[Neslit]

>we would be better off if no one died

(Clarification: I think we'd obviously be better off if no one involuntarily died.)

I don't think I've been hasty in my thinking. What is the most central concern that you have about life as a good thing?

There are deep unsolved problems around long life. E.g., how do you grow as a mind that has existed for 4,000 years? A normal human mind would probably not be able to handle this, so we'd need some way to expand without losing the parts of ourselves that we value. Similarly, I don't know how to grow as a community of huge, ancient minds.

But, as the saying goes, those are very difficult problems, and I intend to work on solving them for as many centuries as it takes! Of course I can't literally claim to possess an absolute truth, but I think there is a very strong argument---or rather, I think most people would simply agree if they thought longer and more sanely about the question---that life can be awesome given some work, and it is precious, and we don't want to just give up on our vast adventure because, like, medicine is hard to figure out, or cryonics seems like something weird people do, or whatever.

[cr1895]

I'm struggling to think of how to reply. This topic is both hard if not impossible to grapple and fascinating to think about. I keep going off into mental tangents about our place (and insignifigance) in the incomprehensibly huge cosmos and how you can so easily say that we humans, who have been dieing along with every other living thing for all of our collective existence, that somehow we should strive to eradicate death and live for thousands of years, much less eternity.

I don't know if hasty was the right word; I don't mean to just dismiss what you're saying. Clearly you've considered this at length.

I cannot easily accept that perpetual life is a good thing and death is something which should be avoided (obviously, in a grander sense). I don't have a concern about life as a good thing in the same way I don't have a concern about death being a bad thing. Life and death are complementary. I can't fathom anything else.

[Neslit]

>Life and death are complementary

Hm, I hear people say this a lot, but I genuinely can't empathize with where they are coming from. This is a blank spot in my map. Could you say more about the intuition behind this statement, and why this makes death seems desirable or less bad?

To illustrate how I emotionally parse the statement "Life and death are complementary", I want to make a possibly distressing analogy, so apologies in advance, and:

TRIGGER WARNING...

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TRIGGER WARNING: abstract discussion of rape

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That statement reads to me like:

"Being raped and not being raped are complementary. Members of higher animal species rape each other in the natural course of life, and humans have committed rape throughout history. Rape is a part of nature, so it is foolish to think that we humans could or should eliminate rape forever."

This is an obviously abhorrent position, and I genuinely don't see much of a difference talking about death instead. Clearly horrible thing is clearly horrible.

Again, I am absolutely not trying to imply you are evil, or thinking inside my head that you are evil, or anything remotely like that; I am just trying to convey how I kneejerk-emotionally react to your statement about life and death, in case it helps you say things to me that will cause me to understand where you are coming from.

[cr1895]

Your analogy fails because death is not something which is necessarily a conscious action taken by one against another. If we were discussing why murder was good and complementary to life then it is more applicable, but we're not.

Your inability to parse why I see life and death existing in a sort of balance is similar to my inability to have the same clarity that you do that death is inherently bad and should be eliminated. It's certainly something I'm going to think about.