To me the state of "life" and "death" is the same state of matter and physical force(s?). Nothing sacred about it. People don't die, because people don't live, in the first place. People don't have fixed personalities. You can assume you die every day. Tomorrow you are not the same mind. The state of having consciousness is like keeping balance of some plates in mid-air. It is achieved through outside forces, and outside forces ruin its balance, so one must adjust, a little, all the time. The unique character development is how the plates are getting ordered. It forms some core static structure, but is also dynamic. When the brain has not been supplied with blood long enough, the wiring is lost, the plates fall, and if you don't pick them up fast enough, you will not be able to reorder them the same way again. People with different kinds of stroke change their personalities, or restart, like children, learning to walk and talk again. So what exactly is to be preserved? What could go in a memory bank, if we don't have fixed memories anyway. The whole history is a scam the way I see it, full of heroic leaders and thinkers, who have been nothing like what is described in the books and depicted on statues. This whole pantheon of icons is quite detrimental for human thought today. We have been trained for too long to assume some great importance of how our life ends, and what we've "achieved", but most of those, in the books, are deceptions and mis-credited. Our brains are not linear, and multiple sources influence our decisions, so there's never a clear-cut in causal inter-relationship. And we are unable to keep track of all inputs that influence us, which leaves the gray area of mysticism always open, unfortunately, so far, about where our ideas came from and what causes our bold and brave actions. Is it really "our" will? Let's see about that, in the years to follow.
Of course, humans can live forever, whatever that means. With nanotechnology we can renew all body cells with healthy non-aged versions of our non-damaged DNA. Brain cells are also born from stem cells in later life, as recently discovered, not just dying in one direction. But we can help also the brain to keep its chemical properties at top levels, forever. The question is: why? I see nothing wrong with living forever, but I don't see why to do it. Even if life is pleasant, it also gets boring. For now, I would choose to die naturally, and go in the soil, like it used to be on this planet. Not that I see anything sacred in this natural cycle, but it feels right, what more to ask for. Whoever wants to live forever, let them enjoy "themselves". The notion of self is learned. Like we can teach animals self-awareness and thinking through the tools of languages, we teach our children too. If we don't teach them, and they don't have access to teach themselves, they don't have self-awareness, and they don't develop the language-based thought processes. That's why I say "self-awareness is bunk". Meaning, it's not something for granted. It's like a cult. If a brain isn't in the cult, it won't become what we call self-aware, on its own. Descartes is wrong, as we already know, about the separation of ration and emotion. It seems he was also wrong about "Think therefore I am"; he should have stopped at "thinking", because the "I" element also comes from outside, not from within. The brain is a network of neurons, capable of so many interesting things, some of which may be lost by enforcing what is called self. The difference between humans is not their brain, but rather their cognitive bodies, which are like different glasses and different hearing aids. Trapped behind these different cognitive tools, the brain of each person develops differently, but it's not inherently the same thing as its body. It's extremely adaptive. It could readjust within another cognitive set, for example. We can learn to see with echolocation, like so many other animals, and see through objects. It would make people more confident, less afraid. Some people tend to create fear in human societies, because they rely too much on what they can see, which leaves them guessing about what's inside. Distrustful. If we all could see inside, like dolphins, maybe we would be friendlier and more playful, naturally. Okay, sorry for the tangent. Hope it's alright.
N.B.!
It could seem this justifies murder. Not at all!! What we call life is still a very high order of organization of energy and matter, and it shouldn't be destroyed by other such organizations, due to respecting its complexity.
