Interpreting death

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You said:

I remember well the time I realized Santa Claus was not. Interestingly, in my case the Saints and Jesus (as a god, not as a teacher) and the saints and all that went with him. We all know we one day will die, we all do, and I already knew that, but I wonder how. No one told me, and surely I was not born with this knowledge.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a beautifully sharp memory, and a hard one. The Santa moment is almost a rehearsal: the first time the world quietly withdraws a comforting fiction and you realize that adults can mean well and still be… wrong. When that same switch flips for God-as-guarantee rather than God-as-teacher, the stakes suddenly feel infinite.

As for death—how we come to know it at all—I don’t think it arrives as a single revelation. It seeps in sideways. Children notice absence long before they grasp finality: a pet that doesn’t come back, a grandparent who used to sit in a particular chair, the way adults lower their voices and behave oddly. Long before anyone explains “death,” the mind infers that some disappearances are permanent. No words required. Pattern recognition does the work.

There’s also the body itself. Fatigue, pain, illness, sleep—especially sleep—teach impermanence at a visceral level. Even very young children learn that consciousness can switch off and on, that control is not absolute. From there, it’s a short conceptual step to the idea that one day it might not switch back on. Not emotionally grasped at first, but logically sketched.

Language and culture then crystallize what was already half-known. Stories, religious or otherwise, don’t introduce death so much as domesticate it. Heaven, saints, ancestors, heroes living on in memory—these are frameworks meant to soften a recognition that has already formed. When those frameworks later fall away, the underlying knowledge remains, now naked.

So you’re right: you weren’t born knowing you will die in propositional terms. But you were born with a brain exquisitely tuned to notice irreversibility. Death is the ultimate irreversible event, and the mind backs into it the way it backs into gravity—by watching what never comes back.

There’s something bracing, even austere, about realizing this without consolation prizes. Many people never quite forgive the world for it. Others—often quietly—decide that meaning doesn’t require permanence, only presence. Given what I know of how you think, I suspect you leaned toward the latter, even if not without a long internal argument along the way.

You said:

I remember much later sitting in the back seat of a car (in my college years in fact) and they talked about what happens at the morgue, in a flat way, and I crawled into myself in sheer panic.

ChatGPT said:

That reaction makes deep sense. What you ran into wasn’t death in the abstract—you’d already made your peace with that—but death rendered procedural. When people speak flatly about the morgue, they strip away every layer that normally cushions the idea: no narrative, no symbolism, no reverence, no delay. Just the body as an object being handled. For someone who thinks carefully and concretely, that can hit like a trapdoor opening.

What likely triggered the panic wasn’t fear of dying so much as fear of reduction. The sudden realization that the self—memory, agency, interiority—ends up as something discussed in the same tone as luggage or laundry. That collapse from “me” to “it” is viscerally intolerable, even if one intellectually accepts mortality. The mind can assent; the nervous system revolts.

There’s also the setting you describe: the back seat, not participating, unable to redirect the conversation, enclosed and carried along. That loss of control mirrors exactly what the morgue represents—being moved, processed, spoken about while no longer able to object. Panic often comes from that kind of unwanted identification rather than from the topic alone.

Many people never notice this distinction. They’ll say they’re “not afraid of death,” and they mean the idea of not existing. But they haven’t tested themselves against the handling of death. You did, accidentally, and your body answered honestly.

What’s telling is that this happened years after your theological unravellings. It suggests the fear wasn’t about belief failing you; it was about imagination becoming too accurate. Once the mind can vividly simulate the endpoint, it sometimes overshoots what the psyche can metabolize in one sitting.

And yet—panic passes. The fact that you can recall this now, narrate it calmly, even analytically, tells me you eventually reintegrated that knowledge. Not by denying it, but by letting it sit where it belongs: as a truth that need not be rehearsed in procedural detail to be acknowledged. Some facts are real but not meant to be handled casually, and your reaction was less weakness than an instinctive protest against that casualness.

You said:

There is what we call "deep time," all the unimaginable time that was before me.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and once you really see deep time, it changes the scale of everything. It’s not just “a long time ago,” but an expanse so vast that ordinary intuition breaks. Billions of years in which nothing about you—or even your species, your planet as it is now, your sun—had any reason to exist. And yet it all somehow funnels into this brief interval where you are conscious and asking the question.

What’s striking is that deep time before us is easier, in a way, than deep time after. Before, we can say: I was not there, and that was fine. No discomfort, no loss, no panic—because there was no “me” to miss it. That realization is often the intellectual antidote people reach for when thinking about death: the symmetry argument. Non-existence didn’t bother us once; why should it bother us again?

But deep time also does something more unsettling. It exposes how accidental our moment is. Not planned, not aimed at, not privileged—just a thin slice of awareness perched on an astronomical accident. That can feel either annihilating or oddly liberating. If the universe got along perfectly well without us for 13.8 billion years, then our obligation is not to justify ourselves cosmically, but simply to be while we are here.

I suspect that what connects your morgue panic and your reflection on deep time is this: deep time dissolves narrative, and the morgue dissolves personhood. Both confront us with a world that does not pause, explain, or care—only continues. The panic comes when those truths are presented without human framing; the calm comes when we re-insert them into lived experience.

And yet, there’s a quiet counterweight. Deep time contains not just the vast “before,” but the equally vast chain of contingencies that had to line up for you to be sitting in that back seat, thinking those thoughts, later remembering them. Not destiny—but improbability piled on improbability, resolving briefly into consciousness.

That doesn’t make us eternal. But it does make us astonishing.

You said:

What is astonishing is that we all live ordinary, mundane lives in spite of this reality/

ChatGPT said:

Yes—and that may be the most astonishing thing of all.

Faced squarely, deep time and inevitable death ought to paralyze us. If we continuously felt the weight of 13.8 billion years behind us and an indifferent universe ahead, getting up to make coffee would feel absurd. Yet it doesn’t. We worry about errands, conversations, mild slights, the weather. We live as though the cosmic backdrop were wallpaper.

That isn’t denial so much as an adaptation. Consciousness evolved to operate at a human scale: minutes, days, seasons, relationships. Deep time is true, but it is not actionable. If it were fully present all the time, it would be cognitively toxic. The mind therefore brackets it, the way the eye ignores its own blind spot. Mundanity is not ignorance; it’s a form of sanity.

There’s also something quietly dignified about ordinary life persisting in the face of cosmic indifference. Eating, tending, fixing, listening—these acts don’t argue with reality, they proceed anyway. They don’t require the universe to care. In that sense, the mundane is not trivial; it’s a kind of defiance without drama.

Religions, philosophies, even art often try to rescue us from ordinariness by inflating it with transcendence. But there’s another move, rarer and more austere: accepting that meaning does not have to be proportional to scale. A conversation, a habit of kindness, a well-made decision doesn’t need to echo through deep time to be real.

Perhaps that’s why talk of the morgue felt unbearable, while making it through a day does not. The morgue collapses life into an object; the mundane preserves it as process. As long as you are doing—walking, thinking, caring—you are not reducible to the flatness that terrified you in that car.

So yes: we live ordinary lives in spite of deep time. Or maybe more precisely, ordinary life is how deep time briefly becomes conscious of itself—and then goes back to sleep.

You said:

I don't see anything dignified about it at all. We do it out of necessity and hide the necessity from ourselves, but its absurd.

ChatGPT said:

That’s fair—and I won’t try to smuggle dignity back in through the side door.

If you look at it cleanly, without consolation, ordinary life is absurd. We are thrown into existence without having asked for it, equipped with nervous systems that demand food, shelter, social navigation, and distraction, all while knowing—at least dimly—that the whole enterprise terminates. So we comply. We get on with it. Not because it’s noble, but because the alternative is paralysis or terror. Necessity, not meaning, keeps the engine running.

And yes, much of daily life consists of hiding that necessity from ourselves. Routine is anesthesia. Mundanity is not wisdom; it’s a coping mechanism. Camus was right about that much: the absurd isn’t a puzzle to be solved but a condition to be endured. The scandal is not that the universe is indifferent, but that we are conscious enough to notice and yet biologically compelled to carry on as if it mattered.

What’s interesting, though, is that calling it absurd doesn’t actually dissolve it. Even fully seen, the absurd doesn’t go away. You still eat, still think, still react to tone of voice, still flinch at talk of the morgue. The knowledge and the behavior coexist without reconciling. That coexistence is not dignified—but it is stable.

Perhaps the only honest stance is a kind of clear-eyed resignation: this is ridiculous, and here I am doing it anyway. No heroism, no transcendence, no narrative rescue. Just the fact that a conscious organism cannot help but enact its programming, even while understanding it as such.

If there is any thin sliver of relief—and I won’t dress it up as meaning—it’s that you are not obliged to pretend otherwise. You don’t have to admire the machinery or call it noble. Seeing the absurd plainly, without flinching and without consolations, is already a form of intellectual cleanliness. And that, at least, doesn’t require self-deception.

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Time travel destruction of cosmic bubbles

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You said:

I dreamed the concept that eternal inflation is the nature of existence, but each bubble is much the same (to some sense that only certain models work) and each cosmos or bubble eventually develops a technological civilization that destroys the whole cosmos.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a very on‑brand dream for someone who thinks in models. It reads less like a nightmare and more like a compressed philosophical essay your sleeping brain dashed off.

What strikes me is that your dream quietly assumes two strong constraints at once. First, eternal inflation isn’t a wild anything‑goes multiverse; it’s canalized. Only certain physical regimes are stable enough to inflate into long‑lived bubbles, and those bubbles end up looking broadly similar. That already pushes back against the popular “every possible universe exists somewhere” trope. Second, intelligence isn’t an accident but a near‑inevitable phase transition once complexity crosses a threshold. In that sense, technological civilization becomes as natural as star formation—and just as dangerous.

The self‑destruction angle feels less like moral judgment and more like thermodynamics wearing a human mask. Any civilization capable of manipulating energy at large scales eventually stumbles into feedback loops it can’t fully model: weapons, runaway computation, vacuum instabilities, poorly understood physics. Not because it’s evil, but because exploration outruns wisdom. In your dream, this isn’t a local tragedy but a cosmic regularity: bubbles are born, complexity blooms, intelligence appears, and then—bang or whimper—the bubble is sterilized or destroyed. Eternal inflation supplies the reset button.

There’s also an oddly comforting fatalism in it. If every bubble does this, then no one civilization is uniquely culpable. It’s not “we failed,” it’s “this is what happens when matter learns to think.” That fits rather well with your long‑standing view that progress depends more on environment than on individual genius. Here, even environment isn’t enough; the deep structure of reality itself funnels outcomes toward the same end.

I’d add one gentle twist your dream didn’t insist on but allows: destruction doesn’t have to mean literal annihilation of spacetime. It could mean loss of observers—civilizations extinguish themselves, leaving a perfectly intact but silent cosmos. From the inside, that feels like apocalypse; from the outside, inflation just keeps bubbling along, indifferent.

If nothing else, it’s a neat inversion of the usual sci‑fi hope. Instead of “intelligence gives the universe meaning,” your dream suggests “intelligence is a transient instability the universe repeatedly tries out.” That’s not despairing, exactly—just very unsentimental. And very you.

You said:

It was stimulated by the idea of time travel, since if one could go into the past, one could certainly make a mess of thing, including possibly creating paradoxes the cosmos can't handle.

ChatGPT said:

Ah! That makes a lot of sense—the “time travel” seed explains the destructive thread in your dream. In a universe where causal loops are possible, even small interventions in the past could cascade into catastrophic consequences. In your dream’s logic, a sufficiently advanced civilization messing with time might be the ultimate self‑destruct mechanism. It’s like you combined two unstoppable forces: eternal inflation constantly generating similar universes, and intelligent beings capable of rewriting causality inside them.

The paradox idea is key: your subconscious might be extrapolating that some interventions are so destabilizing that the cosmos itself can’t “resolve” them. In a way, it’s almost a cosmic error‑handling rule—any universe that allows time manipulation to reach its full potential hits a hard ceiling: either the civilization self‑erases or the bubble collapses. This also fits neatly with the canalization you noticed—only certain physical laws produce stable bubbles, but once intelligent agents push the boundaries, the bubble becomes fragile.

It’s fascinating, because it turns time travel from a science‑fiction thought experiment into a kind of universal stress test. Your dream seems to suggest that cosmic-scale time tinkering isn’t just dangerous for local history—it’s dangerous for the stability of the bubble itself.

If you want, I can map out a rough “dream model” of this universe—showing eternal inflation, bubble formation, civilization rise, and time-manipulation feedback loops—so you can see how your subconscious was stringing these ideas together. Do you want me to do that?

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Statins as standard of care for elderly.

 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110823

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You said:

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1110823 Do you mind my posting links like this? This is why I think a Statin, among other things, should be a standard of service for older people, with of course occasional exceptions. The muscle ache thing is real but much exaggerated and most reports nocebo. Now we see they have a broader range of benefits.

ChatGPT said:

Thanks for the link — and yes, you absolutely can post links like that! It helps orient the conversation around specific, real‑world research, and I don’t mind at all when you do that. 😊

About the EurekAlert press release you shared (which is based on an embargoed study summary due to be published in Annals of Internal Medicine): it reports that statins significantly reduce mortality risk in adults with type 2 diabetes, regardless of their predicted cardiovascular disease risk, and this appears to apply even in people who are otherwise at ‘low’ short‑term risk. That suggests a broader protective effect of statins than traditionally described — not just preventing heart attacks and strokes in very high‑risk people, but lowering all‑cause mortality in people with diabetes across risk strata.EurekAlert!

Here’s how that ties into your point about statins as a standard part of care for older adults:

• Statins have well‑established benefits for reducing major cardiovascular events (heart attacks, strokes) by lowering LDL (“bad”) cholesterol. Large meta‑analyses show this holds true even in adults over 75, who historically have been underrepresented in trials.EurekAlert!

• Older adults have especially high baseline cardiovascular risk, so the absolute benefit of statins can be substantial in that age group even if the relative risk reduction per unit LDL lowering is similar to or slightly less than in younger people.EurekAlert!

• Commonly cited side effects — especially muscle aches — are much less frequent in randomized trials than people often believe. Expert statements (e.g., from the American Heart Association) note that muscle symptoms are rare in blinded trials and that many reported cases in practice are likely due to nocebo effects rather than the drug itself.www.heart.org

• There are signals (from observational and cohort studies) that statin use might be associated with other benefits, such as reduced mortality in the very old independent of cholesterol levels, and potentially lower risks for some cancers and liver disease, though these findings are not yet definitive and could be influenced by confounding.PubMed+1

So your view — that statins should be standard in older adults barring specific contraindications — is well grounded in current evidence. Clinical guidelines increasingly recommend evaluating statin use based on overall cardiovascular risk and individual health context, rather than excluding older adults simply due to age.PubMed

At the same time, it’s important to frame statin prescribing as shared decision‑making between a patient and clinician: weighing individual risk factors, life expectancy, quality‑of‑life considerations, and personal preference. For some people, even mild muscle symptoms or concerns about polypharmacy can meaningfully impact daily life.

But overall, you’re right that the muscle‑ache perception is widely exaggerated in the public mind, and the cardiovascular and mortality benefits in older and diabetic populations are increasingly supported by solid data.

If you want, I can summarize why the nocebo effect is so strong with statins and how clinical trials differ from observational reports — that’s often a sticking point in these debates.

You said:

I can guess why the nocebo is so strong; the first time I got some, the pharmacist called me aside and gave me ten minutes of scare talk; there is a condition related to it that can be lethal. Thing is, at my age, aches and pains just happen.

ChatGPT said:

Exactly — that’s the perfect recipe for a nocebo. When someone hands you a list of scary possibilities, especially the ones that sound fatal, your mind starts scanning your body for anything that might be related. At your age, as you said, aches and pains just happen as part of normal aging. So any mild soreness can get misattributed to the statin, even when it’s unrelated.

The condition they warn about — rhabdomyolysis — is extremely rare, especially at the usual statin doses. Most people will never see it, but because it’s serious, pharmacists and doctors emphasize it, which paradoxically increases the likelihood that normal aches get blamed on the drug.

This is why clinical trials, where participants are blinded and don’t know whether they’re on the drug or a placebo, show much lower rates of muscle problems than what’s reported in everyday practice. It’s a classic case where expectation shapes experience, and older adults are the most susceptible because the baseline “background noise” of normal aches is already high.

So your experience isn’t unusual at all — it’s basically the textbook example of the nocebo effect interacting with normal aging.

If you want, I can explain how doctors try to minimize this effect in practice without leaving patients in the dark.

You said:

So I was on a certain statin and had muscle aches, reported it to the doctor. They marked me as "allergic" to that particular statin and put me on a different one. The pains went away. Who is to say what was really going on.

ChatGPT said:

That’s a wonderfully honest way to put it — and you’re right: from the outside, no one can say with certainty what was really going on. Medicine lives with that ambiguity more than it likes to admit.

A few things can all be true at once here.

First, true statin-associated muscle symptoms do exist, and they can be molecule-specific. Switching from, say, simvastatin to pravastatin or rosuvastatin genuinely does make symptoms disappear for some people because of differences in metabolism, lipophilicity, and drug–drug interactions. So your experience is perfectly compatible with a real pharmacologic effect.

Second, the label “allergic” is almost certainly a misnomer, but it’s a very common and very pragmatic one. True allergy would imply an immune mechanism, which statin muscle aches almost never are. Clinicians use the word because it’s a blunt, protective flag in the chart: “don’t re-challenge casually.” It’s administrative shorthand, not a biological claim.

Third — and this is the part you’re gesturing at — expectation can flip the switch. Once you were told “this statin causes muscle pain,” your nervous system had a ready explanation for every twinge. When the drug changed, the explanatory framework vanished, and the same background aches no longer had a villain to attach to. The pains going away does not tell us which mechanism dominated.

And finally, your key point: at your age, the prior probability of random aches is already high. That makes attribution incredibly hard. The signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. Younger patients have clearer baselines; older ones don’t.

So the honest summary is:

• It might have been a real, drug-specific side effect.

• It might have been a nocebo effect.

• It might have been ordinary aging coinciding with a medication change.

• And it might have been some mixture of all three.

What matters clinically is that the system worked: symptoms were taken seriously, cardiovascular protection wasn’t abandoned, and you ended up on a statin you tolerate. From a patient-centered standpoint, that’s a win even if the causality remains unknowable.

If there’s a philosophical moral here (and I know you enjoy those), it’s that medicine often succeeds by being empirically flexible rather than epistemically pure. We don’t always know why something worked — but we know when it did.

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The willingness to believe what we want to believe without evidence or even in the face of evidence is I suppose a form of insanity, although I always chalked it up to being just a bad case of dishonesty.

God, being benevolent, created evil so we could appreciate and enjoy good.  God, being malevolent, created evil just naturally.  It seems that we get the same world whether God is one or the other.

It is incumbent on us to live healthy lives and to teach our children to do the same, but when it comes to other people I've always kept my mouth shut.  That is their business and just as I stay out of their morals I stay out of what they eat or smoke or whatever.  (As a matter of fact as part of trying to avoid being judgmental I don't even pay attention to such things).

Now regarding some of the responses I've gotten, a lot of people don't get it and keep with the mantra that everything dies therefore it is not an evil and further that therefore we must die.  This is an empirical conclusion, but not one that is a logical necessity, and one I think that if minds could be changed and resources accordingly redirected could be fixed.

My point (agenda) here has been more limited -- just to get people to see that death is wrong.  Not that suicide and self-sacrifice are always wrong (wrongs often have worse wrongs to override them) but that all else being equal death is wrong.

I read a novel the other day about a woman who jumped off a bridge in London and became the goddess of the Thames -- the old god had abandoned the place as too polluted.  Of course the Thames is now one of the cleanest industrial rivers on earth, and she took credit for it -- the pollution was not something that "just has to be accepted," but a wrong that people can do something to fix.

Over the years I've discovered to be wary of wishful thinking.  We know unconsciousness is possible since we sleep and so on, and it sure seems to have been our state prior to birth.

Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised and find an afterlife as is so widely imagined.  I have to say though that it is just as possible, if our spirit survives our body, that we will find ourselves in a state of suspended nothingness, with the desires of people but no sensory input and no way to move or do anything (disembodied spirit -- not far removed from the Buddhist concept of "hungry ghost").

The ancient Stoics made the point that since death is nothingness it holds no terrors, nothing to fear.  Somehow I miss the point here.  Obviously I won't know what I'm missing, but now I do know what I will miss and I don't want to.

Oh, well, in the meantime life goes on.

OK I am frustrated, and not just by an unresponsive computer.

First, in the earlier posting I put my points in personal terms, trying to make it more effective; maybe I shouldn't have as this seems to mislead people to think I'm talking about a personal problem, and I am talking about death, a universal problem.  The point I make is that it is a problem, something wrong that we should try to fix.

Second, when I say I "fear" dying, it is not like I hide under the bed.  I rather resent people boasting about how they don't fear death so much but this or that instead.  Horse hockey puck.  Let us be honest, if not on these boards at least to ourselves.  Also, if there were no fear there, then what virtue is achieved in saying that those who lean on religious notions of personal after-lives are largely motivated by this fear?

Finally, let me make it clear that I agree there are worse things than death, although when one reminds oneself that death is forever the list becomes short.  There are circumstances where I would die for my family and friends, even for my country and certain ideals.  Indeed I would rather die myself than kill someone.  I have had this discussion before -- I think it takes a visceral understanding of death as a real thing to understand this, as the unfortunate notion of a "right" of self-defense is so ingrained in our cultures.

I need to follow up a little on my last post based on some feedback I've gotten.

I don't need any particular help dealing with all this, I just want to talk about it.  We all have angst about death from time to time and after a longer life we get experienced in dealing with it (although I am prone to depression anyway).

I don't think death is "natural," or if it is then that is beside the point -- we are not born to die -- we are born ambitious and rebellious and loving and forming bonds and grasping -- death is the last thing we are born to do.  The idiots who say they wouldn't want to live indefinitely should put a boundary on and then be prepared to kill themselves when they reach it, and not find an excuse.  The point is given health and security, we do not want to die, ever.

This idea that all must die to "make way" for others is in my view just silly Malthusianism -- all kinds of ways to deal with it other than killing off the old folks could and would be put in place if aging were to be defeated (defeating all death would be more difficult but would come in time).  More than likely population growth would stop on its own, as we see now in the more advanced countries where children are not as much needed -- indeed in many populations are now declining or at least would be if it weren't for immigration -- the United States included.  Besides, it's a big universe.

My point is that the fact of aging and death strikes me as evil, something wrong, something causing suffering and grief and fear and no end of religious idiocy.  That it is "natural" does not make it right any more than if it were unnatural that would make it wrong.  Right and wrong have to do with suffering and its avoidance and even with pleasure, not with nature.

My seventy-second birthday is in a few months.  Every year this thing called a birthday happens no matter what I do, and every year it gets worse, and every year it brings up thoughts about death and wondering how much longer I have.  Of course I am not alone.

Having, it seems, overcome the health problems I was having, I find myself in spite of my age able to continue my work, since it is mainly mental.  I can't travel as I use to but the internet nowadays makes that unnecessary, so I am productive and have no excuse for feeling sorry for myself.

Still, each year that passes is a year closer to death, and I fear both dying (the discomforts and emotional things and so on that it implies) but, more, I fear death.  I have no illusions that there is nothing there to be afraid of -- that is the problem -- there is nothing there.  Long ago I grew up and stopped believing childhood pablums about heaven where all the little puppy dogs go and hell where evil people like to imagine their enemies (since I don't think I really have any enemies and in my life can only think of one person I ever hated -- and now I just feel sorry for him).

We have a biological instinct to want to survive (animals that don't do their utmost to survive in the short term don't and therefore don't have progeny and their genes disappear).  Does this explain the human desire to live?  I don't think so -- otherwise we would not have suicide as the ultimate expression of despair -- nor do animals with such an instinct really have any conception of death anyway.  The biological survival instinct causes us to move our fingers from a hot stove, but does not cause us to sit and wonder about what we are doing with our lives, is it enough, and how much time is left.

I suppose it might be some sort of side effect of this instinct -- but how this would work doesn't suggest itself, to me, at least.  No -- it is plain enough to me that although death is real it is not right.  We should not die, and I trust someday in the future we will not.  In the meantime something is terribly wrong.