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Re:On Mother's Day, My Mom Asked Me to Help End Her Life by amelius on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @07:14AM (#11674199)
Here's a way of thinking about it that might make it a little lighter. First, you have to understand that the version of you at this moment is different from the version of you yesterday. You don't feel what you felt yesterday. All that is left are memories, which are somehow engraved in your brain. The part of you that survives is purely physical. So in a sense, dying and living are the same thing: you die at every femtosecond of living. Dying is not special. You (as anyone else) have been doing it for many years now.

If this doesn't work for you, then consider the following. We are all living beings, and sometimes some of us die, and sometimes new beings are born. But who says that those living beings aren't just one big living being? Our brains tell us so. But this view is only an artifact of the brain. If our brains were all interconnected more strongly, then I bet our brains would view us as one living being. So what you can take from this is that dying is just like losing a few brain cells. This is also something that you have been doing for years (in fact billions of years). So in this view, you never die until, of course, the universe ends.

Re:On Mother's Day, My Mom Asked Me to Help End Her Life by akanet on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @07:26AM (#11674260)
> you die at every femtosecond of living

This is an interesting theory that has its roots in solipsism: the belief the world vanishes the moment you close your eyes. The fact of the matter is that it (and solipsism) just don't seem to be true, not even to solipsists. If you truly believed you were dying at every second, you'd act in all sorts of ways against your long term survival, but here you are posting on the internet.

Even if we take the position as true, it seems entirely reasonable to perceive the end of the "chain" of "yous" to be a tragic event.

> But who says that those living beings aren't just one big living being? Our brains tell us so.

Well, our brains, as well as the general evidence we see in the world around us. If we were one giant interconnected entity, dying would probably be very different. However, there's very little reason to assume that as a given - I can't talk to my dead relatives through any of my living ones.

I think this argument is perhaps more simply stated as "you were never a large part of the human race, so your death will not matter in a large way either" which is quite true, in fact. My counterpoint would be that the death of the individual rightly remains terrifying to that individual. If I were the human race, I would correctly not concern myself with the death of a few of my brain cells (and I do not, regarding my own real brain cells), but I would regard the death of the human race (myself) as truly important.

If anyone's interested, I've written about some of these kinds of arguments I've heard before: http://vincentwoo.com/2011/04/30/arguing-for-immortality/

Re:On Mother's Day, My Mom Asked Me to Help End Her Life by junko on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @08:00AM (#11674423)
I personally don't like thinking that I'm just one part of something much bigger. Yes it IS true, but I consider myself too uniquely different from every other person in this world. It's not vanity, because it's the same for everyone else. No matter who or where you are, you are a universe of its own. You have a mind and a character that will always be different and will never be fully comprehended by others - a snowflake, yeah I get that's cliché but it's true. And imagine that no matter how many billions of snowflakes there are, each one is different from another. Now that's mind-boggling. Whenever I get the "death dread", I think of this, and remember what a privilege it is to be in this world and experience these 'universes' - no matter how brief life may be.