[amyjess]

Ultimately, I am going to quote one of my favorite writers [0] and say that I am not afraid of a life that ends.

I don't want to be a brain in a jar. Or in a computer either. I enjoy experiencing physical sensations and interacting with the world in meatspace. And if I can't enjoy either, then just let me die.

And I apply this to not just brain preservation, but any attempt to artificially prolong the quantity of my life at the expense of the quality of my life. I do not want to spend my last years in a hospital bed hooked up to machines and unable to move. That was how my dad died, and even then he was lucky enough his partner (who he had discussed this with before and who had the authority to make the decision) eventually agreed to switch him to palliative care in his final hours. Similarly, I have seen what chemotherapy does to people, and I have long since decided that if I ever get cancer, I will refuse chemo and let myself die. I am also having a living will drawn up that includes a DNR order, multiple scenarios where doctors will be ordered to pull the plug, and a prohibition against anyone amputating any of my limbs or sensory organs even if it's necessary to save my life.

I will make sure I die with my autonomy and my dignity intact.

[0] Al Ewing. He writes comics. Read his stuff, he's good.

[xnorswap]

Do you have a source for this quote? Googling just returns this page.

I was particularly struck by:

> if I ever get cancer, I will refuse chemo and let myself die

And figured this quote must be at least 20 or 30 years ago? Cancer isn't necessarily a death-sentence, and many treatments are much less harsh than they were 20+ years ago.

[latexr]

> (…) and a prohibition against anyone amputating any of my limbs or sensory organs even if it's necessary to save my life.

> I will make sure I die with my autonomy and my dignity intact.

Amputees have autonomy, dignity, and rich lives. To believe that the loss of a limb is so severe that death is preferable is absurd and insensitive.

What if instead of requiring an amputation, he loses faculties by accident like suffering from parosmia due to COVID or having a weight crush a body part? Did he suddenly lose his dignity? He certainly lost some autonomy. What’s the next step then?

[bambax]

Many people end their life when they find it's too painful to live. Many more wish they could -- the debate around end-of-life issues is raging in many countries.

[kelnos]

If having to undergo a few months of chemotherapy in order for your cancer to go into remission is "too painful to live", then I think someone's threshold for pain is way below that of the average person, to a point where that's kinda sad.

I know several people who have gone through chemo and came out the other side happy and healthy, after recovery. They live full, rich lives. They are much happier living than dead.

Sure, there are some cancers where you end up with declining quality of life for months or years before you eventually die. I wouldn't fault anyone with deciding to opt out of that from the very start. But that's not what we're talking about, exclusively: the person upthread was very absolutist and rejects chemotherapy in it entirety.

[latexr]

What’s your point? I support the right to euthanasia, nothing in my comment contradicts that.

We’re not talking about someone in pain wishing to die, we’re talking about someone vehemently arguing they would rather die than live without a limb, without having experienced it. And their reasoning is a lack of autonomy and dignity, none of which are a given.

There are literally millions of people without limbs, half a million new ones per year in the US alone. They’re not poor invalids, they’re people who adapt and can do things we only dream off while living normal lives.

[gregjor]

> To believe that the loss of a limb is so severe that death is preferable is absurd and insensitive.

No. Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd. Since the commenter did not impose their opinions on other people you had to put those words in their mouth to call them insensitive.

I prefer to die with autonomy and dignity as well, meaning I would like to pull my own plug. That other people might have a different threshold, or want to die differently than I might, seems neither absurd nor insensitive. The commenter just described their threshold, they didn't judge other people.

[latexr]

> Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd. (…) The commenter just described their threshold, they didn't judge other people.

My sentence does not judge the person, it criticises the belief. Learn to differentiate or you’ll be doomed to a life of ad hominem attacks and taking things personally.

If person A says they love spiders and person B replies they find spiders repulsive, there’s no value judgement passed on person A.

My remark was not a commentary on yourself, your world view, the author, or your approval of them. I don’t know you.

> I prefer to die with autonomy and dignity as well

Who wouldn’t? By itself that statement is meaningless. What’s in question is how one defines the terms.

I invite you to take a closer look at that quote and understand what it means to the people who live those situations. Let’s exaggerate to make a point: If someone said they refused to be treated by a black doctor even if their life depended on it, and followed up with the remark they would make sure to die with dignity, do you not see how that would be insensitive to black people? A writer, especially an ostensibly good one, would understand that basic sentence structure.

Again, that is a purposeful exaggeration to make a point. I’m not making a remark on yourself or the author, I am disagreeing with the belief.

[kbelder]

I'll judge the person. Someone wanting to die because they lose an arm is nuts.

[gregjor]

> My sentence does not judge the person, it criticises the belief.

An opinion or belief can't "be" insensitive. A person may intend to say something insensitive, another person may interpret an opinion as insensitive (as you did when dragging in amputees and people suffering from other conditions and injuries). "Insensitive" can only refer to a person's intention or another person's reaction. So calling someone insensitive for their expressed opinion does indeed judge the person.

> Learn to differentiate or you’ll be doomed to a life of ad hominem attacks and taking things personally.

Surely someone as skilled in rhetoric as yourself can see the irony of you warning me about "a life of ad hominem attacks" embedded in an ad hominem attack. Then you followed up with the implication that I don't understand "basic sentence structure." Address my actual comment rather than telling me what I need to learn and how I will get doomed for not thinking like you.

As for spiders and racists, those have nothing to do with anything in this thread. If someone says they don't want to live if they lose a limb or face chemotherapy, whether you agree with their stated choice or not, no other person or race got mentioned or implicated in the comment you replied to. Setting up a false and deliberately inflammatory analogy to make your point, equating an opinion about perceived quality of life with racism, doesn't help your argument. Try sticking with countering the arguments the commenter (and I) expressed.

Personal opinions about end-of-life care, personal autonomy, dignity have the same flavor as religious beliefs: you can't counter them with logic. Just calling someone wrong or "insensitive" or "nuts" as some other commenters have misses the mark, because the subject involves beliefs, not facts that we can argue. One can express their own different opinion, but going beyond that starts to verge into attacks on personal beliefs, which requires making assumptions about another person's faculties, judgment, and ad hominem, all of which you have deployed in your comments.

[latexr]

Urk, clearly continuing this conversation is fruitless. Even after mentioning twice and with emphasis that I’d use a purposefully exaggerated example, you decide to latch on to it as if it were the central thesis, calling it “false and deliberately inflammatory”. Do you understand the meaning of “purposefully exaggerated”, of analogies and hyperbole as a means to explain a point? Stop assuming bad faith, and please go fresh up on what an ad hominem is, as you keep mischaracterising it. My original comment had nothing to do with you, unless you’re Al Ewing and pretending not to be. Stop taking it personally, this isn’t even about you. You’re also conflating what other people said with my points, which is unproductive.

[kelnos]

If someone else is free to decide that they'd rather die than lose an eye, or rather die than have to experience a few months of chemotherapy in order to be cancer-free, then I am also free to decide that those views are absurd and extreme, and reflect a deep misunderstanding of medical outcomes.

> Denigrating someone expressing their personal opinion seems absurd.

There's a difference between saying someone is foolish and saying their beliefs/opinions are foolish. The former is not what the GP did.

[gregjor]

> then I am also free to decide that those views are absurd and extreme, and reflect a deep misunderstanding of medical outcomes.

I don't agree. You can decide that another person's expressed opinions don't align with yours, according to what you believe and think you understand about medical outcomes. The original comment didn't mention medical outcomes so I hesitate to judge how much the commenter knows about that. And I hesitate to call someone's personal views absurd. They have opinions I may or may not share. I can't make a rational argument to prove them wrong.

A person's beliefs can't "be" foolish or even wrong. Belief by definition does not come from an objective and rational evaluation of facts and probabilities. I can say I hold different beliefs, but no more.

We most often encounter this kind of argument around religion. Someone can sincerely hold religious beliefs that don't submit to rational and objective argument. We can have different beliefs but we can't prove someone else's beliefs wrong. To call a belief that you can't argue against with reason "foolish" or wrong equals calling the person holding the belief foolish and wrong. You can show that chemo can work and people with cancer can recover. You can't say how any individual should feel about that, or how they should choose to deal with a cancer diagnosis. The original comment didn't make any statement about whether chemo works or not, or whether some people can thrive with dignity after losing a limb. Rather the original comment expressed one person's belief about how they feel about those possibilities, for their own definitions of autonomy, dignity, and quality of life.

[hinkley]

I suspect part of extending human life much beyond 120 years is going to be finding ways to delay physical adulthood, so that proportionally you still have the same time to learn and grow, and those growth hormones are still kicking around repairing things for longer. Because the quality of life 100 years after your organs have stopped repairing themselves is not going to be that great, but if you could reduce that to 80-90 years then maybe.

[kelnos]

This seems a bit extreme. Chemotherapy and its effects can be a very temporary thing, and your quality of life can go back to normal after you've finished your course and the cancer has gone into remission. Certainly there are aggressive cancers where you'd be fighting a painful battle of attrition, but there are many cancers where prognoses are good, and quality of life once treatment is done is more or less the same as before. A blanket personal ban on chemo is reckless and shortsighted.

The prohibition against amputation and sensory organ removal is a bit nuts too. You'd rather die than have someone remove one of your eyes or ears, or say a hand or arm or foot or leg? That is profoundly sad, and intensely insulting to anyone who has had to deal with that sort of thing and has nonetheless lived a full, rich life.

I get that many medical interventions do actually have a terrible, permanent effect on quality of life, but these seem like pretty extreme views that ignore reality.

[gregjor]

I don't know what the commenter who posted about chemo and amputation actually thinks or believes. But I hesitate to call them "nuts" or to lecture them about how they have a wrong opinion. And I would not expand their personal opinion as a judgment on people who decide they can live with the effects of chemo, or amputation, or loss of an eye, because nothing in the original comment included a judgment on other people. Everyone has their own threshold for what they consider a life worth continuing, but we should not impose our own thresholds on other people, or judge them for making different choices.

For me the question goes beyond "Can I survive chemo (or amputation) and resume something like a normal life?" When you have to face cancer or loss of a limb or any illness or injury that threatens your life, or perceived quality of life, or dignity and autonomy, you necessarily have to think about what that means for your future. Until you get a diagnosis of (for example) cancer you don't know what it feels like, or how you will react, to the fact that no matter if you survive the treatment or not, you will always have that threat and reminder of your mortality in your conscious thoughts. You think about how you might not get so lucky the next time, how much your treatments might cost, what your illness might put your loved ones through, how far you will go to keep yourself alive even when it imposes costs and obligations on other people. And you think that maybe other people will have to make hard decisions about your future if you can't. A cancer diagnosis doesn't just affect me, in other words. If I lost a leg or arm that would impose burdens on my wife and family, affect my ability to make a living. Those thoughts more than the medical condition itself lead people to arrive at opinions such as the original commenter expressed.

Having faced my own mortality already I know I think more about how my own end of life scenarios affect other people more than how they will affect me. I worry that I will suffer a stroke, or slip into dementia, before I can pull my own plug, leaving people I care deeply about with that awful obligation, and the burden of caring for me rather than living their own life. And it's that thought, not the fear of disease or dying, that leads me to my own ideas about how much I might endure, because I won't endure it alone or without cost to others.

[paxys]

> I enjoy experiencing physical sensations and interacting with the world in meatspace. And if I can't enjoy either, then just let me die.

Who says a brain in a jar can't enjoy either of these? Who says that isn't, in fact, what you are enjoying right now?

[gregjor]

More realistic to make plans for dying, than to fantasize about living forever.

[tartoran]

Cancer is no longer a definite death sentence and chemotherapy can make it go away for good, depending on what kind of cancer that is. I'd refuse too chemo after chemo in a very aggressive form of cancer though.