> You really don't want to end up with dementia and related illnesses, it totally sours everyone's view of you.

This seems like such an absurd conclusion to this, as though the opinions of other people of you are what matter when you functionally lose your personhood and then die.

Maybe a better focus would be that there often isn't a good way for a community to manage a person who suddenly becomes irrational because of an illness.

The parent described someone who went above and beyond the norm of other members in his community in his constant positive interaction with his neighbors, collegues, and former students. It is highly likely this kind of person would give a considerable shit if he knew he would become a nightmare for the same community.

There may be others reading in the thread who also can relate to the personality of the teacher and may care about their affect on others when they are "not themselves".

There's a difference between "I don't want the disease because I don't want to become a menace to others" (what you're saying) and "I don't want the disease because it would make me lose social status" (what the original commenter said).

I am left wondering. Can’t people (in general) understand that Alzheimer’s changes a person fundamentally, irreversibly and forever until death follows? Many positive traits of personality disappear, the negative starts to dominate, I think mainly from fear and a subconscious awareness of what is being lost. That’s pretty much 101 of grieving when a loved one is struck with Alzheimer’s. The person has left. You continue caring for a body / a different person because of the relation you have to a former them. But please don’t connect the persons past deeds and being to the actions with Alzheimer’s.

For myself: I hope for assisted suicide before Alzheimer’s. I value me for me. Not-me I don’t value, and Alzheimer’s does not improve not-me over me. But people who cannot separate me from not-me (with whom not-me loses status for me)… I don’t care about them! (Philosophical mood.)

Very few people would choose to be unpopular, and unfortunately this type of behavior is decided by brain function, things like depression, from the beginning.

Either and or both?

I don’t want to go that way either. If I start losing my mind to Alzheimer’s or dementia I don’t want to slowly turn unrecognizable to those who love me, fuck that shit. Give me something suitable and I’ll do it my damn self if needs be.

FWIW I agree with you. I want to go out on my own terms if I get that sort of diagnosis. The only major health-related concern I have is that I'll some day experience a traumatic health event that immediately disables me and stops me from making that decision, whether legally (competency) or extralegally.

I know there are medical directives that can be put in place but they don't cover everything and they can't compel anyone to end my hypothetical misery, the most they can do is withdraw care.

There are lots of degenerative diseases particularly striking the various biological systems of the body. But neurodegeneration, whether Glio, ALS or dementia are especially cruel and horrific in that they attack and erode the patient's personality, a fundament of individuality and self.

To me both those things are basically the same.

In my experience having had a parent suffer this way, you lose them before they are dead and you grieve along the way. I can understand the "souring" phrasing - in that there is less affection for the altered person in the present even while feeling a duty for their care and a deep love for who they were.

I'm grateful for this story - it's powerful to see examples of autonomy at end of life - and contrasts starkly with the experiences many of us have with aging parents. End of life, at least in the US, can be deeply flawed and misery for all.

Valuing how others remember you is definitely a motivation in life for many. I respect that it is not your own, respect that it may be mine. It is by no means "absurd".

The definition of good is probably the closest to doing the opposite of inflicting pain on others. There’s very little chance that you will be hated by being good. So definitely behaving or being good is not so different than behaving in a way that other people don’t hate you.

Or sometimes people love you for inflicting pain on others. Look at current political figures beloved by their cult.

Or there are others trying to do good things and being hated for taking a courage to challenge things.

> There’s very little chance that you will be hated by being good

Jesus, Socrates, anyone who stands up against an immoral hierarchy. Rethink your thought

To go down this rabbit hole, presumably someone is hating somebody in this immoral hierarchy though? If everyone is happy with everyone, where's the immoral part? I do think the OP is right that in many circumstances of everyday life, being good usually correlates with being appreciated by people you actually have relationships with. Of course, this being real life, there are exceptions. However, while a child may complain and claim they hate you for not letting them have too much candy, they do love and appreciate you in a deeper way for taking care of them.

Jesus, Socrates, et al, are extreme examples that clearly debunk the comment made above. There are much more mild versions of that everywhere and everyday. Being ‘good’ in no way guarantees you will be loved. In fact, if you have integrity you will probably end up butting heads with people who are ‘not good’, and those folks will likely not hesitate to do underhanded and manipulative things to make you hated by others and not just them. Thankfully that is not everyone, but it is childish to believe that somehow being ‘good’ will make you beloved. If that were the case, being ‘good’ would be the easy choice that everyone makes. It is not.

> It is absurd because it places subjective opinions over objective goods.

Care to name even a single objective good, and explain how exactly it is objectively good?

What does "care for" mean, precisely? Is circumcising or baptizing them objectively good, so that they don't burn in hell for all eternity? What about shaping their skull in a more pleasing form? If they have ambiguous but otherwise working genitals, should you do surgery to assign them a clear sex? Or unto more mundane affairs, is it objectively good to give them baby formula instead of mother's milk, or maybe the other way around? Is it objectively good to take them from their parents and care for them yourself if the parents are not caring for them? How do you objectively determine if the parents are caring for them?

That's a bit contradictory, isn't it? If caring for helpless infants is an objective good only for those who inherently understand why that is, then that's a dependence on the observer's understanding and so it is subjective.

There's a world of difference between something being objectively a certain way, and between feeling really strongly some way about something and thinking that everyone else reasonable would feel the same way too. There are things that are encoded into (most of) our very instincts, things we (for the most part) find absolutely common sense, but this doesn't make them objective. I wish language was able to succinctly express these different levels of "being on the same page", but alas I don't believe it does at the moment, and abusing the word "objective" I can't say I love as an alternative.

Everyone to whom I’d explain that was cared for as a helpless infant.

If at any point we’d have stopped doing that, we wouldn’t be here to be arguing about it.

And how does that assign goodness to it all?

I agree with you that it is good to care for helpless infants. The fact that this cannot be clearly explained to someone who doesn’t inherently agree indicates that this is not an objective good, though.

The devil’s advocate would probably also ask how it would be objectively good to protect baby Hilter, knowing that protecting his innocent infant life would lead directly to the deaths of millions.

The answer to that would be that if you have the ability to kill baby Hitler you would also have the ability to allow him into art school, it is an impossible absurd thought experiment after all.

Is caring for a helpless infant objectively good if it is infected with an extremely virulent plague that will undoubtedly kill any human who comes in contact with it, or a human who comes into contact with them, or them, many layers deep? What if that infant has 2 days to live no matter what, but millions of people will die if it's cared for?

Objective good does not exist, context is king.

Instead of naming something concrete, it makes more sense to define what the only legitimate basis for morality and the human good is, which is human nature. If you deny that, then there is indeed no possible objective basis for the good. You could not differentiate between any two human action. Decisions would be entirely arbitrary. It would make no difference what you did, except factually in the sense that you did one thing and not another.

If you observe any animal or living thing, you will generally see it behaving in ways that seek to actualize it as the kind of thing it is. The nature of a thing bounds the potentials it has, and so circumscribes the limits of what can be actualized; this is a basic feature of all things, living or not, that they are "causally composed", as it were. In any case, this activity is not necessarily conscious. No squirrel is thinking "Gee, I need to collect nuts to grow and nourish my body and avoid predators so that I can produce offspring and actualize X, Y, and Z." In such cases, the squirrel is moved by various inclinations and appetites whose proper satisfaction actualizes certain ends of "squirrelness". A good squirrel (not in the moral sense, but in the sense of it exemplifying squirrel nature) is one that is able to actualize these potentials and does so to realize its squirrel nature. A bad specimen is one that cannot or does not. So, if you get a squirrel addicted to meth, and all it does is do things that get it more hits of meth while neglecting or impeding the realization of its squirrel nature, then you have a failure or deviance opposed to the good of the squirrel. The same could be said of a squirrel that is lethargic or one that lacks limbs.

Human beings are no different in this general sense, save that human beings are able to a) comprehend their circumstances, at least somewhat, and b) choose between apprehended alternatives. This means human beings are moral agents. So, here, a human being bears a certain responsibility for his choices and actions. If he chooses to act against his nature, especially as a rational, moral, and social agent, then he is acting against his nature and thus against his good. And if he is acting in such a way while understanding that he is doing so, then he now also has moral culpability for his defective actions.

In short, to be the kind of thing you are by nature is what is good. The act in accord with your nature is what makes good actions. Death is not good per se, and to act to destroy yourself is opposed to your being human and thus to your good. To intentionally do so is morally evil. (This must distinguished from self-sacrifice for another, which can be in accord with human nature under certain circumstances, but it is not the case here with Kahneman.)

> Instead of naming something concrete, it makes more sense to define what the only legitimate basis for morality and the human good is, which is human nature. If you deny that, then there is indeed no possible objective basis for the good.

Quite the opposite - I agree with that, and that's why I think goodness is not an objectively evaluable property. At the risk of making you feel I'm twisting your words, you pretty much said it yourself: what the human good is, is at the very least subject to human nature. Therefore, your evaluation of goodness cannot be objective. You're at best speaking from the subjective perspective of a human being.

But if you now say this doesn't get to the heart of your overall reasoning, I agree.

Consider then if goodness is even more subjective than just being a human value - for example, imagine that individuals might have (if even just slightly but) differing natures and so differing values. This would mean that your evaluation of what's good and what the human nature is like is not going to be durable across people. Worse still, you may even consider scenarios where the nature of a person changes over time, or they may value different things given a specific context. This would mean that your evaluation of what's good and what's bad is no longer durable not just across people, but across contexts, situations, and even time itself.

Notably of course, this is logically indistinguishable from other people simply making a measurement error of the same supposedly objective property. So this all hinges on whether you (can) believe that instead of there being an ontic, fundamental property of goodness, one that you're properly accessing and others disagreeing aren't, your access is the same as anyone else's. And that regardless of whether such a property objectively exists, it may either not hold an observer invariant value, or you may never be able to tell to have learned that value.

There is no such thing as objectivity in human experience. Every single thing, even attempts to be objective, are all filtered through the subjective experience of life. Our brains interpret objective reality and provide us a subjective translation.

Then if your claim also a mere subjective emanation, and an arguably mysterious one?

The subject receives the object in the mode of the subject, yes, but this does not mean that knowledge of the objective is impossible.

You were so close to genuine self-ownership in this post, especially with decrying slave morality - than you ended by getting spooked all over again.

You might enjoy “the unique and its property” by Max Stirner. An excellent philosophical book and especially relevant given that Alzheimer’s takes away the self…

The point is he deserved to be remembered well but due to recency bias and the severity of whatever he did during the end stages of his disease he will not be. I personally suffered immense trauma in my early 20s when I moved to a really cheap place. My parents refused to believe me that there was a black mold and general mold problem in the place I was living and that it was causing me psychological distress and flaring up my eczema. Despite all evidence that I had they dismissed it because I had told them I was depressed beforehand. They are not very in touch with empathy or compassion or mental health. Very old-fashioned view that these things are character flaws which are not to be spoken of. Anyways they dismissed my concerns did not read my messages or view my pictures of personal property being destroyed and the landlord not responding to me, the whole rental was illegitimate and I had identified that early on they even ignored that I got a scalp infection which I had to take oral anti-fungal medication to get rid of. The preponderance of evidence was so overwhelming, but for whatever reason they could not admit I had been right and that they were wrong and refused to help me and actively discouraged me from taking legal action or even to move home for months. Eventually I was blessed with an extended relative who gave me shelter. During one of the worst parts of this period my parents even went so far as to assert that what was actually happening to me was the onset of paranoid schizophrenia. I was close to the right age and sex for it to happen. I knew that paranoid schizophrenics often become homeless and violent and the general awfulness of the condition. If it was not for my own investigation that there was no family history of it and a friend who believed what I was saying and told me that I needed to leave the house and then finally extended family I had a plan to no longer exist. This was partially out of not wanting to be remembered badly, but also so many other things like; not wanting to hurt my loved ones, not wanting to hurt strangers, not wanting to slowly degrade into an unstable and potentially dangerous person and of course the median life expectancy for that condition is so low. I lacked the constitution to allow myself to become someone who would likely damage the world and severely damage those close to me so my logical conclusion based on a false premise during those couple days was to nip it in the bud so to speak as it's a progressive condition. My relationship with my parents has not been the same since, but how could it be. I am forever indebted to a friend and extended family... they quite literally saved my life.

The end point being that with the parents I have there was nearly a guaranteed outcome of only objectively bad things happening for me, for them, for people around me. During that state I saw my plan as honorable and wrote it down in what I was to leave to explain my actions.

My brother had schizophrenia. No one thought well of him. I guess he should have killed himself as well by the logic some are professing on here. Oh, he tried, but he ended up dying of heart disease.

> Maybe a better focus would be that there often isn't a good way for a community to manage a person who suddenly becomes irrational because of an illness.

Yes, this is the focus. Science has stalled when it comes to neurological disorders. But the response is love and understanding. I do not understand how someone would "sour" on a person because they have an illness. A very absurd conclusion indeed.

Dementia and Alzheimer is not something that can simply be managed throught treatment. It is an inexorable descent into suffering for both the person and its entourage with absolutely zero hope of getting better. At best in the last stages you get very short glimpses of normality within hours of confusions, frustrations, anger and pain.

If I am ever diagnosed with one of those, I absolutely want the chance to end my life before I reach a stage I become a burden to my loved ones and can't give a trustable consent. I'd rather go too soon than too late.

I’ve had a lot of people suffer in my life from health conditions, ranging from mental illness, heart disease, and cancer. And I’ve had to take care of them all at different times. Did I consider this a burden or a gift? Oh, it was hard, but does that mean it’s a burden?

If you think you’ll be a burden on your loved ones can we really say they’re your loved ones? This is a serious question. If you’re thinking that you’ll be a burden do you think that these people really love you?

At least I would want to let them use experimental drugs, or do anything to further the cause of curing Alzheimer’s.

But again, this is all far from the original article about an old man who decided to die because well, we don’t really know, he just didn’t see the point of living anymore.

Have you ever cared for someone with late stage Alzheimer or other forms of severe dementia? The reality of it is that a person who suffers from this is simply not the person you knew, by any measurable definition. They don't remember you, they may well fear and hate you. They change moods at a moment's notice, they live in a state of either lethargy or accute anxiety, suddenly waking up in a place that they don't recognize or remember ever living in, nor remembering how they got there. Their life essentially becomes a series of TikTok reels in which they are the main actor, or a vivid dream. Not only are they not the same "self" that you loved, they are usually not even a coherent "self" beyond a few tens of minutes.

And, just to make everything as heartwrenching as possible, in this series of short reels their mind is swiping through, they occasionally become the person you had loved, for some minutes. And you know that these moments will never get more common, only rarer, but you can't help but think that they're "still in there".

It is my firm belief that any sense of "me" would be long dead by this time. Keeping my body and scraps of my consciousness alive only to torment my loved ones, caregivers, and neighbors would be a cruelty that would serve no purpose. I hope that I don't ever have to make this choice, but I also hope that, if I am ever diagnosed, I will have the chance to make this choice and avoid such suffering.

> Have you ever cared for someone with late stage Alzheimer or other forms of severe dementia?

Yes.

Did I say that it was easy? Did I say that the spiritual way through all this was just pretending like everything is OK? No, it’s a very difficult process.

Avoiding suffering is impossible. Choosing to die to avoid suffering does not guarantee non-suffering. Only understanding suffering and where it originates can get rid of suffering, and you don’t do that by avoiding it.

You are not replying to my core point. Do you believe that a person with severe late stage Alzheimer is the same person they were before the disease reached that point? Do you believe that their old mind and personality still exists at that point? If so, why?

For many other neuro-psychiatric diseases, we know that moments of psychosis are reversible, at least to some extent, with drugs and therapy and the kindness of others. The same is manifestly not true, tragically, for dementia: everything lost is gone forever.

You are not the same person you were when you were nine years old are you? Literally all your cells that you had then are gone and replaced. You’ve also had new experiences and that’s changed self-concept as well. We are not one continuous person that something like Alzheimer suddenly changes.

It’s because we associate so much with our experience as memories that makes us think that that is what we are. Are people with Alzheimer’s the same person? No, they’re different people. This is why we’re not allowed to just go around killing people with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

The thing that makes us alive is the constant change and activity in the body. If you say, someone does not change, that someone is the same throughout their whole life. That amounts to calling something dead, still, unchanging, lifeless.

These people with dementia, they still have a personality don’t they? I know my friend’s mother does. And my friends, father who died a few months back with Alzheimer’s. Yes, he was angry and had outbursts that were 100% uncharacteristically not like his old behavior. But behavior does not dictate who you are is signals that we still have a consciousness. And that is who we are. We are not our memories. We are not our current form of expression. We are our consciousness. Because our consciousness loses the function of accessing memories does not make us any more us.

You are not your memory. You are consciousness. You are the thing that reads memories.

But again, this drifted so far from the point of the article. This man killed himself not for his current suffering, but for his perceived future suffering. He was afraid of change he was afraid of what that change meant. He wanted people to see the same dead person That people saw him in life. A constant unchanging perception.

You very much are your experiences. You are the sum result of your formative experiences and memories - no more and no less. Sure, I've grown since I was 9 years old, but there is an uninterrupted stream of experiences from when I was 9 years old up to now, and some of the things I learned back then are a part of who I am today. The raw concept of consciousness as the observer of your mental states, the "thing that reads your experiences", is not recognizable as a real mind - if it has no experiences of its own, it is a blank slate, with no desires, fears, intentions etc: those all come from formative experiences and lessons learned.

Alzheimers destroys this stream. All of a sudden, key formative experiences that made me me disappear irreparably, and so what survives is not me, it is a new consciousness formed of other experiences (mostly a subset of the ones I had, though Alzheimers can also sometimes create fake memories from pieces of real memoeies, conjectures, maybe even dreams or old desires etc). And while this is a consciousness, it is not a regular human consciousness, since it doesn't have anything similar to the regular human uninterrupted stream of experience, it is a consciousness made up of fragments of the consciousness of another person. And it is uniquely well positioned to hurt the people that the original person loved the most in the world, without realizing they are doing so. Plus, the life of the new person inhabiting your mind will be, inevitably, horrible. Because, again, they will be in constant shock and confusion because of their missing, incomplete, disordered memories.

So yes, the person we're talking about took a choice to avoid this horrid change. He was afraid of change, yes, because he knew well how horrible said change is, entirely inevitably so. It's normal to be afraid of horrible change. If someone is about to cut your leg without anesthesia, it's normal and good to be afraid of said change, and try to avoid it if you can.

By the way dementia etc throw a wrench in the concepts of consciousness, afterlife etc.

A person with late state Alzheimer's, are they conscious? Do they still have "spirit" ψυχή? Is it the same person, or the person moved on? Are they human anymore?

Sorry I have no answers.

“Choosing to die to avoid suffering does not guarantee non-suffering.”

Either it does or you’re claiming to be religious and implying you know for sure what happens after we die.

I am not stating either the above. I am only stating I don’t know what happens after we die. So to me dying is not a guarantee of some relief of my suffering. It’s just a logical statement. There’s no religion behind it.

Do you know what happens after we die? If you do, can you tell me how you know it?

> If you do, can you tell me how you know it?

The other poster responded to what happens, but here is the how do we know part. We understand very well how physics works, up to some small gaps that are irrelevant here. We know that information about the contents of your mind can't be transmitted outside your body in a way that would not be picked up by some of our sensors. People have tried to actually measure if there is any emanation from the body as a person dies, and there simply isn't any, in any spectra. So, there is no possibility of a soul living the body. Plus, any concept of an afterlife has no place where it could happen. There is no place on earth, in the clouds or underground, for an afterlife to take place in.

So, unless you think all of science is dramatically mistaken, we know with very good certainty that an afterlife is not a real possibility.

> I don’t know what happens after we die.

It is quite simple actually, you are dead and you as a whole only exist as a memory in other people's brains and your identity as paperwork, tombstones and for those that couldn't refrain from attracting attention history books, old journals artworks and memorials. Your molecules and atoms are disponible for anything else the cycle of nature needs. Expecting anything else is at best delusional.

> If you think you’ll be a burden on your loved ones can we really say they’re your loved ones? This is a serious question. If you’re thinking that you’ll be a burden do you think that these people really love you?

I think it’s a pretty fuckin dumb question.

Gatekeeping “love” behind service of ceaseless emotional toil with a smile is ridiculous.

Good lord, we have very different interpretations of ‘burden’. I had healthy, happy, typical children that I loved to bits and they were absolutely a burden! Some days I could barely deal.

Acknowledging that the things you love are a huge pain in the ass sometimes and keeping on loving them is perfectly healthy.

A burden is a heavy load. The stronger you are the less things are a burden to you. In this case, if you are more spiritually strong you are, the fewer burdens you will have.

Spiritual strength is the ability to be a smug jerk to others because you think you’re better than them. It certainly is a coping mechanism for some people, but it’s hardly one that should be encouraged.

I’ve been nothing but nice on this comment thread. If you disagree with me but can’t gather the words to explain yourself It’s no reason to call me a name for your lack of vocabulary or understanding.

If you think it's "nice" suggesting to people that their close family must not love them, and they must not adequately love the close family that they cared for, then I recommend you don't be "nice".

In this case, if you are more spiritually strong you are, the less ability to absorb feedback on your communication style you will have.

> If you’re thinking that you’ll be a burden do you think that these people really love you?

These are not mutually exclusive.

As a caregiver and survivor to family members with mental illness and dementia, yes I would say that someone can be a loved one and a burden. These aren't places on a single dimension, but totally different dimensions that can mix in amazing and terrible ways.

Yup. Ask me if I want to live. If I'm unable to answer and it's not reasonably expected that I will be able to answer in the future then the answer is no. I am the mind inside, not the body outside. If the mind is gone that's it, the body is worthless.

> I do not understand how someone would "sour" on a person because they have an illness.

It is extremely exhausting to try and be ‘understanding’ of someone that does everything to sabotage themselves.

> I guess he should have killed himself as well by the logic some are professing on here.

Maybe people are able to answer that question by themselves and don't need the judgement of other people answering differently.

the conclusion is true, though obviously the worst part is that this guy spent at least a year in varying states of despair, anger, and even worse psychological terrors.

you don't want dementia because it damages and hurts you and everything and everyone around you

(my grandpa physically attacked grandma multiple times in his last year)

>This seems like such an absurd conclusion to this, as though the opinions of other people of you are what matter when you functionally lose your personhood and then die.

They do matter.

Being concerned with how your behavior affects your family or your community, and the opinion they have of you, above your own self-interest, is how good parents, good friends, good citizens, and so on, are made.

> Being concerned with how your behavior affects your family or your community, and the opinion they have of you, above your own self-interest, is how good parents, good friends, good citizens, and so on, are made.

You've changed the meaning behind the original comment in a subtle but important way. The original commenter wasn't concerned about their effects on other people, they were concerned about how the disease would ruin their public image. Maybe they didn't mean that but it's what they wrote.

This distinction matters because those people whose top priority is their public perception (i.e. social status) are never "good people". It's normal to care about your social status to some degree but it shouldn't be the first thing you consider.

My wife's grandma passed some years back due to dementia/Alzheimers. Her final memories of her were of struggling to change her diaper because she insisted "she didn't need a change" and being really racist.

I really don't want my family's last memories of me to be that. Yeah my wife remembers when her grandma was of sound mind, and has some good memories with her back then, but they stopped due to the disease.

Everyone should be entitled to their own opinions on how they want to be remembered. I would rather be allowed to pass in sane mind.

It's not so absurd. The only afterlife that exists (in a materialist sense) is what other people think of you. The only part of 'you' still around us quite literally just a memory in someone's head. That's not nothing.

Whether we should care about that or not is a philosophical conversation, I suppose. I would take the side of if we care about what people think about us when we are alive, surely we should care what they think of us when we are dead. Otherwise, we only value their opinion of us as a function of what they will do for/to us, which seems not great.

This is a maximalist view, in reality not feasible or scalable. Of course this is what we need to strive for, but aiming to decrease 'total unhappiness' with what we have, is a rational, if somewhat cynical, aim.

But even at aface value, more rational long-term approach would be to treat it, surely

To more precisely represent the words of the person you're replying to, you should have said "memories" not "opinions".

This. Life is such a precious random occurrence that failing to protect it in the face [dementia|physical disabilities|etc] is the real tragedy.

It's not like life stops when someone (with a grave an irreversible condition that causes suffering) dies. It goes on with the young generations (i.e. the billions of them!). I think too much clinging to a single life causes the whole (which is more important) to suffer. That's not to say we shouldn't value and respect elders, but clinging to life excessively is ignorant and potentially cruel, in my humble opinion. I defend the right to die in the face of incurable diseases that cause a lot of anguish and suffering.

I think clinging to life is partially rooted in an egoist/solipsistic metaphysics that you yourself are all that matters (to yourself at least, of course). Relax, we're just a small part of the cosmos. Ancient and immortal :)

The alternative being when someone becomes inconvenient to others we should encourage their death? What good is compassion or empathy when the lesser in society could just go off and die, right? Why stop at incurable diseases? Political opponents, coworkers, nasty service workers, double parkers, lawyers, and many other groups cause a lot of anguish and suffering.

No. But I think that people should be able to decide when they want to end their lives if it is because of pain that won’t get any better, a terminal illness that causes pain etc. while they have all of their cognitive functions.

But we should put guardrails around if the reason for assisted suicide is not pressure from relatives, depression, etc.

They should. But also, the easier you make it, the more social pressure they'll feel to just do it.

Doctor to a high degree of certainty know which diseases are terminal or cause a deteriorating condition that will cause pain where the person has all of their cognitive ability. That’s why I carved out Alzheimer’s or dementia.

And that's what makes it a hard topic. Because you need to draw a line, and everybody will have opinions about the line's position. Rightfully.

But it being a hard topic does not imply the easy solution of banning it.

I would argue that banning it is not an “easy solution” but in fact the hardest solution.

Nobody's saying that anyone should be encouraged to die. That is an evil thing. But that does not mean that people should not be permitted to choose to die vs suffer.

The thread topic was about terminating the life of someone suffering from dementia who likely didn’t have advanced directive. I read this comment in that context - that it would nto be voluntary, but in cases where the person couldn’t choose for themselves.

You are assuming no advance directive. We are talking about cases where there are advanced directives.

(Although there are cases I would be ok with it without--to me, what's important is the mind. To me personhood extends from first consciousness to last consciousness. Once you are sure the last consciousness has passed I attach no value to the body that remains.)

There’s no bright line. Suffering is a subjective experience. Lack of prohibition is tantamount to encouragement.

I'm afraid that's a logical leap too far. To allow does not equate with to encourage.

Right now, the political party in power openly wants undesirables, especially homeless people, to simply drop dead and stop bothering everyone else.

The relevant word during our fascist rise is schadenfreude. People not only want to see them drop dead for having the audacity to be dirty and unhoused - they want to see them suffer, hard, the entire time.

You gotta find a way to stop making the inflicting of pain on others pleasurable.

Ancient and immortal? So eternal return?

As I mentioned in a another comment, framing it as "how one is remembered" is leading to pointless tangents in this thread.

The important point is this: are you causing emotional, psychological, physical distress in the real world to those you care about when you have this disease? Yes or no. That's what I care about. Whether they are able to remember me well despite that, or poorly because of that should be completely secondary.

That’s irrelevant here. What is relevant is that we have a contempt for human life and a lack of charity. The teacher was not at fault for his condition. We should learn magnanimity.

Sure, we can think about how the burdens of caring for our family can be lessened as they age, or how we may help reduce that burden for our family, but family does have the duty to care for its members, and to place such considerations above the intrinsic value of human life is very sad indeed.

This is not contempt for human life. It is a recognition that sometimes as the body deteriorates that the quality of life becomes negative.

I watched both of my parents deteriorate in the end. The morphine blotted out my father's ability to form long term memory, if it wasn't in front of him things were like they had been before so much morphine was needed. There can be no value in such "life".

As far as I'm concerned not allowing people to end the suffering is a form of sadism.

I suspect this thread will go like many have in the past: there are two camps. The first has never seen a bad death and has a lot of opposition to people choosing to end their life. The second has seen a bad death and a lot of people would choose suicide before reaching that point. If it is a contempt for human life that means people have contempt for their own life and that doesn't make much sense. I can look at myself: I have been dealt a presumably genetic killer, I saw what it did to my mother and I will not allow that to happen to me. Do I have contempt for my own life because I expect the end to be suicide?

This is about assisted suicide. You can argue all day long about how you have the right to end your own life, but the real issue is whether you have the right to grant another person immunity from charges of homicide for facilitating your death. That is an entirely different beast.

I see no difference. What is important is whether that's your intent or not, I do not care if the means involves another person or not (assuming adequate controls to ensure it's what you wanted. That's why Switzerland has become the place to go--under their law it is not illegal for an uninvolved person to provide aid assuming the person provides the actual trigger. I recall one in a documentary, guy had almost no motor control but he could still bite--a trigger that would start a timer that would turn off IIRC a respirator. They then sedated him so he wouldn't be struggling for air when the ventilator switched off--but without his triggering the timer it was just sedation, he would wake up in time.)

Now you're just shifting the goal posts.

> The teacher was not at fault for his condition. We should learn magnanimity.

This is equally true of conditions like paranoid schizophrenia or psychopathy. Sometimes a person is just born with wiring that makes you dangerous to others. Does this mean that everyone around them must have the magnanimity and charity to them attacking people at random?

Yes, everybody should be interested in getting them treatment, just like they are interested in getting people treatment who have leukemia, were born with a malfunctioning liver or need an artificial hip. Instead, they get thrown in prison for the rest of their life because they are evil and we all can feel good about having made the city safer.

People with leukemia want treatment and are willing to suffer uncomfortable treatment to get cured.

Paranoid schizophrenia have lower compliance rates and fairly large collateral damage. Psychopathy is a trait not a disease, but again, issue is that they do not cooperate and dont want to "cure". Psychopaths are fine as they are from their point of view.

It is just their victims who mind.

What does protecting life look like when one is literally losing everything about themselves that they value?

idk man whether the people I love hate me matters to me...

Not sure how this is relevant given it's the effects of a future climate catastrophe being discussed, not something that has already happened.

Einstein was enamored with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Spinoza, in Schopenhauer's conception of the will and Spinoza's pantheism. The God of Spinoza (or indeed Einstein) is strictly deterministic, and we are all a part of such a God, as is all of nature. Hence his quote 'God does not play dice', and in part it explains Einstein's philosophical commitment against some of the indeterministic interpretations of quantum physics being ultimately true.

This comment is a bit odd to me since I don't think those basic things you mention have been difficult to get working on most distros for quite a while now.

It depends on which day of the week it is.

Ok a bit flippant, but I've been running KDE on my NUC as a secondary desktop for years now. Most of the time it works fairly well, but then suddenly something breaks or needs tweaking. And when it does it's often not trivial for a non-geek to handle.

That said, if they can get Krdp working properly, I'll almost certainly switch to KDE as my main driver, and demote Windows to my secondary.

These threads always seem to oscillate back and forth between "It's 2024 and you can't get Peripheral X working with Linux!" and "Peripheral X's have worked for 20 years now!"

That probably means that it works for some people, but not all. So if you want to use peripheral X, maybe you get lucky and you have just the right versions of hardware and software, and it works. Or maybe you're unlucky, and it doesn't work, and you can spend months trying to get it work. It's just not how I want to spend my time.

It's just that some people check the Linux compatibility before the hardware purchase, while others rely on pure luck.

That's pretty much impossible. In a sibling thread I explained that even if a machine is Ubuntu certified, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's compatible in real world.

Assembled PCs tend to be more compatible (because of more standard components), but on the othe hand each individual component doesn't receive the coverage (testing) as laptops. There was no way for me to know that my mobo's sleep is broken on Linux, even if the previous mobos from the same producer had good compatibility.

> In a sibling thread I explained that even if a machine is Ubuntu certified, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's compatible in real world.

I've never even heard of Ubuntu certification. I instead search for people who are using the product I wish to buy with Linux, and see what they say about its compatibility. This always works. So it is not pretty much impossible.

> I instead search for people who are using the product I wish to buy with Linux, and see what they say about its compatibility

I'm not sure if you refer to friends or strangers on the internet.

In the former case, one is restricted to a very small pool of models to choose from.

In the latter case, "strangers on the internet" who say that their hardware "works perfectly", are typically completely unreliable; saying "my hardware works perfectly is treated as a badge of honor, so there's a perverse incentive.

One example, in a lot I've personally experience, is that I've read from multiple "strangers on the internet" that the wifi from the laptop I'm typing from, "works perfectly". In reality, the Linux drivers are half broken (on Linux, it has a poor signal).

Try to buy preinstalled Linux. Works for me (on Librem 14).

I'd imagine that the Linux users who report success are probably more selective when it comes to hardware. It's been my primary OS for 25+ years and I've seldom faced compatibility issues, but I also do my research and buy accordingly.

Cunningham's law in action. The first camp are asking how to get it to work.

Weirdly, by compatibility is better on Linux than on Windows.

On Windows, on a clean install, I need to install the drivers from WU to get audio working, etc. And then I need to open Intel website to get the latest Bluetooth driver, go to Dell to get the latest wifi, as on Windows Update's these are not the latest.

And even after all of this, some of the drivers on Linux is better maintained, because the support for old Intel GPUs on Windows is very short. Meanwhile, on Linux, I get Vulkan support, and all recent drivers on my Broadwell. Video perf is way better on Linux here.

I mean, Ubuntu did break screen sharing for a while 2 years ago [1]

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/1407494/screen-share-not-wor...

I wonder if meditation could give you this ability? After having an intense 'breakthrough' during meditation I had an enhanced ability to imagine things, especially visually, for ~1 week. I stopped meditating for a while because it was too intense and immersive.

It felt like I 'let go' of some subtle assumptions around how I would visualize things normally and had an expanded ability, but it also seemed more intrusive and without the same 'distance' between 'me' and the imagining.

Game Programming Patterns is also excellent. There's something that feels quite 'honest' and straightforward about the style of both books. It sometimes seems like authors feel like they have to play along with the idea that it's all black magic, or maybe I'm just too stupid to understand GoF design patterns.

To be fair that really isn't 'big money' in most of those cities, assuming big money has some connotation of significantly above average after tax and expenses disposable income in those areas, especially relative to your peers. I don't think it would be unfair to say that would be big money compared to many European workers in the same jobs though.

There's an idea of 'fixed action patterns' where certain behaviors are encoded in the neurology of an animal, and triggered by certain stimulus.

For spiders then there is an action pattern that upon certain stimulus they will use their spinnerets begin forming a web, first placing anchor points and gradually building it up with radial threads and spiral. The exact behavior differs by species such that they have different resulting patterns. It seems possible that there is an element of 'learning' beyond the basic pattern as well, even in seemingly very simple animals.

I doubt the spiders have a mental model of what their web looks like as such, it's more evolutionary driven genetic behavior, a particular neuronal pattern encoding the action sequence rather than an underlying fundamental understanding.

Thanks!

>For spiders then there is an action pattern that upon certain stimulus they will use their spinnerets begin forming a web, first placing anchor points and gradually building it up with radial threads and spiral.

I can sorta understand stimulus causing them to start making a web (sorta like stimulating a mammary can cause lactation) - but how do it 'know' to use a radial pattern rather then ah-hoc mess the black widows on my porch make? The 'ad-hoc' pattern seems like it would be more 'likely' then a nice pattern? Overall, I guess it just seems like a rather complex pattern/behavior?

Also, I guess I have a more basic question of 'what is instinct' if its not some sort of 'memory'? People seem to have an 'instinct' of the mechanics of throwing a ball, yet we have wildly different abilities with regards to accuracy, 'form', distance/speed (due to muscalture?) - it just seems like we have an 'instinct' for the 'simple' mechanical movements but not for the more complex behavior like throwing a ball to hit a target ?

Thanks again!

You can basically think of insects like this as organic ASICs. Input in, output out. It's a biological circuit that just has a raw response that's hardcoded in. Kind of like asking how does a computer know to do "MOV". It's baked in to the circuit. Do trial and error trillions of times and some of the circuits end up functioning and survive.

It just seems like a lot of behaviors are closer to full blown programs rather than a single instruction :-)

And the more complex the behavior the more it blows my mind :-D

Thanks!

Thanks for the link below - it was pretty neat :-D

Yeah, the depth of biology is insane. You can even look closer to home - humans have built in visual mappings for specific shapes. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-...

The stimulus starts the fixed action pattern, but that action pattern includes the behavior to make the entire web, not just the start off the process. Different species of spider have different fixed action patterns (and different neurology underlying that, and different DNA underlying that neurology).

I think throwing a ball is more learned, although some behaviors like grasping the ball may provided a fixed action foundation on which higher order learning builds. Baby humans have a grasp reflex that works in a similar way to the fixed action pattern described, but with a simpler action sequence. If you touch the palm of a toddler, they will instinctively tightly grasp. It's interesting that the grasp reflex disappears around 5 years old, so the fixed neuronal pattern is subsumed by higher order learned behavior.

>>includes the behavior to make the entire web, not just the start off the process.

Thats where I get stuck..the 'behavior' has to account for different sizes of webs (the spider might be in a tight space, or a more open space), etc.

That just seems like an incredibly complex behavior to encode...Cells are supposedly 'simple' organisms but they manage to create/manage such complex behaviors...it's mind blowing..

Thanks!

It's been awhile, but I was reading about black widows. Apparently the better fed they are, the worse the web, so they don't over feed.

A chaotic web is a sign that the black widow spider is well fed and not hungry.

Huh...I didn't know that...the lil S.O.B.s on my porch must be really well fed - the webs are everywhere :-D

Thanks

I'm pretty sure it's generally 1 spider per web, and I thought blackwidows (assuming they are still alive) take down the webs when done. So presumably you have quite a few spiders.

In any case here's a discussion of said paper.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/death-tra....

yeah - I guess it varies but I can usually spot about 5 of them out at night...Thanks for the link!

> I can sorta understand stimulus causing them to start making a web (sorta like stimulating a mammary can cause lactation) - but how do it 'know' to use a radial pattern rather then ah-hoc mess the black widows on my porch make? The 'ad-hoc' pattern seems like it would be more 'likely' then a nice pattern? Overall, I guess it just seems like a rather complex pattern/behavior?

My guess: It "just feels right".

In the beginning (?), the species didn't have any "preference" and just did whatever. Some species cut the pizza in circles (as in, cutting out a circle from inside the pizza, leaving a donut-shaped pizza), others cut squares, others cut weird shapes, etc. All over the place.

Over time, those predisposed to cutting the pizza in a straight line, from border to border, passing through the center, began to survive slightly longer than the rest (for some unknown reason), becoming the dominant predisposition. To anyone born since then, it just felt right to cut the pizza that way. Not passing through the center of the pizza was just weird. And stopping a cut midway, without going all the way through, was also just weird.

At that point the amount of cuts still varied though, so it was all over the place. Some cut it in half, other made 2 cuts (4 slices) but they were in ugly 20° angles (so 2 huge slices and 2 small slices), others made hundreds of cuts so each piece was tiny and was annoying to eat, stuff like that.

Over time, those who preferred to cut the pizza in 90° angles started to survive slightly longer, and over time became the dominant predisposition.

And so on and so on. With these learnings it was becoming easier for people to make pizza ("find food"). Pizza sizes increased, and so did the amount of people sharing a single pizza. Making it easier to attract others, and share a pizza with them. Meeting more people makes it slightly more likely to find a life partner.

Time passed, same old song and dance. Now all pieces must be symmetrical. It was the most fair way to share. Not doing it this way meant the one doing the cuts was evil and must be avoided.

Current situation: Most people cut the pizza in 8 equal-ish slices because it just feels right to do it that way. Those who don't do it that way might still reproduce, but are slightly more likely to be avoided because they are weirdos. They are also slightly less able to get food, because nobody wants to share their pizza with those weirdos, so they are slightly more likely to starve due to being unable to "attract" food.

In that parallel universe, someone named 224hcem asks:

> But how do they "know" to cut the pizza in 8 equal slices rather than the ad-hoc mess the teenagers next door make with their microwaved pizza? Overall it's way more effort to try to make all pieces nice and equal, and the movements have to be more precise meaning the brain calculations are more complex compared to just winging it.

I guess I just get hung up on how such 'simple' cells can encode such complex behaviors...

Thanks

Adjacent, and you've probably seen it before, but you and others might be interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_psychoactive_drugs_o...

This is fascinating stuff.

LOL - yeah, I remember seeing the spider ones and going "probably better then I could do stoned" :-P

I've always wondered why so many different culture know some notion of a dragon. Is it possible that these are based on inherited memories, patterns, insticts of dinosaurs? I know this would be a wild leap but one my wonder.

The trick is that "some notion of a dragon" is incredibly vague, with "dragons" sharing very few commonalities between cultures. A European wyvern and Quetzalcoatl are almost nothing alike, yet people consider them both "dragons."

>Is it possible that these are based on inherited memories, patterns, insticts of dinosaurs?

It is possible that these are based, at least in part, on the discovery of dinosaur fossils, but humans didn't even evolve until the dinosaurs were long dead. So even if it were possible for "inherited memory" to include visual memories it wouldn't do so for dinosaurs.

Why should inheritance stop at species boundaries?

It isn't a matter of "species boundaries," which aren't even really rigidly defined, so much as time, complexity and information compression.

It doesn't seem likely that whatever primitive mammalian ancestor eventually evolved into primates, and then into humans, carried within it a coherent enough visual and behavioral memory of dinosaurs to have survived so many generations of mutation, eventually informing the modern idea of "dragons" as winged reptiles.

And again, it isn't even true that there is a cross-cultural concept of "dragons" to begin with. It's a eurocentric myth, in that it assumes a Western concept of a "dragon" to be the default, and ignores any other cultural context in order to fit their mythologies into that mold.

I had the opposite experience. I always had such an intense 'inner monologue' that it dominated my experience of life. Outside of doing things that required all of my attention like playing games I never lived in the moment. It made social interaction difficult because I would always obsess over how to say things in the right way.

It took me until my 20s to learn how to relax it and not go over and over everything.

Your account seemed really alien to me when I read it, it's hard to believe people can have such a different experience of life. It's rarely discussed explicitly.

To be fair 'modelling the brain' might not include things like neuron metabolism that probably isn't required for AI but is a part of the substrate of our own consciousness.