Why do we die?
I have a question that I have often thought about but have trouble finding answers to. In the last few hundred years mankind seems to be able to extend the average life that we are able to live, but there seems to be a problem with our technology to be able to do anything beyond that. I don't know where the problem is really with how the cells in our body age, whether our vital organs are not able to continue functioning beyond a certain time, and/or it is some other issue but there doesn't seem to be a reason why we have to die when we reach beyond a certain age and/or there is a way to prevent this from happening.
I'm wondering if anyone here on this forum has any addition information/insights into this problem.
I'm wondering if anyone here on this forum has any addition information/insights into this problem.
Comments (47)
Most of the increase in life expectancy over centuries has to do with nutrition and sanitation. I'm sure immunization and anti-biotics have had a big role too. Insect and rodent control also. At the same time, I don't think the maximum age to which people live has changed much. The three score and 10 years specified in the Bible is still fairly accurate.
I think the technology associated with longer life is probably at a whole different level affecting different bodily systems than that required for disease control.
Are you asking Why life is life?
Because life includes death by definition (implicitly at least).
I wish technology is not able to solve the nature of passing away. Death is one of the purest conditions of humankind. If we develop worthy plans and projects is precisely for this reason because our time on the earth is limited. When a person passes away, it flourishes a different concept about him: the one you had when this person was alive and the one you have now when is dead.
Even within healthy bodies, death is an ongoing process. Cells die, either by wearing out or by following instructions -- programmed death (apoptosis). Cells that don't die as intended become, cancers and end up killing the organism.
A line of research currently being looked at is HeLa Cells.
From Wiki:
HeLa is an immortal cell line used in scientific research. It is the oldest and most commonly used human cell line. The line is derived from cervical cancer cells taken on February 8, 1951,[named after Henrietta Lacks, a 31-year-old African-American mother of five, who died of cancer on October 4, 1951. The cell line was found to be remarkably durable and prolific, which allows it to be used extensively in scientific study.
The cells from Lacks's cancerous cervical tumor were taken without her knowledge or consent, which was common practice in the United States at the time. Cell biologist George Otto Gey found that they could be kept alive, and developed a cell line. Previously, cells cultured from other human cells would only survive for a few days. Cells from Lacks's tumor behaved differently.
The (horrible imo) Elon Musk is making some progress with neuralink.
CRISPR tech is very interesting.
The most interesting claim coming from the scientists involved in current transhuman technologies is that the first person to live to between 135 and 175 years is alive today but many such scientific claims in the past have proved unfounded.
Further info on HeLa cells is that they are basically telomeres.
The text below is from https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Telomere:
[b]A telomere is a region of repetitive DNA sequences at the end of a chromosome. Telomeres protect the ends of chromosomes from becoming frayed or tangled. Each time a cell divides, the telomeres become slightly shorter. Eventually, they become so short that the cell can no longer divide successfully, and the cell dies.
Telomere. Along the chromosomes, which are long pieces of DNA...when you look at them as a picture, they look like lines. Well, the hard part is how to protect the ends of this line. Because you could imagine that if you didn't protect them they would become ragged, and maybe there'd be little parts of them that would be lost. So the telomeres are special DNA that sit at the end of the chromosome that have repetitive sequences that are recognized as the end of the chromosome, but they keep the chromosome from becoming frazzled or damaged. And every time the cell divides, the telomeres also divide. But sometimes they can become shorter. And as they become shorter, that's a clock that the cell is counting to know how old it is, and that will limit how many times the cell can divide without losing some of the important DNA on the chromosome. And one of the interesting features that's understood now about telomeres is that in cancer cells, which have a more infinite capacity for self-division, one of the important changes that they make is that they keep their telomeres long, so that molecular clock goes away and those cells can keep dividing, even though they should get to the end of their lifespan. And that's one of the ways in which the cancer cells basically trick the human body into thinking that they should still keep replicating.[/b]
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/384334
:death: :flower:
This sounds more or less the old conventional way of thinking when it comes to "life extension" - proper diet, avoiding high risk activities, getting shots for the flu and other diseases, etc., etc. which may or may not extend a persons life for maybe another 10 to 20 years and has been taught for around the last 100 to 200 years about.
However this thread is meant to focus on the "non-conventional" such as perhaps cryonics, gene therapies, cloning and what not, unless there is some kind of "radical" kind of conventional therapies that has a means of extending peoples lives for 30+ years or more such as something that is talked about in I believe is called the Blue Zones which I'm not sure if it fits into either into the conventional or unconventional medicine.
And a few hundred years ago people where saying that if man was meant to fly God would have given us wings. Both that argument and yours is really just an appeal to authority - this is the way it is now and it is what we know so why bother to question such things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
While the two things in life that seem to be certain is death and taxes, in reality there is actually nothing in life that is really certain.
Again like Alkis Piskas's post, this is just an appeal to authority/antiquity. While there may be issues if the human population getting too big, for the purposes of this thread I'm not bothering to address such an issue because it is an entirely different subject on it's own.
I have heard about both the supposedly immortal cancer cells that continually grow and are used in medical research and about CRISPR. To be honest, I don't know much about them other than that they exist and may help in solving certain health issues and/or may help provide insights into how to extend human life.
What doesn't add up is our nociceptive system - why does it exist if not to prevent/avoid crossing the river Styx? Clearly, it isn't working all that well, oui mes amies?
Too, the whole thing reminds me of villainous masterminds killing all his/her subordinate henchman after a certain objective (more life i.e. offspring) is achieved. Jibes with the theory of evolution I'd say.
I will try to read up on this more, but I think the problem with "entropy" isn't an issue that is just something that affects organic systems but it is something that EFFECTS ALL systems, organic or not.
For example in IT there is the constant problem with even if failure rate with the electronic devices used in computer system is a lot better than it was decades ago, there is still the constant issue of what to do and how to handle such issues such as when a hard drive fails. If you have a home computer and the hard drive stops working you have either the option of replacing the hard drive or buying an entirely new computer, however there is still the issue of how to deal with the potential loss of data that was stored on it. In something like a corporate/business setting it is unacceptable for one to lose their data because of such issues so they have to do things like back up their information, use redundant hard drives (multiple hard drives that have copies of the same information if one goes down), and/or redundant computers in which if one fails another can come online which will handle the work required from the downed computer.
While it is a given that such redundancy is easier to implement through electronics then with organic systems (or at least complex organic systems such as human beings), it at least shows the potential for human beings to be able to at least partially overcome some of the problems with entropy that you talked about.
How do I know this, just the fact that when a child is born THEIR DNA is (more or less) not NOT EFFECTED BY THE TIME THAT HAS PASSED while their parents spent growing up and becoming old enough to have offspring. Because of this it is a given that there is a line cells used in the process of both creating us when we are just babies and then used again in creating both sperm and eggs cells of our offspring. These line of cells, no matter how long they are used over and over again, DO NOT AND CAN NOT BE EFFECTED BY the AGING PROCESS.
If any species didn't have these line of cells to counter -effect the aging process, they would immediately die out in a generation or too. Because of this I think it is safe to say that all organic beings have some means to create a similar kind of redundancy I talked about in my post to 180 Proof about information redundancy created in IT systems, however the information that is protected is DNA information instead of electronic information.
I don't know "If" knowledge of such cells and their process helps us in any way in prolonging human life, but it shows that least in lives of cells there is a way to keep a certain line of cells as more or less IMMORTAL in at least in a way that we can pass mostly unaltered DNA from one generation to another.
I can't see the connection, but anyway. The "argument" above is almost the same with the classic "If my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle"! :smile: Mine, if you can call it an "argument" too, is not hypothetical. It's factual.
Quoting dclements
Well, you can evade taxes! :smile:
OK, joking aside, I really don't see what are you trying to find out or establish in your topic ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality
The only reason you believe death is inevitable is because all of your life you have seen anything that lives eventually dies. Before the invention of the airplane an other technology, people had only seen bird an other animals fly but never human beings so it was easy for them to assume that human being would never fly since they never had before.
When you (or anyone else) base their opinion only on how things are now and/or what is generally assumed by the public at large (while ignoring other possibilities), then they are making an appeal to authority/appeal to antiquity fallacy. If you don't understand this kind of fallacy I suggest you read up on it . While I can lead a horse to water I can't make them (or in this case you) drink
Appeal to tradition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition
Also as a rule of thumb in philosophy, if you can make a quick answer to any complex issue in less than a minute without hardly thinking at all it is highly likely your position will be based on one or more fallacies. Also when your position isn't really based on any real information (ie. is merely a sentence that states your opinion) it is again likely just based on a fallacy. Only when you get to the point where you can state "this is what I currently know, but my viewpoint can change based on new information presented to me" do you stop making logical fallacies in philosophy since any and all human knowledge is subject to change depending on new information being made available to us.
If you do not understand why this is I suggest you read up on the Doctrine of Anekantavada
Anekantavada/Doctrine of No-One Sidedness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I only ask that read some of the stuff I just posted (as well as some of what others posted), think abut what we are trying to say, and then post back with what your thoughts are on it the subjects that are brought up.
Thanks
I think I more or less agree with your statement if it is about that the Abrahamic religions provide an unsatisfactory answer as too why we have to die, however I'm also coming from a standpoint of that all conventional answers as to WHY we have to die (instead of trying to extend life) is pretty moot.
Also I'm kind of assuming that all religious doctrine that claims that the first men such as Adam and his immediate descendants lived longer than modern humans 9because of their closer connection to God perhaps?) isn't true since there does not exist any knowledge at the present to support such claims.
Of course if there was information on how or why such humans lived longer was available we should/would take it into consideration. This is a thread focusing on the science ramifications of man trying to extend his life, not the theological ramifications of extending human life.
So, if you want to live forever, be a hydra.
There are also plants that live a long time, like a sea grass off the coast of Australia that is around 100,000 years old.
Presumably, immortal species do not evolve once they become immortal. They just stay the same. So, had you been born an immortal hydra millions of years ago, you'd still be hydra. Or, had you been born into the last common ancestor of apes and humans 20,000,000 years ago, you'd still be the last common ancestor. No philosophic mongering for you, you immortal not yet very bright-ape.
There's a jellyfish that's considered to be biologically immortal because it occasionally reverts to a younger stage and starts over. For the rest of us, it's Hayflick's limit.
Me too. It's not for sissies.
:rofl: You can do it! C'mon!
Good people are glorified in society - books, poems, biographies, medals, certificates - but, here's where it gets interesting, also pitied and ridiculed, yes all at the same time, as naïve (read numskull/cretin/idiot/dunce/fool/etc.) and that means either a world of pain or an early grave. At this rate, in a coupla centuries, the only good person would be a dead person; evolution dictates that this is so.
The only explanation for good people still amongst us is memetics, not genetics. No wonder the physical world was deemed evil by gnostics? Please google for more info.
:up: :party: You da man!
I did read the whole stuff that uou posted. And I responded to that. So we are OK.
Ok, here is a question that would be interesting for someone to provide an answer to:
If Hayflick's limit is true (or even maybe true) for regular cells in large complex organisms (such as humans), why do the crown cells (to be honest I don't know if they are crown cells, but for some reason I want to call them that) or whatever cells involved creating the used in animal reproduction ARE NOT effected by Hayflick's limit and/or anything else that involves cellular aging. In one of my previous posts in this thread I pointed out that it is a given that ALL ANIMALS require a process in which the cells involved in reproduction have to go through a process where the DNA is somehow either fix and/or anti-aged in some way that allows the cells in the animals offspring to be more or less "brand new" just as it is with any and all animals that are born healthy/without defect.
Without the means to create an IMMORTAL line of cells, a species would quickly die off and become extinct. If I could remember what and/or where I read about this process I would post it here but for the life of me, I can't recall what it is called.
I suggest you either drink more coffee and/or perhaps pop some nicotine gum into your mouth to help you feel more alive. While the process of getting older isn't all that fun, I can tell you that it is nowhere near as bad as the actual process of dying is.
The closest you can get to it without actually being dead is imagine your deep in an underground cave by yourself and you get stuck and can't move. Then while waiting/hoping that someone comes to help you your flashlight goes out. Perhaps for the first minute or two (but likely in much shorter of a time) you are able to keep some of your cool, but then you feel like you are having trouble breathing and your mind start rapidly racing with thoughts of both how to try to escape and what will become of you if you are unable to free yourself. When you are really in a situation where you might die you often A)Unable to move/feel like you are paralyzed B) Unable to see and/or hear what is going on around you C)Feel like you are trapped in your own mind without being able to do anything about your condition.
I'm not saying that it is a given that everyone goes through such experiences when they are close to death, I'm just trying to point out it isn't quiet as peaceful as some people lead you to believe. Also it is worth noting that while you are pronounced "dead" soon after your heart stops beating, the human brain can survive for somewhere around 20-30 minutes once oxygen is no longer being supplied to it. And though it maybe isn't a given that one is conscience all that time, it is very likely isn't exactly a pleasant experience if one is conscience while lingering around in this world just before they pass into the next.
Stem cells? I think they're immortal. Cancer cells are too.
I think Bittercrank may have been onto something regarding the ability of a mortal population to adapt to changing conditions?
To me, these are all just pieces of the jigsaw. I think it will take a while yet before we get the first transhuman who lives for 1000 years. You might however be interested in the following:
Copied from the site: https://transhumanity.net/becoming-the-first-transhuman-a-call-for-the-right-stuff/
[i]Sometimes technological congestion in a given field can be cleared with decisive action. For example, the CEO of the gene therapy company BioViva, Liz Parrish, took action to help clear the way for lengthening the human lifespan sooner than would otherwise have occurred. She recognized that the only way to speed up human trials on lengthening telomeres (to enable the potential for longer lifespan and freedom from the diseases of old age) was to undergo gene therapy herself.
So, in September of 2015, Liz Parrish, under the supervision of the noted members of the BioViva Advisory Board, received human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) gene therapy by injection. The telomerase enzyme makes cancers potentially immortal, and mutations in the hTERT gene have been implicated in promoting certain types of cancer. But Liz Parrish will be regularly monitored for her gene therapy results, which will be made public. Mice given telomerase (Tert) therapy by injection did not have an increase in cancer.
As a result of her actions, Liz Parrishs therapy is the first known telomerase lengthening human trial. In 2015, trials were conducted on human cells in culture, but Liz Parishs experiment is the only in vivo progress of note in the field of telomerase research since 2012. In that year, Dr. María Blasco, of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center, injected mice with just one shot of telomerase each and achieved a 13% increase in longevity in elderly mice and a 24% increase in the younger adult mice. Blascos experiment represents the only in vivo progress of note since the 2010 Harvard Medical School experiment, led by Dr. Ronald DePinho, that resulted in dramatic signs of age reversal in elderly genetically-engineered mice: The mice were engineered to age prematurely, but were made clinically young when their telomeres were lengthened through drug intervention. It is hard to understand why no trial has since been set up to determine how long the lifespan of normal mice might be extended through the telomere therapy employed.[/i]
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/655900
As Woody Allen said, "I'm not afraid of dying -- I just don't want to br there when it happens." And he, of course, was joking,
Seriously, many people probably experience varying degrees of derangement in the final hour(s). If death isn't swift, there may be successive organ failure and a rapid build-up of toxic substances which amplify the dying process. So yes, it could be pretty unpleasant for a while. But then it is over and the curtain of silent oblivion descends forever.
Rather than focusing on stretching out life, even life without end, an actual attainable goal is to live life in the knowledge that life is short. Make the most of living while one can.
Old age can be a burden, true enough, but I know people (like myself) who are very much engaged in doing what makes life meaningful and interesting to them. One can and should prepare to die with as much serenity as possible, but not dwell on it.
The fact that cancer cells, certain stem cells, etc. are immortal isn't really all that important since it is already a given that single cell organism (such as bacteria) have the means to be able to be able to divide/grow indefinitely without having to deal with the issues of aging, or at least it being a real problem for them. Just as I said before "if" they didn't, they would cease to exist. Many single cell organism have evolved to the point were they have incredible means to deal with various environment hazards such as radiation, vacuum, etc. One strain discovered has been called the "Conan" bacteria.
Deinococcus radiodurans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans
Extremophile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremophile
I apologize that I'm late in replying. My mom had to go to the hospital yesterday so I kind of got a bit distracted from getting back to this thread.
I will have to read/review this thread in the upcoming days in order to have a better idea of what it was all about. And again sorry for being late in replying to you post.
I know it may sound like a stupid position to have but I believe that extending peoples lives serves a larger purpose than merely giving the people the luxury of living longer.
The system that we have now where children spend close to twenty to twenty five years growing up and trying to lean enough that they can be productive for about just another twenty five to thirty years which at that point they are in such decline that they are less useful then they where when they were younger.
It is not exactly a one to one ratio. but for every year of growing up/learning one can only spend about one year of said investment to be able to work and try to better the community around them. This cost is just something we have come to be something we expect to have to deal with in the modern world but it is also something that can be said to be costly and wasteful and it requires those that DO WORK to often have to work in unsatisfactory conditions because they have to do more work for those that are unable to be productive.
A large part of my argument is that "IF" we were able to extend peoples lives it is likely that either many or most of these people could work longer, work conditions might improve, and society might be able to improve due to the extra idea/input from these people that are contributing to society instead of them just wasting away in nursing homes in their later years.
There is an old saying I heard once "Youth is wasted on the young". While this is more or less true today, does it have to be in the near future?
No problem!
Longevity will be of no value to people who will be stuck in dead-end and life-sucking jobs until they are 100. One of the reasons people long to stop working is that their jobs are highly unrewarding. We can't all be like Anthony Fauci, still going strong at 81, and ready to move on to something else. I'll take that back: Many of us could be like Tony, still going strong at 81 -- but not under the current circumstances.
Life can be more enjoyable than it tends to be. Work can be more satisfying than it usually is. This can not happen within the existing economic arrangement, even if we lived to be 200.
My impression is, based on observation, reading, and experience is that most people have their most creative and productive years between by age 40, age 50 at the latest. I'm not thinking of "creative professions" here -- rather, people who can create, innovate, invent, and implement effective solutions to social or technical problems. The two decades following brain maturation (around age 25) seem to be our most mentally productive periods.
It's a very good question why this period of high productivity doesn't last longer (for most people). At age 50 I was past my peak in creativity. Intellectually, I might be reaching my peak at age 75. Time will tell. Too bad I wasn't functioning at 25 the way I function at 75. "I could have been a contender."
There are 100 year old people who remain intellectually and emotionally engaged, but they are really few in number.
The point I am trying to get at is that there is something... existential, not biological that brings our periods of productive creativity to a peak, and then diminishment. You know, Kant said that nothing straight was ever built with the crooked timber of mankind. The fact is, we keep running into our species deep, built in imitations. It wears us out.
I searched for some updates on Liz Parrish and found a few articles including the one below from Quora. I always like to find both sides of a claim, especially since Liz represents a company who is no doubt in pursuit of profit.
[i]I asked Dr. Hiromitsu Nakauchi PhD a world renowned geneticist that question. Here is his answer,
I am the head of the Nakauchi Lab of Stem Cell Therapy at Stanford University working my entire life in genetics uncovering new diseases, elucidating the causes of disease, and developing therapeutic modalities by connecting the knowledge and methodology of basic science including immunology, molecular biology, cell biology, and developmental engineering with clinical medicine. Our ultimate goal is to contribute to establishing new frontiers of stem cell therapy and to make clinical applications of stem cells a reality. There is no scientific evidence that Ms. Parrish has lengthened her life by a single moment. There is also no scientific evidence her health has improved. Working outside the rigorous scientific method and attempting unapproved FDA, HHS or CDC regulations for authorization is ludicrous and what Ms. Parrish has attempted is a new low in pseudoscientific quackery. Altering the genetic makeup of humans by lengthening telomeres is dangerous, as the ageing process is poorly understood. The telomeres' function is to restrict the number of times a cell can divide thereby multiplying to suppress cancer. Meddling with a fundamentally important tumor-suppressive mechanism that has evolved in long-lived species like ours is not a particularly good idea.[/i]
It isnt a back up mechanism. Life started off immortal. Bacteria dont have a programmed death. They just keep dividing until accident overtakes them.
But death was evolved as a way to sharpen up the evolutionary process once life became multicellular. There was a division of the body into its immortal germline - the genetic information being transmitted generation to generation - and the mortal disposable soma.
Every generation then becomes a clean test of the genetic fitness. You dont have all these ancient remnants hanging around with their out of date DNA.
Bacteria dont even have proper sex but just share DNA fragments so can pick up the latest useful bits of genetic kit at any time.
But life has evolved to be ever more digital, or counterfactual, in how it likes to expose single individuals to the competition of life.
Complex organisms are a complex package of interacting gene programs. Nature had to make sharper judgements at the level of a whole body. Hence the immortal germline got tucked away safely in the gonads and the body was made disposable - built to have an expiry date and so make the ticking over of generations a thing.
Given death is a designed in feature of complex biology, this likely makes dreams of bio hacking immortality a more difficult task than folk realise.
There is a natural arc of development that shows its logic at all levels of biology from ecology to neurobiology. Life logically follows the three stages of immaturity, maturity and senescence.
To be alive is to become well adapted to living in your environment.
A new born has a lot to learn. But also it is fast growing and so can recover fast from making mistakes. It is set up to learn by trial and error and so throws itself into things in a reckless immature way.
Then comes quite logically the next stage of having learnt a fair bit about how to succeed in the world. If you have survived 30 years, you can call on that much personal experience in dealing with the kind of challenges your environment is likely to chuck at you. You will be mature in having a more optimised balance when making risk/reward decisions. You can still afford mistakes as you still have the ability to recover - repair body damage - but also you are positioned to gain more by investing effort in what you already know works.
What must follow that is senescence, where the balance changes again. After you have lived a long time, you get so smart and well adapted that coping with the everyday becomes an overlearnt routine. You are now wise. You can act out of efficient habit.
But there is a cost to being super adapted. Your recovery powers wane - if you are super adapted, there is no need to change your ways. But that means you are becoming brittle. Live long enough and the unexpected is eventually going to trip you up. Something breaks and it is time for you to be recycled.
So it is all the simple logic of a developmental trajectory where you swap youthful reckless freedom for the unthinking mastery of old age.
Ecologies follow this path of succession as the steps from weeds to scrubland to ancient forest. Brains do it from fast learning infancy to smart maturity to wise old age.
In philosophical terms we die because we are alive. Not dying = not living.
Death had to be evolved as a planned life stage as it became too important just to leave to random environmental accident. Negentropy can only persist if it has the semiotic machinery to keep separating signal from noise. Or in other words, ensure a species remains evolvable because the entropy of DNA corruption gets fixed, the cancers get suppressed.
So life arose as negentropy feeding off entropy flux. To do that, it had to first avoid just being entropified by that energetic environment. And having mastered its negentropic existence by building up the elaborate mechanisms necessary, it started to face the new problem of needing planned obsolescence. It had to add to add back death as another level of negentropic regulatory feedback.
Like dogs of course! :snicker: