And he says, "It seems as if the ideal argument for most philosophers is you give your audience the premises and then you give them the inferences and the conclusion, and if they don't accept the conclusion, they die.
But the more we learn about how that limiter functions, the more we learn how we can push it back just a bit, in some cases by convincing the brain that the body won't be in mortal danger by pushing harder.
As I assessed him, I realized that there was nothing that could be done for him, and like so many other cases, he looked me in the eye and asked that question: "Am I going to die?"
Now, this tradition has an enormous amount of scholarship and learning, and Yared had to study and study and study and study, and one day he was studying under a tree, when three birds came to him.
And looking back, he said to me that, yes, Proust was right that at 22, we are sure we will not die, just as a thanatologist named Edwin Shneidman was right that at 90, we are sure we will.