Tag: death

The Good Life Closes Out Bad Possibilities

~ cafebedouin

Far from having a “bucket list”, I now understand that the proper conduct of the second half of life is to approach something like what the Tibetan Buddhists call tukdam, to do less and less, but only to sit and meditate, and to breathe once every century or so, so that by the time you actually die there will be scarcely any change to register. I can picture a future not so far from now when, to the question, “Is he alive or dead?”, the only fitting response will be: “Who can say?” …

…Alcohol is surprisingly similar to salt in this regard: it is easy to see how it can help to keep us alive, when times are hard, even if it helps to kill us when times are easy (or hard, but in another way)…

…You keep pushing nature to give you more of what it has, in higher doses, and eventually it breaks, and gives you something with a causal history rooted in the thing you started with and the thing you wanted more of, but with an opposite and hostile nature….

…To put this another way, I no longer see the world as frothing with possibility, as “open”. That’s what it is, I think, to survive past midlife: your life is not done, yet it is, as we say, “a done deal”.

Can it still, under such circumstances, hold out the hope of being “good”? Hell yes, life is good. It’s a gift, it’s a miracle, &c. And it is surely a blessing to live long enough to learn to stop searching in vain for sources of transcendence in the common substances of this world, however rarefied they are made, however spirit-like, by the long art of men.”

-Justin E. H. Sith , “Gone Bad, Come to Life: On Fermentation, Distillation, and Sobriety.” justinehsmith.substack.com. November 27, 2022.

Excellent throughout.

Simulated Selves

~ cafebedouin

“This Mum and Dad live inside an app on my phone, as voice assistants constructed by the California-based company HereAfter AI and powered by more than four hours of conversations they each had with an interviewer about their lives and memories. (For the record, Mum isn’t that untidy.) The company’s goal is to let the living communicate with the dead. I wanted to test out what it might be like.

Technology like this, which lets you “talk” to people who’ve died, has been a mainstay of science fiction for decades…

…“The biggest issue with the [existing] technology is the idea you can generate a single universal person,” says Justin Harrison, founder of a soon-to-launch service called You, Only Virtual. “But the way we experience people is unique to us.” …

But she warns that users need to be careful not to think this technology is re-creating or even preserving people. “I didn’t want to bring back his clone, but his memory,” she says. The intention was to “create a digital monument where you can interact with that person, not in order to pretend they’re alive, but to hear about them, remember how they were, and be inspired by them again.”

-Charlotte Jee, “Technology that lets us “speak” to our dead relatives has arrived. Are we ready?” technologyreview.com. October 18, 2022

Advances in artificial intelligence are opening up new possibilities of creating virtual representations of people. It’s a kind of advanced Turing test, not of a machine intelligence being able to pass itself off as human, but instead, being able to pass itself off as a person that you know or had known.

If you provide enough data – in the form of video, voice and text – you presumably can approximate what a person might do or so in certain contexts. It becomes possible to create individual avatars or constructs that approach the real thing.

The first application is for people to process grief. It seems obvious that this will be a thing, where people will use this technology to capture people around them and keep them alive in a sense. As with most change, there are benefits and risks to consider. On one hand, it would be nice to be able to talk with and confer with digital avatars of people that have died or left our lives for one reason or another. On the other hand, it is easy to imagine that these “relationships” would become maladaptive, where they call upon the limited time that we have and prevent us from meeting new people and spending the time necessary to have meaningful relationships with them.

Beyond grief, I think, in some sense, we already have inner representations of people in our minds. For example, I will sometimes want to make a comment that lacks tact, I sometimes have a version of my wife in my head saying something like, “You can say that, but say it nicely,” which, in fact, is something my wife says to me several times a year. I’d guess a digital assistant version might be better than the version I have in my head who I could consult about the right way to handle certain social situations. But, then again, I could just ask her in person. Wouldn’t the digital version get in the way of the real person, and ultimately damage my real relationship?

I like the idea of having multiple versions of myself. I imagine the process of adding data to be much like working on a blog, where the process of documenting surfaces thoughts that you might not have had otherwise. It changes you.

Then, you’d be able to consult with a different version of yourself. You’d be able to check in with past versions, and see how you have changed. You could get second opinions, from a close approximation of your self. There are also hazards here because ultimately this is a past facing exercise, and temperamentally, I try to live more in the future, or in the moment, when I can manage it.

In any event, this is interesting food for thought. I’d expect using this technology at funerals or by people that want to live on in a sense beyond when they die to be common within the next decade or two. It’s probably useful to think about the various tradeoffs before then.

Reduce Your Death Anxiety

~ cafebedouin

“The one thing all human beings have in common, is the fact that one day, our lives will end in death.

What does the idea of death mean to you? How does it make you feel?

Chances are the thought of death triggers fear or anxiety in you. You might not feel totally comfortable with the idea of dying and your life coming to an end.

Research shows that in our modern-day Western society death denial is a common attitude. Which is very contradictory in itself when you think about it, as death is ultimately the one thing we can not avoid from happening.

Ignoring death often leads to more death anxiety which can have a huge impact on your mental health and your day-to-day life, while contemplating death will give you the benefits of going through life more aware and with greater purpose.

With my online video course I will give you the tools to explore your relationship with mortality, and reduce your death anxiety.“

—https://acourseindying.com/get-ahead-of-death-online-video-course-on-mortality/

My father-in-law recently died after several years of illness. Talking about the possibility of dying is fraught with people engaged in magical thinking, as if broaching the subject is causal. It’s simply a reality people must face, and when they put it off, it is invariably worse. For €79, it’s probably a useful exercise, but the reality is the people that really need it won’t be the one’s buying this course.

Chances of Dying From an In-Hospital Medical Error

~ cafebedouin

“Errors in medicine include wrong diagnoses, drug dosage miscalculations, and treatment delays. These errors are likely to be underestimated because studies tend to focus exclusively on hospitals and not on the rest of the healthcare system; because some errors may only have debilitating effects years down the road for a patient and are thus harder to trace; and because reporting these errors may not be encouraged by the medical culture. The patient safety movement is important because errors that can be prevented should be prevented…

…A study from the UK reports that 3.6% of hospital deaths were due to preventable medical error; a similar study out of Norway reports 4.2%; and a meta-analysis of the problem published in the BMJ in 2019 concludes that at least one in 20 patients are affected by preventable patient harm, with 12% of this group suffering from permanent disability or dying because of this harm.”

So, let’s do some back of the envelope math. The American Hospital Association says there were 36,241,815 hospital admissions in 2021. The most recent data (2019) I can find is on Wonder that has in-patient hospital deaths was 813,249, which is close to the what was previously reported for a year. So, roughly 28,000 people die in hospitals due to medical error and 56,000 have some kind of disability as a result. If you look look at mortality by condition for 2019, that can look like a lot, depending on what you want to focus on, such as the same level as flu or twice the level of dying from inhaling food or vomit. But, some of that is due to the categories of cause of death and how Wonder reports them. When those get put into official lists, like the top causes of death, the number of flu deaths doubles and more than twice as many commit suicide as die as in-patients in a hospital due to medical error.

So, I guess the lesson here is that any time you enter a hospital, it is not without some risk. But, let’s put that risk in context. Of those entering a hospital, 2.2%, die. The chances of someone dying as an in-patient due to medical error are 4% of the 2.2%, or ~0.88%. If you want to put that risk in some kind of comparable risk category of preventable deaths, its just a little less than dying from an accidental gun discharge or sunstroke. Presumably the risk is higher the more severe your condition and isn’t uniform.

…Stay A Little Longer

~ cafebedouin

“As death draws near, I feel the same uncomfortable transition I experienced when I was a teenager at Brantwood Camp in Peterborough, New Hampshire, packing up to go home after a grand summer. I’m not sure what awaits me when I get home, but this has certainly been an exciting experience. I had a loving family. I had a great job at the newspaper. I met fascinating people, and I saw myriad worldwide wonders. It’s been full of fun and laughter, too, a really good time.

I just wish I could stay a little longer.

—Jack Thomas, “I just learned I only have months to live. This is what I want to say.” The Boston Globe. July 21, 2021.

Scientists Are Giving Dead Brains New Life. What Could Go Wrong? – The New York Times

~ cafebedouin ~ 2 Comments

“But there was a worst-case scenario: A partly revived post-mortem brain, trapped in a feverish nightmare, perpetually reliving the very moment of its slaughter. ‘Imagine the ultimate sensory-deprivation tank,’ a member of the N.I.H.’s Neuroethics Working Group told me. “No inputs. No outputs. In your brain, nobody can hear you scream.'”

—Matthew Shaer—Scientists Are Giving Dead Brains New Life. What Could Go Wrong?” The New York Times. July 2, 2019.

Brain in a Vat

~ cafebedouin

“In a challenge to the idea that brain death is final, researchers have revived the disembodied brains of pigs four hours after the animals were slaughtered. Although the experiments stopped short of restoring consciousness, they raise questions about the ethics of the approach — and, more fundamentally, about the nature of death itself. ”

—Sara Reardon, “Pig brains kept alive outside body for hours after death.” Nature. April 17, 2019.

Reminds me of a question I heard about whether anyone is still conscious during organ harvesting. The idea of being vivisected while conscious is serious nightmare fuel.

Brain in a vat has the potential to be worse because it could go on indefinitely, see Iain M. Banks Surface Detail as one possibility.