It doesn't seem pleasant for the person themself either. Constant frustration, gaps in your memory growing ever larger, disorientation, loss — periodically augmented by brief flickers of recollection of what you used to be — and yet no one can legally end your misery, because you can likely no longer unequivocally consent to euthanasia or assisted suicide, even if you explicitly signed a declaration that you did not want to end up like this — legally, the current husk of your former self must consent, and it can't.

Some places permit consent in advance, the person specifies the conditions but hands the evaluation of whether they have been met to the doctor.

> we should euthanize another human

You are shiftinf the topic. This is about self-euthanization, assisted suicide. Not others.

> Where do we draw the line?

As written elsewhere, having to draw a line does not mean that the only reasonable conclusion is to make it illegal in general. It's a hard topic without easy answers. "Don't allow it" is an easy answer that doesn't do justice to the topics complexity.

A good friend of mine passed away a year ago with an incurable disease, diagnosed 3 months before his death, and it was essentially guaranteed that he'd have to endure unbelievable suffering during the last weeks of those months. He didn't have the choice to end it early. It was heartbreaking.

I for my part hope that I can choose myself when the time has come.

It is not really a shift. The slippery slope is the heart of the debate. Once assisted suicide is allowed, the line between respecting autonomy and others making that decision blurs. Safeguards may help, but asking where to draw the line is the central problem.

I'm not arguing either side, but I'd like to note that human societies have been drawing various lines dealing with the legal and ethical issues surrounding the death of other people in various stages of age, competency and guilt, usually without descending into a free-for-all killing frenzy.

When things get bad, it was usually not the drawing of lines that did it, but the intention and underlying stance on the rights and indeed humanity of others. The line is not what makes the slope slippery, but a pervasive lack of empathy seems to do it. We also know that bad actors do not care about lines much.

So I think that slippery slope is not a powerful argument on its own.

My body my choice. And I shouldn’t have to justify my choice. I’m not sure if it’s country specific or religion based, but certain groups really can’t grasp the fact that we have agency over our bodies and how we live (or not).

Yes it. You are not the arbiter of what the heart of the debate is.

I am freely able to set the tone and make arguments wherever I see fit in responding

Sure, but it's obvious that many don't agree with your views.

I am not sure the point of your comment. Do you have anything to add to the discussion?

My parent comment has driven alot of valuable discussion (other than your comment)

Perhaps you find the replies to bait 'valuable.'

You literally co-authored a paper on how online communities handle conflict, and yet here you are generating a textbook example for your own citations. At least you’re staying on-brand.

I didn't co-author it, I just think people should read it. Impressive projection, though.

Where do we have an example of the medical community engaging in any sort of slippery slope in this regard?

The politicians, yes. Auschwitz may return but it won't be voluntary.

KZs were supported by the medical community and were very fruitful for research since the experiments couldn't and still can't be replicated elsewhere.

I am not implying that at all. People should be free to choose when to die, and people should be free to set conditions for their future wherein they no longer wish to live even if they could not express that at point.

That's a personal choice. Anyone not interested in that won't have to do anything and can just wait for the end.

It's not that simple. Once the option is there, there is incentive to encourage people to take it when their continued existence would be a burden.

You can quite easily draw a line that society does not get to force someone to live a tormented existence in spite of their prior declaration that they do not want to be tormented.

“It shouldn't be that way” is not an excuse to torture people through your moralizing indifference to the fact that it is that way.

I've wondered about this for my hypothetical future self.

Currently? I'd say that I wouldn't want to live with dementia, but what if my "demented self" (kinda hate the phrasing, sorry) in the future wants to live, or doesn't remember they don't want to live?

Do I have a say over the life of someone who doesn't remember they were me?

You don’t have a say over your future you because your future you is not the same person as you.

That's what I lean towards, too.

The entire issue they're pointing to is that deciding that someone's existence is sufficiently tormented is difficult and morally fraught.

If you visit an elderly care home you'll find plenty of people who express their wish that they don't want to live any longer. It's not getting better for them - they are just waiting for the day to come, often in agony.

And don't you think the solution to that should be to not ship your parents to a care home rather than finishing the job by euthanizing them?

Stop conflating “I don't want to live” with “I don't want my parents to live”.

But do people who have dementia or say a mental illness have the capacity to make that decision?

It sounds like Daniel Kahneman was suffering from depression after his wife's death and all he saw in the rest of his life was sadness. He had no hope. What day was the best day to die? What if the next day his hope came back?

"What if the next day his hope came back?"

What if he tried that, but every day just got worse than the last day?

And people don't get any younger.

My grandmother is 98. She hates her life since she could not go out anymore. But she is catholic and suicide would be a mortal sin. So she waits till gods take her. And suffers till then.

I would make a different choice for sure. If life is hell and no one depends on me, why should I continue the suffering? (At the cost of others, if I would need help?)

But my plan is of course to reach 120+ in good health. But if I decide I had enough, it will be my decision.

> What if he tried that, but every day just got worse than the last day?

Anyone can say that about their life right now, can't they? How many people struggling today think that their life will get no better? Look at all those who made it through slavery, what hope did they have? Their hope came from their faith.

Suffering has a purpose, this is something your grandmother understands through her faith. Buddhists understand this as well. Maybe the problem is not our suffering, but our lack of faith in others and in in something bigger than ourselves.

Well, but what if I ain't a christian nor a buddhist and don't think suffering as a normal living condition is necessary? (Can you proof it is? Also I don't think all christians/buddhists share that believe)

So sure, suffering and pain are part of life. And accepting that helps a lot to not get stuck in that condition by avoiding painful things, you cannot avoid.

"Anyone can say that about their life right now, can't they?"

So no, not anyone is saying that. Only those with a death wish.

And I don't consider having a death wish as a mental condition. It can of course result of a illness, but it can also be a consciouss wish and then finally a decision.

And if other people decide they may not do this, but have to remain in their state of living hell, then this is just torture to me.

> Well, but what if I ain't a christian nor a buddhist and don't think suffering as a normal living condition is necessary? (Can you proof it is? Also I don't think all christians/buddhists share that believe)

At the very least, suffering (through childbirth) is a prerequisite to bringing life into this world.

edit: strange that this is flagged. my parent asked for proof that suffering is inherent in life, and I don't know anyone who has said that the physical act of giving birth is anything but painful.

No, I asked for proof that a constant condition of suffering is inherent of life. Not that suffering is also part of life.

(Vouched for it to be able to reply)

There is no such thing as constant suffering and there’s no such thing as constant joy.

Without suffering, we would not know joy and without joy we wouldn’t know suffering. So these are two sides of the same coin, do you see that?

It’s our attachment to ourselves that brings us both joy and suffering. So, I’m sorry, if you want to get rid of suffering you’re going to get rid of joy as well. So I don’t know if dying brings us joy or gets rid of our suffering. We really don’t know what happens to us after we die, do we? You can say that everything just ends, but I’m really not wanting to say that because, well, I’m still alive.

I told my schizophrenic brother why he shouldn’t take his life by suicide. I just asked him if he knew what it was like being dead and if he thought he was certain that being dead would be any better. He literally told me the confusion of that question. Let him to accepting his life as it was. Better the Devil You Know than the one you don’t.

> Without suffering, we would not know joy and without joy we wouldn’t know suffering. So these are two sides of the same coin, do you see that?

Bullshit argument.

The suffering that many people experience is profound. These people don’t have a more profound experience of joy than those whose lives are chill. And the happy lives of people who haven’t suffered are not better because the sufferers have felt worse.

> I told my schizophrenic brother why he shouldn’t take his life by suicide. I just asked him if he knew what it was like being dead and if he thought he was certain that being dead would be any better. He literally told me the confusion of that question. Let him to accepting his life as it was. Better the Devil You Know than the one you don’t.

“You should suffer because the next part may be even worse suffering” is such a fucked up argument.

> The suffering that many people experience is profound. These people don’t have a more profound experience of joy than those whose lives are chill. And the happy lives of people who haven’t suffered are not better because the sufferers have felt worse.

Some people have great suffering. Some people have small suffering. But the suffering is the same, and the source is the same. You don’t need great suffering to understand suffering.

A lot of people who have everything they want still suffer, even though nothing is wrong in their life. That is the most interesting kind of suffering to me. But it almost seems like you think these things you’re totally independent or maybe I don’t understand your argument.

> “You should suffer because the next part may be even worse suffering” is such a fucked up argument.

It’s a logical argument. And it kept my brother alive who had no hope and wanted to kill himself, then he has Hope again and he didn’ think about killing himself.

I don’t know what he might’ve done if he read the original article. I might’ve not have had the 20 years with my brother that I did.

Or maybe your brother was guilted into suffering because you injected a greater fear into his life and your faith is fiction. Maybe your faith isn’t fiction but suicide is ok and Jesus tells him it was completely unnecessary to oppose his own reasoning at the pearly gates (or whatever your faith is).

There is no clear answer that extending life is for the best. Not unlike a painful, fruitless intubation that has no chance of providing quality life-hours.

Not saying this is true of your brother but a lot of people are content to say “good job team, he will suffer tremendously, but he is alive!” And that’s fucked up.

I don’t know why you’re bringing up Jesus, I’m not a Christian, and I don’t have faith in Jesus or any religion.

But are you saying since my brother was suffering he should’ve died by suicide?

I’m saying the fact that your brother did not commit suicide doesn’t mean life got better.

Perhaps it did. I hope it did. Likely a large portion of people who get past suicide and don’t later commit suicide do feel it got better.

But for a lot of people it doesn’t get better and telling them to keep living is just a cruel self serving choice

The first of the four noble truths set fourth by the Buddha:

The truth of dukkha: Recognizing that suffering is a fundamental part of existence

They even call Joy “hidden suffering”. Because whenever the thing is that gives us joy, if we become attached to it and it is taken away then we have suffering.

And the Christians believe that the suffering of Christ was needed to forgive everyone of their sins.

So they both view suffering as an important aspect of life. Something to be used for learning and understanding the human condition.

But the buddhist and the Christians believe that you can escape what you would think of a state of constant suffering through religious practices. It’s the faith the American slaves had in Christ that got them through their state of living hell. And we’ve even seen a Buddhist light themselves on fire to protest the war in Vietnam. So I’m sorry, but I can’t look upon suffering as something that’s negative and I accept it as part of life and just as I can learn things from joy and I can learn things from suffering, and they are both the same size of the coin and equally as valuable.

If I’m 95 years old with terminal cancer, my life isn’t going to get better.

And please don’t bring some mythical being in the argument.

Both the Buddha andJesus were real people. I wasn’t bringing up God as I don’t believe in a Christian God, and Buddhists don’t believe in God at all.

But those two characters taught us a lot about suffering. Where it comes from and how to face suffering with courage and not just throw your morals out the window once you have the glimpse of even future suffering.

Maybe it’s just me, but I see every moment as the best it can possibly be. Whether I’m seeing this gorgeous sunny blue sky today or I’m 95 years old with terminal cancer. It’s a miracle to be born and to exist in this world, it’s extremely rare. And I want to live every last second of it. Maybe that’s what’s upsetting me about reading what he wrote. If you just try to grab the good times in this life and use that as a goal you’re going to be severely disappointed.

My only definition of “morality” is are you doing something that affects other people. If you aren’t doing anything to hurt other people, I consider that “morally neutral”. If you aren’t doing anything to help other people, that’s “morally good”.

How is my hypothetically deciding to end my own suffering “morally bad”? I don’t owe suffering from a terminal illness to anyone.

Your calculation for what you will suffer to enjoy another day of life may be different than mine and that’s fine.

> How is my hypothetically deciding to end my own suffering “morally bad”?

Because you’re saying that life is not worth living at some point. But that’s just my level of morality. I think life is so rare and precious that I do not even want to miss the suffering that’s given to me.

And that’s your personal choice. No one is advocating killing people who don’t have the mental capacity to decide.

The action by the man in the original article is advocating for the killing of oneself. His advice is to avoid suffering it is best to kill yourself. Approving of that message is advocating for death over suffering and that’s just something I disagree with. It is my personal choice, but his personal choice has an impact on society so it’s not really a personal choice. If we find it acceptable for people to kill themselves to avoid suffering or in his case to avoid future suffering than I think this is something that needs to go beyond personal choice.

How did his choice impact anyone else besides people who cared about him? Society is not harmed by people not wanting to endure suffering if he isn’t leaving dependent children or a disabled spouse. Why should he be forced to suffer because someone else is uncomfortable?

When anyone’s life is taken it is considered worthless, less than. Whether that is someone else’s life or your own, that sets a precedent, and it sends a message. No action happens in a bubble. Again, he was not enduring suffering either. He was merely afraid of future suffering. Which makes this in my opinion 1000 times worse.

"And I want to live every last second of it."

Glad for you. I really hope you never come into a situation that you wish for your life to end. But please take into account, that other people might experience life different at times.

No one has a death wish, because things are a bit rough sometimes. But if life is constant hell and when there is no hope anymore. Then you wish for death to release you.

(Also do you know what latestage cancer can mean? Constant pain that does not go away, ever.

And Jesus might have been a real person, but that he choose crucification out of his own choice is very much part of the mythological story that other people told after his death)

So many of you, here are thinking that my father did not die of a rapid metastatic cancer. Or that I held my schizophrenic brother in my arms after he tried to overdose on pills. Or that I’m not suffering from a disorder that I’m not going to detail here.

When you deal with suffering every day, you come to have a different relationship with it that is, if you don’t take the view of material list and instead follow the past of the several spiritual leaders who dealt with suffering and understood it in a way that is much deeper than “suffering is bad”.

Christ test there is much more complicated than he wanted to die because he was suffering. Christ chose his suffering and his death as a sacrifice for other people. Christ did not die by his own hands, but from others. He chose peace and love over his own suffering and death. It’s one thing to die because you have no hope and it’s another thing to die to give Hope to everyone else.

The man in the original article, he died for nothing. He died for his own selfish desires. He died because he thought it was embarrassing to be old.

Yes, when dementia has you terrified of, or raging at, your closest loved ones (who you don't remember at all so you think they're demons or strangers) all day every day to the point where they all can't stand you and feel terrible for wishing death would come to end your massive suffering. Beautiful moments, just beautiful.

Hanging in there with cancer? Sure, fight it and deal with the pain. Dementia? No, please end it. The two aren't even close in comparison, cancer feels easy and merciful.

How is it “greedy”? I consider greediness as hoarding resources more than you need thst could help someone else. You are not being greedy for refusing to suffer especially when you don’t have any dependents.

Yes, you’re right which is why I said greedy almost. I think there are some aspect of him wanting more than he’s deserved. Like wanting a life that ends perfectly while everyone else’s life has to go on with their suffering. But I think it is just generally selfish what he did.

Again being “selfish” is just restating the same. How is he withholding anything from anyone else by his decision.

How is own life not his to take?

Slavery has been against the law for a few years. Are you saying the state owns his life? I’m sure at 90 years old his parents are dead and don’t own his life.

I also don’t know if there are little green men living on the moon. But I’m almost sure that the earth wasn’t created in 6 days less than 7000 years ago. Can you tell me abt religious belief that makes sense?

do you think I’m a Christian or something? Because I’m not.

And I’m not staying the state owns his life, I’m saying I don’t know who owns it. I’m saying that’s a really difficult philosophical question.

But in the United States, you cannot die by suicide legally. So the state does have control over your life.

But let’s say I own my life. Why would I want to destroy something I own? Who is the I that benefits from that action?

If you own your life then why do you allow your life to suffer? Why don’t you just stop you’re suffering if you own your life by other means then killing yourself?

You see it gets very tricky.

If the government doesn’t own your life which you agree with, then it doesn’t have the right to tell you what to do with it. If I’m in debilitating pain that has no chance to get better, why wouldn’t I want to end it.

And the US has always been hypocritical about controlling people’s lives.

I agree with some of what you say about the "self", but

> you really can’t suffer if you have no sense of self

... there's no way to know if this is true.

> If you just try to grab the good times in this life and use that as a goal you’re going to be severely disappointed.

No, it sounds like you would be disappointed in that scenario. Many would be elated to get through this hell-hole relatively joyous & unscathed.

The historical Jesus was with a high degree of certainty quite different than the way he is currently remembered and the way he is portrayed in much of the new testament. The majority of the stories involving him either did not happen or were significantly changed between when the event occurred and when, generations later, it was recorded.

I see your last paragraph as naive, and cruelly dismissive of what true suffering is. It is possible to be in a place where the only life you have left is excruciating and intolerable. You are in a privileged position to have never seen a beloved family member die a slow and terrible death, or to have had a serious prolonged health event and have the moment of realization that for some people, your horrible weeks of insufferable illness are their entire experience of life, and wonder if you'd even want to live if that was all you had left.

> You are in a privileged position to have never seen a beloved family member die a slow and terrible death,

can I say this is not true without going into details?

is it because I had insight of my suffering that were different than yours that you don’t believe me?

It's probably because I've experienced a family member's suffering that I wouldn't wish anybody to do through, and also had health events myself that led to such a "reduced quality of life" (read: constant discomfort bordering on torment, allowing no comfort, relaxation, sleep, or ability to focus on anything even mildly enjoyable.) for several months on end that I considered that if believed it would never get better from that point, I really wouldn't want to live anymore. It was effectively an anxiety attack that stayed at maximum intensity for three months solid, and didn't respond to any kinds of drugs, even benzos. I was constantly terrified that I was going to die, and I couldn't hold conversations during the entire period. During this period, I considered that there are people who experienced my condition as a lifelong experience, rather than a temporary, albeit long, episode. For people with dissociative disorders and dementia, they experience something like that, but with significantly higher terror and without even a reasonable grasp on reality. My horrible experience that made me ponder how much more I could survive is somebody else's "good day".

"It's going to get better" is a reasonable position. "It's not going to get better, but still keep hanging on while you experience intolerable torment for all the time you have left, however long it may be" is sadistic and sick.

> Suffering has a purpose

Maybe some suffering has a purpose, and some suffering does not? It doesn't have to be always this or always that.

Let's see how you handle suffering when it comes knocking on your door

He shared his brother had shizophrenia and much later died of it. I assume he did got a glimpse into what suffering means.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45548996

Seeing someone else experience something is not the same as having it happen to you, and those who wish to instill their opinion on others often have the smallest worldviews and ability to think about what it might be like to experience what someone else is going through.

Please stop assuming you know what suffering I’ve had in my own body and my own life. I don’t wish to discuss it here, but I don’t think it needs to be discussed. My experience doesn’t matter in the logic of the argument.

If you don't want to talk about it, you can't expect anyone around you to take it into account.

You can leave it unsaid if you aren't going to say it, and either way you claim it isn't relevant.

I am saying it’s relevant because suffering is suffering. It has the same source so it does not matter if it’s a big suffering or a little suffering. Understanding suffering does not need a degree of suffering. It just needs suffering.

The man in the original article was not suffering at all yet he killed himself. What kind of suffering was that? It’s not that he was suffering. He didn’t wanna suffer at all. He didn’t want to suffer shame. This man knew so little about suffering that he took his own life rather than try to figure it out and the remaining years of his life.

> It has the same source so it does not matter if it’s a big suffering or a little suffering.

What religious belief are you trying to explain here?

I’m sorry, I’m not one of those people. I don’t have “religious beliefs“. There are things I’ve learned in my rather long life and through my suffering and happiness and reading a lot of different spiritual books as well as a lot of materialist books. (my current fascination is the possibility of tubules being the source of a quantum consciousness.)

All I wrote was a remark about how suffering has the same source. Why do we suffer? Isn’t that an interesting question? Do we need to suffer? Can we have pain without suffering? These are not answers I can tell you. These things people have to understand by experience and observation.

I want saw a Whitetail deer with a compound fracture to its rear leg. The bone was sticking straight out. Probably hit by a car. But there it was walking with its herd, calmly eating grass with the rest of them.

So that’s what I do, I look at my life outside of me and I look at the life inside of me.

Suicide is not evidence someone failed to understand pain; it's often proof they understood it too intimately, lived within it until nothing else remained.

What you've attempted is a philosophical sleight-of-hand that collapses under minimal scrutiny. Your "suffering is suffering" assertion—tracing all human agony back to a singular, universal source is a fallacy of composition. I encourage you to look into this concept, as you seem like a person who would like to be thoughtful in the way you approach these subjects.

The deer example highlights that you are mashing vastly different experiential realities to avoid dealing with the contextual depth of human distress. The resilience of a wounded deer, driven by biological signaling, offers no insight into the psychic anguish, societal shame, or cognitive collapse that is often part of human despair. Pretending these are equivalent is intellectually bankrupt from the start.

Claiming the person noted the article "was not suffering at all" and "knew so little about suffering" is stunningly out of touch.

The issue here is intellectual humility: your personal framework cannot possibly encompass the private hell another person lived with - well, until they couldn't anymore.

Why do you see depression? Note the article mentions a partner--he lost his wife but he had found someone else so I do not think this is a result of losing his wife.

I think it was this part that stuck out to me.

“His partner died in 2018 as a result of vascular dementia. The loss affected him deeply.”

I can see that loss affecting him even though he had a new partner. Depression does not always go away when you meet someone new.

But I think people with depression have lost hope in the future. And it sounds like he lost Hope in his future.

> it sounds like he lost hope in his future

People in their 80's are watching their friends die one after the other. They aren't fooling themselves about their long-term prospects. No problems with enjoying life, I support that, but it's hard to believe the end isn't coming for you like it comes for everyone else.

I just think this idea that it is "hope" or "depression" is wrong-headed.

Having some older friends might give you a deeper perspective.

I am old. I have friends in their 70s and I have friends that died of cancer and suicide and heart attacks. I had a father who died terribly of a rapid spreading cancer and a mother who lived with chronic pain and heart disease for 30 years. I have friends who like me live in poverty some of them suffer from it, others of us don’t.

If you lived in your 80s and you have not figured out what life is about then that’s not a problem with life, that’s a problem with the person who did not figure out life.

This is the spiritual quest that I think is missing in the world right now. I’m not really being woo-woo here and I’m not talking about God or any other mythical being. I’m talking about the amazing thing that it is to be alive. Being alive is not just about happiness, but you can be joyous experiencing both happiness and suffering. Our suffering will end, and our happiness will end.

Acceptance of the things you can’t change is the key here. I am no stoic that’s for sure. If you’re too hot, move into the shade. But if I have no shade and I’m suffering the heat, how much more happy am I going to be when I finally reach shade!

It’s my friends who went through the deepest suffering that are the most happy and joyous. It’s these people who teach us about life, Not the people who kill themselves because they’re afraid of looking like an old man.

While I respect your perspective on the value of suffering (which seems to arise from our sense of self and what we associate with “I”) and figuring out life, I think you judge Kahneman as an outside observer without access to his inner thoughts, state and factors that went into his decision.

I'm not sure if you even read the article nor his books, and I disagree with your interpretation of his actions because they have very extravagant presumptions, judging from your comments.

I don't think he was afraid. I think he mapped out his late age future, and wanted to fast forward to what his next adventure even in post-death while leaving his last touches on the world a good one. Leaving the world a better place than when he started, as they say.

> I’m less concerned about what was in his head than the message that he sends.

As quoted from the article: Daniel Kahneman did not want to make a statement or start a debate. "I am not ashamed of my decision," he wrote, "but I don't want it to be discussed publicly either."

That's not how I see it.

It was seeing my father's death that really solidified it for me that there are things worse than death. I am not in the slightest depressed about it, though.

I think the implication was more "people should be free, when they're of sound mind, to choose euthanasia if they lose that sound mind".

Apparently where the line currently is leads to a whole lot of pain and suffering for everybody involved, for the sufferer and their family, because bad actors exist.

I tell you this now in good faith, any human being can choose when to end it. That is without question. I can go get in my car and drive into the nearest body of water, if desired, and no law could stop me. Even under supervision 24/7, it is still possible to do it. We are a determined species.

The only thing in debate is if they can be ethically assisted in the task, with compassion. You say no, someone might pressure Nana into dying to pass her inheritance. Well, the same people might very well put a pillow over her face when no one is looking. A bad actor is a bad actor and murder is illegal but people do it anyways and moral hand-wringing doesn't exactly stop it from happening.

From where I stand you're just unknowingly advocating for extra pain and suffering. Perhaps you'd change your mind if you were in the shoes of someone losing their marbles or worse, someone who has to care for them.

This is such a cruel perspective, implying that he'd be better off dead, for what, 3 years of inconvenience to his community, despite the previous 80 years being spent contributing positively to it?

You even literally show that he isn't solely remembered for those last 3 years of his life. We owe people like that care and understanding, not murder framed as mercy.

It's always so painful to see old people around who are clearly living alone, forced to do everything themselves, having to ask strangers for help because they're afraid of being a burden, and their actual children can't find time for them. Only to now see people actually supporting murder because old people become a burden for a couple of years near the end of their life.

He’d be dead either way, the question is if having those three years were a net improvement to his life

Not for us to question or answer though.

No, you'd let them decide if they want to die.

3 years living vs dying is a 3 year net improvement on life. Such silly statement.

By your logic we should kill everyone at their peak.

I've known at least 2 old persons who were literally looking forward to their death because of chronic pain and general boredom and frustration of requiring 24h/7 assistance and not being able to live the way they used to.

They would have likely used assisted suicide if it had been an option back then.

In this case man doesn't want to die but others are suggesting it to make it easier on society.

Which is really the scariest part about this while discussion. Already plenty NPCs repeating how expensive it is to keep old people alive, it's not a matter of time until old people will be encouraged to make the right choice - or have it made for them if they are not capable of making it.

On the contrary, I urge you to consider whether it is your statement that is overly dismissive. Is there perhaps some existing conditioning, maybe in the form of religious upbringing that is driving your reaction to this? Many of us in fact find OP's a very thoughtful comment than a "silly statement".

> By your logic we should kill everyone at their peak.

No, they suggested that the old and ailing whose quality of life has deteriorated to the point where there is no hope or no more joy in living, ought to be given the choice.

Let me end by quoting my favourite lines from the HN guidelines:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

The problem is on your end.

Consider the following scenarios:

There is a red button that orders your euthanasia. Pressing it instantly teleports you to a euthanasia facility and leads to your death unless you say no within 30 seconds. The button reads your fingerprint and can only be pressed by you. (Assume science fiction level technology to make this true)

1. The button is located 5000 km away from you in an unknown location.

2. The location is known.

3. You can order the delivery of the button to you for $50

4. The button is in your basement

5. The button is next to your bed

6. The button is on your keyboard and mouse

7. The button is on your keychain

Now consider there is a blue button with the same rules as above, which makes you feel compelled to press the first button for a day and it can be pressed by anyone.

You'd want the red button as far away from you as possible and the blue button secured in a location that is as inaccessible to others as possible.

In today's society there are too many people obsessed with pressing blue buttons. Also, pressing blue buttons is not a crime, because red buttons happen to be pretty far away from most people.

But now there are people obsessed with pressing red buttons. They want to ship the red button to your house on your behalf, while thinking they are doing you a favor.

This would be okay if the blue button pressing people were a minority and there was a punishment for pressing blue buttons, but it turns out both positions are popular and when averaged together, the buttons will be placed next to each other, thereby turning the blue button into a second red button.

I see nobody obsessing about pushing red buttons. I see people that would like for option #3 to exist. And when death approaches, option #5.

A simple test of how people feel: Consider the twin towers. We saw quite a few people choosing jumping over fire. We do not question people making such a choice. It is the same choice, just on a much more compressed time scale.

(And we have the bonkers case out of WWII: the guy survived apparently uninjured. Someone who made the choice and was still around to ask them why. We don't know exactly what happened, no analysis was made at the time but attempting to reconstruct the situation said he probably hit the outer part of a pine tree and then rolled down a snowbank. He had on heavy clothing and had blacked out during the fall--not exactly surprising as he jumped from 18,000'.)

That is a very good analogue.

They are suggesting a man who is making life hard on others should die for society which I think is wrong. No one is saying that those who choose to die shouldn't have that choice rather it's not society who should be making the choice.

In medical research on treatments the outcome is often measured in quality adjusted years of life, because just keping people alive at any cost is a bad metric.

3 years of living in constant pain - not saying it’s the case here - is not better than being dead to some people.

That's literally a one-dimensional analysis. Are you sure you're not missing any other relevant factors?I find it hard to believe you uncritically think 'more = better' in every context.

More doesn't equal better but it is no one choice but the person. Not society or the medical system assigning a quality of life score.

A beautiful woman dies twice as the old saying goes.

While what you say is extreme there is a point in the decline past which there is no point of living. If you have something worth living for - cling to life and to 107 if you like. But if the only thing that waits you is to slowly decay and fade and lose yourself - what is the point?

Thank you for saying this. It's not a popular view, but it is the correct one.

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

I don't think I've read a wilder defense of euthanasia in my entire life.

This is a "great guy" who committed his life to teaching kids, being a good neighbour, and his reward is one of his former pupils arguing he ought to be killed because he's grown unwell, he's unable to maintain his optics, and the community he gave his life to has therefore 'soured' on him. How very inconvenient for you, that this man is unwell.

What message is this supposed to send to anyone? "Don't get invested in trying to be nice to the neighbours, they're all ghouls who'll have you shipped to the glue factory as soon as you stop seeming useful." And once everyone internalises this level of social atomism, where do you expect these 'great guys' to keep coming from?

But this guy wanted to die right? Bit different. Agreed that 'how others view you' is such nonsense. People are cruel that way and also: those children who couldn't be bothered visiting or helping out, will be standing at the funeral sniffling and telling 'such great dad stories'. Makes my blood boil.

> 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.)

Of course people understand that.

IMHO it is important to see which context people are coming from. Different culture, social acceptance, historic treatment options, etc. influence the response.

Also, dementia is not the only disease with a strong degenerative impact on character and behaviour e.g there is schizophrenia et al. What is common with many of these conditions that there is a strong individual component of progression and morbidity.

It is great that you have the option to make a choice for yourself. Others might decide to make other choices.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

Jason Zweig, Kahneman's friend, wrote about this and many other thoughts Kahneman would have gone through in making the decision.

  As Barbara Tversky, who is an emerita professor of psychology at Stanford University, wrote in an online essay shortly after [Kahneman's] death, their last days in Paris had been magical...

  One afternoon, according to her online essay, she asked what [Kahneman] would like to do. "I want to learn something," he said.

  Kahneman knew the psychological importance of happy endings. In repeated experiments, he had demonstrated what he called the peak-end rule: Whether we remember an experience as pleasurable or painful doesn't depend on how long it felt good or bad, but rather on the peak and ending intensity of those emotions. "It was a matter of some consternation to Danny's friends and family that he seemed."

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/daniel-kahneman-assis... / https://archive.ph/fEWrc, The Last Decision by the World's Leading Thinker on Decisions (March, 2025).

You know how the story is going to end if you stick around for it. I would make the same choice he made. And I would do it before I was ruled mentally incompetent to do so. My wife and I have already had conversations on doing exactly this having watched multiple family members succumb to dementia. It's horrific and the state salivates at institutionalizing you for the final lap.

No cure for getting old and no cure for dementia on the useful horizon. Having made it to 90 intact, he had knocked living out of the park already. I completely understand his thinking here and support it. He likely could have gone a little longer, but he also might have had a stroke or some other nonfatal cataclysmic event that took away his options.

Kahneman's family & friends who knew beforehand apparently did object.

You should read the piece by Jason Zweig, if you haven't. The decision was deeply personal and was most certainly not an endorsement of euthanasia.

  ... Kahneman's final email said: "Not surprisingly, some of those who love me would have preferred for me to wait until it is obvious that my life is not worth extending. But I made my decision precisely because I wanted to avoid that state, so it had to appear premature. I am grateful to the few with whom I shared early, who all reluctantly came round to support me."

  Kahneman's friend Annie Duke, a decision theorist and former professional poker player, published a book in 2022 titled "Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away." In it, she wrote, "Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early."

  She is frustrated by his decision. "There's a big difference between it feeling early and it actually being too early," she says. "You're not terminal, you're fine. Why aren't you taking the outside view? Why aren't you listening to people who will give you good objective advice? Why are you doing this?"

  Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon who befriended Kahneman more than 50 years ago, says, "Danny was the type of person who would think long and hard about things, so I figured he must have thought about it very slowly and deliberatively. Of course, those of us who spend our lives studying decisions, we think a lot about the reasons for those decisions. But often the reasons aren't reasons. They're feelings."

You're always going to leave something on the table. One of life's trickier lessons is learning when too much optimization becomes less optimal.

34M. I live with my mom who's had it for a few years.

It sucks. It's so easy to forget who they were before the disease. This is them now and it's hard as hell.

Simple things that take 1-step for us take 50+ steps for her. She doesn't readily communicate that she's hungry or thirsty or needs to use the bathroom, we have to constantly ask. She's always exhausted and walking around in circles but reacts aggressively to most suggestions to go to bed or take a nap (no matter how we word it). She can't focus for more than a few seconds, so she has no hobbies to occupy her time, and even the TV loses her interest after a minute at most. Her speech is one unbroken babble, and she gets annoyed if someone starts a conversation near her but doesn't let her interject.

Not sure how much more my dad and I have left in us. The disease stripped everything from her and it's stripping everything from us. In-home care is the likely course but she hates all strangers and is always paranoid about anyone other than us being in the house. There's no good solution.

Tell your parents you love them.

I've had just the smallest touch of this caring for my elderly parents, and you have my deep empathy. It's exhausting and really really hard.

Yeah but if you are in that state, you probably don’t give a shit and everybody else seems to be the problem. So how do you solve this? When dementia isn’t too far progressed, your life seems to be still worthwhile to live and once the dementia gets worse, it’s too late to realize this.

I read that in some societies, if you ended up not being able to feed yourself, they would bring you to your favorite tree and leave you there.

If you ended back in camp you’d be welcomed. If you didn’t, that was your end. I found that remarkably comforting and peaceful.

If you don’t make it back you would die of starvation and lack of water. These are some of the worst ways of dying. What do you find comforting and peaceful about it? The person has been abandoned by their community and could suffer terribly for days.

The idea is the tree is not too far from camp. It should hours not days to return. And I suspect they would check on them.

I have this childhood memory of my neighbour's dog, that grew old and one day decided to go out in the woods and die peacefully. They found it a few days later.

I wish to remain so lucid when the time comes, that I can go sit under a tree and let myself go like that old dog. Perhaps I should leave a note.

I always think of that scene from Donnie Darko - where he says when his dog got sick, she went to hide under the porch. “To die?” His therapist prompts him. “To be alone” he corrects her pointedly. [0]

That’s kind of what I want when I die too - I don’t think I want to be around other people when it happens. I want to have my final moments to face death on my own, without feeling like I have to perform for other people.

… that said, give me another 60 years to chew on it and maybe I’ll feel different.

[0] https://youtu.be/8j1IMBM-QyE?si=jfCe9YUvKW_t5m5e

Wow I’m the total opposite. I’m very annoyed to be around others most of the time, but upon dying I can’t imagine doing it alone or without the help of loved ones.

A lot of motivation to be risk averse with my physical body in this life comes from a desire to make it to old age. Furthermore, I instantly understood why having children was good when I realized that they are your insurance that you’ll (usually) have someone to help comfort you on your deathbed who is themselves still lucid.

Honestly that strikes me as a pretty fucked up and self-serving reason to have children.

You should have kids because you want to create new life, and support them as they become the best humans that they can be - not because you’re scared of dying alone.

> antinatalism, the philosophical position that coming into existence is always a harm

> a decrease in the human population would prevent a significant amount of human-caused suffering

Ridiculous. Without coming into existence there is nothing anyway - by that logic, coming into existence is always a pleasure too, it’s always a joy, it’s always a triumph and a fulfillment. Existence is always existence, nothing is always nothing. It’s a useless tautology.

If you’d rather be nothing then give up on living. I’m perfectly happy existing.

> I’m very annoyed to be around others most of the time, but upon dying I can’t imagine doing it alone or without the help of loved ones.

I'm the same but I'm trying to accept that while we are born among family, dying is a solitary journey.

(There is a saying along these lines, but search engines are utterly useless at surfacing it)

Or they'll treat you with a daily oil bath and feed you tender coconut water ... until few days later your kidney's blow out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalaikoothal

I think people tend to underestimate the risks in allowing suicide —- here’s a blurb from the linked article:

However, social acceptance may lead to more egregious abuses: the issue gained a higher profile in early 2010, when an 80-year-old man escaped after discovering his intended fate and heard his family members discussing how they were going to "share" his lands, and took refuge in a relative's home.

> people tend to underestimate the risks in allowing suicide

People obsess over this risk. It—and religious opposition—are the reason it’s only an option for those who can travel to and hospice in Switzerland.

> social acceptance may lead to more egregious abuses

Do we have any evidence societies that have tolerated suicide had higher rates of murder? Switzerland doesn’t strike me as a hotbed of senior murder, for example.

That’s not suicide. That’s a conspiracy to commit murder.

Yes, and that is one of the reasons our culture has made practices like these taboo- it can give the veneer of respectability to despicable acts

And why there should be more nuance to the issue: legalizing suicide is not the same as legalizing assisted suicide.

I want to be free to die on my own terms. Conversely, I do not want the healthcare system to be allowed to even suggest it.

suicide already is legal -> if you succeed there's no one to prosecute so the question is just absurd. One can only discuss legality of attempted suicide.

You're assuming someone in shape to do it correctly. Someone who is choosing it for medical reasons might not have the strength and motor control, especially if they don't have access to suitable tools.

True, but the methods are quite gruesome.

The state tends to suppress methods which would be peaceful and effective, Such as Nembutal

The healthcare system should not be allowed to suggest it. And it should require an independent review if you request it. That doesn't mean the system shouldn't be allowed to provide it.

The healthcare system is financially incentivized to encourage you to do it. It must absolutely remain taboo for medical professionals to even think about the option.

Using exceptions to make rules is dumb.

Isn't it only exceptional because assisted suicide is relatively rare worldwide?

What has been described above is not suicide.

People also underestimate the risks in allowing sexual intercourse, driving a car, playing football and doing ice baths ...

Death from hunger (esp. when you're frightened and don't understand what's happening) is neither comfortable nor comforting

Fascinating that you think someone with dementia would be suffering more from hunger then from their condition sapping away at them.

Neither you nor I know what the person with dementia is suffering from.

What you call "comforting" is leaving a helpless prison in the wilderness to succumb to thirst, hunger or predators

Thirst and hunger. They’re meant to die a peaceful death so pretty sure no predators involved.

Go to a dementia facility and hang out with your those people. You will see suffering.

My grandmother died of dementia.

If you think that "cannot feed themselves" is when a person is already completely gone and it's okay to "leave them under a tree to die of hunger and thirst", I've got news for you.

My mother has dementia, so maybe dementia just has different expressions and you shouldn’t generalise ?

If I was starving to death, the acute sensation of hunger would override everything else in my mind.

Unfortunately someone with advanced dementia does not know if she has eaten or not. Most of the time there will be no eating, unless someone else puts food in your mouth.

That wasn't the case with my father, who had a pretty good appetite up until his last few weeks.

I'm sorry for your first-hand experience, but I also need to remind you that 1 first-hand experience does not translate well to the overall population of people experiencing dementia.

That’s literally what it says in the story though. That it would only happen if the person won’t eat by themselves.

Why would they need to know whether they have eaten, or even what eating is? They would feel the sensation of gnawing hunger in their stomach, the same way a baby or animal does.

You ever hung out with someone in deep dementia ?

But seriously, how do you know that?

You could express your wishes about how you would like to be treated in advance, while you are still clear in the head. That’s already possible for other situations, like when you are braindead and entirely dependent on machines to keep you alive, with no chance of recovery.

Having a living will is a great idea in general. My dad got a brain tumor and had no documentation on what he wanted do with his estate, in the event he became vegetative, etc. By the time he realized he needed one, it was too late for "sound mind judgement" and my mom had to go through this ridiculous legal process to ensure she held on to his assets and whatnot while she was directly caring for a dying man.

Save your loved ones some grief, create a living will with a trusted lawyer, update it about once a year. It's worth it. There are so many insane snafus one can get into with estranged family members, the state/gov't, medical institutions, etc that make the situation even more difficult and stressful to deal with. Don't expect anyone coming out of the woodwork to act according to honor. They are vultures and know no such kindness.