Offering humane end-of-life options to people suffering today does not prohibit ongoing disease research towards potentially helping people in the future.
I wouldn't want my government to have an option of dealing with the problem this way, and if I needed MAID, I'd just self-administer.
It just doesnt seem something a state should be charged with.
If the words "cure" or "prevent" don't indicate that, why did you bring it up? :)
I think this is being needlessly pedantic. Keeping in mind that one of HN's guidelines is to respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of a comment, I think we can assume that GP meant, essentially, "learn enough about these diseases so as to detect and prevent them from causing irreparable damage"
>If the words "cure" or "prevent" don't indicate that, why did you bring it up? :)
the strongest plausible interpretation of my comment would be I brought it up for the reason I said - that if you could cure the disease you would have to be able to give anyone the capabilities the disease destroyed (because these diseases seem to destroy parts of the brain so even if you "brought back" the brain it would be a different brain with different data in it)- and that, although I did not state it, I felt that the original poster had not considered this when they expressed a wish to cure.
on edit: obviously if you have experienced minor damage you can get back to what you were before because the brain has a lot of redundancies and it can recover if decline is halted, but if you have experienced major damage you're probably not getting back and asking for a cure there seems unlikely to work.
Not really curing people already in advanced state of the maladie...
anyways, they're not mutually exclusive, but enhanching life should preceed ending it in the order of priorities imho
As an adult who already lost a few of my relatives, and will probably lose a few more: if we truly loved them, we'd have put at least 10% of GDP into eventually curing all degenerative diseases, while implementing a simple scalable cryopreservation infrastructure for those who won't be there in time.
It could be done, The West and Asia could achieve this. But didn't, due to all too well known web of aversion & coping mechanisms.
In your small-mindedness you failed humanity.
exactly who do you think I am? It sounds like you think I am some sort of avatar of one of these societies, and for some reason I am here posting on HN.
>while implementing a simple scalable cryopreservation infrastructure for those who won't be there in time.
ok, well as long as its simple.
>In your small-mindedness you failed humanity.
okey-dokey, well I can definitely see you are going through something right now, hope you get better.
It's easy on older -about to die-, people, but what about not such clear cut cases, some families are actually against their beloved ones taking their lifes, and the state allowing it, (Parents suing their offspring, to try and not have them do it, for example)
and yes, a judge rules out on such cases, but to me, well, i dont see why the state should -sanction- taking your own life, when is something that shouldn't be natural, there's medical cases for sure, but laws sadly aren't perfect, i'd rather have no one wrongly off themselves
Can you provide some reading? Because this doesn't really mean much by itself.
> It's easy on older -about to die-, people, but what about not such clear cut cases, some families are actually against their beloved ones taking their lifes, and the state allowing it, (Parents suing their offspring, to try and not have them do it, for example)
Then those families can talk about it and the person dying can make their choice. The families who don't like it can do what they want, just like those who do want it.
> when is something that shouldn't be natural,
Almost nothing about our modern life is "natural", including most of medicine. That said, how is death unnatural?
> Additionally, without the desire to preserve life and value of the advantages of aged minds, we will not make as much progress on the disease.
I'm not sure why you think that easing end-of-life suffering would lead us to stop preserving life?
We're also not talking about "aged minds," we're talking about damaged minds - and even if we were, we're not talking about de-aging or anything like that.
why not cure cancer while you’re at it
