Death is a social construct

Comments

• Corgana@startrek.website ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  A Trek-inspired thought provoking essay is my favorite kind of post! Thanks for sharing.

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  • Grail@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Thank you for the praise. I actually had the idea for this article while watching Kamen Rider Ex-Aid. There’s a plot in there about someone seeking to permanently end the condition of death for the human species. Late in the show, it’s revealed that everyone who died already can be brought back through some science fiction nonsense the villains have been working on. For a japanese children’s cartoon in the genre of power rangers, it’s remarkably philosophical. It got Me thinking about the meaning of death, and thus, article. I decided to make it about Tuvix because that’s a very well known and clear example of what I’m talking about. The episode with the planet that dumps all their corpses through wormholes would also qualify, but it’s way less fun than arguing whether Janeway is a murderer.

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    • Corgana@startrek.website ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I love the one where the bodies get dumped in the wormhole lol. Your essay also made me think of VOY’s “Mortal Coil” where Neelix has a “spiritual” crisis but as you said the crisis can be viewed as coming from the collective definition of what death means socially.

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• kieron115@startrek.website ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Janeway apologist!

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  • Grail@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Don’t worry, I’m still on team “Janeway is a racist and a transphobe”

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    • kieron115@startrek.website ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      She just hadn’t had her coffee yet okay! On a serious note though I have to agree with @Corgana@startrek.website. The evolving definition of “medical death” as more of a logistical necessity than anything is something that I never really thought about before.

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• scarabic@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s a problem of induction, like Hume’s sunrise problem.

  Nope.

  This inductive principle argument that we can’t know the sun will rise tomorrow, just that it always has before, was a cute little bit of philosophy when I was back in college.

  But it has since been weaponized by religious people, arguing in bad faith, to undermine the credibility of science and legitimate their religious faith. They say we can’t know anything, therefore science is just built on faith anyway and is therefore no different than religion.

  Again: nope.

  The thing is, we know why it rises, not just that it always has. And it actually doesn’t always rise, at the poles, and we can explain that too. We have a model that can predict much more minute events than the sun rising or not, in fact. We have devised experiments to strain and test our models and predictions. Scientists don’t really talk about “knowing” things anyway. The bar a scientific theory must meet is being able to make testable predictions about the future. Maybe theory can never be proven but at some point we become fools not to accept it. To claim something doesn’t exist, based on the inductive principle, is to wave away the entire universe with a flick of the wrist as your opening argument.

  If you still want to engage in this “we can’t really know anything” bullshit, that’s your choice. I no longer have any patience for it, having seen how it is being misused. Everything is just socially constructed because we can’t ever know anything, because Hume? Great I guess life doesn’t exist either because you don’t know you are alive, you just have a lot of past anecdotal evidence that you are. Perhaps your atoms will scatter in 5 minutes from now and you will prove to have been an accidental particle fart of the universe that just happened to blow in on a breeze, and then blew out again. Who can say!!!

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