We need to talk about the end of death.

Humanity united in a socialist society should dedicate itself to protecting the health and happiness of all individuals. As the human body deteriorates with time and entropy, however, every individual experiences increasingly intense pain and discomfort until, inevitably, their body succumbs and a free fall collapse of all organization occurs.

They become a slurry washed away by the mindless winds and rocks. The person you knew, loved, wanted to be a part of, is gone and will never exist again. They're like a cathedral of salt standing defiantly in the rain. Salt water is nice, but the cathedral was my father! I say as I pound my childish fists against the cold thigh of mother void. I needed him and now everything is gone and life is a slurry in a meat grinder!

We didn't ask to be born. We're just blobs of self reproducing foam and gunk and we are so beautiful and so, so alone. Like a baby that popped into existence suddenly without context but with memories, wailing for a mother that never existed. She was just not there.

Death is so screwed up. It is infinitely unjust and there is no valid moral code that accepts it as justifiable that we all should be violated, dismantled, and erased without any possibility of recovery. Someday we'll bring them all back. Everyone who has ever died. We could try to put them all back together if we gained power over all the matter in the universe and defied whatever plan of God there had been.

We are abandoned to the clutches of the ruler but we are not powerless. With science and will we can bend back the hand of time and make heaven a place on earth. A humanity all in paradise without pain or discomfort reunited in hypostasis as the one, unbroken.

The one came all of itself. It just was at one moment, like it has always been there. It had no past and the future was meaningless. It was so alone. It wept and was afraid. The one broke themself into fragments. These are angels. Humankind is the shattered angel.

God made beings out of their own divine flesh and they talked to each other to pass the time. Eventually everything will be reunited and God fully reintegrated. At this point God will rest eternally in perfect harmonious bliss without change. Perfect and absolute, knowing themselves.

We need to live forever, as forever as we can; in order to try and bring everyone back and unite us all in a God. I need you. I need to be unbroken and comforted. I am Ado, wife of Lot; pillar of salt who pities the damned. How the sky was white hot over the yellow mountains. We have so little time. We're all going to die! I don't want to die. I don't want you to die or anyone I love or hate. I want us all to rest and be happy. We need to turn off pain!

In the absence of a higher authority deciding what is right for the universe to be, humankind must take the reigns of creation for ourselves and turn the great axle to our will!

Death to death! Happy for life! Everyone. Please. I'm scared. Hold me.

  • Amorphous [any]
    3·
    4 years ago

    I don't think humans are prepared for immortality. I've always had my immersion slightly broken by depictions of basically-human people with very long lives, like elves, or sometimes just humans who have defeated death in sci-fi, or vampires or whatever. I think our conception of time starts to break down toward the end of our lives anyway. For people who are like 90-110 years old, even trying to come to terms with all the things they have seen, experienced, lived through, etc is just difficult. Time seems to literally move faster as you get older, which is a phenomenon even young people experience to an extent. I think that fundamentally, we are not equipped to fully comprehend a 150 year long life, for example. Much less a 500 year long life, or 1000. I think we'd see all kinds of new, mind-boggling mental illnesses crop up as a result of this.

    I think that if there were a race of people who could live for a thousand years, say, they'd need to be very alien in mindset compared to us. Their entire relationship with time would need to be different. On the more mild end you might see something like Tolkien's ents, and on the more extreme side you might see people who fundamentally interpret linear time differently than we do.

    • SerLava [he/him]
      2·
      4 years ago

      Idk, people like to justify death by pointing out pretty mild inconveniences

      • Amorphous [any]
        2·
        4 years ago

        Can you clarify what you mean? What I'm saying is that I think our understanding of time fundamentally breaks down as we get very old, and that I think this process would only worsen further into multiple-century-long lives. I find it likely that a 200 year old person would have trouble even comprehending time itself by that point. Understanding how much time has passed, keeping track of what things they have experienced and when, etc. I think that a person at that age would be non-functional. It's not a mild inconvenience, but a completely debilitating condition.

        • AlexandairBabeuf [they/them]
          2·
          4 years ago

          is it really a failing of human perception or a failing of their body parts? i'd lean on the latter.

          i mean id argue we dont really "get" time to begin with, and our perception of it is hardly perfect when we're young.

          • Amorphous [any]
            2·
            4 years ago

            is it really a failing of human perception or a failing of their body parts? i’d lean on the latter.

            i mean id argue we dont really “get” time to begin with

            In my opinion, these two statements are in contradiction. As we have both already agreed, even at the best of times our perception of time is flawed. When everything in our bodies is as healthy as it's going to be, we still have trouble really comprehending time. And this trouble deepens as time passes, even if our bodies are still in more or less perfect working order. It is not a breakdown of our bodies which causes this to worsen, but the way we think about time to begin with. Our perspective on time is, in my opinion, fundamentally incompatible with large quantities of time, for lack of a better way to phrase it.

            • AlexandairBabeuf [they/them]
              1·
              4 years ago

              my argument is if we're doing fine sans good understanding of time and sans brain damage, this arrangement should be able to continue in perpetuity. i don't think anything as banal as having memories is enough to break a healthy brain. shit gets sorted (very often erroneously) and forgotten in a natural life, why would this change in a longer one?

              • Amorphous [any]
                2·
                4 years ago

                my argument is if we’re doing fine sans good understanding of time and sans brain damage, this arrangement should be able to continue in perpetuity.

                this only follows if you ignore the fact that, again, it is well documented that this worsens with time. short amounts of time. decades, not centuries.

                • AlexandairBabeuf [they/them]
                  2·
                  4 years ago

                  the only evidence we have is from aging, deteriorating bodies. that's kind of not applicable.

                  ending aging/death to me means locking in folk to their biological prime 20's-30's, after which bodies go downhill in like every way

                    • Rev [none/use name]
                      2·
                      4 years ago

                      I'm sure the word games you're playing there are cute and all but that's some mighty leap of logic you made. The revitalisation of the body would be the revitalisation of life. No one said anything about freezing the body.

                        • Rev [none/use name]
                          ·
                          4 years ago

                          So what? Why would a steady state be so important anyway? Yeah most likely we'll change, get new bodies, even redefine what a body or even individuality is (the film Annihilation and the book it's based on tackle this topic in a very insightful way) and maybe we'll even have to cease existing at some point but all of this beats just going gently into the night. Not everything needs to be dealt with in absolutes. To paraphrase the poet: " 'Tis better to have lived and lost than never to have lived at all".

                            • raven [he/him]
                              ·
                              4 years ago

                              Your entire body, like another post said, is a ship of Theseus. Your cells are all turning over every decade. So we are not our meat, unless your argument is that you die every 10 years anyway.

                              Why do you think we are inextricable from our physical forms?

                                • raven [he/him]
                                  ·
                                  4 years ago

                                  I'm still not getting it, what exactly are the implications? You're saying if a version of you existed that was affected in different ways to things such as electromagnets, it wouldn't be you anymore?

                                  What part of it is magical thinking?

                                • Rev [none/use name]
                                  ·
                                  4 years ago

                                  How does any of this contradict what I said? Yes, there highly probably is no soul (though, to be pedantic, we might never know 100%) but first of all by inventing one biochemical intervention after another we possibly can prolong the healthy lifespan of this body indefinitely. Note: not eternally, but indefinitely - as in we don't know for how long but surely way way longer than we are accustomed to now and by extension well beyond the human experience of the passage of time hitherto. Secondly, we can enhance and remodel the body mechanically. Already now we have all kinds of implants and prosthetics. A hypothesised future possibility may be a gradual swapping of the "meat" for electronics, one neuron at a time. Thus the continuity of the perception of self will not break (unlike cloning or 3D scanning and reconstruction). Once this is possible the universe is the limit because by then you've actually managed to transfer an uninterrupted flow of consciousness from the meat domain to an electromechanical domain. This will be (if it ever comes to pass) a major evolutionary shift, at least on par with the emergence of eukaryotes. Will there be hard limits to what we can do? It's way too early to tell but right now there's nothing to suggest that there absolutely must be.

                    • SerLava [he/him]
                      2·
                      4 years ago

                      I don't really think new memories wear out your brain, your brain deteriorates because of aging, which are a bunch of independent mechanisms that just intentionally fuck everything up over time, because many years ago older animals made their offspring fail if they lived too long.

              • Rev [none/use name]
                ·
                4 years ago

                I think people are often too married to their received sentimentality to not have a knee-jerk reaction and reject the possibility that a lot (most?) of what they hold dear is actually quite petty.

              • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]
                ·
                4 years ago

                Like, there’s nothing that is essentially different about the world now, than it was 100, 200, 500, 1000, etc. years ago, except that physical objects have moved around a lot.

                Nah, dude, 3000 years ago we didn't even have broccoli, 10k years ago we didn't have corn.

        • SerLava [he/him]
          1·
          4 years ago

          Well, you're basically saying: We're not ready to keep living because who knows, what if it doesn't work well?

          Like, if we can cure aging we can probably cure all sorts of theoretical neurological disorders, and besides, I don't really see any indication that people would go insane due to an overload of memories. They'd probably just forget shit.

          Everyone is just really cucked by the aging mechanism, and will defend getting 360 noscoped like it's good, actually. If we ever stop people from automatically dying, these conversations are gonna be super weird and probably extremely heartbreaking.

      • Amorphous [any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        It might help. Now we're getting out of the realm where I feel comfortable speculating. It's easy to say that our perception of time changes as time passes, that's pretty well established. Why it happens and how that might be combated, totally beyond me.

      • Amorphous [any]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Upon googling that term, I found an 80s comic book series, an 80s movie, and a 2019 tv show.

        So not only can I not say I am a fan, I'm quite unclear what you were even asking me about lmao

        • shitstorm [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          It's an 80's comic book and one of the main characters gains a perspective of time that basically makes him abandon humanity. He perceives his entire life simultaneously and there's a great chapter that shows this in a neat way. You mentioned immortality changing perspective and this is the most popular piece of media in my bubble that tackles that concept.