Can people die of old age?
December 7th 2006 23:20
When you medically examine, when you survey, you conclude that a third of the population dies of cancer, a third dies of heart failure, some die of diseases or accidents or violence, etc. (Check out the table at the end of this post.) So it begins to look as if people can never die of old age.
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Well, maybe yes, maybe no. But the fact is, it depends, among other things, on what you mean by "cause". In particular, what sorts of cause are and can be picked out by the expression "to die of x". Consider the following cases:
-- Does smoking cause cancer, and does spanking cause psychological damage? Not everyone who smokes gets cancer, and not everyone who's spanked is damaged.
-- If I shoot you, do I cause your death, or is it the bullet that causes your death?
-- Jorgen Randers takes the view that, if global warming leads to global collapse, it will not be regarded, by future historians, as the "root cause", just as oil scarcity will not be regarded as the root cause of Iraq, but causation will be attributed to American imperialism, Hussein's tyranny, etc.
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So what counts as a cause and what doesn't? Is it fair to say that old age causes death? Is it fair to say that life causes death? Are these legitimate uses in the context of "to die of x"?
Well, there are many possible morals to draw from these stories -- and I'm not going to draw them. As I said, I'm ignorant of causation talk.
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The Australia Bureau of Statistics reckons:
"In 2004, Malignant neoplasms represented 28.7% of all underlying cause of death. When associated causes were included it contributed 39.4% of all deaths as an underlying or associated cause. Similarly, 18.5% of all deaths had Ischaemic heart diseases as the underlying cause, but it was found to contribute to 35.5% of all deaths as either an underlying or associated cause. The following table lists the top ten multiple causes of death (underlying and associated causes) appearing on death certificates for deaths registered in 2004, and their corresponding ranking in terms of underlying causes.
Australian causes of death in 2004
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Comment by MelissaA
Fun Facts
Well, in my book, if you're 83 and you die of heart failure, that's your heart giving out on you after 83 years of hard service working for your body, and therefore of old age.
But no matter what I say, everyone still sticks to the 'listed' cause of death. Is it really so hard to admit that some people do just die because they are old?
So 'cause' I find can be taken to extremes. I find, like you say Adrian, that life is the major cause of death.
Comment by Manjula
but if you look at it another way - What is old? A decade ago, 50 was old but nowadays in America and most developed countries people begin their second life in their 60s after they retire..
So 80s may be old now but a decade later, 100s may be the new old
Maybe it's a fantasy of mine, but there could be a time when you are old old but have absolutely no health problems - then what?
Coming back from my fantasy, in the present time, I guess people want something "formal" and "official" and there's always a PRIMARY reason - be it a heart failure or something else
Yes, life causes death and old age causes death but it is not the IMMEDIATE PRIMARY reason for death
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Causation is a tricky thing, and I don't pretend to have got my head around it. It seems to me, among other things, to be a sort of linguistic trick. When you say something is "the cause", it's ambiguous how far back in time you want to go, at what level of generality you want to speak, what the constants are (smoking doesn't always cause cancer), in which category system you want to classify, etc...
If anyone who's reading this is interested, for some idea of how cause is currently treated in the Anglo-American world, check out Reichenbach's common cause principle and Metaphysics of causation...
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
You're right that old age doesn't necessarily cause death -- science might well evolve to the point that it keeps people alive indefinitely.
And you're very right that "old" is an ambiguous word. Most adjectives are. How long is long? How short is short?
And if someone suffers from a so-called accelerated aging disease, and they die in only a decade or two, have they died of "old age" -- given that "old age" means, to us, BOTH the actual length of time, and the associated symptoms?
Comment by KylieW
Celebrity Obsession
Good post.....but wow, it makes my head hurt! You could go round and round in circles couldn't you??
I can't pretend that I know next to anything about causation, but you've given me something to read up on!
KylieW
Comment by katyzzz
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What a lovely topic for Christmas.
Could we keep the deceased under the tree over the Christmas period, suitably embalmed, of course, no nasty smells at Christmas allowed, where's the environmental air freshener in the polluting spray can?
Wished I'd kept the ashes, they could hang around just fine at Christmas.
This is such a lovely thought of yours and all wrapped up in statistics, try some of Melissa's wrapping paper, it's pretty.
See you before Christmas, Love you, I like it, live and let live, love, that's all you need, I believe it's on special at the reject shop. Bye, darling, love you and everything everyone says and does, it does cause a little difficulty when they do opposites, but I love that too...
did you slip in an Orble to take you to no 1? Love it , luv it. like it, like you, like them, I think I've got the hiccups. I like those, too. Luv
katyzz ........Oh, and I like the skull, too, shake it all about!
Comment by Sisi
Comment by Lilla
From The Home Front
Enviro Warrior
Dream Herald
Esoteric Bookshop
.. my experience with very old people is that as the body ages, the quality of life is lessened and eventually the soul must decide to 'let go.' I think that's when we finally decide that we really do belong to something bigger than here and now, [or not] ... my very old and ailing Dad, says it is a conscious choice now each day on whether to go or not... for now he chooses to stay, because he says, he’s still a coward… but he assures me eventually this decision will change due to pain, just boredom, curiosity and the quest for the unknown - is there really something there on the other side? - or in so many cases... pure grief... I recently read an article about how many people literally die of grief and loneliness, rather than upset the status quo!
Some mystics will tell you that if someone is standing in front of you pulling a trigger that launches the bullet that kills you, then you have attracted that into your sphere through something that is unbalanced within you... so what about Ghandi or Lennon… I thought they were very balanced… maybe that’s why it’s better not to upset the status quo and die of grief … another form of cowardice?
.. as for cancer, it is my heartfelt belief that it’s increase has something to do with pollution and higher population (no surprise there) *lol* but what about the approx. 6,400 new chemicals and synthetic drugs introduced into our world over the past 200 years. Have you ever tried to get a chewing gum with REAL sugar in it… carcinogens are cheaper to produce! What about radiation from cell phones and computers, microwaves and even TV's... when was the last time any of us unplugged and slept a headache off naturally?
Now I’ve gone and waffled on again and am really scared of being black balled for leaving such a long opinion…sorry, it’s full moon… I guess I’m saying I don’t know, but this post was so interesting I thought I’d try and add something to stimulate further thought …
Lilla…
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
No comments re your second or third paras.
And I dunno what "black ball" means, let alone want to do it to you.
Comment by Anonymous
(I seem to remember that you can tell the age of a cell by the length of the mitochondrion, but don't take my word for it.)
So, if the cells in a human body have expiration dates, so must the humans... but it seems only natural to me that certain organs fail before the others, I don't think we will ever be able to say that someone died "of old age" without also being able to specify what aged part stopped working first.
There have been experiments that have tried to lengthen the life of cells, even stop them from aging at all. The results looked like something very familiar - cancer.
Cancer is basically immortal cells, they continue to split without dying, thus the tumor grows.
Feel free to correct me on the details here, I'm no doctor or anything.
Comment by Nonymous
Philosophy Blog
and
Just throwing some ideas around here...
-- If we don't know which part stopped working first, but we do know that, whichever part it was, "old age" was the cause of the failure... Couldn't we still say that the person "died of old age"? Do we need to identify the organ specifically?
-- If we knew what part failed first, there would still be a question as to when "death" occurs, and there's a sense in which medical technology has caused people to use the word "death" in new ways. Two centuries ago, maybe someone would be called "dead" when they had no pulse. And these days, some people would argue that if your head is chopped off and frozen in the right way, you can still be called "alive".
-- Also, there are funny questions about what can be cited as a "cause". If I shoot you in the heart, what caused your death? Me, my finger, the gun, the bullet, your heart...? Or such things as the absence of a doctor nearby, the absence of a bulletproof vest, etc? -- So even if we knew which part failed first, there might be multiple ways to talk about the cause of that failure.
-- You talk about a limit on cellular reproduction. Now, one funny question that gets raised here is whether the natural language term "old age" in fact reduces to talk of cellular reproduction. And, in a philosophical context, this sort of discussion gets raised especially by what's called "Eliminativism". Eliminativists talk about such things as whether one theory is expressible in terms of another theory -- whether chemistry is expressible in terms of physics, whether everything that's said about the "mind" can be expressed by talk of "brains", and so on.
If ordinary language operates on the basis of theories, maybe these neatly reduce to more scientific theories (as I think you're suggesting), or maybe they're wholly inadequate (as Eliminativists suggest -- so, for instance, old-fashioned theories about spirits and demons don't reduce to anything, but are simply inadequate).
Comment by Placement93
This is very interesting when compared to Darwin's evolution because it basically *IS* evolution and the differentiation of species within our own bodies.
Sorry I don't have all the citations for this information, I'm sure you can get the basics just by looking up apoptosis on Wikipedia, but I have a lot of links from a human biology group I belong to in my email that I don't particularly feel like going through. Also sorry that I didn't read every comment and this may have already been mentioned on some level.
93,
--DH
Comment by Timothy Powell
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