Is it ever ethical for one to commit suicide?

[PlasmaAstralProjection]

I think that with the technology we have presently and the ones that are going to appear in the 10-15 years, there won't be that necessity of ending the suffering.

I've read a lot of stuff online about the singularity and all the technology we will have by 2025-2035. There will be medicine that will rejuvenate your body, and I think that by then assisted suicide and stuff like that just won't be needed anymore. No one knows exactly what is going to happen in singularity and they are just speculations, but I strongly believe that medicine will be innovated to a point where we can easily repair our bodies and our inner organs in case of a failure.

So people will probably just die of age and no longer of sickness or illness, they will either die of age or not die at all.
Now is it moral? is it good or is it bad? Should we actually die or stay alive eternally? THAT is the question.

Suicide will no longer have it's place by 2035...
Implants will take place, people with mental illness will be followed closely in their thoughts to make sure they don't give up to the bad ones and I think either everyone will start feeling happier or we're gonna face our own destruction.

Personally, now, I still have no point of view on these things. I'm not sure if it's any good or any bad, because we have no idea of telling what's really going to happen. These are based on predictions made by scientists in the domain... I don't feel like mind control would be a great idea, far from it. But this is due to happen one way or the other... Otherwise we'll end by destroying all computers which I don't think will ever happen.

Sure there's probably lots of people who will kill themselves because they can't bear the information or the technology advancing so quickly. But it's like that, humans are not the same as animals trying to evolve, they CONSTANTLY need that evolution state where they have new products or new technology to ease their lives.
Even myself, even if I would love to just throw everything out the window and go live far away in a temple or something like this being alone with my thoughts, it's never going to happen, I'm just too used to this technology. Everyday I connect. So is billions of people...

So now, suicide vanishing... Easier way of life, if possibly, not mind controlled, happiness forever and the medicine to live your life longer and healthy... I could see a good point in there, being more intelligent(with implants) is one of those...

A few things. One no doctor will be able to look at ones thoughts with such a technology unless the person lets them do it. That would be an infringement on their privacy.  And I am betting that a lot of people will not have such mind reading technologies used on them since they don't want people looking at what they are thinking much less the government or doctors. Now many will allow doctors to look at there thoughts but many for a long time won't do it. And nobody can force this on them in any civilized nation.

Singularity is a theory. It still has to be proven. But with that I to look forward to such a day hopefully within my lifetime. I read about transhumanism and the power of technology for our minds, and bodies. In fact I think one day science will lead the path for anyone to astral project if they want.

Until they can totally manage suffering to a very high degree suicide will be the best option for many of them if they so choose. So first thing is first. Let's stand for the truth to end suffering when it's unethical.

[Stillwater]

A few things. One no doctor will be able to look at ones thoughts with such a technology unless the person lets them do it.

Sadly, I don't think the first ones to be doing that will be doctors, but rather government agencies and business owners (who want first hand knowledge of their clients' thought processes to better target them), and they are certainly not going to ask permission.

The current means to do that exists now, in the form of a scanning laser attached to a functional MRI; the laser itself can be well disguised, and look no more out of place than a camera in the environment. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually haven't already been implemented in a few select venues.

It amounts to taking a snapshot of a person's brain state, and comparing it to a library of known brain states, and figuring out what nouns and verbs they are thinking of, etc.

I hate to give people new things to worry about, but crude mind reading devices in covert applications are already real.

[PlasmaAstralProjection]

Sadly, I don't think the first ones to be doing that will be doctors, but rather government agencies and business owners (who want first hand knowledge of their clients' thought processes to better target them), and they are certainly not going to ask permission.

The current means to do that exists now, in the form of a scanning laser attached to a functional MRI; the laser itself can be well disguised, and look no more out of place than a camera in the environment. I wouldn't be surprised if they actually haven't already been implemented in a few select venues.

It amounts to taking a snapshot of a person's brain state, and comparing it to a library of known brain states, and figuring out what nouns and verbs they are thinking of, etc.

I hate to give people new things to worry about, but crude mind reading devices in covert applications are already real.

I would imagine that that would be a crude form of mind reading.

[Kzaal]

I've had an MRI, but it's yet to be developed enough for mind reading, so far it's only brain waves and unless they do mind reading test as to know what each of these waves mean there will be a long way before that.
Another thing is the Memory transfer and the clone or holographic transference... These things are already being worked on, maybe not clones but they did say they were developing the holographic transfer and that it would become reality eventually. That could be a meaning to stop death or decay.

But I am not personally too worried about how it would be used, because I don't think anyone could make such devices without proper implanted valors, morals to take place or wisdom. Because anyone could just go and mind control you as much as they want... Privacy would have to be kept, or, any extremely violent thoughts about murder or such should be monitored, a little like in minority report...

Brain hackers would be a worry tho, but if that thing takes place and people are more intelligent, they would be able to counter the viruses by making their own programs in their heads to counter it.
Again just speculations, until we either become robots/cyborgs/androids or we destroy ourselves with biochemical/bacteriological weapons or an atomic war. Unless there is some kind of earth-wide event that takes place and some kind of miraculous thing happens to either stop all this or lead us in the right direction.
Or that Astral Projections/Meditation becomes a really popular subject and everyone end up doing it, being sage and everything...
I was kinda referring to AP/meditation as being the miraculous thing but whatever lol, everything's good.

[Stillwater]

I've had an MRI, but it's yet to be developed enough for mind reading, so far it's only brain waves and unless they do mind reading test as to know what each of these waves mean there will be a long way before that.

They have databases of literally tens of thousands of scans which matchup very closely with known thought forms, that they compare against the unknown subject scans.

They have been at this since the 90's; here is a reconstructed dream built with fMRI scans, made famous a few years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo

"The procedure is as follows:

[1] Record brain activity while the subject watches several hours of movie trailers.
[2] Build dictionaries (i.e., regression models) that translate between the shapes, edges and motion in the movies and measured brain activity. A separate dictionary is constructed for each of several thousand points at which brain activity was measured.
(For experts: The real advance of this study was the construction of a movie-to-brain activity encoding model that accurately predicts brain activity evoked by arbitrary novel movies.)
[3] Record brain activity to a new set of movie trailers that will be used to test the quality of the dictionaries and reconstructions.
[4] Build a random library of ~18,000,000 seconds (5000 hours) of video downloaded at random from YouTube. (Note these videos have no overlap with the movies that subjects saw in the magnet). Put each of these clips through the dictionaries to generate predictions of brain activity. Select the 100 clips whose predicted activity is most similar to the observed brain activity. Average these clips together. This is the reconstruction."

[PlasmaAstralProjection]

Looks like a still very crude technology to me stillwater. I have seen the shows that explain how it works and we still have quite a ways to go.

[Szaxx]

You dont need a machine to influence someones mind. You need a mind trained in the 'how to' to make people do some things you want. This is fun with the those open to it.
What is possible after a decade of intense training makes you wonder.
The fMRI instrument is already showing things that we take for granted like the vibrations. In one experiment looking for oxygen in the blood, there was a signal detected outside the body.
It may have been another weather balloon or swamp gas if you ask the wrong person though. Lol.

[Stillwater]

Looks like a still very crude technology to me stillwater. I have seen the shows that explain how it works and we still have quite a ways to go.

Yes and no. The most important step of all, that it is possible to do it, has already been clearly demonstrated. These technologies tend to go on exponential growth curves corrollated to computing power.

Here is a famous excerpt that details how something on an exponential curve can more or less go undetected for the majority of its life, and grow mostrously in its final moments:

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"It's 1pm. Imagine a normal sized football stadium. In this stadium you are sitting on the seat at the very top of the stadium, with the best overview of the whole stadium.

To make things more interesting, imagine the stadium is completely water-tight.

The question is, if a drop of water is added to the stadium and then one minute later it doubles in size to two drops, and then one minute after that it doubles again to 4 drops, and so on.. doubling in size every minute, how much time do you have to leave your seat and get out of the stadium before the water reaches your seat at the very top?

Think about it for a moment. Is it hours, days, weeks, months?


The first drop of water lands right in the middle of the field, at 1pm.

You have exactly until 1:49pm. It takes less than 50 minutes to fill a whole football stadium with water! This is impressive!

But it gets better:
At what time do you think the football stadium is still 93% empty? Take a guess.

The answer: At 1:45pm. So, you sit and watch the drop growing, and after 45 minutes all you see is the playing field covered with water. And then, within four more minutes, the water fills the whole stadium.

This means that you think you are safe because it seems that you have plenty of time left, whereas due to the exponential growth you really have to take immediate action if you want to have any chance of getting out of this situation. "

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Now we know this is the sort of path that biotech has taken in the past as well. The human genome project is a perfect example.

A decade long effort, and it looked like it would take 500 years. Then 85% percent of it gets done in a single year. Now it is trivial to do it again, and would probably take under a day.



By the time things like this are surfacing in the public eye, they are often very late in their exponential growth curve. Perhaps like the genome project, they can seem like insurmountable goals, that suddenly become trivial in the space of a year.

[PlasmaAstralProjection]

Yes and no. The most important step of all, that it is possible to do it, has already been clearly demonstrated. These technologies tend to go on exponential growth curves corrollated to computing power.

Here is a famous excerpt that details how something on an exponential curve can more or less go undetected for the majority of its life, and grow mostrously in its final moments:

----------------------------------

"It's 1pm. Imagine a normal sized football stadium. In this stadium you are sitting on the seat at the very top of the stadium, with the best overview of the whole stadium.

To make things more interesting, imagine the stadium is completely water-tight.

The question is, if a drop of water is added to the stadium and then one minute later it doubles in size to two drops, and then one minute after that it doubles again to 4 drops, and so on.. doubling in size every minute, how much time do you have to leave your seat and get out of the stadium before the water reaches your seat at the very top?

Think about it for a moment. Is it hours, days, weeks, months?


The first drop of water lands right in the middle of the field, at 1pm.

You have exactly until 1:49pm. It takes less than 50 minutes to fill a whole football stadium with water! This is impressive!

But it gets better:
At what time do you think the football stadium is still 93% empty? Take a guess.

The answer: At 1:45pm. So, you sit and watch the drop growing, and after 45 minutes all you see is the playing field covered with water. And then, within four more minutes, the water fills the whole stadium.

This means that you think you are safe because it seems that you have plenty of time left, whereas due to the exponential growth you really have to take immediate action if you want to have any chance of getting out of this situation. "

----------------------------------

Now we know this is the sort of path that biotech has taken in the past as well. The human genome project is a perfect example.

A decade long effort, and it looked like it would take 500 years. Then 85% percent of it gets done in a single year. Now it is trivial to do it again, and would probably take under a day.



By the time things like this are surfacing in the public eye, they are often very late in their exponential growth curve. Perhaps like the genome project, they can seem like insurmountable goals, that suddenly become trivial in the space of a year.

I like that metaphor using a football stadium and water. Well see, I know exponential growth can happen much faster in some fields while in others it staggers.

[Stillwater]

Indeed. Very hard to know for sure, and where biology and especially consciousness studies are concerned, there is very much left to know which could complicate the road.

[Kzaal]

The thing with this is that, there's always someone stronger to oppose theses kinds of things. Population being one of those.
If somehow, there was a mind changing technology that would make people go bad, things would be noticed very quickly.
People always have memories of their past and we all had very strong challenges in our life.
Someone who's mind is built like rock, would instantly notice the manipulation they are trying to inflict upon their valors and would get rid of the technology.
When you push someone to the limits like that and you have millions of people who's daily lives been a nightmare for many years, and they got out of it miraculously. And they promised themselves that they would never go back to their old habits or old life, you can be sure they will do everything in their power.

As soon as it is noticed and taken into priority, things change fast, media, news, internet... Everyone is noticed.
To me it is possible that they find a way to understand what we are thinking but they can't go and alter your memories without you noticing.
The reason is quite simple, if they want to alter something in your brain, they have to activate that portion of your brain, your memories would flashback to you instantly and you would know something is wrong.

The only good way I see this going is for medically treated people in their terminal state. Or before that when they notice that this person can no longer take care of itself and is handicapped in some way. (a little like in Sword Art Online, if you know what I mean.)

[Stillwater]

The thing with this is that, there's always someone stronger to oppose theses kinds of things. Population being one of those.
If somehow, there was a mind changing technology that would make people go bad, things would be noticed very quickly.

I would want it to be that way, but I think the reality is that there are profound man-made evils in the world that people accept, or at least do very little to prevent.

A very unpopular example (and this lack of popularity speaks to the strength of the above argument, I feel), is the presence of colossal-scale factory farming that provides in upwards of 90% of the animal products consumed in the industrial world. Billions of animals live short lives of torture in pitch-black cells just big enough for the volume of their bodies. And this has been continual for literal centuries. Sadly I think the presence of such a thing largely unchallenged disproves the idea that humans will reject evil outright.

What I think is closer to reality is that human actions are largely ruled by biological drives and desires.

If we don't first recognize that, we miss the important first step in understanding how to improve the quality of our thoughts and actions.

I don't think it would be so clear-cut and black and white in the beginning as changing the content's of peoples' minds in the way you suggest. That is significantly more difficult than merely browsing brain states, and probably un-needed. I think it would be something much closer to the role "insider information" plays in the stock market. If you can glean certain key facts, that alone provides a massive competitive advantage.

For instance:

Mr Smith walks into the shopping mall. He passes an array jointly owned by the outlets at that location. Mr Smith is a member of a preferred customer club, which grants very steep discounts, in exchange for permission to access his mental states (in order to "better serve" his needs). The array determines he is in a mildly irritated mind-state, but can determine little else. The system also recalls, from his filed banking information, which is linked to his personal profiles, that his wife has recently delivered their second child. The system tentatively decides it will first offer him a small number of updates on maternity and child-care related items, and see how this strategy works out. Mr Smith ignores 2 such adverts, and the system drops the strategy after 20 minutes. Mr Smith is in fact clothing shopping for gifts for a relative's child. But he isn't motivated to spend large amounts of money. At scanning hub two and three, the system catches a glimpse of something interesting: Whenever Mr. Smith is shopping for clothing, he is actually thinking of guitars. The system reasons that perhaps Mr. Smith is being extraordinarily frugal in his other purchases, because he is actually saving up to purchase a new instrument. The system also understands that such purchases have a lot to do with a person's self image. In the future, perhaps at a delay of one month, the system decides it will try a strategy of marketing all of Mr. Smith's required targeted ads by connecting unrelated products to musical culture, and specifically musical culture connected to Smith's chosen tastes reported from his satellite radio preferences. In the next three months, the system logs a 44% increase in impulse purchases which are suggested by this marketing approach with Mr. Smith.


I think the above example is pretty subtle. Mr. Smith gave them his permission (albeit in coercion to receive "discounts"). They used this information to do something seemingly innocuous. But the reality is that what really happened is that the system leveraged a competitive advantage to greatly increase its profit margin. Consider slightly less subtle examples, without permission, and for higher stakes. I think it is easy to see how merely knowing a person's personal thoughts, without the need to alter them as you suggest above, is more than enough to produce a favorable outcome to the reading party. I think you might be able to imagine such examples without me needing to illustrate those.