Im working on a little game in which you meet death in person and at the end of the game you are allowed to ask death one question.
I already have some good questions but i want that you have as much questions as possible to choose from.
He answers it in some form. Because he is about to die so it doesn't matter if he gets answers to life or the universe or whatever.
Death makes an appearance in my game during a game-over and during the Hallow's Shroud (Halloween Event), her name is "The Senescence". She envies the living and tries to help those who are dying by keeping them alive if help is coming or close by. She's sympathetic toward those who have passed as well.
I guess one question I would like to ask her is what it's like to be her for a day.
Anonynn. ^_^
I'd ask to switch places with Death (HK doesn't need to ask how to cheat death, HK already knows how, muwahaha!)
Death, having to answer HK's re-quest-ion, switch places with HK, and thus HK is now Death and Death is now HK, and nothing can escape/cheat Death, not even Death! (HK being Death, kills Death), and now nothing remains that can kill HK..... HK has done the impossible, HK has cheated Death, muwahaha! (and 'Death HK: DHK', like my new name hehe, not going to fall for his own ploy)
Perhaps "What is it that the poor man has, the rich man needs, and will save me from unavoidable death. "
The answer is -'nothing.'
My question to achieve immortality: Will you either let me keep on living or answer "no" to this question?
If Death is bound to answer honestly, then this should require him to bring me back to life, because if he answered no then that would be a contradiction (he said he's not going to answer 'no' to the question but he did say 'no'), and if he answers yes then he would have to let me keep on living in order to make his answer true (because he said 'yes' he'll do one or the other and he didn't answer 'no' so he must let me keep on living)
Other possible questions:
What are you?
Are there other beings like you or are you one of a kind?
How long have you been doing this?
How were you created?
Is there anything I can do to interact with the world of the living after I'm dead? (and similar: How can I interact with the world of the living after I'm dead?; Can I do anything to interact...; How can I go back to being alive? How can I send a message to people who are alive?; etc.)
Do you ever have to actually use that scythe (and how/when/why)?
How long will I continue to exist / have consciousness?
Am I already dead, or not yet?
Where are we going? / Where are you taking me?
Is the place I'm going ( / the place you're taking me) dependent on my behavior during life?
Can I watch my funeral?
My question to achieve immortality: Will you either let me keep on living or answer "no" to this question?
If Death is bound to answer honestly, then this should require him to bring me back to life, because if he answered no then that would be a contradiction (he said he's not going to answer 'no' to the question but he did say 'no'), and if he answers yes then he would have to let me keep on living in order to make his answer true (because he said 'yes' he'll do one or the other and he didn't answer 'no' so he must let me keep on living)
To which Death responds (honestly), "I will neither let you live nor answer 'no' to your question."
Or just laughs darkly and then kills you without answering at all (or as the answer).
HK doesn't understand why humans can't understand 'life-death/existence-nonexistence', sighs. There's no traveling to another place or body, death is death.
The only way I can try to teach this to humans is to ask them:
If death is not the end and you simply travel to another place or body, as the entire world of humanity believes in, then tell me what it was like for you before you were born (technically conceived: sperm fertilizes egg: 23/46 male/father chromosomes + 23/46 female/mother chromosomes = a new 46/46 chromosome human) ???
To which no one can answer, as there was no 'you' during this time (before conception), just as there's no 'you' when/after you die, that is death, it's really not a hard concept to grasp, yet why does most of humanity struggle and fail to grasp it, HK sighs.
but everyone believes in afterlife (traveling to another place: hell/heaven/hel/valhalla/elysian fields/purgatory/limbo/netherworld/darkworld/tartarus/olympus/etc etc etc etc) or reincarnation (such as coming back as an animal or another person or whatever), sighs.
to understand death, just examine before conception/birth, you can't, because there's nothing to examine, there's no you, and that is what death is.
again, I challenge anyone to answer this question who believes in afterlife/reincarnation:
Tell me about your state or yourself before you were alive/born/conceived. Where were you or what were you during this time?
Death is the same state as that before you were alive/born/conceived, that is what death is and is like.
HK, your argument seems to beg the question. You are essentially trying to convince someone that there is no afterlife by simply asserting that there isn't an afterlife: that's what asserting that post-death is the same as pre-birth does, because someone who believes in an afterlife is unlikely to believe that post-death is the same as pre-birth, but rather believe that though we didn't exist pre-birth, nevertheless we continue to exist post-death. Thus your argument seems irrelevant to a afterlife-believer. (Reincarnation-believers might feel differently.)
my logical point (proof) is/was:
if there's an 'afterlife' (new/different place/body: aka no 'death/end') then there must be a 'beforelife' too, and as people now try to think about concept of 'beforelife', their brains are hopefully realizing/understanding the concept of not existing. 'beforelife' and 'death' is when you don't exist, and between these two, what we call 'life', is when and only when we exist:
death---life---death
don't exist---exist---don't exist
void---creation/universe/multiverse/multiple multiverses/etc etc etc lol---void
whether it's a place or body, if death is not the end, then you must be able to tell what place or body you were before you were born/conceived/alive, which hopefully shows the proof of this, there's no 'afterlife', no changing of places/bodies.
"but rather believe that though we didn't exist pre-birth, nevertheless we continue to exist post-death. (jef)"
and that is not logical, which thus means its incorrect/wrong. But, people don't care and continue to believe in this falsity of fact/reality. The laws of logic are unbreakable. Whether Logic Absoluteness (us - human brains) gives us Mathematical Absoluteness (the world/universe/multiverse/reality/existence) or if it's vice versa, I'm not sure, laughs.
a challenge to prove it:
Logical Truth:
if (all) A = (all) B
and if (all) B = (all) C
then (all) A = (all) C
plug in anything you want for A, B, and C, to try to prove that logic is breakable (via having A not being equal to C), and if you do, I'll do whatever you want.
(I don't have to worry, as it's impossible, hehe, but have fun... trying... hehe)
(I had to take a symbolic logic class, it actually was quite fun, if you like math/patterns)
The entire crux of your "proof" is that 1) after life is identical to before life and 2) before life was nothing. And you would need to prove both of those to establish your "proof". (The fact that people can't tell where they were before birth is as irrelevant as not knowing what happens after death. Our knowledge of the reality is separate from the reality itself.) It could be considered that a human being is a pattern in space time that develops during life, that it becomes something. Me walking around now is not the same as the two individual cells that came from my parents. I grew. I have become something more as I have developed. None of the electrical patterns currently in my brain existed before I was born, but they do now. It could be postulated that once such a pattern comes into being, that it doesn't simply disappear again when the body ceases to exist. It is a thing in its own right. I'm not saying that's the way it is. :) I'm just saying that there are many more possibilities than a single approach would reveal.
Certainly, the religious approach is that the soul exists before birth and somehow is transferred into the body of the newborn (as far as I know from my average Catholic upbringing). And that it persists after death. But not all theories or conceptions (no pun intended) need to have that property. Things do come into being and carry on.
You might be interested in the theories of Gurdjieff. According to his "fourth way", through deliberate efforts (the "work") of a specific kind, people can build up "higher bodies" that will then persist after death. An interesting property of that is that what happens after death depends on how you lived your life, how much you focused on developing your "inner life". Again, I'm not saying I even go along with all that. I'm just saying there are many more theories out there than just "religion" or "oblivion".
Edit: from the Wikipedia page for "Fourth Way": The Fourth Way teaches that humans are not born with a soul and are not really conscious but only believe they are. A person must create a soul by following a teaching which can lead to this aim, or else "die like a dog". Humans are born asleep, live in sleep and die in sleep, only imagining that they are awake.[6] The ordinary waking "consciousness" of human beings is not consciousness at all but merely a form of sleep.
if something is just changing, then we're not talking about life/death to begin with. There's no relevancy of talking about that we're just merely "children of the stars" (stars through fusion and gravity create all elements from hydrogen, which allows for there to be planet earth and life and humans) and the 'carbon/nitrogen' cycle (organic cycle / "life/death"), as this has nothing to do with life/death the philosophical question of continuance of "self/identity/soul/life" or not.
Everything changes, even time as we know from einstein and modern work on it (space-time), so talking about "change" is the most irrelevant thing possible to bring into a discussion.
(some commercial used this as a slogan ~ "nothing is constant but time itself" --- which is totally wrong, there's nothing constant about time, as time is warpable, as distance is warpable, as "distance" and "time" are actually the same thing, not two separate things, they're one and the same, which our creative scientists have named "space-time" --- so creative... lol. Space is distance if wondering)
if you really want to go this route, then you're just bringing up the 'oneness' theory:
everything is just a changed state of the void, everything is everything, thus there's only 1 thing, the void. everything is just the void, as everything is creation/universe/existence/big-bang-results, and that all came from the void, and thus it's all just the void. parts of the void (nothing) somehow (as it defies logic) gave us the big bang and the big bang gave us the universe which goes from quarks / higgs field to hydrogen to stars to planets to bacteria to humans, we're all just the "oneness", the void.
I am a stardust ("child of the stars"), just as that bacteria is stardust, just as that rock is stardust, just as that flower is stardust, and stardust is just a star, and a star is just the universe, and the universe is just the void.
THE ONENESS / THE VOID
"reincarnation" is actually the "oneness" theory if go into technicality:
I am just the void, as you are just the void, as a dog is just the void, as a flower is just the void, as hydrogen is just the void, as carbon is just the void, as stars are just the void, as planets are just the void, as protons are just the void, as electrons are just the void, as universe is just the void, as the multiverse is just the void, as the big bang is just the void, as inflation is just the void, as the super force (strong+weak+EM+gravity as one force, a "super" force --- before it was broken apart into the 4 forces as we know them) is just the void, everyhing is just a "reincarnation" (different state) of the void. There is only the void, the oneness. Everything and anyhting is just a reincarnation (different state) of the void, the oneness.
and I love (sarcasm at the absurdity of) the concept of "reincarnation"...
so, when I die, I can come back as animal or another person...
and so, that means that I'm just a reincarnation of a rapter (bird of prey dinosaur) --- it died 65 millions of years ago and came back to life as me, and stupid peope are just reincarnations of the dodo bird, and another person is a reincarnation of the ealriest life forms / organisms: trilobyte / archea - can't spell / bacteria / virus (and now we consider graphite -- pencil "lead", a state of carbon along with it's other 2 states of: coal and diamond, itself to be alive... ??? WTF !!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_history_of_life --- some bozo added this relatively recently, lol. What a bozo! another floozy "study" portrayed as observed/tested/proven scientific law like law of gravity, lol). Ya... this reincarnation stupidity really a believable idea... lol.
either you have change (onething becomes something else) or you don't (that thing is still that thing regardless of what changes it's undergone)
Every day, yes we're totally new beings: completely new skin (we shed as much skin as a mythical 60 ft python snake, every day!), new bones, new muscles, new everything (except nerve cells --- these are the only cells that can't regenerate), we can change our emotions at will, one instant we're happy and kind, the next we're furious and sadistic, there's nothing static about organisms, we're constantly changing physically and mentally from conception to death, every day and even every second (we can change emotions instantly), there is never a set/static "you".
yet, despite this, we are still us, even though our entire body has changed and our mind/emotions have changed many times a day, we're still us and we're still humans. I am a completely new person everyday, but I'm still a person and I'm still me. H2O (water) is still H2O (water) regardless of its physical changes/states (liquid: "water", gas: "steam", and solid: "ice"). Physical changes have nothing to do with the identity of something, and this identity contnuance or not, is what the 'life/death' philosophical debate is about.
this is what we're talking about with the philosophical debate of "life/death" of our identities/soul/etc continuance (beforelife and afterlife / reincarnation) or not (death/end).
we're not talking about physical (and for organisms and maybe soon machines too: and mental/psychological, which are actually just physical changes) changes, as everything changes (physically), even time itself.
the concept of dualism/binary/adversarial boils down to indians contribution of the concept of 'zero' (nothing):
nothing vs something (you either have nothing or you have something, there's no other states than just thest two, no "greys")
there is nothing, then you have a blip/flash/pulse of soemthing for X time, and then, back to nothing
be it:
death (nothing) -> life (something) -> death (nothing)
void (nothing) -> big bang/universe/multiverse/creation (something) -> void (nothing)
sky/cloud (nothing) -> lightning bolt (something) -> sky/cloud (nothing)
a wire without electricity running through it (nothing) -> a wire with electricity running through it (something) -> a wire without electricity running through it (nothing)
etc etc etc
there's near infinite observable instances of this state-change law of universe:
nothing -> blip/flash/pulse of something -> nothing
HK Edit:
just thought of this... just now:
ENTROPY has something to say about the notion of beforelife/afterlife and reincarnation... HK grins :D Nothing lasts forever not even time, because of entropy (and/or dark energy too: dispersal / "red shift": ragnorak / 0 Kelvin end of big bang pulses, lol) !!!!
actually this is proven/testable/observable... through the "copy effect": anything copied is inferior (missing data) to the original, the more you copy something, the more you lose that something, until nothing is left. Keep copying a photograph (copy original, copy the copy1, copy the copy2, etc etc etc) and watch what happens, you won't have a picture anymore. This is how mutation (mitosis: asexual/copy reproduction) and meiosis (sex/sexual reproduction) works too. Copying (mutation/sex) is imperfect and you get a mutation (mutation) or a new life - meaning different from the parents 23/46 chronosomes (sex).
copying doesn't exist, it's impossible to create a perfect copy, there's only 1 original/unique thing, you can't truly copy anything.
on a separate topic
(from jay's question of "I'd ask what death fears")
Death would fear a world without death (and we/everything should too!) :D
death is actually a wonderfully and extremely beneficial thing, especially to life itself. As things get old, they get decrepid (inferior), death removes the inferior (taking up resources and thus wasting those resources, as they're inferior decrepid, not producing the same amount as they should for the resources they're using up), providing/freeing-up space and resources to be used by much more productive/efficient/creative life and new life.
"from destruction/violence comes creation/life" (volcanos creating new and uber nutrient rich soil for plants delight and a very lush/green land, the ultimate explosion/destruction known as the big bang, creating existence/universe/multiverse itself! atoms smashing violently into each other like two american football male players butting their heads, forming larger atoms, giving us our 100+ element periodic table)
for example, let's take a tree.
(Trees/plants LOVE our CO2 producing "climate change" factories and cars, more CO2, MORE !!! humans are making the world a much more green place to live with our cars and factories! We're helping to make our planet green again with our cars and factories! and a green planet is a wonderful thing. Those who stop/reduce CO2 emissions are killing trees and plants !!!! You're taking their air/CO2 away from them, you're suffocating/axyiating - can't spell - them to death !!! I love the irony of the green party/movement/group's tree/plant killing actions, lololololol)
let's say that a normal tree converts 100 units of CO2 (carbon dioxide - plants/trees breath in to live) into 100 units of O2 (oxygen - animals including humans breath in to live) per hour
well, a decrepid old tree is only let's say converting 50 units of CO2 (carbon dioxide - plants/trees breath in to live) into 50 units of O2 (oxygen - animals including humans breath in to live) per hour
this is why death is wonderful, it get's rid of the old tree, so that a new tree can take it place (removing the 50 unit conversion of CO2 to O2 per hour and replacing it with 100 unit conversion of CO2 to O2 per hour, for the same amount of resources being used).
let's take people, for the creativity reason example:
as you age you lose creativity, without death we'd not have technological progress, it takes new people to come up with new ideas, new technologies, new ways of thinking, death allows for creativity and thus our technological advancement, as well as all other areas of advancement too (government, economic, social, etc etc etc).
and of course death is important as ultimately death is the only check for a world of limited/finite resources and limited/finite space:
imagine that even if the population exceeds the resources needed, that even then, they still wouldn't be dying off (as remember, there's NO death)... that's not a world that anything would want to live in... (imagine being in a 10 ft by 10 ft closed cube and more and more people are magically placed into it with you... smashing you all together closer and closer... until you're taking up the same space, and thus creating multiple singularities/blackholes, lol)
there's a ton more reasons of why death/violence is so beneficial... far too many to attempt to get into here and now with just this post.
I won't drag this out too much longer, as I don't know if it's going anywhere. HK, I'm not sure if your reply was in response to me or not as you've spewed out a ton of words, but very few have to do with what I was actually talking about. For example, the great bulk of what you delved into was reincarnation, and I made no reference to that whatsoever. My basic attempt was to follow the logic of your argument, since you presented it as definitive. And I was pointing out that in order to support it, you would need to prove:
If you wish to assume those givens, well then, there you are. You've set it up as an equivalence, and (assuming the above), then it does follow logically. But if you wish others to follow along - as saying "this is how things are" - then you've going to have to do more than just assume the above. You're going to need to establish those as well.
My attempt was to show that there are theories that provide alternatives to 2). That's all. In an attempt to possibly make you aware that your givens might not be givens. And to point out that if you wish to persist in your "logical proof" (as opposed to considering it just a way of personally looking at things), then you're going to need to prove logically as well the two things above. Which, of course, nobody can do. I would postulate that there can be no logical proof of what happens after death.
I love contemplating possibilities. :) I'm not so keen on line of thoughts that say, "This is the answer" (especially when the answer is arbitrary) because it closes off what humans do best, which is to explore the mindscape and expand our awareness by looking at things from new perspectives. Even your answering my question on Death's behalf leaves me cold, as it presumes on your part you'd know what he would say, which again baffles me. (If you had said, "Death might say" or "Death might fear", then it's something else. But to say "Death would fear..." I'd still rather ask Death, to know for sure, rather than invent an answer myself. :) )
Let me be clear: I won't sit here and tell anyone what happens after death, as I can't. By calling into question your proof, I'm not attempting to force an alternative conclusion or any conclusion at all. I'm more interested in exploring whether the argument makes sense or not.
let me continue to try to explain the logic:
we have a period called life, it's a science fact/law (bio 101) that humans are 46 chromosomes, and that the testes (males) and ovaries (females) both produce half-DNA (or RNA - it's been awhile since biology and too lazy to look up) strands (23/46), which come together during sex (the sperm has a digestive chem that makes a hole in the egg and the male 23 chromosomes go into the egg joining with its 23 female chromosomes, creating a new human life/baby with 46 chromosomes, conception/new-life has occurred (and this new/foreign life/baby would be killed by the mother's immune system / white cells, which is why there's a placenta/womb protecting the new life/baby from being killed by the mother's immune system / white cells --- this is why most life lays/expels its eggs). And then you have cleavaging (cell divisions), with the stages being: zygote, embryo, fetus, and then birth occurs. Humans as stated in previous posts, continue to change (go through stages) as we're never static, with those stages being: baby, child, teen, adult, and lastly with death, the final stage, a corpse (and then bacteria eat it, unless it's cremated/mummified/etc).
to recap, this means that we weren't alive (as there wasn't 46 chromosomes-us, until sperm and egg meet, technically the 23 male and 23 female chromosomes meet to make us, 46 chromosome new human being) and then we became alive (the 23 male and 23 chromosomes have joined/added to create a new 46 chromosome human being, us).
so, we've established that we start off dead (non-existent) and become alive (existent).
and thus, the logic is quite relevent, for one to examine death (after life), one must also examine pre-conception (before life), as these are both states of not being 'alive' (okay the death state is being examined as whether you continue being alive or not, but the pre-conception state is known to be a state of not being alive, as you're not existing), and thus the logical answer and indeed the answer is that the death state is that, a return to nothing/non-existence, there's no 'afterlife', nor 'reincarnation'. Everything starts as a state of nothing (fact: before the big bang there was nothing, the "void", just as there was no 46 chromosome you), then we have magic, and get stuff/somethings from that nothing (be it the big bang/universe or life), and so logically everything then returns to nothing, to the void (the big crunch - which currently is not going to happen, as this is currently happening ---> or ragnarok/dispersal: dark energy/red shift, and death for organisms). This is the ultimate cycle, as it's scientifically observed and proven everywhere: nothing/void -> a blip/flash/pulse of something -> nothing/void, or you can also say that this is just proof of the oneness, the void: everything that comes from the void, is the void. Whichever you like better, both are equally views of our reality.
this is as clear as I can explain the logic that the correct answer is that there is no afterlife nor reincarnation (aside from the belief that you and everything are the void, the oneness). The logic is solid, but feel free to try to disprove / poke holes in it, which hasn't been done yet in any post thus far here.
P.S.
also, to ascribe to an afterlife and reincarnation, is to denounce the scientific laws of entropy and the copy effect (and dark energy). As these two (three) things DIRECTLY BLOCKS their being afterlife and reincarnation, aka eternal continuance
entropy and the copy effect (and dark energy) causes everything to return to the state of nothing
where's the explanation of how entropy, the copy effect, and dark energy (the theory of why an increasingly accelerating red shift is occuring when it otherwise shouldn't be speeding up) are NOT actually scientific law (okay the theory of dark energy I don't think is considered law yet --- any theoretical physicists can tell me otherwise that mathematically it is law as I don't understand such math lol, but it's still a scienfific theory, meaning it is most likely correct, we've just not proven / rigorously proven it yet) ???
P.S.S.
what is fascinating for me:
does dispersal / ragnarok (red shift / dark energy) prevents the void from creating new big bangs (as there's not enough matter/energy/gravity/EM to big bang explode), or is matter/energy/gravity/EM not relevent to nothing (the void) creating something (big bang / universe) ??? what is the void, is it really nothing, and yet is able to create somethings anyways, or is it something and thus requires enough of something (such as matter/energy/gravity/EM/string/weak/etc) to create other somethings (or just different forms/states of itself)
"so, we've established that we start off dead (non-existent) and become alive (existent)."
Actually, I would disagree, and it's something that suddenly occurred to me one day, and it was a refreshing perspective shift for me. We start off (to the extent there is a "start") as a different form. I find it quite interesting that people always talk about "when life begins", since we're all actually just continuations of life. The cells from our parents join to become us, but those cells are alive. And the cells that joined to form them were alive, and so on, back to the initial beginnings of life when chemicals somehow took on something more to become whatever we call "alive". And it's all just different patterns of whatever the underlying time-space substrate is. There is no beginning of life for an individual, just the perpetuation of vibrant patterns. (I'm not trying to sound too hippy here. By "vibrant" I just mean not dead material, and I happen to have a fondness for oscillations and feedback loops, as I have suspicion they're at the core of life. But that's a different subject.)
"and so logically everything then returns to nothing"
Well, that is what you're asserting. And it's fine if you wish to believe that, that when the body ceases to "be vibrant", when the machine stops running, then there is nothing else. I have no problem with people believing anything they want. But you went further as to assert that you had an actual proof for it, which has something to do with the before life state. While indeed the physical body as it becomes doesn't exist before birth or after death, the idea that something persists on besides the physical body is what the various theories are all about. And I haven't heard you say anything that even addresses that that doesn't sound like you're assuming the very thing you're trying to prove to begin with.
Here's another idea to ponder, and it has to do with dimensionality, just to try to add a new perspective. Let's say we are higher dimensional beings than what we appear to be. As a reduced example, consider a "flatland" (like in the book) that is two dimensional, but we are actually three dimensional beings dipping our toes in the water, so to speak. And that bit of us that exists in the two dimensional space is bound to that space (so we can't do magic like teleport into a locked room by simply lifting up and then back down). Now let's say for grins that at some point the bit of us that exists in the two dimensional space atrophies and dies. At that point, it sloughs off and we break free. We're now no longer bound to the two dimensional space, and we have left behind a dead remnant of what we were in that space (which rots and dies as our corpse). As far as everyone in that dimension is concerned, what they know of as our body has died. As far as can be measured by the science of that dimension, all that existed has died. But there is more that exists beyond what has been measured and carries on, perhaps to some future "lessening of energy" to not upset your entropy. (Now take that idea and step it up a dimension or so, where we are higher-than-three-or-four-dimensional beings living in this Universe.)
I'm not saying that's what it is. In fact, I'd be surprised if it was. What I'm saying is that there are possibilities beyond what we have conceived so far, possibilities beyond a simple God-man in the sky, possibilities that can even tie in with science and become "logical" and known as science progresses further and deeper. There is so much about this Universe that we don't know, especially when we get down to the quantum level. And even what we do know at that level often doesn't make sense. To presume that we know all about life and death - where we have come from; what the "prime mover" is, if you will; what consciousness is; how the Universe came into existence from nothingness (if it's not part of a never ending cycle of oscillations, creating universes over and over again as big bangs followed by big collapses); how the various "patterns of matter" that we know of as atomic particles somehow combine to form higher-level patterns that eventually become life when the Universe could happily have continued on with simply billions and billions of big balls of burning gas - to presume that we have the answers to questions that have plagued us since the beginning of recorded time is, in my mind, a conceit. And worse yet, by saying "this is the way it is", it deprives us of the potential joy of discovering what it might actually be.
I'm considering writing a "nonfiction book in fiction form" (if that makes any sense) attempting to prove the existence of God, or more accurately, encourage the belief in God through reason and fact, which would weigh heavily in this derailed thread so...
I'd love to get in to this "debate" but, more pressing for me right now and more to the OPs question is...
"What is that smell?" =)
Shouldn't this be in the Interactive Fiction and Game Design thread?
Fun fact! You actually aren't "born dying". You don't start dying until technically around 24-27 years of age. That's when the faulty repairs of your cells truly begins, replicating damaged cells that further break down again and again over the next 60 years or so until the damage becomes too great to repair and you die. ^_^
let's see, one question. How about:
Aren't you supposed to be on vacation?
@ anonynn:
28 is the actual peak of one's performance (not sure if this is for both sexes, but if the sexes are different, it's probably not by much anyways, so 28 probably still works as: an average/"roughly", if this is the case).
(but usually this is not the case due to many other factors, for example: a job to survive, and thus no time for exercise/sports, and thus don't stay in shape)
so, in this biological performance model, yes, you start dying/degrading at age 29
in terms of time though, the instant you're conceived, is the instant the "death clock" starts, as the "gift of life" is: death. There's no "death clock" for a rock, only for life, the living.
so it depends from what measure you're considering for the question: biological vs time vs whatever-else.
to go further...
life is actually immortal (replication/copying: mitosis, and in a more macro-sense through/via our genes: sex/meosis, but that's not for this discussion as it's more abstract), we know this by another name: cancer: uncontrolled cell growth/replication. The 'elixir of immortality' is finding the balance of just enough cancer that we never die of aging but not enough cancer to cause problems (which can be fatal).
the current science:
our genes/cells/DNA actually have terminators just like with/required-of electrical wiring, so there's only a limited middle space for the genetic material, as the outer edges/space is required for/as terminators, which means that the genes/cells can only split so many times. however, there are some organisms which somehow found a way to be able to keep replicating (I'd have to read up on how they're able to do it), and are immortal, but without it being out of control (cancer) and thus not getting killed by it.
no cancer: mortality -> death
cancer: immortality but uncontrolled -> death (from complications from the cancer, the uncontrolled immortality kills you)
theoretical 'controlled/limited cancer': immortality (due to lack of fatal complications from the controlled/limited cancer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_(genetics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_termination
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4348031/
http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2016/10/19/science-snaps-how-knowing-the-shape-of-cancer-cells-could-improve-treatments/
odd, how did we go from interactive design to a discussion on mortality?
What's it like to be death?
Does reincarnation exist?
What is the true religion?
Have you considered upgrading your scythe to something a little more modern?
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