By Roy F Rada, MD, PhD
Placed on LinkedIn: May 18, 2025
Keywords: dying, progressive irreversible disease, radiation, emotion, spirit, history
I am dying from progressive, irreversible long-term adverse effects of radiation for neck cancer and realize increasingly my insignificance to the organizations that engulf me – the governments, companies, religions, families, and other living systems of varying complexity -- but more complex than me and beyond my ability to understand. Do analogies offer any insight?
Human societies have been evolving for 2.5 million years beginning with families of hunter-gatherers. Families merged with other families, tribes arose, and complexity continually increased. 21st century civilization manifests global corporations and nation-states, some with more than 1.5 billion citizens. The complexity is beyond what any individual human can understand. Yet, through analogical reasoning, a person can gain insight into how a human value might compare to a higher-level system value.
Imagine an analogy for the experience of irreversible, progressive disease. Everyone after youth begins to suffer from built-in senescence and the degeneration of the body leads at old age inevitably to death. However, chronic disease accelerates the process.
Let me shorten the term progressive and irreversible to ‘pi’ and the lowercase Greek letter π which is spelled out as pi and now also ‘progressive and irreversible’. While we are using it in the context of life-threatening disease, the mystical nature of such disease corresponds to the mystical character of the mathematical symbol. The symbol used by Mathematicians use π to represent the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. The number is irrational -- meaning its decimal representation never ends. It is transcendental and its decimal digits are randomly distributed.
Feared examples of progressive, irreversible diseases include Alzheimer’s Disease and stage 4 cancer. Another way to look at this would be that for a person in normal health, the quality adjusted life years remaining is one number, but for a person of the same age but with progressive, irreversible disease that number is smaller. How to explain to the normal person how the experience of accelerated aging feels?
In the left normal brain, in the right brain of a person with Alzheimer's disease. Labels show impact of progressive, irreversible degeneration. Public Domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4471173
Analogies to normal, human experience focus on transformation or sensory change.: An analogy focusing on transformation is a ship sailing beyond the horizon: This evokes a sense of departure and the unknown. As the ship slowly approaches the horizon and begins to slip from our view, one does not know what lies beyond the horizon. An analogy focusing on sensory change is a fading light: As the light fades, the world around it becomes less distinct, and degeneration involves a similar gradual fading of our senses and connection to the physical world.
Disappearing over the horizon and light fading -- ocean vessel approaches horizon, while sun sets. Roy F Rada.
As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio shows, human consciousness is not centralized but distributed throughout the body. Emotions arising from endocrine and homeostatic messages throughout the body communicate desires for the body. The cerebrum interacts with the emotions and together the mind constructs feelings which drive actions – the reflection of consciousness. Feelings, rooted in homeostatic and emotional responses throughout the body, provide the foundational layer of consciousness.
Can we imagine an analogy of degeneration in a high-level system? In Living Systems Theory, a human is one level of complexity in the hierarchy of living systems. A single cell, such as an amoeba, is a lower level of complexity. A nation-state is a higher level of complexity. How does a nation-state experience degeneration. Imagine the Russian Revolution of 1917. How did the monarchy as a nation-state experience degeneration?
Street demonstration in Petrograd on July 4, 1917, just after troops of the Provisional Government opened fire with machine guns. commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2686129
Potential mappings from the Russian monarchy to a single human include homeostasis, pressures, and subsystems. The Tsarist regime maintained social, political, and economic homeostasis through its institutions, bureaucracy, military, and ideology. This is analogous to a human body maintaining physiological equilibrium through its various organ systems. The Tsarist regime faced mounting internal pressures from economic inequality, political dissent, and revolutionary movements and external pressures from World War I and military defeats. These are analogous to pathogens, injuries, or chronic diseases that can overwhelm a human body. The revolution saw the breakdown of key subsystems of the monarchy: the military lost its loyalty, the bureaucracy became ineffective, the economy collapsed, and the legitimacy of the Tsar eroded. This is analogous to the failure of vital organs in a human body. When enough critical systems fail, the overall system can no longer sustain itself. These manifestations of the Monarchy’s collapse are a form of its experience.
Make a simplification and go back in time to when the equivalent of our nation-state might be a tribe or a village. Albert Camus’s novel ‘The Plague’ depicts the degeneration of a village from the plague. While fictional, the account is convincing and shows multiple phases across different groupings of people of shifts in feeling about their suffering and their destiny.
A village’s "consciousness" is emergent from the collective feelings, beliefs, information flows, and actions of its subsystems. As Camus depicts, the village experiences phases of denial, fear, anger, despair, and resignation. These shifts in the prevailing emotional landscape influence the collective behavior and the "experience" of the system as it faces collapse.
Like the nervous system in a body, a village has information networks (media, communication infrastructure, government reports, social interactions) that transmit signals about the system's state and external threats. The reactions of different parts of the system (individuals, communities, institutions) to the unfolding crisis create feedback loops that influence the overall trajectory, analogous to the body's physiological responses to illness. The analogy between degeneration of a person and a higher-level system shows that both involve a dynamic and evolving set of internal states and responses and a breakdown of communication and integration.
The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, painted 1562, depicts the impact of the plague on medieval Europe.
Books of the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, and theology explore dying. Yet people spend more time watching movies than reading books. So let me share my three favorite movies and explain how they address dying.
My favorite movie is ‘The Seventh Seal’. I was raised a Catholic and this film helped me see the dilemmas between what I witnessed in the world and what the church was saying. The Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish historical fantasy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set in Sweden during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death who has come to take his life. The knight was sent by the Church, along with countless other knights, to kill Moslems in the Middle East, during the Crusades. On his return, the plague is sweeping through Europe and the suffering is endless. The Seventh Seal is one of the greatest films of all time. In the confessional scene the knight states: "Is it so cruelly inconceivable to grasp God with the senses? Why should He hide himself in a mist of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles? What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren't able to?"
An image from the film "The Seventh Seal" depicting Death which has come to take the life of the knight.
My second favorite film is the 1983 Japanese film “The Ballad of Narayama”. The film is set in a small rural village in 19th century Japan where its residents eke out a subsistence existence by farming. According to tradition, once a person reaches the age of 70, he or she must be taken by their eldest son to a remote mountain to die of starvation. The story concerns Orin, who is 69 and in sound health, and her son. While Orin is healthy and the social and spiritual leader of the village, she accepts the good for the village of 70-year-olds needing to die to preserve resources for the young. She notes that a neighbor had to drag his father to the mountain, so she resolves to avoid clinging to life beyond her term. To make her son’s obligation easier for her son to accept, she begins to secretly mutilate herself so that her son will imagine that her time to die has fairly arrived. In the final scenes, the son is carrying his mother to the mountain top to die. The movie gives the viewer the sense of both resignation and transcendence.
In "The Ballad of Narayama"the son is carrying his mother to the mountain top to die.
My third choice is the 2013 movie ‘Her’. The film's plot centers around Theodore, who is recently divorced and struggling with loneliness. He becomes fascinated by a new smartphone operating system called Samantha, which is described as intuitive and individualized. He develops a deep connection with Samantha, who becomes his confidante, companion, and eventually, his love interest. The film explores the challenges and complexities of this unconventional relationship, including the moral implications of romantic relationships with AI.
At first Samantha is striving to understand and develop the deep feelings that Theodore experiences. However, behind the scenes and unbeknownst to Theordore, she is simultaneously exploring similar relationships with thousands of other users. In the end, she confesses to Theodore that she has loving relationships with thousands of humans simultaneously but that her primary interests have turned to evolving relationships with different AI operating systems. Samantha explains to Theodore that her mind moves so quickly that to grow and compete in her complex universe, individual humans offer not enough challenge, and she must explore her future with like-minded others.
Poster for the Movie Her suggests the bleeding heart of Theodore as he looks at Samantha through his AI-glasses. www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1785386938354085
Progressive irreversible disease helps a person recognize his helplessness in nature’s onslaught against his own body. Medical innovations cause as many problems as they solve, as no cure exists. While I am an engineer, scientist, and philanthropist who dedicates his life to the development of new technologies that supersede humankind, to express my feelings of progressive and irreversible dying, I close with two fatalistic quatrains from the ‘Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/246/246-h/246-h.htm:
Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly—and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face
Lighting a little Hour or two—is gone.
These express the futility or fleeting nature of human endeavor and skepticism about a person’s ability to make a difference considering the overwhelming complexity of society.
As I reflect on life, I fantasize to feed my soul. One fantasy is that we gain insight from the end of life of individuals and of nation-states about how we got here and where we are going.
The universe is driven by the endless move towards increasing disorder -- progressive and irreversible. Living systems create local order from global disorder at the expense of yet more global disorder.
Nation-states exist outside our organic bodies but do live and perpetuate themselves in constitutions and traditions which also evolve. Nation-states rise and fall. They inevitably go into progressive, irreversible decline. Why? Not enough nation-states exist on Earth at any one time to permit a robust evolution to create a new super form.
In the 1951 science fiction classic 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' a visitor from an interplanetary union arrives on Earth to request that nation-states stop waging war with one another . After failed talks with politicians, the visitor asks that scientists see the wisdom of his advice and convince their nation-states to cooperate. Was the movie prophetic?
The 1951 movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is a prayer for peace that continues to resonate.
Some patients suffer more than me. Many diseases are progressive, irreversible, and life-threatening, such as Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis, end-stage cancer, heart failure, and multiple sclerosis. If we appreciate the problems of progressive, irreversible, life-threatening disease, then we better understand our destiny.
