> it wasn’t a benign teratoma after all, but rather a malignant cancer called synovial sarcoma [..] Heart cancer? Who the hell gets heart cancer?! Is this some kind of horrible metaphor?
I thought they meant Virgil the Roman poet, and I thought it was pretty funny that he was categorised under '/celebritydiagnosis'. Now I realise I'm probably out of touch with celebrity culture...
A deeply moving and wise piece. Just what I needed to start the year.
"The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation."
As someone who grew up and continues to live between a Western European country and a developing country in the so-called "third world", I have been intensely thinking lately about how "relative" our sensations and experiences are. In one of the countries, people get really mad and their days get spoiled because a train arrives 5 minutes too late, on the other side of the globe, people have never experienced such a good train service and they wouldn't mind arriving 5 minutes too late, they would be intensely grateful for being able to get such a cheap, safe and comfortable transport service. To name one of too many such examples.
I find it so difficult to relate to such "first world problems" lately...
I think peoole seem happy but just like to complain. My theory isnit is some evolutionary thing to help the tribe spread news of potential survival problems so they can be delt with. Our brains have not caught up with modern life is all.
Nobody really cares if a train is on-time. They care about the consequences of being late wherever it is they have to go. If transportation is generally unreliable across an entire country, then appointment times will be lax, nobody will be fired for being a few minutes late, your date won't decide they don't like you, etc. It's all about the surrounding expectations and how other people will treat you because of them. If Western European countries also had a culture of no hard timelines and schedules only being suggestions, then people who lived there wouldn't get stressed over a late train.
You are entirely missing the point. Yes, sure, there are examples in which there might be consequences if the train is not on-time. But a lot of the time I see people literally stressing out about a train being late for no reason whatsoever, because they don't have any stakes on that train arriving on-time. Lots of my colleagues don't really have to be at work at a particular time, our working ours are completely flexible every day. But they will always complain extensively if their trains get minimally delayed.
So what are they getting so mad about? Because they are "losing" 5 minutes of their precious time being idle in a train station? I guess those 5 minutes would have been quite remarkable if they could have been replying to emails at their desk. As I said, there were no negative consequences whatsoever for those guys if the train arrives late. They have just lost all sense of rationality and want to be mad for the sake of being mad about something "not working as expected or intended".
But getting used to the comfort is very quick. Introduce that train service in the "3rd world" country and it will probably take few days to see the complaints over a "later than normal" train.
As a person who moved abroad from a 3rd world country, I can relate. I sometimes think about how it would be like to move some of this 1st world people to the other side of the globe to show them how people are living their lives, without all those comfort. I wonder if their life would change afterwards.
I think that depth has been more widely recognized in neuro-biology before, but has fallen from grace in favor of a naive mechanistic enthusiasm at the beginning of that early neuroimagining euphoria.
You may look into constructivism, especially the biological foundation (e.g. the work of Maturana and Valera). It offers the (somewhat forgotten) hard science link to modern philosophy and psychology, like post-structualism/-modernism and systems theory.
As far as I know, it's not very popular, because it presents a little crisis and is "not very fun"... or at least that's what the criticism comes down to IMO. (I suspect, it's kinda similar to Gödel's assault, but much easier to dismiss.)
Put so bluntly, it is self-refuting: if we cannot know the truth, we cannot know that statement to itself be true-if a statement is self-refuting, how can it be rational to believe it? The “except for” may save the statement from being self-refuting, but only at the cost of becoming an instance of special pleading, which is equally irrational.
I can easily comprehend truth. 2 + 2 = 4, there ya go. "We don't have direct access to external reality, but instead it's mediated through our senses and cognition" is closer to what people are getting at.
It's much the same way a Unix process can 'perceive reality' via serial ports and processors managed in kernelspace.
Perhaps we’re unable to see absolute truth, but we are able to see bits of the truth as it were. Nor is sensory experience our only or even primary way to see truth. Professor Linden has wandered into Epistemic Philosophy but he’s not qualified to give the lecture.
We can keep inventing and looking for new lenses to apply to our mind's eye, but for some reason, we find that every lens we try is slightly warped in different ways.
There are people who tire of the search, settle on one lens, and then think the world is fisheye-shaped.
We're all terminal, but I can't help but think that a terminal diagnosis gives people a clarity that the rest of us lack. It's easy to be on autopilot when how much time you have is unknown.
My partner got diagnosed with early stage lymphoma in '19 and it had a drastic effect in our outlook on life.
After treatment and full remission in '20 we shifted some aspects of our lives as a result. Some of those changes would have fairly significant long lasting outcomes over the rest of our lives (started trying for a child, became more open and true to our most intimate inner selfs and more).
But mostly we stuck to the normal routine. Working too much. Stressing over trivial things. Having time and energy be sapped away by the thousand cuts one has during a working week.
Then she had a second cancer diagnoses in august '21. Completely unrelated to the prior one and the treatment she received.
It was also in its early stage, but turned out to have metastasized to a lymph node. That triggered a full protocol of chemo and radiation.
Our future is now permanently changed. We will not be capable of having children together due to the effects of the treatment. Even though we are very hopeful, there is a considerable risk of recurrence in the next few years. Which according to the doctors would be untreatable due to the amount of radiation she has now already had.
The autopilot is completely turned off by now. We are updating our bucket lists and planning to quit or changing to jobs that will allow us to live a slower more adventurous life where more of our time is spent together rather then in an endless pursuit of material goods (or commuting to an office space devoid of all creativity and inspiration). We may even try out life in a van for a few months.
And the thing is that while all this is going on, we are both extremely sad about the lost opportunities of starting a family, while also being incredibly glad that the treatment went well and that the prospects for the future are good (her odds of having a recurrence are among the lowest for the type of cancer she had given numerous parameters).
We are now focused on truly living this life to the fullest, which to be honest wasn't so much the case mere 6 months ago.
I had a completely out of the blue heart attack last year and it's very weird to have gone from feeling fit and healthy to that and then back again.
I find it quite weird because its such a profound thing to be let down by your own body. Particularly when I live pretty healthily and exercise a lot. I was even swimming when I had the heart attack!
Unlike other brushes with death I've had skiing and driving you lose an element of trust in yourself. It's not given me clarity so much as muddled everything up because it was so random and there is nothing in my power to do about it. I think mentally I'd have preferred a worse diagnosis, that I had a congenital or chronic problem, at least it would be understandable and I could feel like I was doing something to avoid it. But instead I'm really back where I started with a looming fear.
In reality it's a problem anyone could have I was just unlucky enough to have it.
Very wise comment. Furthermore this autopilot has gradations, where one may consciously recognize that nobody gets out of this alive, but the changes made are of differing levels of determination depending on how intense the sense of the inevitable.
I welcome the feeling that I may be the first person in history to not die. I've tried the opposite, holding my mortality close to my chest. The crippling existential terror was not worth whatever "authenticity" it came along with.
The last line hit me like a ton of bricks, but I think only because all of the writing that preceded was equally good. I'm often taken aback when I read really nicely written prose by "random" (i.e. not professional writers) online. To me, more than anything else, really great writing has always seemed like the mark of a superior intellect. It is the one skill I truly wished I had focused on more in my youth; the ability to convey ideas in this way that is both concise but draws the reader in seems like a remarkable gift! Just in the small chance the author runs across this, I'm grateful to him for writing this piece -- a wonderful bit to reflect on for all of us.
It may not be what you are in search of, but your comment itself is a deft display of linguistic aptitude. I reckon if you did take up writing, you'd only need to learn the thematic principles, not so much vocabulary or verbosity. Remember, most lurkers just view and don't comment. And even fewer folks of those who comment post cohesive prose. I've found the best way to become good at writing is simply by..well, writing. I think you've done a good job in that, even if you currently think comments don't translate to long form. Perhaps an actual writer can elucidate the subject for us.
I have nothing but sympathy and sadness for the plight of the author. It's terrible and unfair. I would certainly rather be snuffed out instantly than have to suffer with a long and incurable illness.
However I found his last point a betrayal of his life and intelligence. Commenting about afterlife for which there is isn't a scintilla of evidence nor mechanism is a poor way to leave his very moving piece.
How is it possible to provide evidence for something that, by definition, lies outside the empirically observable universe? Militant atheism is just as comical as all-knowing theism when faced with the sheer incomprehensibility of existence. The reality is we have no idea what existence entails, and any claims that one does are meant to assuage one's ego more than anything else.
What question does a belief in an afterlife answer? If you didn't start with that belief, what observation could you make to come to the conclusion that there is an afterlife?
I think you are making these two positions to sound equivalent, but I really don't think that is the case.
The point is we are not in a position to know what is outside our frame of reference either way. Strict atheism asserts there is no god with the same lack of evidence that religious people believe that there is.
Of course many atheists will point to some specific religious belief as being unlikely without evidence, but that is a strawman argument that comes down to the semantic question of defining "god" narrowly enough to make it seem absurd and unlikely. The larger question is whether the observable universe is the end-all-be-all of existence, and that is a philosophical question which outspans the reaches of the scientific method. One can assume Materialism and reject Dualism—many do because they find it silly to consider unanswerable questions and prefer to assume a deterministic universe which could theoretically be fully understood from our meat sack bodies given enough time and resources—but unfortunately this belief is based on faith; it can not be proven anymore than the Halting problem can be solved.
> Strict atheism asserts there is no god with the same lack of evidence that religious people believe that there is.
Which is why you'll meet almost nobody that's a 'strict' atheist by that definition, and I'm afraid that I think this is a straw man, much more than the accusation you level in the following sentence -
> Of course many atheists will point to some specific religious belief as being unlikely without evidence, but that is a strawman
Not when they are actually closely held beliefs. What do you think it the proportion of religious people that have closely examined their beliefs in a philosophical manner and found an unanswerable question and recognised Dualism in their outlook?
Because in my experience of religious people, their beliefs have been every bit as literal as the ones the atheists lambast and which you write off as a straw man. It's the philosophically minded apologists that are the rarity.
> Of course many atheists will point to some specific religious belief as being unlikely without evidence, but that is a strawman argument that comes down to the semantic question of defining "god" narrowly enough to make it seem absurd and unlikely. The larger question is whether the observable universe is the end-all-be-all of existence, and that is a philosophical question which outspans the reaches of the scientific method.
Anything that it would make sense to call "god" - and certainly anything that would have a particular interest in what some jumped-up apes on an utterly insignificant little blue green planet orbiting a small unregarded yellow sun out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy thought about anything - is absurd and unlikely. There may well be unknown entities, but they would almost certainly be no more godlike than any other object or force of nature we've encountered.
Here's the crux: What would make sense to call "god"? What would make sense to call "a higher power"? Personally, if there is any consciousness that exists on a different level than our immediately observable universe perhaps with a radically different relationship to space-time, I believe two things are true: 1) it's nature is likely to be so far beyond our understanding that we don't have the precepts to even begin to reason about it and 2) it definitely makes sense to consider such an entity in those terms regardless of whether it has a particular interest in earth-life or not.
Again, this is the semantic game that we play. It's easy to set up these strawmen based on our inherent anthropocentrism combined with past mythologies created to explain things which science subsequently provided better explanations for. However it is a huge leap to look at that progress and jump to the conclusion that our perspective is the one true lens on reality and that there is nothing beyond the reach of our instruments, logic and models.
If you say "god" you inherently bring in all the baggage of that anthropocentrism and past mythologies; that is the normal everyday meaning of the word, after all.
I want to point out that you at no point address the question. It is a simple question, and it is not a trick. Your tangent feels like an attempt at what-aboutism.
>> If you didn't start with that belief, what observation could you make to come to the conclusion that there is an afterlife?
I always appreciate the parable of the flame in Buddhism. If you use a lighter to produce a flame, where did that flame come from? where does it go? If you use it again, is that flame the same or is different?
You realize that the flame is really just a distinction we make of matter that has always been there and it doesn't go anywhere, just changes. I don't mean this to say that "you" are just changing when you die, but to question what "you" really are.
I think consciousness is an interesting area we still struggle to understand. It's weird that no physical thing can be "about" something but that thoughts can be. I can think of george washington riding a unicycle, but does that mean there is a neuron in my brain that physically is that mental picture?
Lastly, there is a contingency problem with matter. If all physical things are contingent upon a cause, then the physical universe must be caused by something that is immaterial. If you think about math, does it really exist? If I ask if "four" exists, there certainly is a english word, "four" and a grouping of lines (4) there can be four of something but these are all just representative of four'ness. So does four really exist and if not why is math so effective at explaining our universe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
If the universe is contingent upon an immaterial cause, I don't think it's out of reach to imagine that cause as an Aristotelian god.
All that to say, I think there's reason to be skeptical about any certainty in knowing what happens when we die. Hopefully it's something interesting or I won't be around to find out!
We may discover that the ideas we have are more real than we are.
We have all died countless times already, 'I' am not the person that was at age 13. There might now be some memories or conception of that person, I could estimate what they would do or think in a given situation (similar to a wife or close friend). But that 13 year old doesn't exist anymore and neither do most of the atoms reside in the current body. I like the flame reference. We die every moment, consciousness is inherently transitory.
That's also a good thing to ponder on, previous versions of your self. The teachings surrounding this in the Buddhist sense are called anatta for anyone interested in reading more.
Irrespective of the reality of an afterlife, the very fact that the vast majority of cultures seemingly independently developed theories about it suggests that people do, in fact, come to the conclusion that there is an afterlife without starting with the belief.
People like to talk about religion as though it's all indoctrination, but the argument really doesn't hold up. Religions that focus on proselytism seem to spread faster, which is unremarkable, but religion definitely seems to form spontaneously.
Consider a religion as a set of beliefs about the world. That it shows up spontaneously has more to do with the creatures it occurs in than external forces.
My mother is currently dying. She now speaks to people and things that are not there. Every hospice site has a guide, the majority of which describe the possibility that the dying person will begin to talk to people that are not there or _that have already died_.
Im not saying it's real, it just blew my mind when I learned it was widespread enough to include alongside the death rattle and lack of eating. I imagined all the ancient peoples watching their elders commune with the dead moments before they died. I imagine it'd be pretty convincing to witness yourself.
> What question does a belief in an afterlife answer?
It’s not answering questions of the physical or observable world. It’s attempting to answer the “Why” (meaning/purpose) questions rather than the “How” (method/cause).
Anyone who has seen another person die has a pretty good idea of what happens after death from empiric observation. Anything else is just wishful thinking, coping with one's own mortality.
If he were to really care to disprove that, he could check your garage. The point is some information isn't available to us at all, there's no evidence any particular way
If he looks in my garage he won't see it, but I already said it was invisible. The point is anyone can make up a nice story that can't be disproven, but it is the positive claim that requires evidence.
Surely there is no escape from solipsism but since it's all-encompassing then how much actual value does it provide?
I mean, we can annotate every observation and every thought ever with "for all we know it could be just an illusion" and live as if we were constantly being tricked by a deceitful daemon Descartes-style but why should we do it, what is there to gain?
I could agree that monism / strict materialism is as baseless as any other view but I think its terseness deserves a bit more respect than being called "comical", if only for the sake of its elegance.
It's trivial to provide a longer description / a more complicated model of reality that will have as much explanatory power as a simpler one.
It's much more challenging to find a shorter / simpler one that will work just as well.
Yes, I am aware that my assumption that challenging things are somehow more commendable than non-challenging things is completely baseless too :)
An afterlife doesn't by definition exist outside the empirically observable universe. Lots of people historically thought they could communicate with the dead with seances and such. One of the disappointments of the modern scientific age is the fact such efforts failed to live up to scientific scrutiny.
He said the way our brain works we can’t comprehend nothingness easily. It’s hard to deal with death. He said he’s not religious. In the end he finds himself romanticizing the idea of an afterlife (even though he doesn’t think it’ll happen)
I mean, to me it’s more intelligent to consider we have no idea what’s going to happen after we’re dead and think about possibilities to prepare ourselves just in case our consciousness does end up in some afterlife. I have strong suspicions we’re just dead and nothing happens, but I can’t be certain of that. Reading books and thinking about different afterlives might help if you end up in one. We don’t even barely understand our own universe, which we live in, so who knows what’s possible here?
This shares notions with simulation theory and other non-falsifiable hypotheses.
I take a practical approach here. We exist today. What will we make of it? Regarding these notions, my thought is since no one can be certain, what practical impact does that have? Typically the answer is "none whatsoever."
Even the OP implies that there is some mental benefit to using hope as a coping mechanism.
Even still, I would think most practitioners are doing it because they receive some sort of practical benefit now, in addition to the hope they hold in the afterlife. Most religious communities provide social/emotional/spiritual fulfillment for the parishioner in the present.
It's interesting when you start to think about the expected value of believing in a religion. Would the correct poker move be to maximize EV by believing in all religions?
Not trying to poke fun, just an odd thought that's been bobbing around my brain this week.
> However I found his last point a betrayal of his life and intelligence. Commenting about afterlife for which there is isn't a scintilla of evidence nor mechanism is a poor way to leave his very moving piece.
I think his point is that it's a beautiful fantasy.
I am not sure how I would react and what I would think, if I have to face such a situation. Perhaps, under that level of sadness and stress, an aspiration that things will continue in an afterlife is one (only?) thought that would instill hope about future.
This is an unusual situation, I think we should expect unusual coping mechanisms.
I feel like you completely missed his point. Which was that since the brain functions by making short term predictions about the future, it makes sense that every human culture has focused on the ultimate prediction about the unknown: "what will happen when I die?"
not exactly an experiment with a falsifiable hypothesis there, but I found it to be an interesting thought
The evidence are there, in abundance actually. However, where and how one is looking for them could very well be the problem of not being able to perceive the evidence.
Just think about it: so far whatever we've invented is based on discoveries of what's already there in the universe. Metals, electricity, fuel, food et al.
Only when we started looking for such things with an open mind, with the right tools and at the right place, we were able to perceive them.
Similarly, our human history (at least in eastern traditions) has been filled with countless tales of those who had set out to seek answers to questions of soul, God, eternity, life beyond physical body et al, and they did find answers. Not only that, they also left details about various practical ways to reach to that exalted state, for those who dare to be seeker like them.
So far, nobody has found answers that are empirically verifiable. Unless that happens, there is no evidence for anything other than what we can see with the tools we have.
The mind has such a hard time comprehending death that it tries to escape through other views of reality. This can happen regardless of your scientific knowledge or religious beliefs. That's the most interesting takeaway from this piece in my opinion, as I experienced the same while losing a parent to cancer.
Isn't the very existence of this world in which we live, an evidence for what lies outside our empirically observable universe? For it can't be created out of nothing?
Yeah, what the author is going through is extremely sad, but unfortunately I too found the piece quite superficial.
The concept of the "afterlife" is far from universal, in space as well as in time (it has a documented history that begins in Ancient Egypt).
Even in the modern Western world, where it used to dominate, it is now disappearing fast. That would be inexplicable if it was part of how the human brain works.
>Even in the modern Western world, where it used to dominate, it is now disappearing fast.
One observation that has been made many times is rather than the afterlife (with its characteristics of rendering judgement onto the unjust and so forth) disappearing, particular in the 20th century, it has been translated into a variety of secular ideologies.
If you want to find fantasies about eschatology, eternal life, resurrection of the dead and so on you only need to talk about atheist silicon valley engineers about the singularity.
But if it was part of how the human brain operates it would concern everybody, not just a couple of tech self-proclaimed luminaries who hope to somehow "not die".
I think it is deeply engrained in culture. I mean you just need to look at pop culture. I don't think there was ever an age with more disaster / last day type movies or books than right now. Environmental politics (which I support, not to get me wrong) often has the same kind of cataclysmic fears projected on it.
There's now services to immortalize your social media presence after you're dead and so on, pretty much mirroring religious ritual.
I think there is genuinely few people who have a truly indifferent attitude towards death or last questions, for most it's just been transformed into something that looks superficially non-religious.
Reincarnation is a topic that comes up a lot in the case of people who had near death experiences. If we take a purely materialist view of this phenomenon it could indicate that there is a mechanism in the brain that leads to these beliefs.
Personally I had a spiritual experience while high on Ketamine last year that shared many similarities with these stories of reincarnation. And it's hard to explain, but it showed me that the perception of the world that our brain provides for us is not necessarily the truth but somehow arbitrary and constrained.
I'm rather fond of the belief some people develop after experiences such as these that there is only one human soul, continually reincarnated across space and time. Obviously it's so deep into unfalsifiable territory there's very little point in a scientific debate about the idea, but as a pure belief I think it's probably a beneficial one in the 'love thy neighbour' sense.
Unfortunately Camus chose the most absurd way to die. It would have been informative if we could see how he lived out his last days with imminent death clearly on his horizon.
I'm sure von Neumann might have said something similar for 50 years before his death. It might hit different when you're told you have 30 days left if you're lucky.
Listened to "Tuesdays with Morrie" [0] over the break, which is a series of interviews and reflections by the author as he interacts with his professor dying of ALS. That and "When Breath becomes Air" [1] are both pretty astounding long-form explorations on impending death.
Hard topic, but I suppose that's the nature of it.
Yeah, heart cells expand rather than divide to repair damaged tissue, which is why primary heart cancer is very very rare. The author had synovial sarcoma which is a metastatic cancer.
we live everyday as if theres a tomorrow while playing a cosmic lottery
This reminds me of The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker [1]. David Linden gives a biological explanation for the psychological idea presented by Becker.
I honestly don't understand why people seek that. Doesn't that sadness and devastation hang with you afterwards?
I gave it a try, but now I am trying to avoid these stories at all costs (thanks for the warning) and firmly believe everything important in life can be told with humor, as well.
1 in 5 people dies of cancer, and usually it sucks, no happy ending. I really, really don't see the need to bring more tragic death into your life than what's likely coming your way, anyway.
Do you "enjoy" the sadness and crying? (Honest question.)
My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 48. Went through treatment, got fitter than ever, started running 1/2 marathons, traveled the world, did the Coast to Coast Walk in England, and raised money and opened a library full of resources for cancer patients and their families at the hospital where she worked.
Then 10 years after she was first diagnosed, she had a seizure as she walked into her lab at a new job she just started. If she didn’t speed like a maniac, it might’ve happened as she drove on I-95 and not in one of the best hospitals in the country.
Metastatic brain cancer.
At first, it wasn’t clear how much time she’d have left (if any at all). But she woke up and radiation gave her another decent year before the last 6 months that were pretty awful. Eventually, she fell out of bed, broke her hip, slipped into a coma and died in hospice a week later on Christmas 2012.
Was it a tragedy? I don’t think about it that way.
The ending was happy. She wasn’t in pain and she took such great advantage of the last decade of her life, including that last year when she knew it was really the end.
For me, it's because I want to gain some perspective, and in this case in particular, without experiencing it first hand.
For example, I will often read cancer patient message boards, or family members that have watched their kin succumb to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Or watching old videos, re-mastered with color on youtube from the turn of the 20th century, and contemplating how their entire lives have gone by. Or the uncovered skeletons of people that died from the bubonic plague in the 14th century, and reflect on how they likely had very important personal matters and concerns. But now there they lie, and the world has long since forgotten them. Their names and stories are long gone.
As a recent example, I stumbled across a young women who died of leukemia almost 10 years ago now. She was a local news reporter, and had a youtube channel[1] and twitter account[2]. She unkowningly documented her demise online with her twitter updates. She even interviewed a cancer survivor in one of her youtube videos and said, "how scary it must be when the doctor tells you that you have cancer!". How very soon she would find out herself. Her videos have about a dozen views, and her tweets went largely ignored. She seemed like such a genuinely sweet woman.
It's both morbid curiosity and a grim reminder of indeed how short life is. What was their mindset in their waning time, and why is mine much different? As fast as time seems to go by, am I all that different? Why wait until your death bed to consider your mortality? Maybe it's right around the corner, or maybe not.
I think the deeper perspective with the original article and the book mentioned by parent is a sense of finding fulfillment in life’s struggles rather than just just blanket sadness.. it’s about finding peace or contentment through struggles. In that sense I think it’s a good thing to understand others and how they have found their version of piece through life's struggles. General idea could be group together as logotherapy- finding meaning to life.
Book by nazi encampment survivor and creator of logotherapy: https://www.audible.com/pd/Mans-Search-for-Meaning-Audiobook...?
But would you agree, you don't need that story over and over dressed up differently? Some people have read/seen more than one of those stories.
Man's search for arbitrary meaning (through suffering and such).
I think that's feeding the delusion that life is somehow fair, or balanced, or something, when really life is just cruel sometimes. Maybe that's the appeal. I just cope with it differently, try to laugh it off.
You can't escape sadness. Life is fundamentally about suffering. Even when you're having a good time, you will still feel sad because you know the good times always end, eventually. I think people seek these stories because it helps them deal with their own sadness. What better way to reassure yourself about your own miseries than to hear the miserable stories of others?
> You can't escape sadness. Life is fundamentally about suffering.
Yeah, no shit. That's why I try to not invite it unnecessarily.
> I think people seek these stories because it helps them deal with their own sadness.
I doubt that. I think it's some form of morbid entertainment I don't need, as indicated by other commenters. Emotionality porn or something. Today the sad cancer story, tomorrow FetLife. (Just kidding; no kink-shaming intended.)
I assume most people will continue their life as if they are not going to die ultimately, afterwards. Or at least I am pretty sure there are plenty of people dying of stress-related disease, which at some point in their life read a sad story about death.
Also the abstract sadness, which comes with these stories is very different to what you experience when really sick and worried - when you disassociate (good) and take life by the day.
Maybe. At least I can not switch off easily and those stories stay with me. I also don't like horror movies. Maybe it's more pleasant, or enjoyable, when you feel differently, or "less".
What if.. after a few million years given humans still survive, they have the tech to bring back all the consciousness that ever existed in some form. All your memories thoughts intact?
I'll tell you some thinkers already thought of that ;)
(also this was a theme in Dukaj books, if someone read them - I really recommend if it's translated to your language)
Then at some point in the future I must’ve made a lot of money to be able to afford whatever tech enabled that. Or, it’s cheap and affordable because of a future capitalist economy with large companies competing, driving prices down. In this future, do we do it for enjoyment or is it to escape the predicted unpleasant times ahead?
In this case, his cancer would be an absolute contraindication for a heart transplant. In addition, 20% of candidates do not receive a heart and there are many other factors that will disqualify a person from becoming a candidate:
If you ever want to convince a smoker to quit, you can mention it is an absolute disqualification from receiving a transplant for at least 6 months after they quit.
> In this case, his cancer would be an absolute contraindication for a heart transplant.
Oof, I totally understand why it's an absolute contraindication (the hit that cancer gives to expected lifespan just seems too strong to justify such a scarce transplant), but it definitely feels like a double-whammy.
To a future with long-term viable artificial vital organs!
Tho, if organ donations were opt-out, or even no choice, and the infrastructure to match demand and supply would scale (it does not at the moment), we wouldn't need artificial organs to give this poor man this "high risk investment" and a chance to fight for his life.
Well, maybe in this particular case, an autologus transplant would be much better indeed, as I imagine cancer patients generally don't fare well with suppressed autoimmunity... Then again, no Repo Men visits.
I'm deeply skeptical that a smoker would, after ignoring the overwhelming evidence of the health damage from smoking, conclude that the risk of not being able to get a (quite rare) transplant operation for six months if they needed one would be the straw that breaks the decision-camel's back.
Getting a smoker to quit is a game of persistence. While this factor alone won't make someone quit, it may just be unique enough to make them start thinking. Human beings are good at ignoring things. If you want someone to listen you need new information and new arguments.
no, it's a waste of time trying to get a smoker to quit. i quit pretty much on a whim, when by chance my mind turned in a direction that was open to thinking of myself as someone who doesn't smoke. maybe you can foster that kind of openess, but certainly not by trying to "get" them to quit.
So knowing that the smoking is very likely to kill them directly doesn't convince them not to smoke, but knowing that they can't get a transplant would? That doesn't make much sense
I've found that little details like this can kick people out of destructive habits. Similar to how, if you make a careless parachutist jump without a backup they will check their main chute MUCH more closely, showing people that one less net is under them tends to be a bit of a wakeup call.
When you do something stupid and escape unharmed it tends to make you ignore the risk. Speeding, tailgating, smoking, drinking, fighting, etc... As human beings we really suck at assessing risk.
However there is always a small window when someone comes back to reality for a moment. When a friend gets lung cancer and can't get a heart, when a car loses a 2x4 and you barely escape being impaled on a timber, when you hit a patch of water and your car nearly loses control because you were going too fast, or when you watch a man die instantly after getting hit in the face for the 100th time during a friendly brawl.
I'm not a doctor, but maybee yes, thought that itself does not really move odds in his favour, infact heart transplants are themselves very notorious for becoming cancerous.
New years brings forward thought of life and death, all the more so with the wave of Omicron so many people are dealing with.
I diverge from the author's understandably unhappy perspective. Death isn't an end of the literal energy and parts that make up people, only in our ability to perceive and act on them. It's the end of counting minutes or years, in essence. The human mind can conceive of that, that upon death time ceases to be a crawl and zips forward seamlessly and limitlessly until or unless something ... reconstitutes the parts, energy and pattern that makes each of us human. It's hard preparing for death, I sympathize with the author, but it's also hard living with some understanding of how limited and temporary our lives and worlds may be.
The human mind is designed to solve problems, and so this is its mode. It perceives death as a problem & in doing so, sets itself an unsolvable problem. Also, consider that human language can describe things and situations which are nonsensical. Yet we have a very hard time imagining "not existing." There is no experience associated with nonexistence. Time will not "zip forward." If we are "reconstituted," as imagined here, we will have no memory of any prior existence. Or if, in the infinite permutations, we do remember, how odd and what a perverse reality that would be. This all may have already happened many times. These are the boundaries of our experience. You can have any attitude you like towards this, but why not a positive attitude which will lead you to enjoying this existence as much as possible, and also helping others to do the same?
“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
> ... only in our ability to perceive and act on them.
Personally, i think that our consciousness is all that matters, therefore i cannot agree with this.
> The human mind can conceive of that, that upon death time ceases to be a crawl and zips forward seamlessly and limitlessly until or unless something ... reconstitutes the parts, energy and pattern that makes each of us human.
What about the heat death of the universe and entropy? If that were to be the eventual outcome of the universe, there are no guarantees whatsoever about anything of the sort.
"Even if all that happens is that you vanish out of existence into eternal darkness, you'll also vanish from time. Hundreds of billions of years will pass but for the dead it will be instantaneous, the universe can reach the end of its lifespan yet for those now outside of the linear passing of time, it will feel like less than a blink. The universe could begin and end hundreds of trillions of times, but this time scale is nothing to a dead man. Statistically, you're simply bound to pop back into existence no matter how long it takes. Besides, it can't even be that unlikely if you're here now, right?"
It would also seem to be a pretty obvious fallacy (although I’m very happy to hear the counter argument). It assumes the “game” is not only infinite in length but infinitely open in terms of the space it explores: a million monkeys on a million typewriters may produce Shakespeare but they’ll never produce a bowl of ice cream.
So do countless aeons of immeasurably heavenly and pleasurable experiences. It's hard to try and pick just a chunk out of something that's, for all practical purposes, infinite; even harder to try to judge it out of that infinite context.
Yes, I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I really am just recreated in infinite permutations, I become somewhat apathetic to whether this life is my last or not - the alternative doesn't seem all that better or reassuring.
Why is apathy a more relevant feeling? Sure you may have countless experiences in the future or perhaps just a few but you're here now. The only relevant feelings about yourself ought to be about what's going on in your perceptible life?
This makes a tacit assumption that the dead continue to somehow exist, that some "they" remain, and "for them" something may be one way or another.
Assuming the absence of afterlife, when I die, I literally am no more. No more anyone to experience anything, including time. No one to experience a relief from pain which the death has ended, for example. No one to even not care about the world any more.
This is very simple, if not subjectively intuitive: nobody has experience of not existing, because such experience is a contradiction in terms. But referring to whatever related to a dead person's alleged experience after death is a use-after-free error.
(Dying, on the other hand, is a very real experience, but likely it's very hard to communicate, for a number of obvious reasons.)
I think what it means is an arrangement of mass (particles, spins, charges, ...) exactly identical to your own must eventually reassemble, e.g a Boltzmann brain or a simulation or an actual human identical to you, by chance. It has nothing to do with some everlasting ethereal "soul".
If you reject that tacit assumption, you may wish to examine the closely related tacit assumption that living persons that experience do exist. The relation between the two assumptions is informative.
The thing called you is, in one model, just a collection of atoms, a particular solution to some equations, after all. Some complicated world-lines, that anyone with a sufficiently powerful computer and the right collection of seemingly random numbers could reproduce in principle - or is it?
Maybe the dead don't experience anything. But until you can say what distinguishes "experience" (and "reality") for the living from the mere existence of solutions to equations, it's a missing-definition error to conclude anything sweeping and universal about experience.
You can certainly define experience in various ways, for example particular kinds of electrochemical activity in the brain, or organised information processing in matter of a certain kind. If you do that, you can conclude that those processes cease.
But those are limited definitions for convenience. We cannot say with certainty that's what actual living experience is "made of", so we cannot say with certainty the universal statement that all forms of actual experience cease.
(We can, however, turn "certainty" in the above into a kind of variable, in order to understand what we mean more subtly.)
The distinction is sometimes called "fire in the equations". Who knows what makes a living person actually experience - assuming you believe living persons do.
I don't think this is a particularly strong assumption, it is the same assumption you make about basic continuity of life/you being the same person you were 5 minutes ago.
as someone who has subscribed to this belief for a very long time but have had difficulty explaining it and only recently seen it pop up amongst others (twice in a week now): we use "you" because there isn't language capable of describing it. You found yourself conscious, you don't remember anything before, won't remember anything after, your consciousness inhabits a vessel but is property-less, theoretically this consciousness is capable of "finding itself" in another vessel. In fact, it's guaranteed because you can't be conscious of not being conscious
I've had a similar train of thoughts for a very long time now, since my childhood in fact, it being that, as one is born with a consciousness, it is likely that when one dies, one will gain a new consciousness, a new spirit in a new body, but while being unable to remember of what happened before. To be more precise, it would result in a new existence in the physical world, with a "normal" consciousness; yet, there'd be no connection at all with the past self. I however was never able to find literature on the subject (not scientific literature of course, but rather philosophical or esoteric), probably because I'm not using the right terms when searching for it, but there must be writings about such a theory. "Reincarnation" doesn't seem to be the appropriate term as it's mostly used in religious contexts and often implies the ability for one to remember one's past self. Drawing on your comment, perhaps you may know what terms could illustrate this idea?
How come educated people aren’t accustomed to the idea of dying? Is it only me that thinks of it most nights? Sometimes I feel like our lives is like a finished computer game, a watched movie, an old pc we had, a dream of a past life… our short lives are going to end soon and we can’t avoid it. Ok, I get it that there are some unlucky/bad situations, like the one described in the article, where the end is nearer that the normal case, but this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be aware of our ephemeral lives. Just don’t get obsessed with the idea of death and try to live a better life (in whatever way makes sense for you).
I am not trying to diagnose you, so I'll just say that from my experience as someone suffering from depression, I would think of "the idea of dying most night" during a depression episode, but not when it was over, and definitely not every night.
Until I started treatment for my depression I was very puzzled by the idea that some people might NOT think of death every day.
Again, not trying to suggest you necessary suffer from depression, but if you have any other depression-related symptoms, it might be wise to get it checked.
I have concerns about dying daily, and perhaps hourly. I don't consider myself a depressed person, but someone who is at a philosophical crossroads. I can't come to terms with the finite nature of our existence and I am not sure I would characterize someone who was ok with it as "normal". I would say complacent, perhaps unimaginative, or too focused on their day to day affairs. I would love to rid myself of this rumination, but it's been with me all my life.
You are describing exactly me before my depression treatment kicked in. I would also call that a "rumination" and there were times when I though being one of the few people who SEE what the world really is like was somehow good for me.
It wasn't. In my case it was depression/axiety/OCD. I still know that life is a paradox, but I don't ruminate about it since there isn't anything I can change by thinking about it all the time.
There is a great quote from Ernest Becker:
"The neurotic opts out of life because he is having trouble maintaining his illusions about it, which proves nothing less than that life is possible only with illusions."
During the COVID lockdown I went through a traumatic experience (specifically lockdown and the death of a family member from COVID), and I started thinking exactly like GP and you are describing. I didn't seek therapy either as it was only available over Zoom which I really didn't have the palette for given my WFH job already demanded a lot of that.
Looking back after talking it through with somebody, it was almost certainly a form of severe depression.
I'm sure everybody ponders about life and death sometimes, but I don't think it's common to think about it every night. Perhaps as we age, or as our health declines, the subject comes up more often as death is merely the natural consequence of life and we cannot pretend it won't happen to us when the signs of our deteriorating bodies are all too clear.
However, I do not believe (mentally?) healthy people below a certain age ponder their mortality every single night. I've heard people say they're reminded of their mortality more when they get children who depend on them, but even then I don't think it's a daily occurrence for them.
We worry about what we think is likely to happen to us, mostly in the short term. For many, if not most, people alive, death is not something we expect to see around the corner just yet. Perhaps some people are more prone to think in the (very) long term and there's definitely a philosophical component to these things. Sadly, there are also many that go through depressive episodes who will also often turn their attention to their deaths. However, from what I've seen, I think you're part of the minority.
> However, I do not believe (mentally?) healthy people below a certain age ponder their mortality every single night.
Then you are wrong, depending on how you define healthy and what age you're thinking about. Both myself and a close friend used to ponder our own mortalities frequently as adolescents. I still do ponder my lack of existence after death, though not as often. The reason is mostly that I have less free time on my hands because I have to work. Not a tradeoff I'm happy with.
That was two decades ago and neither of us would be considered (abnormally?) unhealthy, either mentally or physically. Also worth noting we met a decade ago, so neither of us spurred the other.
Probably an anecdote but in the medieval times people often had a human scull on their desk to remind them of their own mortality, sometimes it's good to be able to think: live now while you can.
The thing that stuck out to me: the length of time before getting an MRI. I notice this is something that changes from medical system to medical system.
Where I am, I could get an MRI tomorrow if the doctor requested it, the matching report would be finished on the same day and this would also be free.
(Speaking from personal experience as I’ve had a few now.)
Assuming they could afford to do so, is it not possible to buy an artificial heart and schedule surgery? A quick online search shows there definitely are companies that make artificial hearts even if only to bridge the gap till a donor is found.
Obviously it doesn't guarantee the cancer hasn't spread, there won't be potential complications during surgery, or any other complications down the road... but there can't just flat out be zero options, right? I know certain organs just can't be replaced, but the heart? There's really no mechanical alternatives?
Something to think about: If the essence of you is your conscience and that in turn much like how software is to hardware is applied information, and if information cannot truly be erased, only removed from the storage and processing medium then who you are cannot destroyed, only the medium you reside in. Is there a state or dimension where information can be processed without a medium of mass and energy to store and process it? Can your consciousness be backed up and restored?
Neuroscience does not go beyond the medium for consciousness and soul(or OS if you prefer).
Is the brain an apparatus which produces consciousness and physically stores information or one which connects consciousness to meat and senses? Or both and more?
Also is this thing we’re looking at information or is it the essence of perceiving and differentiating?
Where exactly is it? In molecules in physical space? Neuron configuration and firings - signal patterns distributed in time? Spontaneous, responding to environment, a combination or more?
I don’t know the answers, these are questions I find myself curious about after exposure to different viewpoints and experiences.
Is death an abyss of nothingness, like going to a dreamless sleep and never waking up? Maybe! Do we die and live in an afterlife? Perhaps! But what an amusingly and ironically simple, easy answer either would be!
Look at anything in life and the universe. In this reality, is there anything so simple and clear cut? Yet somehow this process of consciousness we call "death" is reduced to such a profoundly simple and binary thing.
Consciousness and death, two fundamentally undefined things, frequently given a conclusion so simple it can be explained to a child. Not that we can be blamed for doing this.
Given the complexity of everything else in this apparent infinity, it seems far more likely that whatever happens is complex beyond our Comprehension. Something far greater than nothingness or an afterlife.
I've been thinking what it feels like to die is the whole process of your brain shutting down.
My hypothesis is that as your brain cells start to die, some die before others. I wonder if the process of dieing is experienced in hallucinations as the self experiences more and more cell death. Then at some point, the cells that do the experiencing and that give you a sense of self vs other slowly die and you lose your ability to distinguish yourself from the rest of your experience. This, I imagine, is what it feels to be "one with the universe".
Something I think about sometimes is that death is the only thing that we all share, the only thing every organic entity has ever done and will do; indeed, not all of us are even born, not all of us even make it out of the womb, but all of us, every one, dies.
It seems to me that the death state is actually the natural state—life is the outlier, the extreme, unnatural state. Death is home.
I would also add that the fact they are undefined itself is interesting. Are they undefined because we do not know about them or we do not want to define them?
I think we do not want to define them as they would make humans not so special and we do not want to feel "not-special".
No, these questions are not interesting, or profound, or wise and I am sorry you find them still mysterious.
If we cut out parts of the brain, the thing that is you changes. Your consciousness changes. If the brain were merely some sort of antenna, this would not be what we would expect to see. If there were some signal that your brain was picking up on, that signal would have to be detectable externally as your brain is a physical thing and if it can pick up on it, so can another antenna.
All that you are is contained in a couple of pounds of goo inside your skull, your brain is not some sort of metaphysical transceiver
I suppose if there was a hypothetical interface (in the programming sense) for the brain you could create an indistinguishable implementation from the perspective of your consciousness. But really your conscious awareness isn't "you" at all. Think about how differently people perceive you from how you perceive yourself, how your conscious intention can be misinterpreted, and how your conscious and unconscious actions constantly manipulate the world. In a super heady sense, I subscribe to the idea that "you" is everything as a whole. That isn't a super useful definition to us living creatures, but to spiritual ideas such as reincarnation; technically your atoms end up somewhere. I think the rub is when people try to fit preservation of the human consciousness to these ideas, and I'd agree there is no way that's happening.
The brain does not just store but also processes your consciousness. You're looking at it the other way, information inherently surpasses the tangible. If reality was a cgi simulation what you call physical would just be a bunch of pixels like in the Matrix, it is no less real because of how it is represented. The difference between random objects and our brain is that our brain store and operates software which regardless of representation is information that is computed and interpreted in a logical way, therefore if the processing and storage needs can be replicated there should be no reason why the data cannot be transferred, thus making the essence of our being information.
Point of order, it's the whole body that composes the experience that is you. If your brain and body got separated I reckon the 'you' would change, not unlike how if you modified the goo 'you' would change.
Excellent point. There are some people trying to just freeze heads, and you're right this may have some terrifying and unforeseen consequences to the potential person who might pop out the other end of that process. Can you imagine the possible body horror even with a cloned body?
That said, when discussing consciousness, abstractly, it's sort of a necessary vs. sufficient distinction. The brain may be sufficient to maintain identity even without the body. The inverse is certainly not true.
It is so frustrating to me that people ponder these 'questions' and we as a species are so far behind the cultural drive necessary to actually solve the problem of death.
I think it would help if all the people with useless platitudes who love to pretend to be wise about these things would just get the heck out of the way and let us solve this already, but I know it makes you look a little crazy to normal people to say you want to stop death. They start bringing out the cached responses about how death makes life worth living and so-on it's literally insane. Shrugs. Maybe we'll be born somewhere more sane next time ;-)
i feel like most people assume people are dead when we really dont know. there could be flashes of experience after death due to mechanical agitation/disturbance. or maybe something else. and maybe the part of the brain that is needed to produce "experience" is a tiny little section that goes un-noticed when they look for brain death. its not very important so i havent looked into it. but i am afraid that if i die and i appear to die before my brain is inactive then i will have a captive body experience -- unpleasant on its own and very unpleasant if i make it to the autopsy. i dont think they even check for brain death or electrical activity before they start cutting you open. i simply dont understand people who choose to freeze their heads -- its literally the worst idea. i would pay for the opposite service where they take posession of your body and make sure you dont have a captive-body experience and make sure that your brain is destroyed so it can never be resurrected and tortured.
i saw a youtube video where this young woman recounted a near death experience that she had. she was in her car and somehow the car became airborne and was headed straight towards a thick traffic sign pole or something like that. in any case, she saw the pole coming toward her and she knew without any doubt that she was going to die. and she said that she saw flashes of every time she was terrible to someone. and she hadnt realized how terrible she had been in all these instances. and she said she was angry at god in that moment for showing her these terrible things right before she was going to die. i think its fascinating because the body is watching the situation and when the situation is right, the body deploys the mechanism that it thinks is useful. you can look at a picture of a bear and you wont be affected but if your encounter a bear in real life, you wont just go into fight or flight; you will be having a frame of mind and motivations that are unique to that situation because your body is giving those to you. and here, when the body believes with enough certainty that it is going to die, it deploys these memories? maybe the body allows you to see what its been hiding from you for your own sake in a last ditch effort to produce some kind of advantage. the human mind is very mysterious. but my point is that there is some mechanism at the bottom of that. it could show you anything. it could make you experience anything. there is this mythology of having happy experiences on the way to death, walking into the light, etc. but we have no idea what these experiences are other than the fact that they exist. its possible that most people have a terrible, awful experience on the way to death. its something that i think is just underappreciated.
> would pay for the opposite service where they take posession of your body and make sure you dont have a captive-body experience and make sure that your brain is destroyed so it can never be resurrected and tortured.
I think the "service" you're after is called "cremation."
thats funny but i disagree and i dont think you have comprehended my comment. its the stuff directly after you die that counts because the window of post-death activity is probably not more than a day. you are man-handled in all kind of ways immediately after you die in a hospital. cremation takes a very long time at least in my part of the US. ideally i would have people on standby to inject me with powerful drugs and something to pump the blood to ensure any experience i do have is not unpleasant. then taken directly to a facility where my entire body would be instantly vaporized with explosives to make sure there is no suffering.
OK, you're right. From my experiences with relatives, it takes several days.
The problem with doing what you said immediately is "false positives." Up to the 1800s, being buried alive was a very common fear, probably because it really happened sometimes. They didn't have any way of measuring brain activity, even an imperfect one like we have now.
Perhaps, in the state between our last waking moments and death, it could be possible that we might have a spiritual realization about the way we've treated others and ultimately lived our lives. Perhaps, we are given one last chance to view the events of our life from a "higher" point-of-view, thus giving us a chance to reflect upon our memories and look back upon the actions we've taken throughout the course of our lifetimes.
I think you'd like the film Mullholland Drive (2001), it dealt with this theme in such a profound way, that to be honest, it completely transformed my whole way of thinking around death, life, hopes, fears and the essence of dreams. Would definitely recommend, by far one of the best films I've ever seen.
“The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn 'em all away. But they're not punishing you,' he said. 'They're freeing your soul. If your frightened of dying, and your holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.”
A sad story to read. It reminds me of a similar story, a neurosurgeon (who also was a postdoc neuroscientist) had lung cancer and wrote a memoir of his experience, When Breath Becomes Air. The book wasn't published until about a year after he passed. If you ever get a chance, you should read this book.
I feel like cryonics is a techbro meme that is a whole lot of money for basically very questionable and unproven benefit, and just because they choose not to opt for it doesn't mean they're "aren't really preparing" in the way that you personally think people should prepare for death.
Not so much the way that "I think" people should prepare. Just the way I would expect a person who knows how the brain works to act. But then they finish off the thing like this:
> as I prepare for death, I have a renewed respect for the persistent and broad appeal of afterlife/reincarnation stories
Aaand I guess that's just another poor person with the pro-death memecomplex.
You can believe improbable tales that your frozen popsicle-brain is going to survive intact enough to where unlikely regenerative technologies exist and then they still think it's worthwhile to "restore" you. I mean, it's slightly more probable than tales of sky-fairies reincarnating you, but still effectively no chance.
If you want to make ripples in the future world, there's far better ways to gamble your resources than this...
In any case: you can ditch the explicit judgment of those who don't share the views as you, and you'll more likely get heard and get reasonable responses.
It has been tested. So far all the tests have failed.
Let me know when they can cryonically freeze a live mouse, then reanimate it a month later. If the process works at all then that should be easy, right?
I really wish he would keep riffing on the neuro-scientific fundamental principles that always assume "the future will continue to exist, of course it will" as a way to explain and describe religions and how and why they exist, he was about to come up with a Grand Unifying Theory that could "solve" religion... he was so close....
In our culture, we seem to think (or want to believe) that neuroscientists know more about things than other people. But they're just normal people like you or I.
Do people really believe that? A neuroscientist is (i hope) more knowledgeable about the brain than you or me. But I don't think people see them as omniscient. We all have a unique perspective. This particular piece could have been written by any thoughtful person diagnosed with a terminal illness. In fact, there is a whole genre of these stories. And each one of them gives me pause and helps me refocus, if not for just a little while.
For context: https://academic.oup.com/icvts/article/11/4/490/652739. Fewer than 20 cases described in the literature of this particular kind of cancer.