Psychology/Biology? question! Thoughts on death

[Neosutra]

Hmm, I guess you could go into Placisity of the human brain. The brain's ability to self correct, learn, and regulate declines as you move from childhood to adulthood. This leads to stagnation in mental growth and intelligence, as well as adaptation. Perhaps the decline in available stem cells and regulating placisity allows for degradation in gene reproduction. It would follow the path that someone who keeps themselves busy (learns new things and stays active) lives longer. Perhaps the placisity of the brain is a large contributer to life itself.

[The_OG_Nelta]

A psychologically/Philosophically reason in my opinion to my own question (Even though I know I asked it more scientifically, i apologize)

Death is life's biggest motivator. Without death, people wouldn't ever be driven to accomplish anything. This is more of a philosophical conclusion than your evolutionary one, so take that as you will.

[Teorem]

Putting aside the telomere aspect, this part:

2) Evolution occurs across generations, so all life that occurs after the time for reproduction in an individual is essentially lost and unwarranted in the next generation, in that the individual only needs to be 'fit' up until they reproduce. After they pass that point, all factors that contribute to making an individual 'fit' are essentially useless, since that individual doesn't need to be 'fit' anymore.

, is not completely true.

The overall utility of an individual is determined by one's inherited AND behavioral (developed) traits. In our closed system, an individual can still affect the latter in (or even the survival of) another individual without being able to directly contribute to the diversity of the genetic pool, thus having an effect on the direction of the evolution of the system overall.

"Fit" parents may be necessary to produce individuals that are biologically (or whatever other system you're using) viable, but that individual still has to survive and achieve potential in order to have any lasting effect in its system.

[Darus Grey]

Death is life's biggest motivator. Without death, people wouldn't ever be driven to accomplish anything. This is more of a philosophical conclusion than your evolutionary one, so take that as you will.

I disagree entirely, if anything death is equal parts motivation and demotivation depending on your world-view.

I find death demotivating specifically in the sense that life isn't *long enough* for what I want to accomplish, and thus if I lived significantly longer, I would be significantly more accomplished.

In my current life, I don't have the freedom to do something like go to asia-land for 20-50 years and master a martial art(for example) without having to dedicate my entire life to it, and sacrificing many other paths I could have chosen.

Should I get the ability to live much longer, it means I will actively seek out new accomplishments that were barred from me before, not be demotivated because I have all the time in the world.

That type of attitude would be common among immortal humans as well, because those not open to new experiences will commit suicide from depression as is common among many older people who feel they've lived too long, and thus immortal humans would be self-selecting(as in, only those with the mental capacity will make it), which just takes us down another evolutionary path.

[Neosutra]

I also disagree with death being life's biggest motivator. People improve their lives to make it more enjoyable/acceptable to live, not as some defining fist shake at the inevitibility of death.

Having our species self replicate over and over, DRASTICALLY slowing social and scientific progress through each generation having to relearn every lesson the last thousand generations learned is NOT productive. Death is a very unfortunate biproduct that inhibits human life, not contributes to it.

[The_OG_Nelta]

These are my questions, and I need to answer them as well, so would love some feedback on my answers.
I am answering these questions like I am talking to myself so yeah.. easier for me..

SUMMARY OF THE POINTS I MAKE BELOW SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ IT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO (I just started typing and ended up writing a whole lot more than I want to make people read):
-In response to your first point, I argue that evolution does not cause the old to die, but the process of evolution itself only happens if the old dies, so it is only a result of the old dying.
-I agree with your second point that evolutionary fitness does not lead to the individuals living a longer life because evolution is only concerned with the passing down of genes, not of the survival of the individuals, so evolution does not actually cause individuals to live longer.
-However, this does not actually explain why people die. This only explains why evolution does not cause people not to die.

For these points, if you disagree, please actually read my explanations for those points below before showing me where I was wrong, so that you won't ask a question that I've already answered.

My opinion on this issue (not elaborated further below):
I almost feel like "why do we die" is more properly considered part of the question of "why do we live" - as "why does that living end at some point?" We usually just take it as given that we live, because that happens to be the situation that we find ourselves in. Biologically, it seems like parts of our body just generally wear down over time (for example, telomeres which gradually get shorter and signal when cells should die). We can imagine that this doesn't have to be the case because our bodies were able to generate all of its cells at the beginning, so it could still generate a new cell for each one that wears down or goes bad. So why does death still happen? Maybe it's part of the second law of thermodynamics - everything that happens in the universe increases entropy - friction happens, there's air resistance, cars rust, things wear down over time. There's no reason why the body should be different - it just wears down bit by bit until it's no longer able to sustain itself, and then death happens.

I could probably come up with other possible reasons or factors leading into it, but I can't think of anymore at the moment, so I think that's plenty long. Enjoy reading it all!

BELOW:
You seem to be approaching it from a certain perspective - evolutionarily, like you said, but with an assumption; something along the lines of "evolution would make us be able to live forever were it not for the fact that 2) living forever is not considered evolutionarily fit or even 1) detrimental to the process of evolution."

In response, I think it's important to actually talk about how evolution works. All that genetic mutation, recombination, and sexual production do is to promote (relatively rapid) gene diversity. The only reason that this gene diversity leads to "better" or more fit individuals/generations as time goes on is because in different environmental circumstances, with specific kinds of limited resources, some of the phenotypes of these individuals is more able to survive than others, so the "less fit" die off, and you're left with the more fit ones. It's important to talk about the process because it's not like evolution "programs our cells to die" - it's just a natural process that happens more or less arbitrarily. But a key point is the necessity of limited resources.. If there were unlimited resources, then evolution wouldn't really have an effect - all the different genes would not have to compete to survive, and there would be no tendency towards "better" because all of them would be equally fit for survival. Thus, concerning your first point, there's no reason why individuals have to die because of evolution. If there were unlimited resources, both the old and the new would survive. Since there does exist a scarcity of resources though, evolution only happens if the old are not as fit as the new so that the old do die off. However, an important point is that evolution happens AS A RESULT OF the old dying off, but evolution DOES NOT CAUSE the old to die. Thus, evolution is not the CAUSE of death, only the RESULT.

Moreover, what I've discussed so far is about "old" and "new" gene pools - genes that go from generation to generation. The process of evolution itself doesn't "care" about the individual. Like you said with the second point, the continued survival of an individual does not matter as long as they reproduce and propagate their genes to the next generation. Thus, assuming a scientific perspective that evolution has driven and still drives all life, what happened is that environmental conditions have tended to kill individual organisms over time, and evolution has just made these individuals more fit and better able to pass on their genes to the next generation. By the process of evolution itself, however, there is no reason why individuals in subsequent generations should be prone to living longer as long as they can still continue their gene pool. (Basically, I agree with your second point, but wanted to hash it out more.)

This does not completely answer the question as to why we die though - just because evolution doesn't make us live longer over time doesn't explain why we don't.

[Cadsuane]

I also disagree with death being life's biggest motivator. People improve their lives to make it more enjoyable/acceptable to live, not as some defining fist shake at the inevitibility of death.

Having our species self replicate over and over, DRASTICALLY slowing social and scientific progress through each generation having to relearn every lesson the last thousand generations learned is NOT productive. Death is a very unfortunate biproduct that inhibits human life, not contributes to it.

I've gotta disagree with you too. It's too easy to argue that children relearning collective human knowledge is precisely what keeps us from stagnating intellectually and culturally when ideologies, social movements, cultural paradigms and so forth come about in large part due to generational changes. A society of immortals would be too conservative to ever progress.

I also think that death gives us purpose as individuals, though the reason for that is a bit more philosophical.

[Max™]

Way simpler than it's being made here: because Eve ate a fucking apple.



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Heh, couldn't keep a straight face for that one, dammit.

Anyway, it's because there is no manner for genes which prevent aging to be selected for after an organism breeds. As far as our genes are concerned, we're only ever as old as the last time we breed.

If you want a vaguely eugenic manner in which to extend human lifespans, push the average breeding age higher: more genes which contribute to successful mating later in life would get passed on.


Strictly speaking, due to an inability to consider the ridiculous nature of A-series time (i.e. the present is the only moment which exists, and the future isn't real), death is simply another boundary, just as your birth was. You weren't sad to be born after all those eons of time you missed, were you? Why should you be sad that you're already dead at some point in the future, and missing out on all the eons after that point?

Other than curiousity, and the sheer enjoyment of knowing things, I suppose?

[Weiing]

I think death is a motivator to living as well as a discouragement to living. It is really the individual's own interpretation and application of greater meaning to his or her life. Some may revel in the awesomeness of even being alive, an opportunity that seems so common that it's taken for granted, but it may not be. On the other hand, some will lean towards nihilism. Both are acceptable viewpoints and interpretations of life in the face of death.

Your question is an interesting one. It is hard to break free from the 'it is what it is' because we don't know how life would work any other way. Obviously, now there is that 'immortal' jellyfish...and I'm sure some may have even thought how can such a simple creature be able to commit a feat us 'intelligent' and 'evolved' beings have been striving for eons? Yeah, we can go into the scientific aspects of it... but that's been pretty much covered.

I think living comes at a cost. To have evolved, from a single organism to something so complex, comes at a cost. To be able to get a glimpse at this world, however flawed and ruthless, comes at a cost. And the cost is death.

I think death is essential for evolution, to aid in the generations to come. Strictly speaking for humans, if we were immortal... yeah, maybe we wouldn't have to teach incoming generations of the past, the culture and customs, and everything else. However, I agree with one poster that we would become stagnant in our thinking. For humans, evolution isn't just about survival or improving biological and physiological aspects, I believe it also applies to the development of our cognition, our philosophical/intellectual/psychological growth.

Death is also essential to the Earth because it kind of keeps it going. Death and decay replenishes the Earth, stimulates growth in plants. Obviously, I'm not sure how much coffins help with that...but death of animals and of humans past, perhaps.

I sometimes do wonder, what it would have been like to have been born in a different generation, in a different era. A small part of me regrets not having been more when Socrates lived, for instance. At the same time, a part of me yearns to live to see the future, to see what the world will be like then. But to put it quite simply, having acknowledged death, I'm grateful for having even been given the chance to live and experience what I have.

PS
Sorry so longggggggg

[Redshift]

The significance of death? It's the only indisputable part of life that you, along with everyone else, are absolutely certain of but can never prove by firsthand experience.

[The_OG_Nelta]

This is on like a school forum for my class, so putting opinions from there, here.

Although I could talk from a religious point of view, I'm gonna stick with the secular stuff. If you look at death from a "scientific" point of view, first consider the physics of the universe. The properties of the universe are founded by physics and how particles associate with one another. If we look at life as part of the domain of these ... See Moregoverning principles, then it all makes more sense. By law, the energy in the universe is constantly being converted to non-usable energy and the entropy of the universe is constantly increasing. If we look at life, we see that all life is, in fact, energy. Living organisms generate, convert, and use energy. If you look at all evolutionary adaptations, you'll notice that when nature "evolves", it will evolve while still obeying the fundamental laws of physics and the universe. It simply evolves methods to make living more efficient. For example, the lungs that we use to gather oxygen; there are much more inefficient ways that we could use to breathe, however, to facilitate our being terrestrial creatures, nature has graciously granted us inflatable O2 tanks that we carry inside of us. Upon further inspection, we notice that the lungs still obey every aspect of physics; the air enters due to a change in the pressure and concentration gradient between the inside and outside of our lungs. Diffusion of the air occurs by the same principles. If we look at death, the we can conclude that nature has already evolved every possible way to extend life, all the while following the principles of the universe.

[kuronosan]

Neo hit the nail on the head, there is gene loss during cell division. This is probably a terrible analogy, but think of it as having a piece of rope (single strand of DNA) which you're going to duplicate. You tie it at the end with another piece of rope for complimentary base pairing, but then you need to cut the knot off to separate both ropes, both of which are shorter than the original.
There has been some headway into prolonging aging though. Iirc, both cancer cells and embryo cells are the only immortal cells in humans, and don't have any gene loss.

Actually, there is no gene loss during cell divison. There are telomere losses, which eventually eat into nucleotides and cause turnover. Once the essential nucleotides (our genes) are eaten away (much later) then the cells can no longer replace themselves as the DNA needed to code them has degraded too far to replicate properly.

Cardiac cells cannot fix themselves once they die, so that is why many people die from heart failure or total systemic shutdown when they are older. DNA replication is simply too imperfect. It's just in larger organisms it takes a longer time before this happens at a level sufficient enough to cause death.

You see it happen in bacteria within a matter of hours.

[Max™]

I don't think that statement that "the Universe has evolved every way to avoid death" is terribly apt. Speaking strictly of our planet, as I said, once you breed you are dead from the perspective of genes. Living longer to help raise children is indeed an aspect, but beyond that? You aren't being selected for your innate resistance to cancer/cardiac problems/high cholesterol/osteoporosis if you aren't breeding that late in life.

As for the Universe dying, if it didn't have temporal asymmetry, we would not be able to accumulate or become aware of new information in anything resembling the sense we consider normal.

The difference between the state of the early Universe and the late Universe can be thought of as a flow of information, not just a reduction of order/increase of entropy.

Which is all genes are, a way to encode and accumulate information.

[Zalius]

cause matter is tricky like that

[Sly]

Personally I think its kind of futile to think of how humans die from an classic evolutionary perspective simply because we are no longer the bitches of the environment; the environment is our bitch. We change it to adapt where we want to live, whether it be in the north pole or Toronto, and this allows us to live well beyond what our "natural" life expectancies were. Advances in modern medicine have done the same, allowing individuals who would not have been "evolutionary fit" to live relatively normal lives. This isn't to say that heritability does not play a role, but its beginning to play less and less of a role. With advancing genetic screening and recombination techniques, in the future gene therapy may become a saving grace for diseases like Huntington's and even cancer. Perhaps even in life-acquired mutations of an individual can be one day fixed, although feasibility of this idea blows my mind.
That said, human "aging" death mechanistically can be explained by reactive oxygen species formed from metabolism, gene mutation from a variety of mutagenic agents, both chemical and radiative, and of course telomere shortening, all of which contribute to cellular decay at some level. They may not give you the why, but the sure present a good argument for the how.

[Darus Grey]

I always think it rather pompous of us to assume evolution no longer applies to us.

I can't remember which, but I read in one of the genetics journals on human evolution patterns, that a subsect is currently selecting for longevity(the wealthy, affluent), in that they are actually breeding longer and longer lifespans with each generation at a genetic level(as opposed to outside influences like medicine), and this has already been going on for thousands of years.

If you take the family trees of many "old money" types there is a staggeringly SMALL pool of humans from which they actually breed(the sickly prince is an archtype of this phenomenon, he's sick due to royal inbreeding).

With the speculation that if this trend continues for even another 1000 years or so, we'll actually see a species split within humanity, rich white lords who live 150-300 years as the "norm" that can no longer breed with other humans, with further speculation that we could eventually breed death out among this group over the course of 5000~years.

[Cochise]

the only thing that dies is consciousness... everything else just changes

[Zilong]

I always think it rather pompous of us to assume evolution no longer applies to us.

I can't remember which, but I read in one of the genetics journals on human evolution patterns, that a subsect is currently selecting for longevity(the wealthy, affluent), in that they are actually breeding longer and longer lifespans with each generation at a genetic level(as opposed to outside influences like medicine), and this has already been going on for thousands of years.

If you take the family trees of many "old money" types there is a staggeringly SMALL pool of humans from which they actually breed(the sickly prince is an archtype of this phenomenon, he's sick due to royal inbreeding).

With the speculation that if this trend continues for even another 1000 years or so, we'll actually see a species split within humanity, rich white lords who live 150-300 years as the "norm" that can no longer breed with other humans, with further speculation that we could eventually breed death out among this group over the course of 5000~years.

Elves?

[Talus]

However, in life as we know it in all of its evolutionary greatness, how does death benefit?

The biggest thing that sticks out in my head is death benefits the ecosystem by returning organic matter to the soil to be used as nutrients for things that are still living. One example is the saprophytes in the soil - bacteria in the soil that fix nitrogen for plants to use in assembling amino acids. If this didn't happen, eventually plants would die out, then everything else would go sooner or later after that, since plants are the base of the food chain.

[Drako]

I always think it rather pompous of us to assume evolution no longer applies to us.

I can't remember which, but I read in one of the genetics journals on human evolution patterns, that a subsect is currently selecting for longevity(the wealthy, affluent), in that they are actually breeding longer and longer lifespans with each generation at a genetic level(as opposed to outside influences like medicine), and this has already been going on for thousands of years.

If you take the family trees of many "old money" types there is a staggeringly SMALL pool of humans from which they actually breed(the sickly prince is an archtype of this phenomenon, he's sick due to royal inbreeding).

With the speculation that if this trend continues for even another 1000 years or so, we'll actually see a species split within humanity, rich white lords who live 150-300 years as the "norm" that can no longer breed with other humans, with further speculation that we could eventually breed death out among this group over the course of 5000~years.

this wont really happen because technology nowdays becomes cheap faster and faster also, so, this kind of thing will happen only for a few years or decades at most, not leaving time to create such a scenario you imagined.