I've heard this quoted before and it's quite interesting because, on the fact of it, you'd think it would be difficult to quantify because the point in time at which we decide the first homo sapiens came into existence is arbitrary. There is obviously no objectively existing dividing line such that a non-human mother one day gave birth to a human baby. Only a continuum. So the total number of humans who have ever lived, and therefore the size of that percentage, is dependant on where in pre-history we arbitrarily decide to place that dividing line. But on the other hand, the total human population of the world before about, say, 10,000 years ago was a miniscule fraction of what it is today, so moving that dividing line by thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands of years probably wouldn't change that percentage by very much at all.LuckyR wrote:All of the people alive are 7% of all the people who have ever lived.
The only true cause of death is birth.
-
- Posts: 10339
- Joined: June 15th, 2011, 5:53 pm
Re: The only true cause of death is birth.
-
- Posts: 10339
- Joined: June 15th, 2011, 5:53 pm
Re: The only true cause of death is birth.
Scott wrote:It is a counterexample which proves that human birth does not require sex.
I think in considering what actually happens when a sperm meets an egg, and calling that sex, you're ultimately going to come back to birth, or conception, or something that amounts to the same thing: the creation of any entity with a finite lifespan (e.g. a living thing) is the one necessary condition for its destruction. That seems to be Scott's point, and it seems to me to be trivially, tautologically true. It's part of the definition of what it means to have a finite lifespan. But although it is inescapable I still disagree with Scott's conclusion that we can regard that creation as "the only true cause" of that destruction. I disagree with that usage of the word "cause" for reasons touched on by LuckyR:Sy Borg wrote: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 ...
That association exists simply because of the definition of "finite lifespan". Everything with a finite lifespan has, by definition, a beginning and an end; a creation and a destruction; a birth and a death. To me, stating a definition like that does not constitute establishing a cause.LuckyR wrote:Sure, it is a great example of the confusion between causation and association. It is true that every single person who dies has also been born. That is association. Death is a change from the alive state to a second state called death. The cause of this change is never one's own birth. That is a lack of causation.
- LuckyR
- Moderator
- Posts: 7935
- Joined: January 18th, 2015, 1:16 am
Re: The only true cause of death is birth.
Nice summary of the statistical reality surrounding this issue.Steve3007 wrote: ↑April 6th, 2021, 5:28 amI've heard this quoted before and it's quite interesting because, on the fact of it, you'd think it would be difficult to quantify because the point in time at which we decide the first homo sapiens came into existence is arbitrary. There is obviously no objectively existing dividing line such that a non-human mother one day gave birth to a human baby. Only a continuum. So the total number of humans who have ever lived, and therefore the size of that percentage, is dependant on where in pre-history we arbitrarily decide to place that dividing line. But on the other hand, the total human population of the world before about, say, 10,000 years ago was a miniscule fraction of what it is today, so moving that dividing line by thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands of years probably wouldn't change that percentage by very much at all.LuckyR wrote:All of the people alive are 7% of all the people who have ever lived.
- AmericanKestrel
- Posts: 356
- Joined: May 22nd, 2021, 6:26 am
- Favorite Philosopher: Yagnyavalkya
- Location: US
Re: The only true cause of death is birth.
Of course. This is a fundamental truth. Freedom from the cycle of birth and death is moksha.
-
- Posts: 3364
- Joined: April 19th, 2009, 11:45 pm
Re: The only true cause of death is birth.
Quite true. The cycle of life spans birth to death. The question is if this cycle can reflect different objective qualities and can a person respect the whole cycle rather than arguing over one fragment like abortion? It doesn't seem so simply because we don't know what objective quality means in respect to the purpose of life so the debate devolves into which fragment has value determined by "experts."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.
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
February 2023
Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
by Chet Shupe
March 2023