the original crematorium in Woking, which has plaques for a few notable people including Eleanor Marx and Alan Turing. That made the London Necropolis obsolete - a huge graveyard in the same town, with its own dedicated railway leading out of Waterloo station, built when London was running out of room.
I said I took a service at the crematorium: most crems are run by local councils, have one or two chapels as part of the complex, and are set in a cemetery. Stand-alone crematoria for direct cremation do exist, and I think that this will be the way of the future, with funerals taken with a box of pre-cremated ashes rather a coffin, mainly to reduce cost. Cost is high, though far from as high as in the USA: no embalming, hence no need for vaults for pollution control, simple coffin which is cheaper and only needs four bearers, crematoria run more as a public service than as a profit centre, ashes often scattered rather than needing a grave. But it still ends up costing a lot because so many people are needed to run the service.
We do have the equivalent of body disposal by the county. A basic funeral is funded by the local authority, and it is a funeral, not just body disposal. I've done a small number where someone has died with little money, and without known friends or family. I have spent some time contacting pubs, churches and clubs to find anyone who might want to come or be able to tell me anything for the eulogy.
It's a fascinating job - I can't think of anyone other than midwives who can visit homes from such a wide section of society and hear life stories. Today I took a huge funeral for a matriarch from a very clannish area of the town - you often get four generations of a family living within a few hundred yards of each other. It's a very different culture to my own middle-class background.
It's also fun to go to the biennial National Funeral Exhibition - several thousand people who are habitually kind and empathetic, descending on an exhibition hall in the middle of an agricultural showground, to see the latest advances in high-altitude disposal of ashes and demonstrations of the manufacture of wicker coffins (personally I would go for the felt coffin). My wife is looking forward to it, though she has advised me that if I continue to call her Morticia she's going to be picking up some business cards for her own use.
Hopefully, clearing of my browser cache. :-)
When I felt my conscious fading away from a heart attack two years ago, I thought "Ah, I guess I die now. Too bad I can't tell my friend to clear the cache as a last joke."
It confirmed I'm not actually afraid to die, just regretting for a moment before the void that I can't witness what'll happen to the world in the future.
It puts 'glad you could make it' in a completely different light.
So, a heartfelt: Glad you could make it!
Thanks!
> just regretting for a moment before the void that I can't witness what'll happen to the world in the future.
If I may ask, were you regretting about the decisions made in past or decisions that you won't see in future and jokes aside, what was the most important thing in that moment, was it about family, (does anything like random-thing-we-worry-about-for-too-long/work/tech/whatever-else even runs through the mind)?
I don't worry about decisions. Once they're made, they're made and life continues unless there's a good reason and possibilty later to change it. I just like to know where the world as a whole is headed to (before the inevitable supernova event, I'm just curious).
There was also nothing important coming to mind. Family and friends is a small group and I have every bit of confidence they'll do just fine without me. I just hope they'll have a fun party as a final goodbye to me. :-)
Besides, death is the ultimate "What, me worry?" as there is nothing left. Can't even experience the void we enter ( unfortunately because I'd like to experience my brain not thinking about anything at all for once :-p ).
Good news! I've been told our sun is too small to go supernova. ;-)
Glad you're still alive. I too find the most melancholy in not knowing - what happens next!
The sun won't go supernova, but it will become a red giant in about 5,000,000,000 years, which will have roughly the same consequences for life on earth.
To be honest, I can't quite predict if humanity truly survives within the next decade or two/three or a century. Let alone millions of times more than that amount.
We humans are very likely to be our own worst enemy. I would wish for the world to exist till the 5_billion year date that you mention.
> I'd like to experience my brain not thinking about anything at all for once
You can! While you’re alive and everything! I’ve had this experience of few times of it being very quiet, and overall my brain is a lot quieter since then (and I see reports from people who’ve gone further/deeper; I get the sense the path is never-ending).
There’s a ton of resources and people out there that basically point to the same thing in different ways. Meditation is one of the ways but it’s not the only one. Some keyword soup if you want to go searching: jhana states, Jhourney, Art of Accomplishment, Joe Hudson, Zen, Buddhism, awakening, Michael Singer, Loch Kelly
There are varying levels of “woo” in this, and if you’re on the woo-averse side, Joe Hudson’s stuff is a good way in.
I didn’t think it was possible until I’ve experienced it myself. Magnificent. And a little scary too.
One crazy thing is, by being a descendant of the original life form, in a huge chain of reproduction relationships, all the information we have in our DNA about death in the form of autonomous fear responses come from beings that essentially never experienced death themselves.
Actually, it is possible that some of them experienced the death of their brain before reproducing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00904...
And, FWIW, Jesus with an after-death erection was popular enough a motive to officially get banned by the church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostentatio_genitalium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_erection#cite_ref-Steinb...
This is the sort of random stuff that keeps me coming back to HN. TIL!
> the death of their brain before reproducing
La not-so-petite mort.
> popular enough a motive
motif
Imagine being brain-dead after a serious accident, lying in a hospital bed on life support. And your family gives the go-ahead for the doctors to zap your butthole to collect your semen so they can reproduce you.
How did this ever pass an ethics commission?
>to zap your butthole to collect your semen
Jokes on them, I don't think semen is stored in the butthole (except in some cases temporarily after sex)
> rectal probe electroejaculation
Rectal is your butthole.
Wooosh
I don't know whether to upvote this or downvote this.
"Garp".
Interesting point. But I don’t think you must experience something to be afraid of it, even as a population. Nobody experienced the terror of a world ending nuclear war, large asteroid strike, or solar flare (alien invasion if you want to go that far), etc. and they still terrify a lot of people. Sometimes even more than death itself.
To be more pragmatic, it’s now pretty common today for people to die and modern medicine brings them back. For practical purposes the person was dead, by some other interpretations they weren’t, if you consider the only “real” death to be the permanent one.
it’s fairly simple:
clinical death = heart stops = reversible, depends on circumstances
brain death = irreversible = perma-dead. no one’s ever come back.
legal death = brain dead (not clinical) or court order (missing for X years/etc)
The medical standard for death has equated it with brain death since at least 1981, though arguably it started in the 1960s. The history of the definition of death[1] is fascinating.
1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5570697/
I’m putting the current medical definition aside, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and who knows what the next centuries redefine. For the longest time in human history “clinical death” was almost always followed by permadeath.
As the person doing the dying you can’t rationalize it as “no worries, it’s just clinical, I’ll be back”. You die, it’s light out, later on, a blink for you, you recover and are told “you were clinically dead”. You experienced death for all intents and purposes because I don’t think there’s a cognitive process that allows you to differentiate the stages. Heck, deep sleep might be how death “feels” like.
Do people fear death (excluding suffering) because of the threshold itself or the FOMO? Missing on what would come next?
Fair enough, and I had the (mis?)fortune of watching folks go through that as an EMT.
For sure when clinical death starts (even if later reversed), some processes kick in that never would otherwise activate, totally agree. The commonality of near-death-experience suggests something very basal.
I had the misfortune to make some medical professionals watch me go through this :).
sorry to hear that and glad you are here to comment :)
These days I'm rather more concerned that a lot can come next.
The cessation of my sensory experience might be a very long time, but from my perspective random chance bringing me back would be instantaneous.
the true anti-memetic
That is a cool thought, though you meant to say never experienced death themselves before reproducing. The fear response allowed individuals to statistically reproduce more often. Evolution works at the population level not the individual.
I’m not a biologist or particularly knowledgeable about the subject but I thought the jury is still out on that depending on who you ask. I am a noob but I thought it works on the gene level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolutio...
They grind up your skeleton, remove the dental gold, then re-name it "ashes?" That's not very "green."
Why not add this to your will:
1. place my body on a pile of dynamite on an Oregon beach, and blow it up (first issue umbrellas to the funeral party.) Or, failing that...
2. Freeze my body in liquid nitrogen, sharpen my head in a giant pencil-sharpener, then drive me into the ground as a fertilizer-spike.
3. Do #2 above, but throw my sharpened body from a plane flying over farmland. Add fletching to my legs to guarantee pointy-end-downwards.
4. Cast my body in a block of solidified transparent polyester resin, then use it as a large tombstone. People visiting can watch the slow decay, until years later it's a me-shaped bubble. (Leave a little drain-channel to prevent explosion from gas pressure.)
5. Once I saw a button-mushroom entirely take over a live eggplant. Do that to my body, but with psilocybe species. Then dry, grind, and smoke me up.
6. "Resomation," but that's too too conventional.
I've thought about #2 a lot (well, with less hilarious-in-my-mind iconography), but the issue with becoming fertilizer is human->human diseases. Also if you normalize the behavior, it comes back to bite you during plagues where the crops will become diseased.
Ultimately I land on: there's enough 'gotchas' with decomposing human remains where I think a graveyard will do. Though, I wish the casket wasn't necessary.
I always quite fancied attempting the wick effect for cremation. Apparently it takes ages though...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wick_effect
This just reminded me of a friend who explicitly requested to be placed inside of a glass cube and then blown up, his body becoming an instant art project/memorial.
I don't think enough people realize the 'grind up your skeleton and re-name it "ashes"' part of cremation.
skeleton powder is more apt. Enough of the euphemism!
Eh?
Common knowledge in Blighty where the majority of funerals are cremations.
I'm puzzled why you appear to have a problem with this process?
I don't have a problem with the process. Is it common knowledge there? Maybe try aksing people what ashes are. I know it can be a touchy subject but I was pretty old when I found out in America.
This is Britain!
Most town museums of any size will have an Iron Age cremation urn full of burnt bone fragments on display. The ashes weren't exactly ground up back then.
https://learn.folkestonemuseum.co.uk/objects/iron-age-cremat...
Out of all this, its weird to see 2016 is 10 years ago. Kids born that year already in 4 or 5th grade
* sorry to make it we're all feel old lol
i hope 2026 is the new 2016
2016 is a good year
Some people are so afraid to live or go out that they may as well be dead. Particularly when their entire life consists of taking orders from someone else and making none of their own decisions.
One of my jobs is taking funerals in the UK. (It's always useful for a project manager to have access to a number of deep holes). As the article says, things are different in Europe, and even between the constituent countries of the UK. In England, where I am, probably 90% of funerals lead to a cremation rather than a burial. There was a revolutionary change from "illegal and heretical" to "absolutely fine and normal" in a short period of the 19C. I've taken a service at the original crematorium in Woking, which has plaques for a few notable people including Eleanor Marx and Alan Turing. That made the London Necropolis obsolete - a huge graveyard in the same town, with its own dedicated railway leading out of Waterloo station, built when London was running out of room.
I said I took a service at the crematorium: most crems are run by local councils, have one or two chapels as part of the complex, and are set in a cemetery. Stand-alone crematoria for direct cremation do exist, and I think that this will be the way of the future, with funerals taken with a box of pre-cremated ashes rather a coffin, mainly to reduce cost. Cost is high, though far from as high as in the USA: no embalming, hence no need for vaults for pollution control, simple coffin which is cheaper and only needs four bearers, crematoria run more as a public service than as a profit centre, ashes often scattered rather than needing a grave. But it still ends up costing a lot because so many people are needed to run the service.
We do have the equivalent of body disposal by the county. A basic funeral is funded by the local authority, and it is a funeral, not just body disposal. I've done a small number where someone has died with little money, and without known friends or family. I have spent some time contacting pubs, churches and clubs to find anyone who might want to come or be able to tell me anything for the eulogy.
It's a fascinating job - I can't think of anyone other than midwives who can visit homes from such a wide section of society and hear life stories. Today I took a huge funeral for a matriarch from a very clannish area of the town - you often get four generations of a family living within a few hundred yards of each other. It's a very different culture to my own middle-class background.
It's also fun to go to the biennial National Funeral Exhibition - several thousand people who are habitually kind and empathetic, descending on an exhibition hall in the middle of an agricultural showground, to see the latest advances in high-altitude disposal of ashes and demonstrations of the manufacture of wicker coffins (personally I would go for the felt coffin). My wife is looking forward to it, though she has advised me that if I continue to call her Morticia she's going to be picking up some business cards for her own use.
[dead]
The algorithms are limiting my reach so bad right now that when my time comes, the Grim Reaper probably won't even receive the notification.
If we’re lucky, Grim Reaper will be too busy doomscrolling on Tiktok.