The only true cause of death is birth.

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Tegularius
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by Tegularius »

Every process has an inner clock which leads to its demise. If the process malfunctions along the way or due to some accident as so often happens, the demise just happens sooner. Time causes everything to eventually go into its opposite. Whether time itself stands still or not, what it acts upon is always in a state of flux leading to a conclusion. So it's okay to say that the true cause of death is birth since birth is the beginning of a process which in itself is programmed to cease...meaning death does not finish the process as if it were something external but by being an immanent part of it. There's hardly any operation in nature which isn't forced at some point in its career to flat-line or possibly morph itself into a new identity which has no conception of its past.
The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man ... Nietzsche
Steve3007
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by Steve3007 »

Scott wrote:Your mother's birth is a necessary condition of your birth, but not a necessary cause. If we could rewind time and put in the lab, we could easily create a scenario in which your mother was born but you were not.
Fair point.
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Sculptor1
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by Sculptor1 »

Scott wrote:
sculptor wrote:
Technically birth requires sex.
What about artificial insemination?
Artificial sex.
What about it?
The objection remains that 99.999% of life emerged on the planet with ANY birth.

So all examples of birth are a minority practice, in the living world.
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Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by Eckhart Aurelius Hughes »

sculptor wrote: Technically birth requires sex.
Scott wrote: What about artificial insemination?
Sculptor1 wrote: March 18th, 2021, 5:38 pm What about it?
It is a counterexample which proves that human birth does not require sex.
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Sy Borg
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by Sy Borg »

Scott wrote: March 18th, 2021, 6:57 pm
sculptor wrote: Technically birth requires sex.
Scott wrote: What about artificial insemination?
Sculptor1 wrote: March 18th, 2021, 5:38 pm What about it?
It is a counterexample which proves that human birth does not require sex.
A Clintonesque technicality :) It may not be sexual intercourse as such, but the sperm donor at the fertility clinic was engaged in a sexual act. Sex begets life that begets death that begets more life that has sex ...

Just wondering, how appealing does endless life without death seem? The problem is not so much death, but physical and mental decline, and becoming even less relevant in a rapidly changing world. I suspect that, as certain individuals reach record ages, average life spans will reduce due to population, resource, political and climate pressures. It will be a bit like the way Olympic athletes keep breaking records as the crowds that watch them become ever less active and athletic.
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Count Lucanor
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by Count Lucanor »

Scott wrote: March 17th, 2021, 10:58 pm To be clear, I was not suggesting that only mathematical propositions have perspective-independence. Rather, I was giving it as just an example, since all it takes is one counter example to disapprove an alleged rule. In other words, my point was simply that everything is not merely a matter of perspective.
I'm glad you clarified. To be clear myself, I was not suggesting that mathematical propositions were among the "everything" that is a matter of perspective. It was the "everything" that focuses its inquiries on facts about the world, such as the causes of death of living organisms. Ultimately, all of these end up being merely a matter of perspective. They have nothing to do with mathematical propositions. Your argument was not a mathematical proposition, and the concession that mathematical propositions are independent of perspective, does not alter the perspective dependency of other claims that are not mathematical propositions, such as your original claim about the causes of death. So we can easily forget about mathematical propositions and reassert that your claim falls within the scope of things that are a matter of perspective.

It can easily be shown that the statement "the only true cause of death is birth" starts from the assumption that the true cause of death is a singular one, instead of a set of causes. It ignores the possibility that birth is just a necessary condition that acting with other necessary or contingent conditions, produces death. A matter of perspective.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
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Fellowmater
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by Fellowmater »

I love the analogy of this thread, thank you for putting this up here.
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Sculptor1
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by Sculptor1 »

Scott wrote: March 18th, 2021, 6:57 pm
sculptor wrote: Technically birth requires sex.
Scott wrote: What about artificial insemination?
Sculptor1 wrote: March 18th, 2021, 5:38 pm What about it?
It is a counterexample which proves that human birth does not require sex.
Not really.
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NickGaspar
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by NickGaspar »

Scott wrote: March 16th, 2021, 1:13 pm The only true cause of death is birth.

Anything that is born will die. Everything that is created will be destroyed.

When it comes to so-called "causes of death", the rest is at best merely a matter of perspective, if not a deceptive shell game.

For example, consider a cigarette smoker who dies with lung cancer shortly after catching the common cold.

Would it even make sense to debate about whether the so-called "cause of death" was (1) cigarettes, (2) suicide, (3) lung cancer, or (4) the common cold? I propose that it would make no sense to have such a debate or to assert that one of those is or could be the cause.

No human can be saved from death. Thus, nothing else causes a human to die because the death is inevitable from the birth. The human will die regardless of whether they smoke, whether they catch a cold, whether they get lung cancer, whether they drive a motorcycle, whether they are suicidal, or whether they desperately cling to life in terrified fear of death. Neither the presence nor absence of any of those things--or any other things like them--will prevent the person from dying. Thus, those things and anything like them cannot be a true cause of death.

One could argue instead that a given event or factor (e.g. the presence of smoking versus non-smoking) would speed up the time of the death. Slightly accelerating or postponing the timing of something is very different than causing it. Moreover, analogous to accelerations or decelerations in Newtonian physics, these factors are cumulative not mutually exclusive, and are thus in practice immeasurable and countless if not infinite. For example, if 8 dogs are pulling a sled, it does not make sense to say which dog is the cause of the sled moving, nor is it true that only the dogs are responsible for the sled moving. Rather, there are countless and presumably infinite factors at play, such as but not limited to friction, gravity, the weather, and how much the guy riding the sled ate for breakfast.

Imagine the proverbial sled is going down a steep ice-hill, having black-hole-like properties, and thus the sled will reach its destination very soon regardless of any of those other factors, and some of the dogs are futilely trying to pull the sled up the hill but can only at best slightly decrease the rate of acceleration. That would be a more accurate analogy to anything attempting to prevent human death, such as exercising daily instead of smoking cigarettes daily. There is no preventing death, and no practical way to significantly change to its timing on cosmological scales. The length of a human life is but an itsy bitsy teeny tiny sliver in cosmological spacetime.

As a human, each of us is going to die very soon. Every human dies quickly.

There is no cause of death, besides birth itself.

Once born, the death is inevitable.

We are going down the black-hole-like ice-hill quickly, from birth to death, and no dog can reverse the trajectory.

When one of us humans reach the bottom of the ice-hill (human death), it is absurd and nonsensical, worse than false, to point to any one dog, or even a few dogs, or even dogs as a whole versus gravity or what the sled rider ate, and accuse that thing of being the cause. It doesn't matter what any of the dogs did, and what the rider ate or didn't eat, and thus those kinds of things cannot logically be considered causes.

If you take the cause away, then the result cannot happen. Therefore, if you take an alleged cause away, and the result does still happen, then the alleged cause is no true cause at all, reductio ad absurdum.

Thus, the only cause of death is birth.
Birth is not and can not be a "cause" except life/existence of autonomous biological entities. Its not even a necessary event (in its metaphorical sense)for death to be a future prospect. I am only saying that because you expanded the concept beyond biology by saying "Everything that is created will be destroyed." (creation doesn't necessarily need the event of birth).

So if we decide to talk about biological death, birth is indeed a necessary event but only in order for the prospect of death to be possible(not as a cause).
Having a life/existing is also not the cause of death, , but a necessary pre-existing condition/state for death.
In order to define the cause of death, we first need to define death in a biological perspective...and death is just the end of a life inducing biological process .
Since Life is an on going "immortal" process(as long as the environment allows it and doesn't change)through phenomena like reproduction and evolution in different forms of life, the only mortal aspect of life is the death of individual biological organisms(entities).
And even in the case of individual biological organisms we have examples that don't verify death as a necessary conclusion of their process!
i,e Pando,Jurupa Oak,Old Tjikko,Old Rasmus etc.
The life span in some of those organisms is so long that the death of individual stems or their root system MAY not be an intrinsic feature of their biology, but an external environmental cause.

My point is that such absolute statements (The only true cause of death is birth.) are not only inaccurate since they are not in agreement with our epistemology and science, but also their conclusions don't really offer any knowledge, wisdom or understanding about our world.
Its like saying" the only true cause of dawning is ....having lungs", or"the only true reason the electromagnetic cohesion of the pavement's molecules is our squishy biology."

Sure the only reason why we are able to die in the first place is that we first need to exist but that is not what causes our death. That is more of a tautology than a wise philosophical, incapable to expand our understanding and inform our actions.
popeye1945
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by popeye1945 »

The true cause of death is sex, an organism that reproduces through asexual means is, relatively speaking immortal. We paid a price for sexuality, which was moving from relative immortality to death of the organism, after you have reproduced sexually your job is done, and I believe the only reason we live as long as we do, is that the offspring needs to be nurtured to maintain its life. Asexual creatures eventually over great spans of time will collect to their clone being, enough mutant junk to do them in as a species the model is trashed so to speak. With sexuality the constant mix has a rejuvenating effect, we pay a price for that delight. It might be understood I think that the only difference between individuals is whether the constitution of that individual is weak or strong, which sex, mutation and death tend to maintain, what we think of as our identity I, is the experience of that constitution, seeing as experience is always different, so too is the idea of the identity I.
Belindi
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by Belindi »

It is false that birth is the only cause of death. Both birth and death and a great many other events are caused by living. Living and not- living entities are caused by evolution over time. Evolution over time is caused by nobody knows however the best guesses seem to be within the discipline of cosmology.
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by popeye1945 »

Death is the end of process, as birth is its begining, the end of process can have many many causes, but the state of being is its neccesary contingent.
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Sy Borg
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by Sy Borg »

Not that this matters. If birth causes death, then manufacturing a PC causes it to break down and be scrapped. We would prevent PCs from breaking down by not making them, but life is seemingly not about bland neutrality.
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LuckyR
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by LuckyR »

The entire premise is incorrect. Seven percent of humans born never died.
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Sy Borg
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Re: The only true cause of death is birth.

Post by Sy Borg »

LuckyR wrote: April 3rd, 2021, 2:19 amThe entire premise is incorrect. Seven percent of humans born never died.
That was probably once the case with trilobites too.
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