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And his name that sat on him was [Death], and Hell followed with him
The Ender
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LEADING CAUSES OF DEATH PER YEAR, WORLWIDE
Heart disease: 597,689
Cancer: 574,743
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 138,080
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 129,476
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 120,859
Alzheimer's disease: 83,494
Diabetes: 69,071
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 50,476
Influenza and Pneumonia: 50,097
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 38,364
Death is sort-of tricky to define, even in strictly medical terms. Broadly speaking, for a person, it is the cessation of all bodily functions & neural activity. There is still disagreement over whether or not someone experiencing cardiac arrest should be considered 'dead' given that we can potentially revive them. Brain death has similar complications associated with it - a person can be in a coma, with little to no noticeable brain activity, for a very long span of time and then recuperate from their condition.
There is certainly a point where rigor mortis sets in and the clinical idea of death becomes far less ambiguous, but there is an awkward grey area - or can be - prior to that point.
Outside of medical opinion, a person's personality and complex behavior can become irreversibly damaged without their brain or body ceasing all function - and this is often seen, on some level, as that person now being dead even if their body still remains alive. Relatives of Alzheimer's patients, for example, often see the victim of the disease as having perished well before the degeneration has progressed to the point of affecting involuntary breathing & heart rate control.
It bothers me some nights to think about this nebulously defined state, and that I will enter into it at some yet to be announced time from some yet to be announced cause. If statistic are anything to go by, I suppose my heart will be what eventually acts out the final betrayal. I'm morbidly curious about it, but can't explore the territory: do you really get the often spoke of tunnel vision when things start to give way? How long does that last for? Does your perception of time go awry in your last moments, as it can when you fall asleep? Does it literally all fade to black prior to oblivion?
I'm not a dualist, theist or deist, so I don't wonder if there's some secondary existence waiting for me - but I do wonder what existence is like just before it slips away entirely.
Some nights I feel pretty cheated that humans live for such a short period of time in comparison to, say, stars.
For other people, so I'm told, death simply represents a spiritual transition. Some of those people also believe that death will bring final judgement & justice via supernatural arbitration: that this is how the wicked are inevitably damned even if they didn't face consequences for their deeds in life. Some of those people also believe that cruelly extirpated persons & animals refuse to rest in their graves, haunted the world to the this day as specters & phantoms. This is not a fringe belief in North America, and in fact I suspect that at least some of the readers of this post will share it.
Death: It's where we're all going.
This is the thread to talk about what happens, or what we believe might happen, when we get there - and whether or not you believe there are still places to go afterward.
Heart disease: 597,689
Cancer: 574,743
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 138,080
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 129,476
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 120,859
Alzheimer's disease: 83,494
Diabetes: 69,071
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 50,476
Influenza and Pneumonia: 50,097
Intentional self-harm (suicide): 38,364
Death is sort-of tricky to define, even in strictly medical terms. Broadly speaking, for a person, it is the cessation of all bodily functions & neural activity. There is still disagreement over whether or not someone experiencing cardiac arrest should be considered 'dead' given that we can potentially revive them. Brain death has similar complications associated with it - a person can be in a coma, with little to no noticeable brain activity, for a very long span of time and then recuperate from their condition.
There is certainly a point where rigor mortis sets in and the clinical idea of death becomes far less ambiguous, but there is an awkward grey area - or can be - prior to that point.
Outside of medical opinion, a person's personality and complex behavior can become irreversibly damaged without their brain or body ceasing all function - and this is often seen, on some level, as that person now being dead even if their body still remains alive. Relatives of Alzheimer's patients, for example, often see the victim of the disease as having perished well before the degeneration has progressed to the point of affecting involuntary breathing & heart rate control.
It bothers me some nights to think about this nebulously defined state, and that I will enter into it at some yet to be announced time from some yet to be announced cause. If statistic are anything to go by, I suppose my heart will be what eventually acts out the final betrayal. I'm morbidly curious about it, but can't explore the territory: do you really get the often spoke of tunnel vision when things start to give way? How long does that last for? Does your perception of time go awry in your last moments, as it can when you fall asleep? Does it literally all fade to black prior to oblivion?
I'm not a dualist, theist or deist, so I don't wonder if there's some secondary existence waiting for me - but I do wonder what existence is like just before it slips away entirely.
Some nights I feel pretty cheated that humans live for such a short period of time in comparison to, say, stars.
For other people, so I'm told, death simply represents a spiritual transition. Some of those people also believe that death will bring final judgement & justice via supernatural arbitration: that this is how the wicked are inevitably damned even if they didn't face consequences for their deeds in life. Some of those people also believe that cruelly extirpated persons & animals refuse to rest in their graves, haunted the world to the this day as specters & phantoms. This is not a fringe belief in North America, and in fact I suspect that at least some of the readers of this post will share it.
Death: It's where we're all going.
This is the thread to talk about what happens, or what we believe might happen, when we get there - and whether or not you believe there are still places to go afterward.
With Love and Courage
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Posts
Everyone dies.
I challenge anyone to disagree with this statement.
I would totally be cool with fighting people during the day, getting drunk and singing during the night, and having a nap where all of my wounds are healed to do it again the next day. Valhalla sounds like the ultimate party.
Some rocks orbit for billions of years and will do so until the sun explodes.
Edit: we might cure cancer, degenerative brain disorders, and learn to fix other issues with the body. Then gene damage and replace telomeres loss.
I want to live a Long time. I'm scared of dying and want to see what humans become.
I challenge anyone to disagree with this statement.
I wish I hadn't imagined your zombie mother visiting you while you die and stuffing you back inside her zombie womb.
I think that when I die, the 'me' part of me disappears. My consciousness just ceases to exist.
Which is a futile thing to imagine. You can't picture your own non-existence.
But for billions of years before my birth, this was the case.
And I think how incredibly unlikely it seems that my consciousness ever came into being in the first place. Circumstances had to be just right to make "me".
And in the infinite passage of time after I die, maybe those circumstances will arise again.
Or maybe it'll just be the heat death of the universe followed by an infinity of nothing.
Either way's cool. It's not like I'll be around to care.
Self-replicating machine elves for whom speech, creation, and procreation are indistinguishable activities.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It would be cool to have a much longer lifespan thanks to technology, but I don't know how likely it will be that it will be developed and affordable within my lifetime.
Edit: Maybe some prefer to be called "ex-dead".
A ghost clearly did a shitty job of dying.
I'm with Woody Allen - "I'm not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens."
Life extension tech and all that, but I find it more interesting to stay young and firm for a longer part of your life instead of another 50 years in decrepitude.
They actually managed to do this for some lab mice. They replenished their telomerase, thinking it would make them live longer. It didn't do that, but it did make them avoid age-related illnesses.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2012/dec/13/how-people-die-global-mortality-visualised
I'm somewhat horrified by the idea of diarrhea being the cause of death.
More common than you think.
Severe GI distress like that is incredibly dehydrating. some people shit water out of their bodies faster than they can drink it in (if they can even get past the nausea), and without amazing hospital care and IV fluids, you will totally die.
I was once so dehydrated from an intestinal flu that the veins in my arm were collapsing as they tried to put an IV in. Was pretty scary stuff.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Shooting yourself in the foot to get out of boot camp, falling off a ladder on purpose to get workers comp... I'm running out of ideas here for things that aren't just suicide.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Oh, this thread isn't about the recent kerfuffle over the Death name and the stealing from charities that happened. Nevermind.
Orbiting is falling.
Sure, in a cartesian reference frame, orbiting is not terminal falling. Maybe not so much if you are talking about falling in a polar reference frame or are doing the whole exchange of potential energy for kinetic energy thing.
I mean, if you want to look at life from a seattle grunge rock reference frame, living is dying, so everyone is dying, and wearing flannel.
My point works quite well with the 'non-terminal falling' definition though. I want to strike a balance where though I am constantly being changed by forces in my environment, I never come to a permanent rest. Or, just not for a very long time(though this brand of pedantry does make me at times rethink the wisdom of this).
----
I am not afraid of being dead, of not existing. What worries me is the dying part. Through too much exposure to DMT, I've sort of come too see consciousness as a sort of relative thing. Death seems to be an asymptote, and I fear not the nothingness of non-existence but a sort of infinite perceived temporal dilation that might come with approaching it. As the brain slows down, and the darkness creeps ever more slowly in, and those last cells that give rise consciousness burn out, to never reach that peaceful nonexistence.
*shurg*
Depends on how much smaller is the DM than me?
When it comes to death, I walk a very narrow line where my debauchery and t1 diabetes should even out to where parts should be able to get replaced by technological breakthroughs as they break/fall off. I am fully expecting to be more machine than man by year 60(30 years to go).
If said miracles of industry dont come through, I expect to be dead/miserable by 55 or the world to have ended.
edit: Im not sure where this thread is going, but would some people here choose not to live forever given the ability? I understand the religious wanting the afterlife(albiet maybe thats 'eventually'), but as someone who thinks this is all we get, I'd want to give it a go for a while until I found out I didn't anymore.
My own personal belief is that once you're dead, that's it. Everything that made you, well you, died and stopped functioning (the brain). The chemical reactions, the certain position and momentum of the atoms, your experiences and your way of approaching and solving problems and issues, that's all unique to just you; so when you die and your brain decays away that's it. And that's what terrifies me, not the death itself or the loss of a life, but that each one of us are unique and with each death that uniqueness disappears with us. That eventually we're forgotten.
No one truly dies in this world as long as their story goes on.
It just is. Everything else is elaborate deception, self- or otherwise. Religion exists because of death. Essentially everything in life flows from the desire to not die. Not human life - life. We can try to rationalize it as "part of life." We can speculate about an afterlife, hoping death isn't real. We can even kill ourselves in acts of devotion or despair. But I would suggest that even those are only truly possible because so much of our society, intellectual works and thoughts are spent avoiding really realizing it.
We will someday no longer exist. Everything you have ever thought, felt or imagined will be as if they never were. It won't be blackness. It won't be numbness. Its not that you won't feel or think. Its that you will not be. That is literally inconceivable in a first person universe.
I can hope there is an afterlife. I can hope we'll magically hit an immortal robot bodies singularity before I die. But its far more likely all that I feel will be gone. The total destruction of everything that truly matters - love, humor, fears, happiness, relationships, memory, identity, music, literature, art, honor, ethics, consciousness, sapience... what could be worse than that? What could be scarier?
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
I think, because those things can go on beyond without us, in the traces which we leave on the earth, in the mind and hearts of our associates, countrymen, friends, family and children, the corruption of those things can be scarier. Maybe, this is why humans will choose death, or potential death, to protect the things which we create which will live on after ourselves. Love, art, ethics, the image of ourselves we create for others, people will face death for these things, because their destruction is less inevitable than that of a human's life.
or something.
Pain scares me. Knowing that my death would cause others pain scares me.
In fact, that's one of the only things that has kept me from suicide at different times in my life.
Sometimes death itself sounds downright appealing.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So the universe is contracting?
There may be some trauma in my past.
"Readers who prefer tension and romance, Maledictions: The Offering, delivers... As serious YA fiction, I’ll give it five stars out of five. As a novel? Four and a half." - Liz Ellor
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