Assisted Suicide

[Russell Nash]

Quote Originally Posted by alogos

OK I understand my opinion will be unpopular in this forum, and that is fine. My opinions are never popular. Firstly I would like to thank Mr. D. and Ligeia for at least representing practical concerns against assisted suicide.

Dear Alogos:

Within 100 years, none of us, who presently writes on TLO, is going to be alive. I know that you believe in life after death, but nothing can be proved. Our life, all we know, will die within 100 years. Only certain people, lucky ones? I cannot say, like Ligotti, or other famous people, would be somehow alive because their writings would still be available. But even Ligotti, within the next thousand years or so will be forgotten. If someone decides to commit suicide, one maybe loses his only chance to contemplate the mystery of life. Once dead, either it's over or we'll live somewhere else (I doubt it), but not here, on this planet. For me, to be alive is the greatest mystery in the Universe. We might not even exist as selves, as discussed in another thread, but this subjectivity is mine.

When I think of my two deceased parents, I see them as history. On the contrary, being alive, I can still change mine. I can do something, or I cannot. I still can decide to do something, anything, like observing this ugly rain in Toronto tonight. It's not much, but being dead is the end of the road.

Quote Originally Posted by sundog

Another practically painless, easy, efficient and instantaneous way of killing oneself would be to walk out into the ocean from some beach and shoot oneself in the head. The water pouring in to one's brain makes survival pretty unlikely. Any other suggestions?

A similar method has already been practiced before, by Alfonsina Storni, successfully.

A year and a half after her friend Quiroga committed suicide in 1937, and haunted by solitude and breast cancer, Alfonsina Storni sent her last poem, Voy a dormir ("I'm going to sleep") to La NaciónLa Perla beach in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Later that morning two workers found her body washed up on the beach. Although her biographers hold that she jumped into the water from a brealwater, popular legend is that she slowly walked out to sea until she drowned.

Alfonsina Storni - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alfonsina_Storni

[Russell Nash]

A Botched Suicide

You are very depressed. You are suicidally depressed. You have a gun. But you do not quite have the courage to point the gun at yourself and kill yourself in this way. If only someone else would kill you, that would be a good thing. But you can't really ask someone to kill you. That wouldn't be fair. You decide that if you remain this depressed and you find a time machine, you will travel back in time to just about now, and kill your earlier self. That would be good. In that way you even would get rid of the depressing time you will spend between now and when you would get into that time machine. You start to muse about the coherence of this idea, when something amazing happens. Out of nowhere you suddenly see someone coming towards you with a gun pointed at you. In fact he looks very much like you, except that he is bleeding badly from his left eye, and can barely stand up straight. You are at peace. You look straight at him, calmly. He shoots. You feel a searing pain in your left eye. Your mind is in chaos, you stagger around and accidentally enter a strange looking cubicle. You drift off into unconsciousness. After a while, you can not tell how long, you drift back into consciousness and stagger out of the cubicle. You see someone in the distance looking at you calmly and fixedly. You realize that it is your younger self. He looks straight at you. You are in terrible pain. You have to end this, you have to kill him, really kill him once and for all. You shoot him, but your eyesight is so bad that your aim is off. You do not kill him, you merely damage his left eye. He staggers off. You fall to the ground in agony, and decide to study the paradoxes of time travel more seriously.

http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/s...travel-phys/#1

Do not use a time machine to kill yourself. Paradoxes are hard to understand.

[Piranesi]

The case of Ernst Hass:

”Last week, the European Court of Human Rights decided in the case of Haas v. Switzerland (judgment in French only) that the right to private life is not violated when a state refuses to help a person who wishes to commit suicide by enabling that person to obtain a lethal substance.”

http://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2011/01...ommit-suicide/

[Karnos]

Don't worry, with the economic crash getting worse, an energy crisis in the horizon and the possible societal collapse (at least in the west) I'm pretty sure we'll see plenty of "suicide clinics" popping out in back alleys or in private boats on international waters.

[sundog]

I saw this commercial just yesterday. I think Retzigler's ideas about hope and selfishness relating to suicide are misconceived, and I doubt those three DVDs will be a match against the conspiracy against the human race. But considering the Hopelessness Guarantee this - ultimately - is a great offer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VnfpcXS-Yk

[tonalized]

In general, I am in favor of assisted suicide, but I believe there should be strong regulations. My reasoning is that I am a schizophrenic and have attempted suicide many times. Luckily, it is one of the many activities that I have no proclivity for. If I had had the slightest inkling that I could take my meds and return almost to normal, I would have done that immediately. My point is this, there are many who think they want to die, that under somewhat different circumstances would feel differently. While I don't stand at the forefront of those who believe life is precious, it is all we have. Sometimes the easy way out isn't the best decision.

[tonalized]

Allow me to retort. Suicide (if you've never been inclined to attempt it) can be a very complicated matter. Without the proper guidance it's very possible to survive an attempt making life incredibly worse than it had previously been. As I've already stated in a previous reply, while I agree with Doctor Assisted Suicide in some cases, I believe there should be ample regulation. My reasoning is that, as someone who at one point was previously fixated on ending themselves, but has come around and am glad I never pulled it off, every possible cure (if you will) for the stated condition should be tried before such drastic measures are taken, but when there is absolutely no hope, I see no problem. As for the idea of human life being special, I can't speak to that. Universally, we are rare, but there are almost seven billion of us. If anyone is in that much pain, I don't think letting them go will risk the end of civilization, if that in itself would be a bad thing. And no I'm not religious.