Life Brings Death as Light Brings Darkness

Vanitas · November 21, 2010, 9:27pm

Spongebob and Patrick.

jonquil · November 21, 2010, 9:29pm

My question was totally serious. These are legitimate questions for me. After your apropos thoughts on why organisms have a self-destruct process, I was hoping that you would have some thoughts to my real concerns.

Vanitas · November 21, 2010, 9:30pm

I know why we age, why they don’t, and the dynamics of it. But in the event that jellyfish do not any longer have sufficient predation, I would imagine that they proliferate, destroy their own resources, and the equilibrium of all ocean life is messed up.

Vanitas · November 21, 2010, 9:36pm

Or maybe everything will perish and all life will return to the sea, with a few primitive sea organisms, and evolution will begin over again. And that will just happen until our sun blows up: out of the sea, back into the sea, out of the sea, back into the sea.

Vanitas · November 21, 2010, 9:43pm

My joke was just as apropos as my thoughts though, so I couldn’t resist.

jonquil · November 21, 2010, 9:59pm

I have also been considering this notion. Weren’t humans once primitive sea organisms? However, it was a different earth that we evolved into. The new earth will be so different after we leave it, so contaminated and defaced.

Vanitas · November 21, 2010, 10:19pm

Couple of Styrofoam cups, a few TVs, plastic bags, and my used vicodin bottles aren’t going to hurt anyone.

jonquil · November 21, 2010, 10:26pm

Multiply that millions of times every day . . . .

JohnJones · November 21, 2010, 11:13pm

helptheherd:

One may wonder what the title of this thread means… life brings death as light brings darkness…

it means that with life must come death just as with light must come darkness…darkness can only be characterized by light and light can only be characterized by darkness…what of life and death? it shows that life must also be characterized by death and death must also be characterized by life…

what does this tell us???

one may not have light without darkness and one may not have darkness without light…then one may not have life without death and one may not have death without life.

this seems to be immediately and irrevocably true when viewed in this way…therefore we must wonder what the purpose is in scientists assuming that human life will one day reach technological advances great enough to create physical immortality.

is this not akin with saying we will some day create light without darkness??? (do not worry about answering this question specifically)

we must wonder what the purpose is in believing that we will some day have life without death…and better yet we must use our common sense in understanding how it is logically possible or impossible to have physical life without physical death.

from a philosophical point we can see that life needs death in order to be life and death needs life in order to be death, just as light needs darkness in order to be light and vise versa… what i am getting at is…it is literally impossible to separate light from darkness or darkness from light- they are not separate objects but instead are 2 different ends of the same thing (or “the other side of the coin” for example- no matter what, it is still one coin- not two separate coins)

scientists that are working on our genes to create a human life that will not die naturally is rather absurd and intellectually limiting to say the very least…prolonging life is one thing…but to assume that we will some how make human life immortal meaning to exist until the end of time is irrational (one second can be stretched into a billion years of a society’s demise or the demise in them of that which is existential…at a certain point it could be infinite torture to lose this, especially if time is stretched infinitely)

life itself involves many many things which are all impermanent- from memory to intelligence to our very core identity (which could only be immortal after death of our physical body)

playing around with our genes might make us live longer but how does that transfer over into a human being “physically” immortal?
…immortal meaning that we will not die…hence life without death (akin to light without darkness)

we must realize that it is death itself that allows us to learn…it is death itself that gives us energy and motivation to learn and the memory to learn and the memory to have memory to learn of memory to have to learn lol

death is what allows life to exist…darkness is what allows light to shine brightly…it is a context in which light may be itself and show itself in its many ways (and vice versa)…we may therefore say that death is the context in which life may present itself in all of its many wondrous ways…

how may scientists take away the context without therefore taking away the contents? they are not separate- they are not separable.

we may imagine ourselves to be immortal- and yet how will we move? breathe? sleep? live? …knowledge is literally not possible without death! death is that which allows life to move! (or life is that which allows death to move- for simplicity’s sake we will say that death allows life to move)

is not learning possible only through life? is not life possible only through death?

maybe this will help those to better understand…

imagine someone that is physically immortal…why would they learn? why would they live? why would they breathe? why would they do anything whatsoever? …does not the fact that they are immortal mean that they would not have to do anything? is not thought a product of life? therefore how may one have thought through physical immortality? HOW MAY ONE HAVE MOTIVATION WITHIN PHYSICAL IMMORTALITY? motivation can be said to be our reason for everything within life- motivation to live- to breathe- to sleep- to survive…how may motivation to survive come about within immortality? does not this motivation have to be alive? to move? to exist in order to be relevant?

therefore imagining a physically immortal being we would have to wonder what its motivation would be to live? if not, then death is ever present within…that is very important to understand…without death there is no motivation…therefore any entity that is alive must have death within itself biologically (and therefore logically, being that our logic and biological makeup are directly related to one another)

what does it mean that any entity that is alive must have death within itself biologically? it means that life and death are inseparable…death gives life to time! it takes time to think and live and breathe and eat and drink and sleep and love- but one that is physically immortal would not have to abide by time therefore what would be their motivation to abide by time if they do not have to abide by time (does not the motivation itself come from time)? unless they are already abiding by time(are alive and were born) and then become immortal afterwards (after they are born)…how is this possible?
we know that in order to be born in the first place one would then need to be mortal and use time and have death within…so how may one that has already been born and uses time go into a state where the body does not use time but the mind does (thinking)?

one may say that these physically immortal humans will simply keep up with their bodies- continuing to eat and sleep and that through genetical manipulation their body will not age past a certain point. hmmm well there are many ways to age- not just our appearance…what about our internal clock, what about our memory? does not our memory abide by time…do we not need our memory to be ourselves? how will scientists be able to make memory immortal? will they manipulate memory so that we may directly nourish it and keep it alive? then what is it that is keeping track of our memory? will scientists manipulate our identity so that we are able to directly nourish it? then what is keeping track of our identity? will scientitsts be able to manipulate our souls so that we are able to directly nourish it?

in other words…scientists may be able to manipulate our genes so that we will not age but that does not mean that we will not continue to age otherwise…no matter what we will still age just as long as we use memory for simplicity’s sake…memory itself would need to abide by time and so what fear awaits these poor physical immortals…shall they one day just die despite their supposed belief in their own immortality…shall their identity tear away at a certain point or their consciousness suddenly go blank one day? and more importantly if our brain is dependent upon our identity and our body is dependent upon our brain, then if we lose our identity our brain will immediately shut down and we will of course die.
humans are born from death and therefore have death within them…trying to take away death from life is irrational, illogical and impossible.

life itself is of death…death gives time and movement and feeling…are scientitsts attempting to take away feeling from existence that is only alive in the first place because of feeling? existence itself must have death in order to be existence…it is the same as nothing and something as i have spoken of many times. in this respect we may look at life as something and death as nothing…simply the inseparable union of that which comprises existence itself…therefore in order for us to be alive we must then have death within us as well down to the very core of ourselves which stands different -but it is only our core that stands different and trust me our core is not made up of genes

therefore working on our genes will give us a temporary prolonging of our life not physical immortality…

physical immortality is impossible for an entity that was physically, mortally born…for those thinking we will one day be physically immortal please realize the idea itself is illogical as well as irrational (once life and death is truly understood) and is truly not possible in any way…that is, it is impossible to separate life and death- you must have one to have the other.

God bless

-hth

yES iTHINK SO. bUT NOT ALWAYS. iT DEPENDS ON MY MOOD tHAT IS WHY i DON’T OFTEN FIND IT sO. tHATS ALL i@M SAYING.

helptheherd · November 21, 2010, 11:52pm

JohnJones:

helptheherd:

One may wonder what the title of this thread means… life brings death as light brings darkness…

it means that with life must come death just as with light must come darkness…darkness can only be characterized by light and light can only be characterized by darkness…what of life and death? it shows that life must also be characterized by death and death must also be characterized by life…

what does this tell us???

one may not have light without darkness and one may not have darkness without light…then one may not have life without death and one may not have death without life.

this seems to be immediately and irrevocably true when viewed in this way…therefore we must wonder what the purpose is in scientists assuming that human life will one day reach technological advances great enough to create physical immortality.

is this not akin with saying we will some day create light without darkness??? (do not worry about answering this question specifically)

we must wonder what the purpose is in believing that we will some day have life without death…and better yet we must use our common sense in understanding how it is logically possible or impossible to have physical life without physical death.

from a philosophical point we can see that life needs death in order to be life and death needs life in order to be death, just as light needs darkness in order to be light and vise versa… what i am getting at is…it is literally impossible to separate light from darkness or darkness from light- they are not separate objects but instead are 2 different ends of the same thing (or “the other side of the coin” for example- no matter what, it is still one coin- not two separate coins)

scientists that are working on our genes to create a human life that will not die naturally is rather absurd and intellectually limiting to say the very least…prolonging life is one thing…but to assume that we will some how make human life immortal meaning to exist until the end of time is irrational (one second can be stretched into a billion years of a society’s demise or the demise in them of that which is existential…at a certain point it could be infinite torture to lose this, especially if time is stretched infinitely)

life itself involves many many things which are all impermanent- from memory to intelligence to our very core identity (which could only be immortal after death of our physical body)

playing around with our genes might make us live longer but how does that transfer over into a human being “physically” immortal?
…immortal meaning that we will not die…hence life without death (akin to light without darkness)

we must realize that it is death itself that allows us to learn…it is death itself that gives us energy and motivation to learn and the memory to learn and the memory to have memory to learn of memory to have to learn lol

death is what allows life to exist…darkness is what allows light to shine brightly…it is a context in which light may be itself and show itself in its many ways (and vice versa)…we may therefore say that death is the context in which life may present itself in all of its many wondrous ways…

how may scientists take away the context without therefore taking away the contents? they are not separate- they are not separable.

we may imagine ourselves to be immortal- and yet how will we move? breathe? sleep? live? …knowledge is literally not possible without death! death is that which allows life to move! (or life is that which allows death to move- for simplicity’s sake we will say that death allows life to move)

is not learning possible only through life? is not life possible only through death?

maybe this will help those to better understand…

imagine someone that is physically immortal…why would they learn? why would they live? why would they breathe? why would they do anything whatsoever? …does not the fact that they are immortal mean that they would not have to do anything? is not thought a product of life? therefore how may one have thought through physical immortality? HOW MAY ONE HAVE MOTIVATION WITHIN PHYSICAL IMMORTALITY? motivation can be said to be our reason for everything within life- motivation to live- to breathe- to sleep- to survive…how may motivation to survive come about within immortality? does not this motivation have to be alive? to move? to exist in order to be relevant?

therefore imagining a physically immortal being we would have to wonder what its motivation would be to live? if not, then death is ever present within…that is very important to understand…without death there is no motivation…therefore any entity that is alive must have death within itself biologically (and therefore logically, being that our logic and biological makeup are directly related to one another)

what does it mean that any entity that is alive must have death within itself biologically? it means that life and death are inseparable…death gives life to time! it takes time to think and live and breathe and eat and drink and sleep and love- but one that is physically immortal would not have to abide by time therefore what would be their motivation to abide by time if they do not have to abide by time (does not the motivation itself come from time)? unless they are already abiding by time(are alive and were born) and then become immortal afterwards (after they are born)…how is this possible?
we know that in order to be born in the first place one would then need to be mortal and use time and have death within…so how may one that has already been born and uses time go into a state where the body does not use time but the mind does (thinking)?

one may say that these physically immortal humans will simply keep up with their bodies- continuing to eat and sleep and that through genetical manipulation their body will not age past a certain point. hmmm well there are many ways to age- not just our appearance…what about our internal clock, what about our memory? does not our memory abide by time…do we not need our memory to be ourselves? how will scientists be able to make memory immortal? will they manipulate memory so that we may directly nourish it and keep it alive? then what is it that is keeping track of our memory? will scientists manipulate our identity so that we are able to directly nourish it? then what is keeping track of our identity? will scientitsts be able to manipulate our souls so that we are able to directly nourish it?

in other words…scientists may be able to manipulate our genes so that we will not age but that does not mean that we will not continue to age otherwise…no matter what we will still age just as long as we use memory for simplicity’s sake…memory itself would need to abide by time and so what fear awaits these poor physical immortals…shall they one day just die despite their supposed belief in their own immortality…shall their identity tear away at a certain point or their consciousness suddenly go blank one day? and more importantly if our brain is dependent upon our identity and our body is dependent upon our brain, then if we lose our identity our brain will immediately shut down and we will of course die.
humans are born from death and therefore have death within them…trying to take away death from life is irrational, illogical and impossible.

life itself is of death…death gives time and movement and feeling…are scientitsts attempting to take away feeling from existence that is only alive in the first place because of feeling? existence itself must have death in order to be existence…it is the same as nothing and something as i have spoken of many times. in this respect we may look at life as something and death as nothing…simply the inseparable union of that which comprises existence itself…therefore in order for us to be alive we must then have death within us as well down to the very core of ourselves which stands different -but it is only our core that stands different and trust me our core is not made up of genes

therefore working on our genes will give us a temporary prolonging of our life not physical immortality…

physical immortality is impossible for an entity that was physically, mortally born…for those thinking we will one day be physically immortal please realize the idea itself is illogical as well as irrational (once life and death is truly understood) and is truly not possible in any way…that is, it is impossible to separate life and death- you must have one to have the other.

God bless

-hth

yES iTHINK SO. bUT NOT ALWAYS. iT DEPENDS ON MY MOOD tHAT IS WHY i DON’T OFTEN FIND IT sO. tHATS ALL i@M SAYING.

lol…i have no idea what this means JohnJones

God bless
-hth

helptheherd · November 22, 2010, 12:02am

lol…no problem Vanitas

-hth

Only_Humean · November 22, 2010, 7:37am

Ah, a religious viewpoint. Fair enough.

Vanitas · November 22, 2010, 11:02am

Yeah, that’s religious. I’m rolling my eyes now by the way. I believe in natural selection. Especially when it comes to huge biological events like aging. Especially given the fact that I clearly discerned an advantage in the aging process, it is fair to assume that is why it exists. Not even the mods of this board have any class apparently.

Only_Humean · November 22, 2010, 11:36am

Life expectancy for the very great majority of human existence was less than half of that in the modern world, even leaving out infant mortality. Anything that gave an advantage to breeding rates over that period would be favoured, no matter what the longer-term effects were on the organism. Something that kills you at 60 has no noticeable deleterious effect on a gene’s selection, when disease and bad weather and wild animals are selecting for things at half that age.

Alternatively, if you have evidence that old age was positively selected for due to massive global overpopulation near-extinction events, I’m open to consider that. Odd that it didn’t happen to jellyfish, though.

Vanitas · November 22, 2010, 11:47am

Only_Humean:

Vanitas:

Yeah, that’s religious. I’m rolling my eyes now by the way. I believe in natural selection. Especially when it comes to huge biological events like aging. Especially given the fact that I clearly discerned an advantage in the aging process, it is fair to assume that is why it exists. Not even the mods of this board have any class apparently.

Life expectancy for the very great majority of human existence was less than half of that in the modern world, even leaving out infant mortality. Anything that gave an advantage to breeding rates over that period would be favoured, no matter what the longer-term effects were on the organism. Something that kills you at 60 has no noticeable deleterious effect on a gene’s selection, when disease and bad weather and wild animals are selecting for things at half that age.

Alternatively, if you have evidence that old age was positively selected for due to massive global overpopulation near-extinction events, I’m open to consider that. Odd that it didn’t happen to jellyfish, though.

You are bringing a particular time span of a particular species into a universal discussion of life. I mean, what I am talking about is just common sense. Even the first Wikpedia article of biological aging mentions:

"August Weismann was responsible for interpreting and formalizing the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution in a modern theoretical framework. In 1889, he theorized that ageing was part of life’s program because the old need to remove themselves from the theatre to make room for the next generation, sustaining the turnover that is necessary for evolution.[1] This theory again has much intuitive appeal, but it suffers from having a teleological or goal-driven explanation. In other words, a purpose for ageing has been identified, but not a mechanism by which that purpose could be achieved. "

The mechanism is the disintegration of what we now call telomeres.

Vanitas · November 22, 2010, 11:54am

The argument could be made that animals die because of natural predation so nature would have no reason to evolve this adaptive trait. But consider predatory animals, the kings of the beasts, like lions. Animals that perish rapidly because of predation, when taken out of nature, actually have immense life spans, like turtles, jellyfish, lobsters- the trait is not dominant in them, aging. The animals that do not have many predators would have benefited greatly from this adaptive trait, aging. Aging would allow for genetic variability, because the older an animal got, so it would gradually lose its reproductive capacity, it would get weaker so another leader could take its place, etc. Eventually, if it wasn’t killed, it would die, making room for new competitors in the Colosseum we call life. I think this addresses you, Humean.

Only_Humean · November 22, 2010, 6:21pm

Vanitas:

You are bringing a particular time span of a particular species into a universal discussion of life. I mean, what I am talking about is just common sense. Even the first Wikpedia article of biological aging mentions:

"August Weismann was responsible for interpreting and formalizing the mechanisms of Darwinian evolution in a modern theoretical framework. In 1889, he theorized that ageing was part of life’s program because the old need to remove themselves from the theatre to make room for the next generation, sustaining the turnover that is necessary for evolution.[1] This theory again has much intuitive appeal, but it suffers from having a teleological or goal-driven explanation. In other words, a purpose for ageing has been identified, but not a mechanism by which that purpose could be achieved. "

The mechanism is the disintegration of what we now call telomeres.

The bolded text is why I brought up religion.

The mechanism that is missing is that whereby telomere disintegration is selected for - evolutionarily preferred. If the argument is that without it you get overpopulation and repeated near-extinction, the question is how the aging subpopulation survived the overpopulation of the immortal group merely by virtue of dying faster - this is a question for any mechanism, of course. The argument that only those who died earlier evolved fast enough to become ‘higher animals’ is only post hoc ergo propter hoc - no mechanism of selective preference is advanced.

WW_III_ANGRY · November 22, 2010, 6:40pm

Why do you think we would not want to pursue happiness just because we are immortal? I didn’t read the end of it because you didn’t grab my attention, the first few questions you asked in regards to why would we want to do anything just simply has obvious answers. For one, if I was immortal, I wouldn’t want to sleep under a bridge for eternity. Of course I would want to learn and continue learning and why not?

jonquil · November 22, 2010, 7:04pm

Karaoke and Cold Lazarus’ offered an interesting solution to the problem of human mortality in the character of Daniel Feeld, played by the inimitable virtuosic Albert Finney. I don’t think anyone has ever tried that in real life, but I’ve also seen similar scenarios in other sci-fi shows. After thinking about it, I decided that I don’t think I’d like that solution at all.

Warehouse13 played around with cryogenics this season, which reminds me of that other solution of freezing yourself and hoping to be awakened again after humans have figured out how to keep you alive. I don’t think I’d like that possibility either, but it beats Daniel Feeld’s option.

helptheherd · November 23, 2010, 11:10pm

well…it is your choice ww111angry…im not sure what you want me to do about that

learning is not possible without death ww111angry as said within the op- physical immortality is impossible because it would be existence without death but existence itself has death within- as stated within the op…therefore once again physical immortality is not possible within existence…it appears you do not fully understand the idea of physical immortality

God bless

-hth