|
Supercar Gautier posted:The wave metaphor did a pretty solid job situating the door not as suicide, but as transformation. Walking through it doesn't so much mean "I am done with existing" as "I am done with being this". Which is why we very literally see that the components of Eleanor's being continue to persist and sprinkle over the earth. They'll never form the entity that is Eleanor again, but they'll take root somewhere. Eh. To me it's functionally the same as the hokey "we're all just energy, death is just the energy taking a different form" platitude people come out with in the real world. Like, it's literally true that the atoms that make up a living human will go on to make up other objects after that person dies, but people frame this in a way that implies some sort of continuity for the individual's consciousness, or soul, in order to make the terrifying starkness of it comforting instead of upsetting. A less upbeat way of framing the wave metaphor is, like, "when you die, you're worm food". I honestly found these last couple of episodes disturbing. The idea that death is a desirable alternative to eternal mediocrity (and they literally call it death in this episode) is so leaky philosophically, and insofar as it's an arguable idea at all I don't think the show argues it well. Watching the characters line up to destroy themselves in order to escape the monotonity of eternal perfection jarred a little. It felt like the show landed somewhere between wanting to write a metaphor about death in real life, and wanting to honour the terms of their sci-fi premise, and landed with one foot on each side, doing an awkward euthanasia splits across the chasm.
|
#
¿
Jan 31, 2020 23:12
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 05:11 |
|
|
Man, the Judge has been around since/until forever and seems satisfied with watching TV and listening to new podcasts in perpetuity.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2020 18:49
|
|
|
I think the Jeremy Bearimy thing works as a "don't think about it, time isn't that important to this story" in the episode it's introduced, but then the finale actually centres around the passage of time leading to inevitable self-annihilation, so it's a little at odds with the original purpose of the joke.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2020 12:50
|
|
|
I mean...one Bearimy is supposed to be the entirety of existence in a system of cyclical time, so there are actually a lot of questions to ask about what the protagonists' linear experiences are like. They presumably experience the future of humanity, meet people who were born centuries after they died, witness the heat death of the universe, etc. Do they feel like they've done everything they want to do because time is cyclical but their personal infinities are not? Have they witnessed the eventual extinction of the human race, and if so, how do they feel about that? Of course none of this is tackled because it's not the point. But the introduction of endless cyclical time as an intentionally vague and nonsensical gag, and then having the heroes go through thousands of Bearimies in the finale as a serious plot point, does make for a strange contrast that implies some of these questions.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2020 13:04
|
|
|
Catfishenfuego posted:The door is totally a metaphor for suicide which is why it's painless, involves telling everyone you know and them being happy for you, leaves no body or mess behind and was explicitly explained as your essence moving onto something new, greater and unknowable on like, six occasions, including the end where they literally show that you still exist in the universe in some form and get to help people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODV6mxVVRZk
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2020 23:24
|
|
|
silvergoose posted:I gotta say I'm pretty sad about no episode tonight. For real. I feel like Tahani got really short shrift in the final season - more or less nothing to do character arc-wise, and most of her lines were that one tired joke about namedropping celebrities repeated forever. I like Chidi and Eleanor, but it felt like the final season-and-a-half or so became the Chidi and Eleanor show with Tahani and Jason as their sidekicks.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2020 16:40
|
|
|
CarlosTheDwarf posted:Tahani and Jason were too weak to be main or even regular characters. Jason was fine. Tahani was just underwritten in the last half, she had plenty of good beats in the first 2.5 seasons.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2020 21:15
|
|
|
jumba posted:They should have ended with Brent being the last human to go through the door, finally making to The Good Place and being fulfilled (after shooting 1 under par at some rando golf course) ... 5 Bearimys after the heat death of the universe. Bearimies are the entirety of time and cyclical, so every Bearimy encompasses the heat death of the universe. They're long!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2020 00:00
|
|
|
Ishamael posted:But you are going to die, we all are. There is no immortality drug, and there never will be. So death can either be something that seen is a natural and necessary part of life, or it can be something we kick and scream against despite it being an inevitability. I mean, yeah probably, but not necessarily. There are people working on indefinite life extension right now. It's an incredibly difficult project, but with decades (or centuries) of technological advancement, there's no reason to believe we couldn't see human beings with indefinite lifespans. Death is a natural phenomenon with causes we can target. Most people who die of "old age" actually die of organ failure, or of illnesses their body has grown too weak to fight off. These are solvable problems, even if they might take a century to solve. Death isn't going to be avoidable for our generation, most likely, but it may be avoidable for future generations. Further, the fact that something is inevitable doesn't mean we need to conceive of it as good. It may be psychologically helpful to do so, but it could be harmful in other areas (e.g. clearsightedness about what we can do to solve the problem) if we conceive of inevitable bad things as secret good things that we ought to embrace. Like, back when infant mortality rates were very high, society was thick with myth and superstition about angels gathering innocent little children and taking them to Heaven, because the reality was too horrible to deal with. In response to that, we invented a fiction about how the lost kids were okay, actually. Lots of poems and songs about the Grim Reaper stewarding the young and taking care of them. Now that we've gotten infant mortality rates down to the point where it's comparatively rare for a child to die, we view the death of a child (rightly) as a horrible tragedy, and are less likely to engage in myth-making about how it's actually okay for children to die because they'll live on in God's kingdom. That myth-making definitely helped grieving parents, but it (most likely) was not an accurate way to look at the problem. It was a stopgap to help us cope with something horrible, not an end in itself. I think the same is true of discourse about "death is necessary and we should learn to embrace it", or worse still, "death gives life meaning". Death is really bad; ecologically it may be necessary, but all sorts of terrifying, awful things happen in ecosystems - which are amoral emergent systems, not ethical or experiential models we should emulate. As human beings, death takes the people we love from us, and will one day take us from the people we love. We should be trying to avoid it. In fact, most people try to avoid death for as long as possible, because we know that this is true. While inevitable death is a reality, sure, we can stick with the myth-making about death's beauty and necessity if we want, but we should also acknowledge that it's a comforting fiction.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2020 01:10
|
|
|
Arist posted:Coming to terms with your own mortality is "a comforting fiction," as opposed to this post you just made, which is all hard scientific reason Well...yeah? Indefinite life extension's totally plausible. It won't happen soon, but it is likely to happen at some point in the future. Is it immortality? No, not really, but it would change the role of death in our society from an ever-present and frequent thing to a relatively uncommon one. Ancillary Character posted:Everyone knows the only outcome of an immortality drug is that some horrible rich people will live forever and the rest of us will toil for eternity for their benefit and amusement. Realistically, any such treatment wouldn't be a single thing - it would involve cures for various illnesses, ubiquitous organ replacement, telomere modification, etc. That's not to say the rich couldn't hoard it - they could, and they would try - but it would be harder to keep a lid on all those treatments than if it were a single miracle drug. But you're right, life extension could cause vast inequality and open up a whole new genre of class inequality. The same is true of most major technological advances, though - the rich always get their hands on them first, then the citizens of wealthy countries, while the global poor are left out in the cold. We probably still want those technological advances to happen, though, and in the best case they're paired with social movements that fight to make them available to everyone. ImpAtom posted:But death is still inevitable. Even if you can make yourself physically incapable of dying of sickness/old age you're still eventually going to lose the gamble on a car crash or whatever. And even if you assume immortality and invincibility well... These are all good questions, and it's totally true that permanent immortality in the absence of human companionship or physical stimuli would be terrifying. But that's far beyond the remit of what current science can project; what we can project is long extensions to lifespan facilitated by regular access to advanced medical technology. If the infrastructure providing treatment ceased to exist, your lifespan would be finite at whatever milestone the most recent treatment had managed to achieve, so you wouldn't have to worry about living indefinitely in isolation. The two premises (permanent immortality and invulnerability vs. continuous life extension through iterative elimination of common causes of death) are really different, and I think there are different questions to be asked about the two of them. I think you're probably right that there's a point where infinity might become a burden; I also think that point is somewhere really, really far beyond the end of the natural human lifespan. Most people would give a lot for even ten more years of life. As such, I think the idea that death as we currently know it is both pleasant and desirable is mostly a way for us to cope with the fact that it's inevitable, and that it's going to cause us a great deal of sadness at some point in our lives. In the majority of cases, it isn't accurate or true to say that death is a good and pleasant thing; it's just a method of comforting ourselves through a reality we are presently unable to change. If we lived for millions of years and suffered from existential ennui on that scale, possibly all that would change. In the world as it presently is, though, most people don't want to die when they do, and their loved ones don't want to lose them. Death causes a great deal of material suffering. Platitudes about death being a journey or a necessary thing can soften the blow and make the pain tolerable, but they don't change that essential truth.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2020 03:06
|
|
|
Arist posted:No, dude, you misunderstand. My point is that whatever bullshit you tell yourself to try to avoid having to come to terms with the cessation of your existence is arguably even more of a "comforting fiction" than "death is a part of life." I'm reconciled to it, my man. I think you're being weirdly hostile here? It's perfectly possible to process grief without coming to the conclusion that death is pleasant, desirable and necessary. Life extension is quite likely to happen at some point in the future. Indefinite life extension will likely follow. This probably won't be in either of our lifetimes, but the present science points that way. It would be good for future generations if they didn't have to cope with death in the same ways that we do. Like, do you disagree with that, fundamentally?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2020 03:22
|
|
|
Ravenfood posted:Huge jump to say "we can replace organs" to "we can extend life indefinitely". At some point neurodegeneration shows up as something you can't simply replace. And maybe, eventually, that becomes a solvable problem too, but at that point we've made so many changes to our understanding of neurology and cognition that whatever conversation they're having barely resembles our own. Recent research using CRISPR-Cas has had some success in directly modifying the telomerase production of living tissue to prevent or ameliorate cell degeneration (or encourage cell reproduction). Studies have also edited, ablated, and tracked telomeres in live organisms with greater precision than has ever been possible before. CRISPR is huge, scary, and allows the sort of work to be done in vivo that would previously have been exclusively possible in vitro. This hasn't been done on brain tissue (to the best of my knowledge), but this kind of live subject cell alteration could be a model, going forward decades, for how you might extend the lifespan of an organ that you can't replace. There are a lot of problems with it still, like the fact that inducing telomerase production can also cause the development of cancer cells, and (for neuroregeneration) the fact that our understanding of the brain's structure is still seriously limited, but we're in the very early days of an era of medicine where it's possible to tinker with individual cells and genes in adult, living organisms. There's a framework for viable alternatives to transplants that will probably become a lot more advanced within the next few decades.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2020 07:42
|
|
|
luxury handset posted:the science is often wrong in terms of social ramifications of technology, and we don't know of any undying organisms with the same level of complexity as ourselves. the only viable immortality is complete transhumanism and, placed in a social context, i don't want to live forever with human-like creatures who will continue to hoard wealth and power beyond generations. like imagine a world were jeff bezos never dies but continues to get richer, or a world where gilded age or earlier aristocrats from centuries ago never relinquished their wealth or power. there are some horrifying ramifications to endless human life, far worse than the natural fear of death inherent in all living things I mean, yeah, this is a horrifying and plausible scenario, but I don't think it's totally inevitable. Almost certainly the rich would get their hands on life extension technology first, and would have the easiest access to it, but that's true of all major technological advancements. It's down to policy that, like you say, is mostly orthogonal to the actual nuts and bolts of life extension whether we'd end up with a fair society or a nightmare. If this technology makes its advent in a world where (for example) we have wealth/estate taxes reducing asset inequality, or where a socialised healthcare system guarantees universal provision of these treatments, maybe we don't end up with a society run by immortal plutocrats. If it makes its advent in a libertarian hellscape that worships the free market and ~wealth creators~, yeah, you're gonna end up with immortal plutocrats accreting all possible assets to themselves forever. Like, right now, Jeff Bezos' heirs (whoever they end up being) will just inherit his wealth when he dies, and while the person of Jeff Bezos will cease to be, the monopolisation of assets he currently enjoys won't. It'll just pass into a new pair of hands, and likely they'll use it in much the same way he does. The concentration of wealth is the problem as much as the specific person who owns the money, so that person sticking around for a long time may not make a huge amount of material difference. What could make a difference is pro-social economic policies!
|
|
#
¿
Feb 26, 2020 20:10
|
|
|
Bobbin Threadbare posted:I'm not sure I'm fully understanding this argument of "we don't have to come to terms with our own death because at some point science might invent clinical immortality." To me that seems like a sociological diversion to what's otherwise a very psychological and personal issue. For the time being, at least, we have no reason to believe that death is anything other than inevitable, so what is the proper way for individuals--not a culture or society, just individuals--to come to terms with that inevitability? I'd say that we absolutely do have to come to terms with our own deaths, because it's very unlikely any such thing will happen while anyone in this conversation is alive - but the fact that it might one day be possible does provoke questions about platitudes like "death is necessary to give life meaning" or "death is a natural (and therefore good) thing". My view is that ideas like these would be distinctly less popular if death wasn't inevitable, and that for most people, they're essentially a way of making it easier to cope with the emotional pain attendant on death. Materially, they usually aren't true. We can imagine a world where people wouldn't care for these sayings at all when we think ahead to a time when death by ageing, for instance, is optional - at which point "you should voluntarily die to give your life meaning" would almost certainly become a fringe view.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2020 08:02
|
|
|
Bobbin Threadbare posted:You're going off on a tangent again. If someone you knew was going to die within the next year, how would you help them come to terms with that death without using the platitudes you mention? That's a big question! I probably wouldn't use those phrases personally, but if some people find them helpful, there's nothing wrong with that. If these platitudes are comforting for people facing up to their mortality, that's fine. There's a lot to be said for comforting ideas that aren't strictly true. But it's important to point out that they probably aren't strictly true, and that we rely on them because they're the best tool we have in a difficult situation. If you wanted to put together a model for guiding people through terminal illness that didn't rely on bromides about death being necessary and good - well, I'm not a psychologist or a counsellor, but reminding people of the meaning their life has already had, that they are loved, that they've achieved a lot of things to be proud of, might be a good start. (I don't think I was going off on a tangent, btw? You asked me to explain my position, and I did.)
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2020 19:29
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 10, 2024 05:11 |
|
|
A Jeremy Bearimy is the entirety of time. So they went from Big Bang to heat death of the universe and then a little past that. Lot of that in the final episodes!
|
|
#
¿
Aug 28, 2020 05:31
|
|