[HN Gopher] In 'The Book Against Death,' Elias Canetti rants aga...
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In 'The Book Against Death,' Elias Canetti rants against mortality
Author : Caiero
Score : 132 points
Date : 2024-08-07 22:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| xvector wrote:
| I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will live in
| a world without death.
|
| I have decided that soon I will quit my job ($1M+ TC at FAANG),
| and I will dedicate the entirety of my remaining life (I am ~30)
| to helping humanity solve death, even if I never benefit from it.
|
| This is a difficult decision for me because I am giving up a life
| of guaranteed luxury and comfort for a moonshot that almost
| certainly will not pan out. But I can think of no greater and
| more meaningful pursuit. This is my Zero Dawn. Moving the needle
| here is the only thing that will let me - ironically - die happy.
|
| I think there are a lot of engineers out there looking for
| something more meaningful than their FAANG or tech job. Immense
| potential to be leveraged here if we come together.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Delay death as you will, but thermodynamics will always have
| the last laugh.
| xvector wrote:
| One dollar or a million - which would you rather have?
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Ironically, your example shows the main flaw of your
| position: Dollars are only worth what you can buy with
| them.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Nearly all of humanities pursuits is giving the middle finger
| to entropy. Yes, we're accelerating it's eventual win, but in
| the short term we're comfortable.
| goatlover wrote:
| Forget quantillions of years, It would be nice to live a few
| centuries without the ravages of old age.
| grishka wrote:
| Thermodynamics only applies to closed systems. Living beings
| are open systems because they constantly exchange energy and
| matter with their surroundings. Earth is also an open system
| because it receives energy from the sun (and, to a much
| lesser degree, from other stars), and sometimes things from
| outer space fall here.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Hubble expansion makes everything a closed system in the
| long term.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Entropy applies across the universe. We know the minimum
| entropy it started with, where we are now, and the maximum
| entropy possible. We are about halfway there.
| makeitshine wrote:
| It's not possible to escape death, and all timelines will feel
| short when it comes to their end. Reducing the suffering of
| life, whether mental or physical, seems a more achievable
| pursuit. To die without cancer, dementia, chronic pain or the
| so many other ailments would be amazing.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| They go hand in hand. Any reasonable path to eliminating
| mortality will entail eliminating aging and degenerative
| conditions.
|
| Often, when people first imagine living much much longer,
| they imagine having more years feeling 90 or progressively
| worse, rather than having more years feeling 50 or 30. But
| much of what makes 90 feel 90 is the degenerative problems of
| age that also end up killing you.
| zerocrates wrote:
| If the pathway to where you're looking to go runs mostly
| through a fight against age-related degeneration, why not
| pitch it that way and just avoid the controversy that
| "ending death" attracts as a concept?
|
| Who's out there handwringing against fighting, just to pick
| a random example, dementia?
| stale2002 wrote:
| > why not pitch it that way and just avoid the
| controversy that "ending death" attracts as a concept?
|
| There are both drawbacks and benefits to the controversy
| of "ending death".
|
| You have mentioned the drawbacks, but the benefits are
| that it attracts the interest of the individuals that
| care about the most important problem in the world, which
| is specifically this problem of ending death.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| That's the idea behind marketing campaigns like
| "healthspan". It's a trade-off. It's very easy to get
| dragged into a pivot that focuses on one specific
| condition rather than mortality and age-related
| degeneration in general.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Aging _is_ a set of degenerative diseases that are 100%
| fatal and affect 100% of the human population.
| xvector wrote:
| If we told someone 200 years ago that I'd be typing this on a
| pane of glass that talks to satellites in low earth orbit at
| the speed of light, accessing the entire repository of human
| knowledge while hurtling through the air at 600 MPH in a man
| made bird, they'd call it impossible (and probably burn us at
| the stake.)
|
| If we told the same person that we have managed to create a
| crude facsimile of intelligence and expect to have full
| intelligence in our lifetimes, running on lightning trapped
| in purified sand, their mind would simply break.
|
| I am confident that humanity will solve death on all relevant
| timescales, out to the heat-death of the universe itself.
|
| I am optimistic that today will be looked back on as "that
| era when people died, isn't that sad?"
| nullindividual wrote:
| No, it isn't sad that we die. It's extremely important that
| we do -- if not just for getting rid of some of humanity's
| worst humans.
| xvector wrote:
| It is not an issue to me if <bad human> lives longer, if
| I get to enjoy more time with my loved ones, watch
| humanity build Dyson spheres, explore the galaxy, etc.
|
| Bad humans then become social issues - and those, we can
| solve.
| jajko wrote:
| You live in society, not alone on far side of the moon.
| In any society including worst communism terror Earth has
| seen, the worst and most potent humans bubble up to the
| top, always, without exception.
|
| No mechamism to wipe this clean means absolute
| dictatorship with no end in sight, you always see it even
| in democracies, strong persons tend to bend rules as they
| like and the only stopping power is re-election force, or
| you end up eith some form of forever putin.
|
| Death brings correction, even if individually of course
| it sucks pretty badly. Even for just avoiding endless
| dictatures its necessary.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Death brings correction, even if individually of course
| it sucks pretty badly.
|
| There is no real correction though.
|
| Because for every person who you think that you helped,
| you should know that those people are going to eventually
| die anyway, meaning that it was all for naught.
| andreasmetsala wrote:
| I think you are mixing up concepts. Curing mortality
| doesn't mean it's impossible to be killed.
|
| Authoritarian regimes don't end because the dictator gets
| old and dies, they end because the people rise up against
| the oppressive government. If mortality was the liberator
| you imagine it to be then North Korea would already be
| rid of their nightmare.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Name one social issue our species has comprehensively
| solved in the last century.
| zo1 wrote:
| We haven't. Even simple ones like poverty, hunger,
| homelessness that are just a matter of admin and money.
| We've been captured by self-perpetuating and effectively
| immortal institutions (NGO's and arguably governments)
| that will not let us solve them because that would mean
| their own death.
| xvector wrote:
| Sounds like dying isn't very effective at solving social
| issues either, then, so the argument that it helps is
| somewhat moot.
| ben_w wrote:
| Comprehensive, as in extensively but not necessarily
| totally? And why as a species rather than as countries,
| given we don't have a single world government?
|
| Equality issues still exist, but compared to 1924?
|
| Is literacy is a social issue or not? 31% to 87%.
|
| Is extreme poverty? 54% of about 2 billion, now 10% of
| about 8 billion, reduced in absolute numbers and not just
| as a percentage.
| blkhawk wrote:
| Most of the worst humans do not die of old age. I doubt
| we will ever solve death (aka entropy) completely.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Death is not really the result of entropy. No life we
| know of is the opposite of a closed system.
| D-Coder wrote:
| > No, it isn't sad that we die. It's extremely important
| that we do -- if not just for getting rid of some of
| humanity's worst humans.
|
| So, kill off all of humanity to make sure you get rid of
| the worst ones? To me that seems... non-optimal.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| It may be non-optimal but it certainly beats the shit out
| of most of the alternatives.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Consider this, those that command most resources will be
| able to get this tech, not you. This isn't everyone gets
| an iPhone. It's the richest get the best health
| insurance.
| ben_w wrote:
| If it was invented in isolation of all other tech, it
| would still be in the interests of the rich that everyone
| else got to use it.
|
| More users, more awareness of limitations and side
| effects and how to treat them.
|
| Longer working lives for the labour force, less need for
| expensive pensions and expensive old age care.
|
| But this isn't in isolation, the changes to AI and
| robotics, even without AGI/ASI or von Neumann
| replication, will make us unfathomably better off by 2050
| (and with, no more labour). What does "rich" even mean
| when anti-aging stops being a choice between "snake oil"
| and "in mice"?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > It would still be in the interests of the rich that
| everyone else got to use it.
|
| Why though? More users? Economy is already moving to a
| free-to-pay model. You earn more catering to rich people
| than the middle class/poor. Look at hardware nVidia is
| earning more extracting money from the richest people
| buying 4090 and 4080 than from rest, and that's dwarfed
| by their AI offerings.
|
| The way I see it, basically you earn money from whales,
| rich people and you toss breadcrumbs to the rest.
| ben_w wrote:
| Why is in the subsequent paragraphs:
|
| > More users, more awareness of limitations and side
| effects and how to treat them.
|
| > Longer working lives for the labour force, less need
| for expensive pensions and expensive old age care
| Ygg2 wrote:
| First, it's easier to do test on undocumented, homeless
| and rights deprived people than regular citizens.
|
| Second. If you're that far in the future, the labor will
| be automatized, who's going to rebel? The automatons?
| ben_w wrote:
| > First, it's easier to do test on undocumented, homeless
| and rights deprived people than regular citizens.
|
| Not if you want to do long term analysis, and rule out
| confounding variables like the impact of sleeping rough.
|
| Though even if you did, that would still be a
| demonstration that it won't just be for the rich. Weird
| demo, suboptimal science, but nevertheless you've now got
| homeless people stuffed with anti-aging drugs.
|
| > Second. If you're that far in the future, the labor
| will be automatized, who's going to rebel? The
| automatons?
|
| It _might_ be automated, but then there 's no longer a
| meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely
| fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with
| a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have
| one, followed by log_2(population)*replication_period,
| before everyone has them. The former is 33, so even if
| they take a year starting from bashing rocks with
| pickaxes, this would still be less than half the current
| human life expectancy.
|
| A better question is who would _want_ to rebel?
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > Weird demo, suboptimal science, but nevertheless you've
| now got homeless people stuffed with anti-aging drugs.
|
| Anti-aging drug. Not anti death drug. We don't keep more
| lab rats than we need. Not to mention lab rats aren't
| known for their quality of life. You aren't going to wait
| thousand years. You'll find a way to induce aging. Then
| run a battery of tests.
|
| > It might be automated, but then there's no longer a
| meaningful distinction between rich and poor. A genuinely
| fully automated economy, all it takes is one person with
| a von Neumann replicator to decide everyone should have
| one
|
| Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full
| automation. Second. It's a replicator, not a magic
| entropy defying system. Energy for it has to come from
| somewhere and they aren't free.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Anti-aging drug. Not anti death drug. We don't keep
| more lab rats than we need. Not to mention lab rats
| aren't known for their quality of life. You aren't going
| to wait thousand years. You'll find a way to induce
| aging. Then run a battery of tests.
|
| We've already got _literal_ lab-rats, if that 's what
| someone is planning to do. Human trials are pretty
| pointless if you don't do them realistically. (Not that
| this means nobody will do them, the Tuskegee study
| happened, but it was _also_ low-value in addition to
| being unethical).
|
| > Yeah, no. First that is not necessary for full
| automation.
|
| It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation,
| as full automation requires anything that a human can do,
| and we can already do "build robot".
|
| If machines cannot make robots, people will be paid to
| make robots, and then it won't be fully automated.
|
| > Second. It's a replicator, not a magic entropy defying
| system. Energy for it has to come from somewhere and they
| aren't free.
|
| Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-
| for. We are an existence proof of this.
|
| Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to its
| own devices, probably give us _gradually increasing_
| power for about five times longer than our atmosphere
| will last. And it 's only "probably" because there's a
| reasonable chance Earth gets ejected from the solar
| system over that time scale.
|
| And before you say it PV is also a thing that we can do
| and thus a thing that must be fully automatable in any
| economy deserving of the description "fully automated".
|
| But it doesn't need to last that long; if such a thing
| takes a year to make a copy of itself, then even limited
| to the surface of the Earth it would be able to make the
| last doubling, 4 billion units, if the construction had
| an energy budget of 247.7 GWh: https://www.wolframalpha.c
| om/input?i=%28%286000km%29%5E2*pi*...
|
| 28.276 megawatts on average for a year is considerably
| more than we use to reach adulthood, even in countries
| with high per-capita usage. Biologically speaking, it's
| about 15700 times the energy consumption we need to reach
| adulthood (and the disparity is even more severe for,
| say, a dog which reproduces significantly younger than a
| human), and we get that energy and those materials by
| eating plants or animals that ate plants, which is also a
| clearly sufficient source of both materials and energy
| that this planet can provide without violating entropy or
| being magic.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > We've already got literal lab-rats, if that's what
| someone is planning to do. Human trials are pretty
| pointless if you don't do them realistically.
|
| Yeah, and there is a gulf between works in mice and works
| in humans, as anyone reading science journals will tell
| you. Now, a human model. That's much closer to the real
| deal.
|
| > It's a sub-set of what's necessary for full automation.
|
| Not really. You are going for a holistic approach when a
| piecemeal bootstrap is much more likely.
|
| It's a very theoretical solution to a problem that can be
| solved in a much messier but available way. E.g. Warp
| drive vs Nuclear power generation ships.
|
| > Giant fusion reactor in the sky that will, if left to
| its own devices, probably give us gradually increasing
| power for about five times longer than our atmosphere
| will last.
|
| You mean the sun? Sure, but that's an extremely unstable
| source of power that will have us relocate Earth(lings)
| first, if we want to continue to "use it".
|
| > Entropy doesn't need to be defied, magic is un-called-
| for. We are an existence proof of this.
|
| Magic is an apt comparison because it's an arcane,
| theoretical construct that has little to do with reality.
| Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it's an overkill for
| trivial purposes, by the time you construct a few, let
| alone, give everyone a copy, you'd probably exhaust Earth
| and nearby resources.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Now, a human model. That's much closer to the real
| deal.
|
| Only if you don't shoot yourself in the foot in the
| process.
|
| > Not really. You are going for a holistic approach when
| a piecemeal bootstrap is much more likely.
|
| Yes really, and tautologically regardless of if it's
| piecemeal or sudden.
|
| > Sure, but that's an extremely unstable source of power
| that will have us relocate Earth(lings) first, if we want
| to continue to "use it".
|
| The sun is more stable than _Earth 's orbit_ and we're
| using it already. And self-replicating mechanisms
| ("life") have been running on it for billions of years
| before we came along.
|
| > Magic is an apt comparison because it's an arcane,
| theoretical construct that has little to do with reality.
| Looking at the Wikipedia entry, it's an overkill for
| trivial purposes, by the time you construct a few, let
| alone, give everyone a copy, you'd probably exhaust Earth
| and nearby resources.
|
| I'm looking at one right now: myself. Specifically, my
| fingers as I type this, because _all life_ meets the
| criteria of a VN machine.
| nullindividual wrote:
| > So, kill off all of humanity to make sure you get rid
| of the worst ones?
|
| No one said to kill off all of humanity. Certainly 'bad'
| people have died in the long (short) history of humanity
| without the remainder of the species disappearing.
|
| Life doesn't occur without death. Death is a necessary
| component. Life _comes from_ death.
|
| Walk into an old growth forest some time.
| losvedir wrote:
| I think you misinterpreted the response. They said
| "humanity" but probably meant "every single human".
|
| You said: "It's extremely important that we [die] -- if
| not just for getting rid of some of humanity's worst
| humans"
|
| Their retort is that this is a very blunt instrument. You
| are advocating killing literally billions of humans (not
| all at once), just to make sure you get the bad ones.
| That's a hell of a lot of collateral damage.
|
| I'm ambivalent on the question of improving healthspan
| and longevity, but I agree with the other person that
| this is a bad argument against it.
| nullindividual wrote:
| > You are advocating killing literally billions of humans
| (not all at once), just to make sure you get the bad
| ones. That's a hell of a lot of collateral damage.
|
| I think you misinterpreted my comment. I was not
| advocating for killing. Killing is an unnatural process.
| getlawgdon wrote:
| The entire repository of human knowledge? Certainly not.
| anthk wrote:
| 200 years ago were close to the industrial revolution. Not
| so far fetched to stories from "The Anachronopete" and
| Jules Verne's novels.
|
| Look at this, from the 1700's:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passarola
| 8372049 wrote:
| > accessing the entire repository of human knowledge
|
| I know this is a common trope, but just think about how far
| it is from the truth. And not just because of business
| secrets, classified information, privacy rules and so on--
| think of the signal to noise ratio, the vast quantities of
| "fake news", propaganda, misconceptions, not to mention how
| hard it is to find reliable and detailed information about
| niche stuff. Information is vastly more accessible than
| ever before, but we still have a very long way to go.
| vundercind wrote:
| Many not-even-that-obscure topics hit "you'll need to go
| get a university press book that's not online to
| continue" surprisingly fast. Any decent used book store
| is full of information that's not online.
|
| Library Genesis is the only reason this is even kind-of
| _close_ to true.
|
| As someone who grew up alongside the growth of the
| Internet (and remembers a time before it), I gotta say it
| hasn't lived up to the hype.
| farseer wrote:
| Future humans will live in a world where some can purchase an
| extended life span. Death will still be there.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Thank you for taking the problem seriously and working on it.
| knodi123 wrote:
| or at least resolving to. :-P
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| > I think there are a lot of engineers out there looking for
| something more meaningful than their FAANG or tech job. Immense
| potential to be leveraged here if we come together.
|
| Amen. I want to build dyson spheres myself. Gathering the money
| right now for it. Of course I know it won't happen in my
| lifetime but you got to start.
| seletskiy wrote:
| I will never understand people who say that mortality is what
| gives life a meaning. It is exactly opposite. If I can't
| observe effects of my actions (and most likely "I" would not be
| able to do so after death), then it does not matter for me what
| I do during life, since outcome is all the same.
|
| There should be no death. For whatever reason, it is incredibly
| hard to find people thinking the same, despite, paradoxially no
| one wants to die.
|
| Can we chat? My e-mail is in the profile.
| pwnOrbitals wrote:
| Fully aligned, and would love to join forces on such a
| project. Let's have a chat :)
| jajko wrote:
| You are confusing You-level and mankind-level, it was never
| about You. Meaning is there, but its not kind to people who
| think themselves as center of universe and mandatory part of
| it (we all are of our own version of reality but thats not
| what I mean).
|
| Life well lived is a life thats easier to let go, believing
| in afterlife or not. Now what does that mean is highly
| individual but for most its around friends, family and
| children, mostly children. Most prople with kids have no
| problem seeing that meaning in mortality, plus there are even
| more logical and potent arguments (resources, selfishness,
| not ending up with immortal dictator forever etc but thats
| for longer)
| lisper wrote:
| > I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will
| live in a world without death.
|
| A world without death is also necessarily a world without birth
| once the whole biosphere has been converted to immortals. I'm
| not sure living amongst a bunch of old people is something to
| be envied.
|
| I also don't think that people who think that immortality is
| enviable have really come to grips with how long forever
| actually is.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >A world without death is also necessarily a world without
| birth once the whole biosphere has been converted to
| immortals.
|
| You think no one is ever going to die from accidents or
| murder or natural disasters?
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| You think those numbers are enough to keep the population
| from ballooning to entirely unmanageable numbers? Consider
| the global population is increasing now and we're talking
| about removing a big chunk of all-cause mortality from the
| field. So unless there's a plan to replace natural causes
| with artificial causes (which moots functional immortality
| entirely) some form of population control is an absolute
| requirement.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >You think those numbers are enough to keep the
| population from ballooning to entirely unmanageable
| numbers?
|
| If we keep reproducing at today's rates, of course not.
| However, birthrates are in free-fall worldwide due to
| many factors, with the biggest ones probably being
| education, women's rights, and access to reliable
| contraception. As the high birthrate countries improve in
| these areas, their birthrates fall; we've seen this
| universally in countries across the world. Of course,
| there's other factors too, like high costs of living,
| gender divides in some cultures, etc. The latter ones
| might be solved eventually, but I truly hope we don't
| regress on the former ones.
|
| With life-extension research, I think it's highly
| unlikely someone is going to find the Holy Grail anytime
| soon that suddenly makes humans biologically immortal.
| Instead, it'll probably be a slow process of incremental
| improvements. So while those improvements chip away at
| the death rate, cultural changes will continue to
| decrease the birthrate: people will continue to choose to
| have fewer children, people will wait longer to have
| children, etc.
| lisper wrote:
| Not many, no. Not enough to matter. Natural disasters just
| don't kill that many people [1].
|
| But now that you mention it I do think that anyone living
| in a world without death will be constantly looking over
| their shoulder and sleeping with one eye open.
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters
| _by_d...
| ben_w wrote:
| If you remove aging and diseases, everything else will
| kill people with 50% chance in any given 1000-ish years.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| Still mean living in a world of mostly very old people,
| and almost no children. Sounds depressing to me.
| ben_w wrote:
| Old people who will likely still look like they are in
| their mid-20s -- few people are going to want to develop
| something that only extends old age, even though people
| (not sure if "some" or "many") will still prefer that
| over death.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| Being old is not limited to how you look. It's also how
| your world views change, how your personality evolves,
| etc.
|
| Also you didn't address my almost-no-children point. That
| one I think is the stronger point. Looking at my children
| grow older day after day is the thing that bring me the
| most joy and sens of meaning in my life.
| lisper wrote:
| > Being old is not limited to how you look.
|
| This is really important. Being young is cool not just
| because your body works better but because you still have
| a lot to discover. Discovery is fun. Experiencing
| something for the first time is fun. But the problem is
| that you can only experience something for the first time
| once. The second time it might still be fun, or the third
| time, but by the time you do something 100 times or 1000
| times or 10,000 times it becomes less fun. This is one of
| the major differences between doing something as a hobby
| and doing it as a job. When it's a hobby, when it stops
| being fun, you can just quit. And sooner or later,
| everything stops being fun if you do it often enough.
|
| The problem is not that we don't live long enough, the
| problem is that most people don't have the freedom to do
| the things they want to do in the time they have. _That_
| is a much more tractable problem, and it is the one we
| should be working on, not extending life spans. If you
| have the wherewithall, ~100 years is more than enough
| time to get sick and tired of everything.
| ben_w wrote:
| > The problem is not that we don't live long enough, the
| problem is that most people don't have the freedom to do
| the things they want to do in the time they have. That is
| a much more tractable problem, and it is the one we
| should be working on, not extending life spans.
|
| We as a species can do both without either slowing down
| the other -- biotech researchers aren't the same skillset
| as politicians.
|
| > If you have the wherewithall, ~100 years is more than
| enough time to get sick and tired of everything.
|
| Disagree, that requires a personality which gets bored
| quickly. Expertise comes from having the passion stay for
| long enough to get really good -- despite the meme this
| isn't exactly 10k hours, but it's still long enough that
| you can fail to grow sick of living after properly
| mastering just fifteen things in a century.
|
| But even if you did, being ageless doesn't take away the
| opportunity to cease to be. If it's really all that dull,
| people will just take up extreme sports such as juggling
| honey badgers or naked skydiving over active volcanoes.
| lisper wrote:
| Those poor honey badgers.
|
| That may sound like a punch line, but it is actually a
| serious point: our existence has externalities that need
| to be taken into account. If you're going to argue for
| the value of potential experiences that will never be had
| by old people because they die, then I think you also
| need to consider the value of potential experiences that
| will never be had by young people because they are never
| born since all available resources are being used in
| perpetuity by the lucky generation that came along just
| as the longevity technology matured.
| ben_w wrote:
| Arguing for the potential future of young people who
| won't be born, is a thing that some do.
|
| Not me, I think there's a hyperbolic discount to
| unwritten futures1, and that we should live in the
| present with a view to the foreseeable future -- a future
| which is, IMO, currently "about 5 years"2, because
| there's too many things changing to see further than that
| anyway.
|
| Perhaps one day things will calm down, and we can be
| confident of what our experiences will be a millennium
| into the future; or perhaps that future, being filled by
| other humans just like ourselves who are themselves all
| making predictions of what will come, will be inherently
| chaotic beyond our own ability to forecast.
|
| And a millennium is what you want for starters if you are
| to explore the stars, as space dust becomes dangerous
| well before relativity makes a huge difference.
|
| 1 https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2020/01/08-21.46.38.
| html
|
| 2 https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/03/23-17.24.34.
| html
| lisper wrote:
| > I think there's a hyperbolic discount to unwritten
| futures.
|
| And yet you value the unwritten futures of existing
| people.
|
| BTW, it's not just about the actual unborn, it's all the
| existing people who want the experience of having and
| raising children who won't be able to. Personally, I am
| happily childless by choice, but I am given to understand
| that some people find it a very fulfilling experience.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| > If it's really all that dull, people will just take up
| extreme sports such as juggling honey badgers or naked
| skydiving over active volcanoes.
|
| That, or... I know that'll sound crazy but... not
| everything has to be an adrenalin rush. Just let go, stop
| taking your keep-me-alive-forever medication, have a
| peaceful death during your sleep, contemplating the fact
| that you'll make room for _new_ humans to have the chance
| to discover all the things you also had the chance to
| discover during the last 231 years?
| ben_w wrote:
| > Being old is not limited to how you look. It's also how
| your world views change, how your personality evolves,
| etc.
|
| It's also your muscles, which won't be old, and the on-
| going feeling of a ticking biological clock driving
| people to say "kids, now, before it is too late".
|
| It's also how much sleep you need, how much energy you
| have.
|
| It's also your metabolism, your ability to recover from
| light injuries, to exercise, to excel at sport.
|
| It's also neuro-plasticity.
|
| We don't have good examples to even guess if world-views
| (or fashion choices) lock in place because of brain age,
| or because we've seen too much and become bored.
|
| But personality, that we can already change with
| chemistry; it's not a reason _by itself_ for anything.
|
| > Looking at my children grow older day after day is the
| thing that bring me the most joy and sens of meaning in
| my life.
|
| Good for you :)
|
| But for me, I wish I'd had kids already, but I have many
| other joys until I find someone who can help me with that
| (most of my friends are deliberately child-free). If I
| became ageless, it wouldn't be a worry to wait.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| What is it you suggest we can change with chemistry? Is
| it boredom? Are you suggesting we can keep enjoying the
| things we are bored with thanks to LSD or something? So,
| a childless world with centuries-old people drowning
| there boredom in drugs?
|
| Please tell me that's not it.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Is this sarcasm? Functional immortality without a complete
| redesign of the economic system guarantees the least ethical
| among us would come to own and control everything with no
| failsafes. Beware what you wish for.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Email me (address in profile). I've already made this step. I
| am presently launching a molecular nanotechnology startup,
| under the not unreasonable assumption that better tools are
| required to fully solve the problem.
|
| Edit: not saying we should join forces or that you should work
| on nanotechnology, but we are clearly value aligned and should
| connect.
| placebo wrote:
| I think the part of "even if I never benefit from it" is a key
| point in living a meaningful life and transcending the fear of
| death, though hopefully you have carefully considered your
| decision from a financial perspective since material aspects
| are obviously also a part of being able to carry out your plans
| in this life.
|
| I don't think there is anything wrong in seeking the longest
| healthiest possible life, but suspect that in many cases that
| the motivation for it comes more from fear of personal death
| than the love of what life is. It's great to be an agent in
| this incredible adventure but my take on it is that when the
| means (a specific localized self consciousness) become the end
| ("being me is the most important thing and it should be great
| forever") then that is where you get stuck in a local maximum
| and some sort of suffering is bound to follow.
|
| Another aspect is that of how much more time do you think will
| be enough? 1000 years? 10,000 years? As someone has already
| stated, you will not be able to avoid death forever and even in
| the most optimistic case (at least from this myopic view of
| immortality) you won't win against entropy. No matter how long
| of a good life you are granted, it will never seem enough
| because from the subjective point of view it will seem to be
| over soon at which point personal death will again become very
| real and very alarming.
|
| It seems the only way out of this is to be able to transcend
| the personal sense of self and see that your real immortality
| lies in realizing that in a very real sense you are also
| something much greater than just a localized version of it.
|
| I'm not some Zen master and am probably afraid of my own
| personal mortality as much as the next person, but after a long
| time of thinking deeply about it, this seems to be the most
| probable conclusion.
| xandrius wrote:
| 10,000 years could be good, especially if you still get to
| choose to get out if you change mind.
| tayo42 wrote:
| If you're making 1m +, just work for like 1 or two more years
| and you have retire to work on this passion project and have
| your life if comfort. With so much money idk how you couldn't
| have both?
| dsign wrote:
| You are not alone. I can't retire yet to start working on this,
| but I'm looking forward to when that day comes. In the
| meantime, I'm working my day job and writing at night
| speculative fiction on the intersection of this topic and our
| current value systems. A big chunk of the problem is that most
| people are extremely conservative when it comes to death... and
| perhaps for good reason. But the time has come when more of
| humanity should leave the shelter of resignation and faith and
| go into that battlefield.
| myworkinisgood wrote:
| Lack of death just means that people won't have the courage to
| take risks against injustices anymore.
| khafra wrote:
| This seems approximately as likely as people not having the
| courage to enact injustices (since their victims will have
| unlimited time to plot a perfect revenge and gather all the
| resources that would require).
| myworkinisgood wrote:
| Real life accounts always say otherwise. Death is a limited
| liability card that people can use to commit anything.
|
| People who commit injustices, even today, are often
| confident enough that they will be in a position to kill
| themselves before suffering at hands of others.
| khafra wrote:
| That doesn't contradict my point: universal mortality
| means the potential losses of an oppressor are bounded,
| and the bound is acceptably low to many people.
| Immortality removes that bound.
| 8372049 wrote:
| Life in itself is worthless. The only reason why life is
| valuable is because it is a canvas, a vessel through
| which you can find happiness, meaning and so on.
|
| This means that if you have a life that isn't worth
| living, you are not at risk of losing anything of value,
| and so the potential loss is still bounded. Sure, there
| is the potential that life can change in the future, but
| whether you have 10, 100 or 1000 years left of potential
| life, you don't really care much about that if your life
| is an agonizing living hell.
|
| Don't ask me how I know.
| khafra wrote:
| Sure, lots of philosophers talk about lives barely worth
| living, and what constitutes the line. Lots of public
| health researchers work on metrics for quality-adjusted
| life years, and increasing longevity is useful only
| insofar as it increases QALY's.
|
| But I really do expect most measures which increase
| population longevity to increase population QALY's. The
| conflict between hypothetical immortal tyrants and
| immortal coup-conspiracies would only be a small part of
| this; material conditions and overall societal wealth
| would weigh much heavier on the scale.
| kbrkbr wrote:
| For now it looks like death can't be "solved" at all. You may
| be able to prolong individual human life, even by a lot. But
| how to solve entropy and the end of an empty, cold universe?
|
| There is even speculation that life is from a certain angle
| only an effect to accelerate entropy under the umbrella of the
| Maximum Entropy Production Principle (but I do not remember the
| source).
|
| So from the standpoint of current knowledge of how nature works
| this seems to look dire.
|
| I also personally disagree. I do not think that the beautiful
| chaos of life is strictly preferable to the requiem eternam of
| death. I'll go when I have to, without hesitation and regrets.
| It's not the things that terrify us, but our opinion of the
| things.
| bboygravity wrote:
| You should see what they can do with mice/rats nowadays:
|
| -- Immunity to prion diseasy by epigenetically silencing the
| prion gene,
|
| -- Cure (almost) all cancers
|
| -- life long HIV AIDS immunity with 1 vaccination (based on a
| modified virus)
|
| -- Extend life by a factor 2 (if I'm not mistaking)
|
| -- Make them light up in the dark with a human ear growing on
| their back (this one is decades old already).
|
| And all of the above is without considering the AGI
| singularity.
|
| Human immunity is really not that far away. Depending on how
| AGI will respond to us we will soon either be wiped out or be
| immortal IMO.
| zeofig wrote:
| AGI singularity is science fiction and, while interesting,
| none of that research comes close to biological immortality
| in humans. Don't deceive yourself.
| ben_w wrote:
| Every tech is science fiction until it's done, and
| sometimes continues to be present in fiction even while
| also being deployed.
|
| Not fooling yourself is hard, because it goes both ways.
| kbrkbr wrote:
| Thanks for your reply!
|
| I am not argumenting against curing stuff and prolonging
| life.
|
| I just think it is not immortality.
|
| I don't think immortality is to have given our current
| knowledge.
|
| It's like saying: "and then we build the perpetuum mobile.
| We're just short of it. One or two more breakthroughs".
|
| I like ambition, I just don't think we even have a trace of
| a path
| crngefest wrote:
| A world without death would be the worst nightmare I can
| imagine.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > I am so incredibly envious of the future humans that will
| live in a world without death.
|
| There will never be a world without death. Not, unless you have
| a way to reverse the laws of thermodynamics, on a universe
| scale. Only world where people die later.
|
| Also, keep in mind, your most disliked people will probably
| remain in power for longer. Next, Putin or Xi will remain in
| power for centuries.
| komali2 wrote:
| What's the pathway you're thinking in this effort? I had a
| similar plan I envisioned in my early 20s, which led me to
| become an engineer. I'll be ready to go down the same path
| pretty soon, would love to chat with more people in a similar
| mindset. Email in the profile if anyone wants to talk more
| about this.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Holler if you want some help, lol. I like that.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| "Solving death" won't help humanity. Isn't that obvious to
| you??
|
| For a starter, birth rates and death rates should be about the
| same otherwise it's not sustainable. If you "solve death",
| birth rates will need to drop a lot.
|
| Do you want to live in a world with almost no children? Just
| very old people all over the place. Sounds like a nightmare to
| me.
|
| You need to let go, accept your mortality and leave some room
| for new humans to live. At some point you'll have had your
| time, death is part of life.
| kevlened wrote:
| > birth rates and death rates should be about the same
| otherwise it's not sustainable
|
| In 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted famine due to
| overpopulation, because he didn't predict the discovery of
| nitrogen fixation, which allowed scaling food production.
|
| There are likely many technological leaps we've yet to make
| which will change your definition of sustainable.
| grugagag wrote:
| All technological leaps come at a cost. Future
| technological leaps have unknown costs.
| kevlened wrote:
| True, but maintaining status quo has unknown opportunity
| costs.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| Do you know about exponential growth? If birth and death
| rates are not about the same, it means the population will
| double every X years. You'll need a major breakthrough in
| food production every X years. For ever.
|
| Even if we achieve that, at some point there just won't be
| enough square meters on earth. But I guess it's okay to you
| since we'll have solved space travel and we'll just send
| billions of people to Mars? Then other planetary systems?
| Then other galaxies?
|
| In any case, as I don't buy we'll ever be able to send
| billions of people to other planets, let alone make them
| habitable, this is exponential growth with finite
| ressources. Doesn't sound sustainable to me.
| disambiguation wrote:
| This is so monumentally stupid I want to believe it's a joke
| but something tells me it isn't.
|
| Alas, I wish you luck captain Ahab.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Death is no big deal.
| brbrodude wrote:
| How old?
| xandrius wrote:
| Until it is.
| cageface wrote:
| Fear of death is a misunderstanding of what life is.
| xvector wrote:
| In my personal opinion: Life is an incredible adventure. I do
| not feel that the value of it is increased by death. I also do
| not feel that I misunderstand life.
| cageface wrote:
| In an eternity all individual events lose their meaning. An
| endless life is a meaningless life.
| voxl wrote:
| you've painted yourself into a corner, how exactly are you
| going to define meaning? As far as we know the universe is
| infinite, and as such all actions fit your description
| anyway, so why not be infinite along with it?
| lucianbr wrote:
| I'm sure I read multiple times that the universe is
| finite. Both in space and time.
|
| Not that I agree with the "infinite life destroys all
| meaning". Just nitpicking.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _In an eternity all individual events lose their meaning.
| An endless life is a meaningless life_
|
| One, we don't get an eternity. It's thermodynamically
| impossible.
|
| Two, we're mortal beings with mortal minds. Our trying to
| comprehend--let alone judge--what an immortal being would
| consider meaningful is hubris.
|
| Three, how does this scale? Is a child's life more
| meaningfully if it ends early? Why is our present life and
| healthspan the sole optimum?
| ganzuul wrote:
| Both GR and QM do things thermodynamics prohibits.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Meaningless for whom or for what? There is no meaning
| separate from a subject.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Meaningless for whom or for what? There is no meaning
| separate from a subject_
|
| The philosophical argument for a truly-immortal being
| being indifferent is that they would, over an infinite
| timeline, experience every possible experience an
| infinite number of times. In that frame, preference loses
| meaning. A being that has no preference is indifferent to
| what happens around or to them. That, one could argue, is
| an existence without meaning.
|
| That's so splendidly separate from biological immortality
| as to be a straw man. (The argument also suffers from
| failing to appreciate that there are many types of
| infinity.)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Far from it being a straw man I think it's already a
| reality that affects us. In very affluent, safe countries
| we are so far removed from death or meaning that most
| people's lives consist of picking a different flavor of
| craft beer or game from their Steam library. This isn't
| just the concern of some theoretical immortal being,
| people have a crisis of meaning already, there's a
| bestseller with that title probably being published every
| week because in a way the illusion of immortality we have
| has already rendered most of what we do exchangeable and
| banal.
|
| Mind you it's no accident that the one meaningful thing
| most people still have, which is having kids, is
| precisely given meaning by our own mortality, it's the
| one transcendent thing that only exists because our lives
| are finite.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _people have a crisis of meaning already, there 's a
| bestseller with that title probably being published every
| week_
|
| People have always been complaining about this, I think
| Socrates and Cicero griped about it in their times.
|
| The problem isn't distance from death but monotony. The
| philosophised immortal being has monotony forced upon
| them. Many people today and in the past self-impose it.
| theonething wrote:
| Huh, I think the opposite. If all of this is eventually
| going away, what's the point?
| ganzuul wrote:
| > An endless life is a meaningless life.
|
| A mere challenge to overcome.
| komali2 wrote:
| How does this cause individual events to lose meaning? Have
| events that happened to the human race as a whole thousands
| of years ago lost their meaning?
| khafra wrote:
| You're not going to run out of atmospheric oxygen, no
| matter how much you breathe. There is, for your purposes,
| an unlimited amount of it.
|
| That may make all your breaths meaningless. But when I'm
| meditating, or bicycling up a hill, or face-to-face with my
| lover, or watching the sunrise on a cold morning, my breath
| has plenty of meaning to me. Limiting the amount of oxygen
| I was allowed to use would not lend those more meaning;
| scarcity is not the same as meaning.
| patcon wrote:
| > I also do not feel that I misunderstand life.
|
| Respectfully: You do. You must. Or if you don't, then life
| misunderstands itself. For life has adopted this pattern of
| death in essentially every conceivable domain, every
| ecological niche. Further, any hypothesised lifeform that has
| discovered death as unnecessary, they curiously have not
| arrived here for us to interrogate. The significance of that
| seems vaguely familiar, but perhaps just Fermi ;)
|
| You don't know me, but I usually air toward speaking humbly
| about things I suspect I know. Readers are free to decide
| which perspective is true hubris: my hubris that aligns with
| all known living systems and their failed aspirations of
| immortality, or the other hubris that stands alone with
| cancers and brainless jellies, where death is a failure of
| all historical life to discover otherwise... that the
| cleverness of life we laud so much praise on -- the same life
| which has invented every enchanted bit of protein machinery
| that runs this whole beautiful mess -- that it has somehow
| had a blind spot all these millennia, that we humans have
| seen clear-eyed.
|
| Death is hegemonic for a reason. It's the Chesterton's fence
| around the whole damn bustling city, that we've never seen
| what comes from the other side of, if we finally remove it.
|
| Much love here. I don't mean to be dismissive, this is just
| something I care about deeply and wish to speak firmly on.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _life has adopted this pattern of death in essentially
| every conceivable domain, every ecological niche_
|
| Biological immortality exists [1].
|
| More pointedly, life hasn't "adopted" death, it's a
| consequence of thermodynamics. Where it can escape it,
| however, it has tried. From a "Selfish Gene" perspective,
| our genes aim--to the degree they have aims--to be
| immortal. Our multicellular bodies are simply easier to
| replace than repair.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality
| bilegeek wrote:
| I hope not to seem combative, but I'll weigh against your
| view.
|
| Life hasn't "adopted" anything. It's like when people say
| evolution "chose" an advantageous trait, when in reality
| it's just a consequence of dead stuff not passing on traits
| and specimens with those traits having more success at
| living, and neutral traits surviving just by not
| immediately killing or _ahem_ rooster-blocking.
|
| Old-age death is merely a mechanical limitation of
| biological processes (and possibly matter in general if you
| subscribe to the heat death of the universe.) It enabled
| rapid evolution, which allowed MUCH more complex life to
| come about after billions of years, but the fact that life
| retains death is merely a consequence of how it came about.
| Probably life that never died would only evolve in response
| to environmental disasters or predation, slowing changes
| significantly.
|
| Don't take this to mean there aren't problems with
| humanity's search for extending life well past our natural
| biology. There are. But all those problems revolve around
| society needing death to not stagnate to hell due to
| evolutionary circumstances shaping our mentality, not the
| universe demanding it for some grand philosophical reason.
|
| If you see death as something the universe "wants", great!
| I merely see death as a limitation and a mechanical process
| for exacting change.
|
| To posit another philosophical quandry: if life can
| reproduce, can it ever really "die" of old age? We're one
| branch on a massive chain of reproduction stretching over
| literally billions of years, so are we really a "different"
| life-form from the first one? One enormous organism, split
| up into quintillions of different parts. If you have a
| child, where do you stop and they begin? Where do your
| parents stop and you begin? They/you literally came in part
| from their/your own cells!
| fnord77 wrote:
| Some of us need a do-over. (In my case, I had a disabling
| disease that robbed my youth and a treatment only became
| available when I started nearing old age)
| borbtactics wrote:
| Time to revisit Mitchell and Webb's brilliant immortal kids skit
| blast wrote:
| That calls for a link
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt6nwvGJiN8
| jokoon wrote:
| I don't understand people who don't want to be immortal.
|
| At five years old I cried because I learned that I was going to
| die one day.
| block_dagger wrote:
| World weariness hits many who live past middle age.
| orangecat wrote:
| Yes, aging is terrible.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Not at all the same thing.
| keiferski wrote:
| It's not so much that I don't want to be immortal - although I
| do think it's a huge positivist assumption that your current
| human existence is the "peak state", the best possible thing to
| continue being forever. It may turn out that this life is just
| an unpleasant dream of a superior consciousness. Maybe it's
| not, and this life is all you get. But we don't know that and
| it seems extremely self-absorbed and myopic (a common trait
| throughout human history) to consider this existence as the
| only real thing.
|
| My concern is more that the world required to keep people
| immortal is almost certainly one removed of all risk, danger,
| adventure, and dynamism. I don't want to live in a world where
| people hide inside staring at screens, because they're afraid
| of physical accidents ending their otherwise immortal lives.
| dexwiz wrote:
| I remember reading an analysis that if people only died by
| accident then the average life span would between 900 and
| 2000 years. That assumes no more conservative living than
| today. Surely things like cars and guns would be much less
| prevalent.
| keiferski wrote:
| You'd still end up with any slightly dangerous activity
| being banned or discouraged. No bicycling, no skiing, no
| martial arts, etc. The risk would be considered not worth
| it.
|
| And that's not mentioning inherently dangerous things like
| exploring the cosmos.
|
| It would be a very small, sad, scared little world, in my
| opinion.
| voiceblue wrote:
| If people only died by accident, it implies the absence
| of murder, which implies either a state of enlightenment
| or non-humanness. I doubt we can meaningfully conjecture
| on such a world.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Or perhaps, lives being so long, there wouldn't be any
| perceived difference between dying at a hundred and a
| thousand years old.
|
| Today, a twenty-something dying in a car crash after
| drinking alcohol is as stupid and preventable as deaths
| gets. And we known that people drive more safely later in
| their lives. And yet, we let twenty-somethings get a
| driving license and drive a car around.
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't think you could discount the Foucault power
| dynamics either. The people running society would all be
| hundreds of years old, so it would have an effect on
| culture.
|
| I don't agree that preventing twenty somethings from
| dying in drunk crashes is easy or preventable at all.
| You'd need to redo the entire transportation and city
| planning infrastructure of almost the entire United
| States to do that.
| ElFitz wrote:
| It's not a US specific problem.
|
| Young drunks also ride electric mopeds in European
| capitals, usually renting them through apps. Sometimes
| without even a driving license.
|
| So while public transports might be a part of the issue,
| I doubt they are the root cause.
|
| But that wasn't my point. My point was that, although it
| is stupidly dangerous, since they statistically have
| significantly more accidents than older drivers, young
| people are still allowed to get a driving license and
| drive.
|
| Even though they are those that stand the most to lose in
| terms of life expectancy.
| goatlover wrote:
| What makes you think everyone would adopt that attitude?
| Plenty of people today risk losing decades of their lives
| doing those things in addition to more risky ones like
| rock climbing. Why would centuries instead of decades
| change that?
| keiferski wrote:
| Living for centuries or longer would be an entirely
| different thing. If the baseline assumption is that
| you're going to live forever unless you have a dumb
| accident, I think society will ultimately orient itself
| around avoiding that possibility.
|
| Of course you still might be a counter cultural movement
| against it, but if the powers running society are all
| centuries-old people, I don't think that counter culture
| will have much institutional support.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _You'd still end up with any slightly dangerous
| activity being banned or discouraged. No bicycling, no
| skiing, no martial arts, etc._
|
| I'm unconvinced. Humans' maximum age has barely budged
| over the millenia. What drove our increasing concern for
| safety was external to that. We also don't see evidence
| of increased risk taking as one's risk-adjusted remaining
| years decline.
| keiferski wrote:
| If the only way you could die was by physical accident,
| you don't think people would do less physically risky
| things?
|
| Historical examples are not really relevant, as getting
| older is not equivalent to getting older then dying and
| living forever.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If the only way you could die was by physical
| accident, you don't think people would do less physically
| risky things?_
|
| On average, sure. But look at how the wealthy spend their
| time today. Rationally, they should be more conservative.
| In reality, the infinity of experience calls out.
|
| Similarly, having biological immortality doesn't mean
| your time preference goes to zero [1]. And if that number
| is positive then value of a statistical life is finite
| [2]. We're thus shifting our place on a scale, not
| throwing the scale out. Hence why the examples are
| relevant: we've shifted on this scale before.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_preference
|
| [2] https://www.epa.gov/environmental-
| economics/mortality-risk-v...
| keiferski wrote:
| I still don't think this is a relevant example at all.
| Rich people are still going to die. If they're careful,
| which they tend to be relative to the population, they
| live a decade or two longer than average people.
|
| That isn't the same thing as immortality.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _That isn't the same thing as immortality_
|
| Biological immortality still means you'll die, somewhow,
| somewhere. Or at least, I believe enough will believe
| that to continue to have fun. There will be folks who
| lock themselves in a room to keep the world away, but we
| have those today as well.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| My feeling is that longevity will have an s-curve effect.
| Every disease and malady we solve today only extends life
| until some other problem kills you. However, the further
| we push things, the more problems we are capable of
| resolving, the fewer things that will pop up and kill you
| - until, probably surprisingly, people are living
| significantly longer lifespans than ever before.
|
| The most generalised effects of aging will probably be
| the most problematic (muscle loss and the like), but
| there are plenty of stories of people in their 90s who
| are plenty spry until they are brought low by a heart
| attack, stroke, cancer and so on.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Why would dangerous activities be discouraged more then
| they already are?
| xandrius wrote:
| Just to make a small note: most martial arts are not in
| any way dangerous. I think crossfit has more chances to
| mess someone up than practicing a martial art.
| latexr wrote:
| > Surely things like cars and guns would be much less
| prevalent.
|
| Why "surely"? I don't see why people would try to stop
| killing each other if everyone were immortal. There would
| still be fighting for resources, power, land...
| hiddencost wrote:
| One of the most constant lessons of literature and mythology is
| that people who dedicate themselves to becoming immortal
| inevitably spend their life harming others.
| goatlover wrote:
| I'm guessing advanced alien civilizations have figured out
| how to live a much longer time. Immortality isn't a
| physically achievable goal, but death from natural causes
| doesn't have to be necessary with a deep enough understanding
| of biology.
| keiferski wrote:
| It's a pretty big assumption that alien civilizations would
| even have a concept of the personal self that is interested
| in personal immortality. Even human beings had less of an
| interest in personal immortality prior to roughly ~2,000
| years ago - before that, your group identity and memory
| tended to be more important, or your soul was something
| very different from a continuation of your earthly self.
|
| It's just as likely that an alien civilization is a
| biological system akin to insects or trees, where the
| individual existence of one entity is not relevant at all.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| I wonder if that's more a matter of incapability than
| anything else, though.
|
| Currently, we have more ability to move the needle on
| lifespan and illness than we've ever had before, and we
| learn more about it at increasingly accelerated rates.
| Doing the same 200 years ago (or earlier) was not really
| feasible. Today, we more or less have a decent grasp of
| the majority of diseases that end life.
| keiferski wrote:
| I think you meant to reply to someone else? Or are you
| saying that the concept of a personal self is tied to the
| increased ability to reduce illness and lengthen
| lifespan? Which is an interesting idea and probably
| defendable.
| goatlover wrote:
| The Hebrew scriptures and Buddha were plenty troubled by
| death prior to Christianity. I don't see why the
| equivalent of an intelligent ant civilization wouldn't
| remove aging from individuals once they were advanced
| enough. Jellyfish don't age, and one of The Expanse
| aliens (to mention a scifi example) were jellyfish-like,
| and had made themselves immune to biological forms of
| death.
| xandrius wrote:
| You understand that those "lessons" are nothing but texts
| invented by someone just like ourselves?
|
| Most people try in their own way to achieve immortality by
| being nice to others, staying active and healthy and trying
| to die as late as possible.
| gmoot wrote:
| Loss is cumulative. After so many scars life can start to feel
| like a burden.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| There is that saying Amateurs talk strategy, Professionals talk
| logistics.
|
| I think it is a case of the strategy is fine (wanting
| immortality), but the logistics are just not there. So as much
| as it may pain us, focusing on not dying would mean you could
| spend your life not living in try to achieve said additional
| life.
|
| I can think of a thousand futures on what I could do in a
| certain position but odds are that none of these situations
| will ever come up. So to have a clear mind, don't cling to
| things that might not happen.
|
| I am glad that many are trying to achieve immortality, I will
| not stand in the way of them, but I also won't be holding my
| breath on it happening in my lifetime.
| komali2 wrote:
| My friends and I argue about "eternity is hell" all the time -
| how even a christian heaven would actually be hell since it's
| never ending. However for me, I could easily create a 20 or 30
| year cycle of activities that would eternally satisfy me. It's
| a little silly but for example I'm starting to hanker for some
| old TV shows I watched 20 years ago. The argument typically
| goes that in eternity, you'd run out of things to do, but I
| just don't see how that's possible, I do things I've done
| before and enjoy it the second, third, fourth time around, so
| there's no such thing for me as "running out of things to do."
| grishka wrote:
| Somehow, all people suddenly do wish to be immortal when they
| realize their death is very close. At this point I'm convinced
| it's a very strong, socially normalized form of learned
| helplessness.
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > Somehow, all people suddenly do wish to be immortal when
| they realize their death is very close.
|
| Any source for this claim or are you just projecting your own
| thoughts on all humans?
| ttepasse wrote:
| I spend some time working in a nursing home for the elderly.
| I never heard that.
| kbrkbr wrote:
| I did, too. And it haunted me until my fourties.
|
| And still I'm fine with it today.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Suffering is unavoidable, and loss accumulates. It is a comfort
| to know that it _will_ someday end, one way or another.
| disambiguation wrote:
| At five years old I cried because my parents made me ride space
| mountain at Disney and I thought roller coasters were scary,
| but since then ive learned to enjoy the big rides.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Do people really think that death is optional, and the problem is
| that we're opting into it?
| goatlover wrote:
| Some people see death from aging as eventually being curable.
| Obviously, something is going to kill you sooner or later. But
| why must it be old age? Assuming you survive long enough, who
| wants to spend their last years in body that's breaking down,
| with diminished cognitive and physical abilities?
| DaoVeles wrote:
| While I get the desire of folks to live forever, IF it is
| possible I still think it is a VERY long way off. All I
| advocate for is quality of life. It feels like every time we
| make an advancement, we discover two new things to solve.
| Eventually we will get there but it might be a lot longer road
| than we anticipate. Sorry Aubrey De Gray, I don't think this is
| something that can be solved for a billion dollars like he has
| claimed.
|
| Eat your fruit, veggies, nuts and whole grains, but don't over
| do it on the food! Move it or lose it. Build bridges, don't
| burn them! I don't say this so you can have smaller pants or
| live an extra decade, that would be a neat side effect, I say
| this so that you can live a happy fun life as much as possible.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Do people really think that death is optional, and the
| problem is that we 're opting into it?_
|
| It's material to the question of researching aging and
| longevity. A _lot_ of people will come out singing death 's
| praises.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| If I reframe your question slightly, too many people think
| about _aging_ as an inevitable, unstoppable, undelayable
| process. That is why we only have serious longevity research
| now, and that is why much of it is sponsored by billionaires or
| venture capitalists, because governmental agencies don 't even
| comprehend the potential utility of it and relevant research
| must be reframed as anti-Alzheimer or whatever.
|
| Once humanity gets rid of this prejudice, a venue towards much
| healthier and longer life is open.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Of course governments don't comprehend the utility of it -
| they are an immortal social structure made of coercion
| consisting entirely of replaceable and self-replenishing
| parts. It benefits from immortality no more than eusocial
| insects would from a longer lifespan. Ironically any
| governments that would pursue lifespan extension is thus
| inherently "corrupt" in that it is technically self-serving
| on the part of its administrators. Except for those with a
| clear voter mandate setting that goal of course.
|
| Secession is already baked in just about every government
| system excepting deliberately unstable ones (favored by
| autocratic using the threat of chaos when they die as a
| shield). To governments that functionally makes it a "solved
| problem".
| ein0p wrote:
| You can rant against it all you want, but we already live much
| longer than is justifiable from the evolutionary perspective. If
| it was up to the evolution alone, we wouldn't live past 50. So
| try to make something of your life while it lasts. Or just enjoy
| the festivities, that's perfectly valid, too.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If it was up to the evolution alone, we wouldn't live past
| 50_
|
| What is the other factor pushing it up?
| ein0p wrote:
| We're probably just using the "overengineering" that the
| evolution put into us to account for much harsher living
| conditions that existed previously. I have no other
| explanation, in any case. That's also why a lot of us are
| fat.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Here: https://www.nature.com/articles/428128a
| komali2 wrote:
| Since humans are very social creatures I think it's possible
| that variations of humans that live longer were selected for
| since the elderly can help care for the younger, teach things,
| etc.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I don't want to sound mystical or religious, but 'self' really is
| an illusion. It is a word that pops up in the LLM of our brain.
| It is a word that describes what we perceive as happening. What
| "we" really are are our thoughts and especially memories. And
| they can live on beyond our physical death. But does that make us
| happy? Of course everybody wants to go to Heaven, but no-one
| wants to die. But rationally thinking, 'self' is an illusion.
|
| StarTrek taught us that you can transfer Kirk and Spock to a
| different place by re-assembling their atoms in a different
| place. But is it really the same Spock that pops up there? Or a
| copy? A copy obviously. Such a copy cam then live on practically
| forever because they could always re-assemble a younger Spock.
| But since it is aa copy would Spock really be happy that his copy
| lives on forever? Yes I believe if he thinks about it rationally.
| And Spock does.
| 9dev wrote:
| A copy living on is meaningless to the original consciousness,
| since the subjective experience of the copy is decoupled from
| the original. There is no more connection than between you and
| me. You can dress this arbitrarily in grand words of leaving a
| dent and so on, but no matter the phrasing: once you're gone,
| you're gone. I don't care if people remember me, if I cease to
| exist, I cease experience the world, and it's all void.
| zeofig wrote:
| I don't identify my "self" (or consciousness) with memories or
| anything the supposed LLM in my brain might babble about. If
| you took those things away, I'd still be here. Rationally
| speaking, self is the only thing that certainly isn't an
| illusion. Anything you perceive could be a hallucination,
| memories can change or disappear, and thoughts are mere dust in
| the wind, but you can't have any of those things without
| something to perceive them. It's the only thing you know is
| there, whatever it is.
| woodpanel wrote:
| I'm torn between the argument that the gift of life is such a
| precious one that eliminating death is one of the most virtuous
| endeavors at all - and the other argument where this is peak
| escapism and a fundamental not-getting-it-what-life-is-about.
|
| At least one can be sure: Death is such a fundemantal part of
| life that every social norm we take for granted (thus not even
| noticing it exists) will be uprooted.
|
| Technically that doesn't need to be a bad thing. It just makes it
| so much more likely that advocats of ending death are overlooking
| the bad parts.
|
| Plus, I can't think of a scenario where, once this technology
| exists to extend life indefinetly, the state's monopoly on power
| won't turn into a dystopian monopoly on life.
| ElFitz wrote:
| > Plus, I can't think of a scenario where, once this technology
| exists to extend life indefinetly, the state's monopoly on
| power won't turn into a dystopian monopoly on life.
|
| And the wealthy's monopoly on wealth will only consolidate.
|
| It reminds me of two quotes:
|
| "Science progresses one funeral at a time" (paraphrasing
| Planck's principle).
|
| "[...] Death is very likely the single best invention of Life.
| It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way
| for the new. [...]"
|
| That's probably what worries me most, when it comes to extended
| or unending lives.
| keiferski wrote:
| Also Kuhn's idea of a paradigm shift. Good luck getting a new
| paradigm adopted when the decision makers at academic and
| scientific institutions never leave.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I wouldn't be so cynical. Many power structures rely on death
| to drive churn. But there are other mechanisms, _e.g._
| sequential term limits and retirement. (Retirement doesn 't
| mean you can't do anything anymore. Just not that thing.)
|
| Moreover, while longer lifespans may drive calcification,
| they would also promote long-term thinking. How would we vote
| about the climate differently if we knew we'd be around for a
| couple hundred years?
| ElFitz wrote:
| Hence "worry", and not an adamant objection to the idea of
| prolonging life.
| retzkek wrote:
| > Moreover, while longer lifespans may drive calcification,
| they would also promote long-term thinking. How would we
| vote about the climate differently if we knew we'd be
| around for a couple hundred years?
|
| Would we act more in favor of the general long-term good,
| or would we scramble even more to get ours now in order to
| secure our own future? I'm not so sure cooperation would
| win.
| mirchibajji wrote:
| Not sure why this was downvoted, but I agree.
|
| It is easy to see why an individual would choose life over
| death, if one has the means for a comfortable life. A second
| order question would then be: would the society value your
| life over their own? Even as we speak, many thousands are
| dying of preventable causes, including man made starvation.
| There is no way immortality will be accessible to all, and
| will only increase inequality.
|
| I'll happily change my mind if we can fix world hunger and
| homelessness before conquering death.
| kiba wrote:
| _"Science progresses one funeral at a time" (paraphrasing
| Planck's principle)._
|
| I would be careful at citing that quote as evidence for how
| science work, especially when considering the historical
| uniqueness of the last two centuries or so.
|
| This article said it's more complicated than that and more
| hopeful.[1]
|
| 1. https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2019/11/07/does_
| sc...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the state 's monopoly on power won't turn into a dystopian
| monopoly on life_
|
| Dystopian as in our _status quo_? (Also, monopoly on violence
| is essentially a monopoly on whether your life continues.)
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >I'm torn between the argument that the gift of life is such a
| precious one that eliminating death is one of the most virtuous
| endeavors at all - and the other argument where this is peak
| escapism and a fundamental not-getting-it-what-life-is-about.
|
| The problem with this line of thinking is that no one is ever
| going to eliminate death, ever. Even if you completely
| eliminate aging, people are still going to die at some point,
| whether it's from war, or natural disasters, or accidents, or
| murder. Making people ageless isn't going to keep them from
| dying when a piano falls on them.
|
| So pontificating about humans living until the heat death of
| the universe is utterly pointless. Statistically, even without
| aging, humans aren't going to live beyond 1000 years most
| likely.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Suppose we hit the SETI gold medal, and meet and interact with
| intelligent aliens. We discover that these aliens are
| effectively immortal.
|
| The aliens ask you for advice about how to live. Would you
| recommend that they all commit suicide at age 100, because it
| will be so good for them and their society?
|
| Always flip the default and ask, will you switch back.
| retzkek wrote:
| What if you could ask an octopus the same, and it suggested
| that dying after breeding is best for society to prevent the
| problems of overpopulation [1]? Unlike your hypothetical
| aliens, octopodes live in the same resource-constrained world
| we do.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Lifespan
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| The narrow mindedness of some of the comments on this thread is
| strange, especially on a site read by people with a supposedly
| open minded interest in the frontiers of interesting new
| technology.
|
| It's absurd to think that one must be arguing for or desiring an
| infinite span of life just because they detest the shortness of
| the one we have as humans, and want to find a way around that
| natural limit. I or others might only want a few hundred or even
| a couple thousand extra years to enjoy ever more fascinating
| adventures, without ever seriously considering the idea of
| literally striving for eternity.
|
| Yes, we have entropy, the current known limits of human biology
| and the laws of thermodynamics and so forth as superficial
| arguments against drastic life extension, but none of these at
| all firmly block the notion of humans developing ways to extend
| their lives by centuries or longer, even if not something like
| practical eternity.
|
| Just in the natural world of today, there are animals like the
| giant tortoise, who live for over 200 years and spend much of
| that robust, sexually active and healthy, or the Greenland shark,
| which lives over 400 years and doesn't even reach adolescence
| until it's about 150.
|
| Our current technology gives us no means of doing the same for
| our bodies, but the possible limits of technology and physics are
| nowhere near definitive enough for calling such a thing
| impossible. That alone and anything leading up to it would be an
| incredible improvement for so many lives that could be lived to a
| whole new degree of freedom and marvel for themselves and others.
|
| And before anyone considers the very tiresome argument that
| multiple centuries of life would get boring, i'd suggest you
| internalize that yes, there are people who would have no trouble
| filling them with things that fascinate them to the very last
| minute of that extended existence.
| DaoVeles wrote:
| While I don't think it will happen in our lifetime, I agree
| with you. I could definitely fill a thousand years comfortably.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Sadly, neither do I. I'm optimistic about the benefits of our
| current technology explosion (at least some parts of it, less
| so others) but I can't quite seriously imagine myself seeing
| aging reversal and life extension to beyond 120 years
| happening before my statistical natural lifespan ends by the
| middle part of the 21st century.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Evolution is what has made death mandatory. We'd be living much
| longer lives if it gave our species an evolutionary advantage.
|
| For example, in many species, the male dies promptly after
| mating. Evolution has no further use for him, so his life is
| forfeit. In fact, survival of the progeny may be advanced by
| getting rid of the old folks.
|
| The reason people live to be grandparents is grandparents turned
| out to be useful in ensuring the survival of the grandkids.
| Beyond that, off to the ice floe.
|
| These ideas are not mine. See "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley
| https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Evolution-Human-Nature/dp/0...
| for the various strategies around sex and mortality that
| evolution has produced.
|
| Nothing says, however, that we cannot tinker with our genes to
| produce what we want.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Evolution is what has made death mandatory. We 'd be living
| much longer lives if it gave our species an evolutionary
| advantage._
|
| Thermodynamics makes death mandatory. Evolution set the timer
| to 100 to 120.
| WalterBright wrote:
| We all know about the heat death of the universe. It is
| irrelevant to this discussion, however. May I suggest taking
| a look at "The Red Queen". I'd be surprised if you were
| disappointed in it.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It is irrelevant to this discussion_
|
| My point is there is a dial. We have to die. But we don't
| have to die when and in the manner that we do.
|
| > _May I suggest taking a look at "The Red Queen"_
|
| Ordered. Thank you!
| WalterBright wrote:
| > But we don't have to die when and in the manner that we
| do.
|
| I believe I made that point with: "Nothing says, however,
| that we cannot tinker with our genes to produce what we
| want."
|
| > Thank you!
|
| Welcs. It's a fun read, and makes you think differently
| about life.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| for humans today. Other animals live much much longer
| (centuries) and arguably there are species that even could be
| "immortal".
| adastra22 wrote:
| This is not true.
|
| First of all, our cosmological models are constantly being
| updated. There are a ton of unknowns here and we cannot be
| certain in the heat death outcome.
|
| Second, even if the canonical heat death model is right, the
| minimum required energy usage to sustain thought / simulation
| will go down as the CMB redshifts to zero temperature. It is
| unclear at this time which factor decays faster: available
| energy or cost per compute. Effective lifetime may be
| unbounded.
| lucianbr wrote:
| > Evolution has no further use for him, so his life is forfeit.
| In fact, survival of the progeny may be advanced by getting rid
| of the old folks.
|
| I think this shows that in species where the male does not die
| promptly after mating, there is good reason to live longer.
|
| > Beyond that, off to the ice floe.
|
| Where does the certainty come that you cannot be useful in
| ensuring the survival of your great-grandkids, or great-great-
| grandkids?
|
| After all, if you're arguing from what evolution mandates, the
| only thing to do is let everyone do whatever, and see where
| evolution goes next. You really can't think evolution had the
| current situation as its target all along, and now the only
| remaining thing is to not disturb it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > You really can't think evolution had the current situation
| as its target all along
|
| That's not the point. Evolution does not have a target.
| Evolution favors the propagation of genes. Anything that does
| a better job of that gets expressed into the next generation.
|
| > Where does the certainty come that you cannot be useful in
| ensuring the survival of your great-grandkids, or great-
| great-grandkids?
|
| I never said certainty.
|
| The notion of diminishing returns comes to mind. Also, the
| percentage of great-great-grandkids genes that are yours
| would be about 8%, so not a lot of contribution.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Also, there's very likely big downsides to any adaptations
| for longer life, such as increased cancer rates, which
| might make it evolutionarily disadvantageous for humans to
| live that long.
|
| Of course, evolution of humans was all done before humans
| invented technology and things like hospitals and bandages
| and antibiotics, so what yielded the best chances for
| propagating genes 100,000 years ago might not make too much
| sense to humans today.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| I don't understand, would you rather die earlier than
| have cancer?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| This isn't about what any person wants, it's about what's
| more likely to increase odds for survival. Living too
| long, for a creature that doesn't have any medical
| technology, means probably a higher chance of cancer.
| Living too short means less chance to pass on its genes,
| or to help its children pass on their genes. So
| theoretically, we humans found a balance between the two
| where we live long enough to be grandparents but that's
| it, and that's what's encoded in our DNA.
|
| However, now that we understand DNA better, and also what
| causes various cancers and how to treat them, we should
| be able to change our DNA to extend lifespans without
| causing us to die of cancer at young ages.
| WalterBright wrote:
| As "The Red Queen" points out, organisms tend to
| accumulate parasites and the parasites become adapted to
| living in the organism. The organism dying will then kill
| off its parasites, giving the offspring a better chance
| not be infected by the better adapted parasites.
|
| The competition for food means the older organisms will
| be better at gathering food, leaving less for the young.
| Better for the older ones to die off so the young can get
| the food.
|
| Nature is brutal. Civilization has been able to
| ameliorate some of the harshness, but it's still there,
| and we have no assurance that civilization won't kill us
| off anyway.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > I think this shows that in species where the male does not
| die promptly after mating, there is good reason to live
| longer
|
| Yep. Parenthood. And for humans (and other social species
| like elephants, other primates, etc.) to be grandparents.
| Humans have a particularly long juvenile period, which they
| need care of parents and cannot reproduce.
|
| The reason humans still die, of course, is so that resources
| aren't wasted on bodies that take more and more energy to
| keep alive and healthy, which ultimately comes back to
| entropy.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| There is no reason behind evolution, attributing any outcome to
| an evolutionary benefit is complete folly. Literally the only
| answer to an evolutionary outcome is that a mutant nutted in a
| bunch of people. Everything after that is also happenstance. If
| we are to accept that societies with grandparents propagated
| some genes better, then we have to do the same about cancer, as
| if its not a complete random fuckup that we have short
| telomeres or whatever else. When a different explanation fits
| the model better: cancer tends to occur after reproductive
| years and therefore wasnt weeded out of the population by
| evolution, which would apply to people that live long enough to
| be grandparents too.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It's no different from water behind a dam that pushes against
| a weakness, and the trickle through it enlarges the hole and
| the water then tears the dam apart. There is no sentience or
| reason behind it, but that's what happens.
|
| Life doesn't have a goal, but life that survives and
| propagates becomes the only life there is.
|
| Life also evolves into local optimums that are dead-ends.
|
| Sentience has helped humans propagate their genes, but
| mosquitoes are even more successful.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Evolution at the moment tremendously favors these who can bear
| children late in their lives. That implies being in full health
| longer as well.
|
| That would surely manifest in a few generations, sans some big
| civilization collapse. Or artificial uterus, for sure.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Does it? The odds of birth defects and disorders increase
| steadily with age.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Those for whom these odds increase faster are at huge
| disadvantage whereas those for whom it increases slower are
| at huge advantage. As you can imagine it is variative.
|
| Of course I should have said "those who can bear healthy
| children late in their lives".
| komali2 wrote:
| I feel like this ascribes too much purpose to evolution. I
| don't know if I agree - for example, males might live longer
| even if it's not selected for, so long as their existence
| doesn't exert negative pressure. And they might anyway so long
| as propagation continues either way!
| WalterBright wrote:
| It ascribes no purpose to evolution. It's simply that an
| organism that creates more copies of themselves will replace
| organisms that fail to do so.
| FiatLuxDave wrote:
| I enjoyed the last line of the article: "An unfinished book is
| the only thing I know of that never dies."
|
| A short story against mortality:
| https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon
| latexr wrote:
| Same story in animation form, from CGP Grey.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
| disambiguation wrote:
| >An unfinished book is the only thing I know of that never
| dies.
|
| The author clearly hasn't seen my ticket backlog.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Death is a preferable outcome to immortality.
|
| If there is no death, there will only be more suffering, as
| suffering is in human nature. We experience pain, and want to
| return that pain.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| By that same logic non-existence is vastly preferable to
| living. Life is suffering.
| elfelf11 wrote:
| No.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Thanks for showing me the light. Your thorough and
| convincing argument made me see the error of my ways.
| latexr wrote:
| From the superliminal school of persuasion brought to us
| by in the Simpsons.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WDi4tAqPkM
| manmal wrote:
| > We experience pain, and want to return that pain
|
| I disagree. We absorb pain for our community/tribe or our own
| goals. Ideally, we don't pass it on.
| yard2010 wrote:
| A few hundred years ago people would punish the sick and
| sometimes throw them into wells, making the rest of the
| village sick. I wondered if violence could be modeled as a
| plague. Once you're exposed, you're starting to catch it.
| Imagine that being violent to violent people spreads this
| disease.
|
| That resonates with what you said - if we could absorb
| violence and not pass it on we can contain it. Unfortunately,
| the western world handles violence with more violence, which
| is the same as throwing a sick person into the village well.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > A few hundred years ago people would punish the sick and
| sometimes throw them into wells, making the rest of the
| village sick.
|
| It kind of reminds me how Fox News selects its presenters.
| They'd definitely be the ones a sane society would try to
| punish.
| bboygravity wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I prefer to live forever (assuming
| healthy), thank you.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > (assuming healthy)
|
| Moments ago, I, too, used to think this way, but then I
| glanced around at the comments here, and I realize that even
| if immortal, we'd still have to suffer each other, and that
| simply just can't go on forever.
| rbanffy wrote:
| With infinite time, we can simply move to other planets or
| star systems.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Granted you can also maintain your close circle.
| digging wrote:
| Why are you alive then? I hope you continue to stay alive, by
| the way, I'd just like you to examine your reasons for not
| having allowed your own death yet.
|
| I wonder if it has to do with the fact that your current
| lifespan is "natural" and an immortal lifespan is "unnatural".
| But what's the difference between being alive in 10,000 years,
| and being alive currently? A person 10,000 years old may
| believe themself to be immortal but there's fundamentally no
| difference between being "currently alive" at 10,000 and being
| "currently alive" at 40. Either way, it's an experience of the
| present. So what makes living to 10,000 _wrong_ , if living to
| 40 is right?
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Men_Are_Mortal a great book on
| this. It shows how the immortal are withered away by time and
| futility of there attempts to change history and be a permanent
| influence.
|
| Meanwhile, the mortal while shortlifed and with only one poker
| chip in the game, play and win/loose with all the passion they
| have and form a sort of river, that withers the immortals plans
| and dreams down to zero.
| rrgok wrote:
| I'm not afraid of death, but I'm sad I cannot see how the world
| will be in 100, 200 or 500 years from today.
|
| I wish people invented a reliable cryogenesis machine, so that I
| can go to sleep, come back after a century, live for 5-10years,
| and go back to sleep. Repeat the cycle.
|
| I don't care about living a long life, it only burdens the body
| and mind. I want to see fast paced changes happening in front of
| my eyes. Evolution takes millions of years, technological
| advances takes century. Being awake for that long only makes you
| miserable, because of all the shit happening in life. Let's admit
| that life is for the most part a shitty deal, with some moments
| of excitement.
| dualogy wrote:
| > _I wish people invented a reliable cryogenesis machine, so
| that I can go to sleep, come back after a century, live for
| 5-10years, and go back to sleep. Repeat the cycle._
|
| Some SF author here wanna pick up on this theme? This has
| potential, if the cryo is available equally to all comers in
| society, because I can't imagine how the world would look like
| -- who'd "shape the time they're in" as some-specific-
| generation when people pop in and out of the progression of
| time liberally, century-hopping, taking a gander for a few
| years, then sleep through many more, then respawn once more.
|
| Maybe one can leave specs for when to not thaw (wars,
| pestilence, famine, recession). No one's around for the bad
| times! Including whoever'd manage the cryo and thawings.
|
| Paradoxical, someone go write that SF!
| Devasta wrote:
| For the life of me I cannot remember where I saw it, but
| there is a comic that once explored the theme, a man wakes up
| from cryo 1000 years in the future to find that anyone who
| wanted to endeavor in any field figured they'd jump on the
| pod and wait for someone else to do some of more of the
| groundwork, that history and technological progress had
| basically stopped.
| dualogy wrote:
| If you ever remember the name of that, gimme a ping!
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Some SF author here wanna pick up on this theme?
|
| Simpsons did it. Er, Vernor Vinge. Highly recommended, like
| all his works.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| IIRC Orson Scott Card of all people did a riff on this, but
| the ability to freeze yourself was theoretically merit based.
| So then all the best and brightest thinkers spent most of
| their time frozen, with kind of a "break-glass-in-case-of-
| emergency" setup.
| ctoth wrote:
| Iain Banks already wrote this for you, it's called Excession,
| and it is even better than you imagine.
|
| I'm pretty sure the concept comes up in other Culture Novels
| but one of the main characters in Excession is the Sleeper
| Service, a ship which does precisely this.
| troyvit wrote:
| I think there was a sub-plot like this in "Children of Time",
| by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Only it was people on a generation
| ship that was forced to operate well beyond its limits. I
| don't want to give too much away but it definitely gave the
| concept a twist.
| anthonyrstevens wrote:
| Alastair Reynolds, in "House of Suns", has a variation on
| this theme, with much-more-stretched timeframes.
| jhbadger wrote:
| This happens in Liu Cixin's "Three Body Problem" books. Many
| of the characters experience life in eras starting from the
| near future, to a semi-utopian era a couple of centuries from
| now, to when humanity fights the aliens 400 years from now.
| They go into cold storage and are awakened when there is
| something for them to do.
| pretzellogician wrote:
| Roger Zelazny's "The Graveyard Heart" does this. It's
| effectively one large party over centuries.
| alonsonic wrote:
| > Let's admit that life is for the most part a shitty deal,
| with some moments of excitement.
|
| Can't relate with this sentiment. Life is what you make of it
| and a lot of times we overcomplicate it and worry about
| meaningless things.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| I think, most people who want to be immortal are actually
| motivated by either the fear of death, or the desire to travel
| far and experience life in the future. But these are distinct
| motivations.
|
| Immortality itself does not compute. It just does not make sense.
| You are a product of your time. So if you end up 10000 years in
| the future, what is going to happen? It wouldn't be good if you
| were still you, a 2000 millennium person. So lets say you managed
| to evolve entirely to become a 10000 millennium human (if that's
| even a thing). Then, you're not really you anymore. There is no
| discernible continuity. So in effect it's like you died and were
| reborn multiple times over. "Immortality" only really makes sense
| over smaller timescales on the order of centuries, at most.
|
| I can tell you, I have relatives who were alive before WWII and
| although they are alive, they are not part of the present. They
| are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok,
| they are not really partaking in the present, but mostly
| reminiscing the life they used to have in their childhood and
| early adulthood.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I do think our brain as a somehow fix structure / existential
| path that would struggle to make sense over multiple
| centuries[0]. Beside reminiscing times gone, there's also the
| absurdity of cycles and "forgettance", where stupid things come
| over and over[1], which is not pleasant.
|
| [0] if you don't just go insane because your memory capacity is
| reached and you just can't organize new ideas without losing
| others or causing damage.
|
| [1] that said this might be due to equal demographic waves, but
| in the case of immortal population, young ones would be less
| and less large % wise.
| the_cramer wrote:
| Depends on the type of immortality. If we can fight typical
| aging processes, then a big part of the problem you state would
| go away. Old brains don't learn and think as fast as young ones
| do, this has purely to do with ageing and cell/dna defects over
| time. Old people are not hyped by AI and new tech, because most
| of them don't understand them and i think this has much to do
| with the reason stated.
|
| Not to say there is not a possible psychological problem for us
| when living forever, it just cannot be researched right now
| because, you know, we tend to die. Let alone the implications..
| insurance, prison sentences, housing, population and control of
| it...
| kochikame wrote:
| You could also argue that old people are not hyped by AI and
| new tech because they have been through so many hype cycles,
| and seen so much in general, that they know that things come
| and go, and tech advances, but the really important things in
| life never change
|
| So not lack of understanding, more that they see through the
| hype
|
| Pretty cool if you ask me
| Nursie wrote:
| I think most people who don't want to be extend life are
| actually motivated by extreme fear of death.
|
| A fear so profound that they've reasoned themselves into a
| corner, that this way we live _must_ be correct and cannot be
| questioned, because if we start to question whether death is
| necessary after a 'natural' lifespan, whether research into
| prolonging life might be possible and might not actually not be
| a ridiculous endeavour for a few madmen, then that deep dread
| they cannot speak of may return and consume them.
|
| Beyond that your comment is full of odd assertions - yes,
| people grow and change, but no, that doesn't imply
| discontinuity or repeated death.
|
| Your older relatives are living in ageing or aged bodies,
| including their brains. Their experience of life is not
| necessarily what we could expect if we were to be able to put
| off the effects of age indefinitely.
|
| Edit - but I'll take your few centuries over what we have now,
| as a starting point :)
| jbstack wrote:
| Not everyone is the same. Some people are more open to change
| and new experiences than others. And ultimately, I'd bet that
| if your relatives were facing death tomorrow, they'd take a
| pill today that would avoid it, notwithstanding that they
| prefer the past to the present. Just because a person doesn't
| like change doesn't mean they prefer death over change.
| olalonde wrote:
| > Not everyone is the same. Some people are more open to
| change and new experiences than others.
|
| It's also likely that in the future, this trait will be
| tunable with technology.
| ben_w wrote:
| Ship of Theseus has many variations; one I like is from Terry
| Pratchett, regarding dwarfs and axes.
|
| "This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost
| nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new
| blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs
| on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . .
| . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family?
| And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a
| pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good."
|
| -- Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant
| lc9er wrote:
| I love this and Pratchett's "Samuel Vimes 'Boots' Theory of
| Socioeconomic Unfairness". Imagine the cost to the poor if we
| discovered immortality before we eliminated poverty.
| rbanffy wrote:
| That's a good point. Living forever before we eradicate
| poverty (and inequality) is a big issue that would,
| doubtlessly, create a lot of social upheaval.
| DougN7 wrote:
| Eradicating poverty could be done today, IF we could
| change everyone's mindset. In my opinion that is harder
| to do than immortality. Heck, we could end war with a
| much smaller change in mindset and we can't even do that.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > could be done today, IF we could change everyone's
| mindset.
|
| Oh yes! But capitalism extracts labor from wealth
| gradients, and extraction is more efficient the higher
| the gradient. Who'd clean your toilets (or make you
| coffee, or slaughter your beef) if there is nobody who
| needs the money to pay for food?
| ben_w wrote:
| I think it's more extractive of wealth from information
| gradients than anything else. If two corporations do
| roughly the same thing, the staff switch to whichever
| pays more while the customers switch to whoever charges
| less or provides a superior product/service.
|
| > Who'd clean your toilets (or make you coffee, or
| slaughter your beef) if there is nobody who needs the
| money to pay for food?
|
| If _nobody_ needs money, then surely _everyone_ has a
| personal service robot?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryten
| rbanffy wrote:
| > If nobody needs money, then surely everyone has a
| personal service robot
|
| Or, at least, they clean their own toilets.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >capitalism extracts labor from wealth gradients
|
| This is the sort of thing that sounds very truthy but I
| don't think that's actually very true. I don't think that
| this property is particularly unique to capitalism. As
| long as people have existed society as a system, whatever
| 'isim' it was labeled with (and even before) has
| extracted labor from power gradients. It's more simply
| stated that people tend toward forming more stable and
| longer lasting social systems (in which more gets done)
| in the presence of a strong hierarchy.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > extracted labor from power gradients
|
| That's true, but in capitalism wealth and power can't be
| separated. Even in democracies, economic power gives the
| very rich political power that's only achievable
| otherwise trough elections.
|
| > It's more simply stated that people tend toward forming
| more stable and longer lasting social systems (in which
| more gets done) in the presence of a strong hierarchy.
|
| Until the system collapses because of its rigidity.
| ben_w wrote:
| Not quite today -- I'm not even sure if it could be as
| early as by 2030 even if you eliminated all corruption
| and just had everyone working to build roads to and
| utilities in the remote towns and villages most in need
| of development.
|
| We can certainly do more, don't get me wrong, but I don't
| think we could change so much for 750 million on a short
| timescale, even though that's just 10% of the world and
| we've clearly got the stuff in total.
|
| China is, I think, doing a pretty decent job of getting
| itself out of poverty, but even they were "only" growing
| at 10%/year in this process.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Eradicating poverty has succeeded many times throughout
| history. We just raise tha baseline of what's considered
| "poor".
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| You have eliminated it by any meaningful definition of
| poverty.
| falcolas wrote:
| I'm going to be a bit US centric here:
|
| Definitions such as food security? We don't have that.
| Housing for every person? Nope. How about the ability to
| ensure our health? Nope. Jobs? Nope. Help when you need
| it for your mental health? As if.
|
| Poverty is still a scourge on humanity.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| In terms of food security - what does that mean? I hear
| (unverified) there are places such as Venezuela where the
| population is starving, which is horrendous, but I
| haven't heard of this in the US.
| falcolas wrote:
| https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
| shots/2023/10/26/1208760...
|
| And if you don't trust NPR, feel free to pick another one
| of dozens of sources under the google search "food
| insecurity us"
| jimbokun wrote:
| The fear of insufficient calories to survive is all but
| eradicated. Obesity is the new marker of poverty.
|
| Agreed on lack of housing, which is largely due to
| progressive local governments preventing the construction
| of new housing. Housing is far more plentiful and cheaper
| in red states.
|
| Agreed on health. Replace the US system wholesale with
| one of the many more successful models in other
| countries. Ironically, our existing government run
| programs are already better in terms of cost and quality
| than private insurance.
|
| Recent unemployment rates reflect essentially full
| employment.
|
| So a mixed bag.
| ben_w wrote:
| Obesity, and large gold (-ish) chains. Or at least, was
| so in the UK before I left.
|
| Don't count so much on housing being so easy to fix, much
| of the rest of the world is also having a hard time with
| that. (Except China, I think?)
| falcolas wrote:
| > The fear of insufficient calories to survive is all but
| eradicated. Obesity is the new marker of poverty.
|
| Tell that to the millions of families in the US who are
| food insecure TODAY. And calories alone are not enough.
|
| "the USDA found that nearly 7 million households were so
| financially squeezed last year that they had to skip
| meals at times because there wasn't enough food to go
| around. Almost all of these households said they couldn't
| afford to eat balanced meals." ~NPR
|
| As for employment, that 4.3% unemployment (per MSNBC on
| 8/3/24) still represents some 13 million people. I'd
| hesitate to call that "full employment" by any metric.
| And it doesn't count the other roughly 20% who are not
| counted in that statistic who are not working
| (intentionally or not).
| anthk wrote:
| I'm in my 30's and I don't give a fuck on 'AI', Instagram and
| Tik Tok.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| In roughly 15 years every cell in your body is replaced, by
| your logic there's no reason to live past 15, since you're no
| longer the same person.
| dualogy wrote:
| I heard that it varies by cell type from at most 7 years,
| down to under-24-hours for a few types. But.. that's just my
| memory from some read many years ago. Curious what the latest
| official number is.
| dualogy wrote:
| > They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or
| TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present, but
| mostly reminiscing the life they used to have in their
| childhood and early adulthood.
|
| You don't have to be 50+ to fit _that_ description =)
| silver_silver wrote:
| >They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or
| TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present
|
| This is such a limited perspective. I'm in my 20s and don't
| bother with any of that either. The continuity is of one's
| conscious experience, not identity.
| beezlewax wrote:
| As if tiktok was the pinnacle of human existence. It's more
| or less just marketing trash.
| falcolas wrote:
| The older I get, the less I want to live forever. I mean, hell,
| my knees have hurt in some fashion or another since I was 10.
| It's not gotten better, it's gotten friends. ADHD... I can
| barely plan for today, let alone make sure I'm not destitute
| for the next billion years.
|
| Now then, if they could solve (and reverse) all the other
| things that come with aging (honestly of those things death
| scares me the least), I would reconsider my stance. But even
| the thought of living for another 100 years at where I am right
| now sounds like a pretty miserable existence.
| imtringued wrote:
| The amount of people here that seemingly don't care about
| quality of life is shocking to me. What's the point of
| drawing out negative experiences to potentially infinity?
|
| One of the tricks that immortality plays to you, is that no
| matter how much you screw up, you still have an infinite
| lifespan remaining to fix everything, including the fuckups
| of an infinite lifespan (uncountable infinities/cantor's
| diagonal argument).
|
| For example, let's say your eyesight deteriorates every 100
| years and there is a cure that will take 2 years of your
| salary to fix. Add this up until you spend most of your life
| maintaining your immortal body.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > The amount of people here that seemingly don't care about
| quality of life is shocking to me
|
| I haven't seen this on here. Can you cite an example?
| afthonos wrote:
| The good news is that as far as I know, there is no plan to
| end death that doesn't also involve ending aging. The bad
| news is that it might come too late for any of us talking
| here.
| falcolas wrote:
| It's not just aging that's a problem. It's _also_ issues we
| 're born with (mental health, autoimmune disorders, and
| thousands of others), or issues inflicted upon us (back
| pain, cancer, etc).
|
| _All of these_ , practically speaking, need to be solved
| to extend life in a way that's worth experiencing.
| afthonos wrote:
| Sure. And practically every one of these issues except
| for aging and death do have lots of people looking at
| them, and as someone with an autoimmune disorder that has
| multiplying available drugs, I can testify that things
| are getting better.
| falcolas wrote:
| We have seen some improvements for some diseases. But so
| many others, especially any mental health issues, are not
| seeing much progress from the "drown the brain in these
| chemicals" method of treatment.
|
| So yeah. I don't want to be a downer, but I'm not seeing
| what I would call enough movement. And it's slowing down
| even more (and those chemicals are becoming harder and
| harder to get sometimes) as pharma and hospitals focus on
| profit over health.
|
| Even "solved" problems (really, problems which can/could
| be managed) are becoming issues again thanks to profit
| seeking. See insulin.
|
| EDIT: So much for not wanting to be a downer.
| dingnuts wrote:
| > There is no discernible continuity.
|
| There's continuity of consciousness which is the only thing
| that matters. Turn me into a mist, I don't care, as long as I
| can stay awake.
|
| General anesthesia is the worst thing I've ever experienced.
|
| Nobody wants to live forever in a decaying body. Just let me
| have my 23 year old body back, just for a few extra centuries.
| c'mon, universe.
| m_fayer wrote:
| I have those relatives too and I know others in their 60s and
| 70s who are very much living in this moment. The difference is
| curiosity and motivation and the humility to recognize that
| what's new and alien might just have something to offer you.
|
| I'd bet those relatives you mention weren't the most curious or
| open people when they were younger.
| m_a_g wrote:
| > I think, most people who want to be immortal are actually
| motivated by either the fear of death...
|
| How are you not afraid of death? How is anyone not afraid of
| death? This baffles me. I mean, I don't spend my days agonizing
| over the fact that I will die someday, mainly because it has no
| use. Chronic anxiety won't help me as long as I take the
| necessary actions. But I'm sure as hell scared shitless of
| dying overall.
|
| If I were 100 years old and every day was a struggle, sure, I'd
| want to just get it over with. But I have a really hard time
| understanding why people won't want to stay 30 years old
| forever. You, your conscience, the only thing that matters,
| will cease to exist. If that doesn't strike fear in a person, I
| don't know what will.
| supertofu wrote:
| What is there to be afraid of about death, exactly? If you
| don't believe in any afterlife or continuation, then there
| will be no consciousness to perceive the other side of death.
|
| If you do believe in an afterlife or continuation, you'll
| have spent your life preparing accordingly.
| jewayne wrote:
| I mean, there are plenty of things that are worse than death.
| I myself have an informal "anti-bucket list" -- things I want
| to make sure I die without doing / have happen to me. It's a
| LOOONG list.
|
| Alzheimer's. Paralysis. Elder abuse. Bone cancer. Even
| identity death. I think anyone who is that terrified of death
| is doing so from an adolescent "bad things only happen to
| other people" mindset.
| lainga wrote:
| If I see any of those coming around the corner, I have
| intent to make like Ambrose Bierce: get my affairs in order
| and then go off into harm's way.
|
| "If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone
| wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a
| pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age,
| disease, or falling down the cellar stairs."
| jewayne wrote:
| I think most people have that thought, but few act on it.
| And unfortunately, death is not the only harm that can
| come from harm's way. Stray bullets can find spines and
| genitals about as easily as they can find hearts.
| Lambdanaut wrote:
| Death is just the name we give to the moment when the
| condensed energy that is moving this system that calls itself
| a body breaks down into a temporarily simpler state.
|
| At some point I'll get caught up in some whirlpool of energy
| and find myself crawling out of some uterus again as I have
| time and time again for all of eternity.
|
| Yippee.
| alonsonic wrote:
| So you define yourself as energy? Not your conscience?
| Because your conscience and sense of self is what most
| people would describe as gone when you die, and that's
| where the fear comes from. Energy has no feelings, no
| conscience, no self...
| Lambdanaut wrote:
| > So you define yourself as energy? Not your conscience?
|
| No division.
|
| > Energy has no feelings, no conscience, no self
|
| Where did you get that idea?
| digging wrote:
| > Energy has no feelings, no conscience, no self
|
| > Where did you get that idea?
|
| It is not an idea that one needs to have given to them.
| It is the simple conclusion of known physics. However,
| the claim that "energy has consciousness" is a non-
| obvious idea, which can't be derived from the evidence
| and mathematics we use to describe the universe. It
| should be supported if you believe it. It would be an
| important learning about the universe. That, or you're
| redefining "energy" as "any system that contains energy,"
| (including a human being, which very few would define as
| "pure energy").
|
| Is there any meaning to this position you're taking? Does
| it support predictions about the world? Does it change
| how you think about the world?
| jewayne wrote:
| Even if that is true, the actual you is just as assuredly
| dead.
| Lambdanaut wrote:
| "Actual me"?
|
| I'm the sea of energy from which all life and death
| springs from. We all live and die in it.
| jewayne wrote:
| Is that what you signed on your driver's license?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Bubbling and flickering like a candle in and out of the
| background consciousness of existence.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The existence of a mind is a property of this mysterious
| universe that is obvious yet not described by any physical
| law.
|
| We know so little what consciousness is at the age of the
| universe timescale (and possibly the infinite multiverse,
| which actually guarantees an infinite number of
| configurations of you), it's hard to think that death is the
| obvious end of you-ness.
| rikroots wrote:
| > I think, most people who want to be immortal are actually
| motivated by either the fear of death, or the desire to travel
| far and experience life in the future.
|
| Good points. But I think another key motivation is the simple,
| banal Fear Of Missing Out. How dare human life on Planet Earth
| continue without me?
|
| While (of course) I would like to live forever, it is not death
| I fear. Rather it is the process of dying that upsets me. I'm
| currently in a position where my mother and siblings seem to be
| in a race to the grave. My mum (age: 95) still has her mind,
| but her body has failed her badly over the past 10 years: every
| movement is an effort and a pain - she no longer leaves the
| house, though she absolutely refuses to become bed-bound. My
| brothers have fought, or are fighting, cancer. My sister had
| her second heart attack earlier this year; she still smokes -
| perhaps her understanding of things is better than ours? (FWIW,
| I have not yet discovered the means of my demise).
|
| If extreme extended life includes endless pain and continual
| loss ... I don't think I'm as strong as my mother. My hope is
| one day I just forget to wake up, drift into oblivion
| dreamless. !Cogito, ergo !sum.
|
| > Immortality itself does not compute. It just does not make
| sense. You are a product of your time.
|
| I wrote a novel[1] about a once-human entity that was born some
| 6-7,000 years ago, and now exists as a sort of eternal mind
| parasite. I had to do a lot of thinking about how such entities
| would think about life, time, and death. As the story developed
| it turned out that my main character quite enjoyed experiencing
| life, didn't much worry about time, but in particular was
| fascinated by how people die - which, as a mind parasite, he
| could experience almost-first-hand.
|
| [1] - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/book/spintrap-the-
| lonely-...
| digging wrote:
| I find this comment incredibly difficult to read in a way that
| the book of scientology is, or a bottle of Dr Bronner's soap
| is. There are many assertions pretending that they logically
| support each other to build to a conclusion, but there's no
| logical connection between them at all. I'm going to try to
| break it down because maybe I'm just completely misreading it?
|
| > You are a product of your time.
|
| Sure. If I were born 600 years ago, I wouldn't be a software
| engineer. Perfect statement.
|
| > So lets say you managed to evolve entirely to become a 10000
| millennium human (if that's even a thing). Then, you're not
| really you anymore. There is no discernible continuity.
|
| That doesn't follow. It veers wildly off course by making the
| assumption that I am a static thing, with a binary identity as
| "me" or "not me". But! I was actually born several decades ago.
| I was once a small child with no understanding of how software
| works. How is it that I'm a software engineer now? Growth, and
| change. Yet I retain my first-person memories of being that
| ignorant child. Did I steal those memories from another entity?
| I find that to be a useless definition of change-over-time, so
| I'd rather say I'm the same person. I feel like you'd agree I'm
| the same person, but only because the timescale is fewer than
| 1000 years, but that's a completely arbitrary cutoff. A person
| isn't defined by an instant _in time_ , a person exists _over_
| time. Therefore there 's no reason I would cease to be me in
| 8000 years even though I was still me in 4000 years, or 400
| years, or 40 years. What possible mechanism could account for
| that total loss of identity after an arbitrary time? It may be
| in year 10024 I have no memory of the year 2024, but I might
| have memories of the year 9024, and in the year 9024 I might
| have memories of the year 8024.
|
| > "Immortality" only really makes sense over smaller timescales
| on the order of centuries, at most.
|
| _Why_? How many 300-year-olds have you measured this against?
| How many 3000-year-olds? It seems you 've just drawn a line
| where you feel like drawing one and started telling people the
| line was a natural feature of the land.
|
| > I can tell you, I have relatives who were alive before WWII
| and although they are alive, they are not part of the present.
|
| Again this doesn't support your arguments at all. Those
| relatives are _old_. Their brains and bodies are weaker every
| year; we can 't expect them to keep up. The idea of biological
| immortality is not that your body would just continuously age,
| or else yes you would just be a braindead corpse breathing on a
| slab for millions of years. Immortality means stopping the
| process of aging. So the challenges of current old people
| aren't really relevant to the experience of ageless
| 10,000-year-olds of the future.
| jimbokun wrote:
| That's because AI, Instagram and TikTok have done nothing to
| improve human life so far and those older people have seen
| enough to understand that.
|
| Except for the ones on Facebook ranting about politics.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| You are just anthropomorhising a biology / technology problem
| that could be solvable (death). The fact that you cannot comput
| it doesn't mean at all that it doesn't compute in general.
| omnicognate wrote:
| So many references to thermodynamics here, which is entirely
| irrelevant unless you choose "immortality" to mean surviving the
| death of the sun.
|
| The world in which we live and die is very far from thermodynamic
| equilibrium. A reasonable definition of escaping mortality is
| being able to continue to live as long as the environment
| continues to support life, which involves it providing suitable
| energy gradients, which the sun will continue to do for a very,
| very long time relative to a normal human lifespan. The second
| law of thermodynamics does not preclude this.
|
| The second law of thermodynamics is also not some quasi-mystical
| curse of doom, and it's not about "disorder" either, but that's a
| whole other discussion.
| geodel wrote:
| Ever since I read book about Scaling by Geoffrey West where
| human's average age is about 40 years I feel tons of problems of
| modern society are due to stretching human life far beyond 40.
| From population rising, declining, pension gap, bankrupting
| social security, care for old people, loneliness, old age
| diseases and so on and on.
|
| Before life was _nasty, brutish and short_ and now for large
| population on earth it is still nasty, brutish but long. And I am
| just not fan of long.
| Nursie wrote:
| How old are you now, out of interest?
| wiether wrote:
| If they are <35, they are too young to realize how fast goes
| by; and if they are >40, they are selfish to still be alive
| while preaching for a shorter lifespan for others?
| Nursie wrote:
| It's more that I can't see a philosophy in which people
| should die at around 40 surviving in a person that nears
| that age, because it's tantamount at that point to saying
| "My life isn't worth living, it provides neither myself nor
| society any value".
|
| This is not something most people think of their own lives,
| and as a result would be more interesting than someone
| saying (in effect) "I think it would be better if other
| people died off".
| marcheradiuju wrote:
| In some forums, "post body" is used to rebuff arguments. The
| implication is that, when the user posts their physique, it
| will be lesser than your own, and your subsequent takedown of
| their ideas will include a photo of your own larger physique
| to reinforce the superiority of the responder.
|
| In your question, there's even less of a fair shake: your own
| age has no part in it and the GP would simply look a fool for
| any answer under 40, due to the context. What's sad is that
| you think that appearance would be anything but an
| underhanded jab on your part, the immortality-conversation
| equivalent of "and yet you live in a society, hmm!"
|
| Say GP was 20. So what? Have you dismantled any of their
| points about the inherent non-fit between the natural
| engineering of the human body and a society dominated by
| adults 40+? The GP at least brought one new idea to the
| thread, and it's rude of you to try to shuffle them off for
| immaturity. Maybe you're the type to say "it was just a
| question!", but its obvious to anyone who would read here
| that you were trying to subvert actual argumentation with a
| character attack.
| Nursie wrote:
| I believe this comment violates HN's rules to assume the
| best intent on interlocutors.
|
| > Say GP was 20. So what?
|
| If the GP is 20 then their personal philosophy that humans
| should die around 40 may be informed by their feelings that
| 40 is a long way off and that people around 40 years old
| are 'other' to themselves and their peer group. Further,
| their philosophy has not at that point been tested while
| staring down the barrel, and has the luxury of being
| somewhat abstract.
|
| And if it has been tested by staring down the barrel, then
| it becomes more interesting, and we may explore why they
| feel they don't have anything further to contribute to
| human society. I'm not pre-judging, I'm seeking to
| understand. Maybe this person would go willingly to
| carousel, but as that is entirely alien to me, I wanted to
| establish if that was the case. And if so I want to know
| more about it.
|
| So regardless of your own extremely rude response, it is
| pertinent information required to understand the context of
| the original post and the thinking behind it.
| marcheradiuju wrote:
| Your expanded reply is a lot more generous than the
| single-line reply you gave, which I pattern-matched to
| countless prior discussions about age where the exact
| same verbiage was used to undercut youth. Hopefully you
| can forgive seeing my past experiences in a matching
| circumstance.
|
| I still think that you do a disservice to the argument
| with the way you frame it. Not having stared down the
| barrel is a euphemism gesturing at naivety, when you
| could more kindly say that few people past the cutoff
| that GP gave would agree, and expand on that instead. I
| appreciate that you appear to mean this rebuttal in good
| faith, and I apologize for my own retort.
|
| If I were to disagree with one element of the
| counterargument you gave, it's that people of a certain
| age cannot 'contribute to society'. We can see that
| people of almost all ages can contribute to society -
| least of all by political means, e.g. Thunberg, Biden.
| But the thrust of GP seems to me more that the original
| engineering of a human involves balancing shared
| resources directly and indirectly in different ways
| across lifespans, and as we stretch that long tail
| further out, it calls on more and different resources
| than the initial structures of socioculture were designed
| for. This isn't just about brain fog or palliative care
| costs, but also about how younger cohorts cope with the
| world around them.
|
| Today, teenagers are told that their career peak will be
| in their 50s - the common response is, why work hard
| today when so much social momentum intends to hold you
| back? If our best and brightest live to 300, what will
| keep disenfranchised youth from decades of despair, given
| the economic revolutions (in the most fortunate outcome,
| rather than crises) these radical changes would entail?
| These are the questions I saw gestured at by the GP
| argument.
| marcheradiuju wrote:
| A follow-up thought, because this topic has haunted my
| mind today. A comment elsewhere in this post gestured to
| Malthusianism, referencing the failures of past societies
| to predict future advancements. That reminded me that the
| Repugnant Conclusion becomes all-too-real in a world of
| extended lifespan, and no amount of techno-optimism can
| solve for this problem. Bioavailability and the zero sum
| nature of resource management demands that we respect and
| solve the issues of population ethics as an integral step
| alongside lengthening lives. It's one thing to rebuild
| society with legible (!) cultures to fit the new world,
| but its wholly another to hand-wave uncounted suffering
| for the pipe-dream of living longer.
|
| Nobody picks their birth. I can easily imagine ten people
| sorting toxic garbage their whole (short, brutish) lives
| to enable the decadence of each member of the future the
| centenarian ruling class. If we want to avoid such a
| scenario, we do so by acknowledging and integrating the
| studied solutions of population ethics, today.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| Do you really mean average age or do you mean life expectancy?
| terryf wrote:
| Wow these comments are depressing here.
|
| Of course I want to live as long as possible! Because life is
| awesome! I want more of it!
|
| The fear of death is of course real, but that's not the main
| reason for wanting to live longer. I want more experience, I want
| to see what happens in the future! I want to understand more,
| learn more and be able to do it at a more relaxed pace without
| the feeling that time will run out!
| olalonde wrote:
| I think it's a bit similar to the deaf community hating on
| hearing aids or bald people hating on hair transplants.
| Psychologically, it's challenging to accept certain conditions,
| so our brains create rationalizations as a defense mechanism.
| Similarly, with death, we have no option but to accept it (at
| least for now), and so we develop rationalizations to convince
| ourselves that it's actually desirable.
| keiferski wrote:
| No, it's not similar at all.
|
| The modern technological world has a certain approach to the
| individual Self and its experience of the world - it ought to
| be focused on almost to the exclusion of anything else.
| Nothing else ultimately matters, as long as your personal
| life experience continues - is what this philosophy ultimates
| boils down to.
|
| Other people, in other places, value different things. Merely
| existing as long as possible is not their primary goal. And
| in fact, the lack of such ways to "use" one's life and death
| in a meaningful way _other than simply existing_ is one major
| cause of the modern malaise affecting many developed nations.
| To live and die for a purpose other than extending your own
| personal experience is something many people hunger for in
| current times.
| olalonde wrote:
| I personally wouldn't embrace that philosophy but if we
| solve death by aging, "dying for a purpose" would still be
| an option: suicide, accidents, etc.
| keiferski wrote:
| I agree but I am responding mostly to the parent comment,
| which suggests that not trying to live as long as
| possible is some sort of disorder or disability.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| That is not what they are suggesting though. They are
| simply making an analogy to a very real phenomenon in the
| deaf community. That they are deaf or are disabled is
| incidental, it could be any sort of community where they
| make rationalizations and then hate those who shatter
| their beliefs.
| DennisP wrote:
| The desire for immortality goes back at least as far as the
| epic of Gilgamesh. Medieval alchemists tried to achieve it.
| In China, Daoists attempted to dramatically lengthen their
| lives by various esoteric means. Tibetan Buddhism also has
| practices along these lines.
|
| Conversely, in today's world plenty of people would like to
| lengthen their lives, without that being their primary
| goal. Just because someone wants to live longer does not
| mean that it's the only thing they care about; it's even
| possible that some larger purpose is a major _reason_ they
| want to live longer.
|
| From a Buddhist perspective, "if you are a practitioner of
| the Dharma, someone who is putting the teachings into
| practice, there is great significance to doing long-life
| practice."
|
| https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Long_life_practic
| e
| 8372049 wrote:
| The primary reason the Deaf community "hates on hearing aids"
| is mostly because it comes at the expense of sign language.
|
| If you're deaf and live in a Deaf community (i.e. with sign
| language), you will function normally in virtually every way.
| If you're deaf and live in a hearing community with hearing
| aids, you'll be forever impaired. With hearing aids and/or CI
| you will still be hard of hearing, you will still struggle
| with group conversations, at the beach or in a swimming pool,
| in noisy environments and so on.
|
| Secondly, the Deaf community strongly objects to the notion
| that lack of hearing is a handicap and instead consider it a
| cultural difference. Somehow, when (we) hearing people think
| of the deaf we consider it a disability to e.g. have to use a
| vibrating wakeup alarm, but we _don 't_ consider our own
| inability to fall asleep in a noisy place a disability.
|
| (For reference, deaf=impaired hearing, Deaf=sign language
| user)
| olalonde wrote:
| My comparison was aimed at your second point. Deaf people
| not considering it as a disability is a coping mechanism.
| If there was a cure for deafness, nearly all deaf people
| would take it and conversely, almost no one intentionally
| seeks to become deaf (of course, there are exceptions).
| keiferski wrote:
| It is not as simple as you're suggesting here. Deaf
| people have their own culture and language, and while it
| is built on a _lack_ of something considered normal by
| others, that doesn 't mean it's inherently just a
| disability that would / should be eliminated
| unquestionably.
|
| Consider a similar example: if immigrant parents could
| instantly make their children forget their native
| languages and learn English fluently, many would choose
| to do so - as it would give the children more
| economic/social advantages. And yet I don't think we
| really want to say that not doing that, and instead
| retaining the native language and culture, would be a
| coping mechanism.
|
| Culture and disability is a really complicated thing and
| deaf culture specifically should not be brushed away as
| just a coping mechanism.
|
| (Side note: I am deaf in one ear and agree with the
| commenter above that it's actually a benefit for going to
| sleep, but of course this isn't considered a benefit by
| society at large.)
| terryf wrote:
| Thank you for this explanation. This is really
| interesting. I'm not deaf, so this is very difficult for
| me to understand, but that doesn't mean it's not
| important.
|
| I'm trying to find something to compare to, but not sure
| if I'm getting this right.
|
| I can't sense radio waves in the 87-110Mhz range, but
| let's imagine that most people can. This means that they
| can hear all the FM radios all the time.
|
| Certainly, this would be very annoying, especially if you
| are not able to block it out. In this sense, I would be
| better off - one less annoying thing to deal with.
|
| Of course, everyone else would be able to be up to date
| with all the news instantly, as they would always hear
| them from the radio. And, assuming you also had the
| ability to "tune the station" that you can hear, you
| would be able to listen to music or interesting shows all
| the time. This would be good and fun.
|
| Would I miss the ability that everyone else has? This is
| a very interesting question and I don't know the answer.
|
| But, I would think that if someone gave me a wearable FM
| radio that I could turn on/off at will, I would think
| that I certainly would accept that.
|
| Again, I'm sorry if this is not a good analogy and as all
| analogies this doesn't really capture all the nuances of
| course, but would this be similar at least in theory?
| keiferski wrote:
| Yeah, it's complicated for sure. I think this is probably
| a good example, except that deaf people functionally get
| along fine in the world, for the most part. At least
| nowadays. Whereas in your example, it seems like the
| people without the radio ability are just inherently
| behind everyone else in terms of information access. And
| in your example world, the people without the radio
| ability would need to have their own unique subculture
| and language where they can communicate and relate to
| each other in ways inaccessible to the radio masses.
|
| Personally, I do think the sense of hearing is important
| enough to be worth acquiring. But the underlying point, I
| think, is that deaf culture is not just a rationalization
| or coping mechanism. It's a fully-fledged culture. And
| while gaining the sense of hearing is probably "worth it"
| and a net gain, you're also losing something in the
| process.
|
| To use myself as an example (although I'm not completely
| deaf) - while I wouldn't mind having my deaf ear fixed,
| being half-deaf has also shaped my personality and sense
| of self. So I wouldn't want to just label it as an
| unimportant coping mechanism, as it's much more
| fundamental than that - even if I ultimately did want to
| fix it. I imagine deaf people getting cochlear implants
| feel somewhat similar.
|
| Evaluating it purely as _a broken thing that is now
| fixed_ doesn 't capture that aspect. And it's worth
| reflecting on how this idea that "useful = always better"
| is just a default assumption.
|
| The language learning example I used is a good one in
| this instance: while it's nice that people can
| communicate more by learning English, it's also a process
| of destruction as local languages and cultures are
| eliminated and assimilated into a global English-language
| culture. The assumption that vocal communication +
| hearing is superior to sign language is a similar
| situation.
| 8372049 wrote:
| > I would think that if someone gave me a wearable FM
| radio that I could turn on/off at will, I would think
| that I certainly would accept that.
|
| In this way it is an apt analogy, since many deaf get CI.
| The implant process removes any residual hearing, so the
| moment they turn it off everything is completely quiet.
| It's nowhere near a fully qualified hearing, however, so
| it's useful as a supplement to sign language, not as a
| replacement.
|
| I don't know of a good analogy for it, but sign language
| obviously also carries with it some advantages and
| disadvantages that vocal communication does not. You need
| a flashlight to talk in darkness, but you can talk (sign)
| as much as you want in a library, through a soundprood
| window or in a noisy environment.
|
| The conversation dynamics are also completely different.
| Often everyone will sit in a big circle with multiple
| conversations going on at once, and you can "opt in" to
| the one you want by watching whoever is speaking.
| 8372049 wrote:
| > Deaf people not considering it as a disability is a
| coping mechanism.
|
| No, it's not, and this claim just shows your ignorance
| and prejudice.
|
| > If there was a cure for deafness, nearly all deaf
| people would take it
|
| This is pure conjecture, and I frankly think you are
| wrong.
|
| > almost no one intentionally seeks to become deaf
|
| Do you genuinely not understand that this has more to do
| with culture, language, habits and the familiar, not to
| mention ignorance of what it means to be deaf/Deaf, than
| an accurate judgment of the qualities of hearing vs.
| silence?
| greenthrow wrote:
| I thought everybidy hated on hair transplants because they
| look like doll's hair and are distractingly terrible?
| seper8 wrote:
| Hair transplants are your own hairs...
| greenthrow wrote:
| Everybody knows that. It still looks like doll hair
| because of the pattern of the implants.
| olalonde wrote:
| I'm quite happy with mine[0]. People don't notice unless
| they knew me before.
|
| [0] https://i.postimg.cc/13tjX46q/before-after-hair-
| transplant.p...
| elzbardico wrote:
| A lot of what we call "The X community" is just a portion of
| a said larger group that is incredibly vocal and politically
| organized.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Dont forget blind people "hating" on bionic eyes and similar
| nonesense. And no, you haven't understood the underlying
| issue at all. All you can do is claim a minority group isn't
| quite in their right mind, thats pretty sad to read. Maybe
| you can read up on Ableism, but thats not the whole story.
| Tech based implants are very poor quality-wise. Bionic eyes
| have a few hundred pixels across, and hearing implants sound
| quite harsh and unnatural. What those minority groups are
| "hating" on (what a strange way to put it) is them being
| forced into this, without seeing a lot of gain. I am blind 45
| years now. If someone would force me into a bionic eye, I
| would need the next 10 to 20 years at least to learn basic
| reading. I'd have to start at the very basics, and its likely
| too late for me to adapt to the visual world. My way of
| dealing with things, as a native blind man, is superior to
| every technology you undisabled people can give me. And if I
| decline, you say I am hating on technology. This is soooooooo
| fucked up, you have no idea.
| olalonde wrote:
| You misunderstood my point. I was doing an analogy between
| three cases (deafness, baldness and death) where a real
| solution does not exist or if it exists, it is imperfect or
| not available to all. For example, hearing implants aren't
| a perfect solution and won't help much in cases of extreme
| hearing loss. I imagine they're also a bit inconvenient.
| Similarly for baldness, hair transplants aren't always an
| option due to cost or insufficient quantity of hair in the
| donor area.
|
| So what happens is that those who aren't eligible for a
| solution often tell themselves that a hypothetical solution
| isn't even desirable at all, as a way to cope. This is
| where I was making the analogy with people praising death
| in these threads. My contention is that they're just
| rationalizing to deal with the fact that death is indeed
| inevitable, for now.
|
| By "hate" what I really meant was that a subset of those
| who aren't eligible for a solution will "hate" those who
| are, because they are a reminder that their situation isn't
| actually desirable. I really should have wrote "deaf
| community hating on _people with_ hearing aids or bald
| people hating on _people with_ hair transplants. "
|
| In your case, it seems you acknowledge that an actual cure
| would be nice, but such a cure doesn't exist right now. I
| feel similarly towards death. I'm not about to do monthly
| "young blood transfusions" to gain a year or two of life
| but I acknowledge that a real cure would be nice.
|
| PS: I absolutely meant no disrespect and understand that
| it's perfectly possible to live a good life as blind or
| deaf person.
| trueismywork wrote:
| "Your" life is awesome.
| pineaux wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with you. I want all those things and would try
| to attain them if possible. But I also think it's selfish and
| "not how it works". I think people are not really made for
| adapting such a long time. I also think the generations after
| you would want to own a part of your ecological niche to live
| in themselves. You might be looking over your shoulder the
| whole time.
| chr1 wrote:
| Well, if people live for really long time like 10000, it
| would become much easier to travel to other stars with
| technology that we already have, so there will be plenty of
| "ecological niche to live in".
| darkerside wrote:
| Would it really be much easier? It's already possible, we
| just would have new generations on the ship when we arrive.
| We don't care enough about those future generations to take
| off for a new world today. Will we care more about our own
| 10000 year futures?
| chr1 wrote:
| Passing down skills and ideas needed for the mission to
| survive and succeed over multiple generations is a very
| hard task.
|
| A group of skilled and motivated people who spend a small
| percentage of their lives on a ship, is going to be very
| different from a group that is trapped in a small town
| for generations.
|
| My estimate would be that the mission to succeed is going
| to need 10-100x more people on generational ship compared
| to a transport ship. (million vs tens of thousands.)
| reginald78 wrote:
| Generation ships could do that without being staffed with
| immortals.
| terryf wrote:
| Yes, it is a bit selfish. But it is also okay to be a bit
| selfish from time to time. After all, it is your life. Of
| course, this needs to be carefully balanced. But doing things
| every now and then just because you want to, is okay.
|
| However the "not how it works" comment ... well, you could
| make that pretty much throughout the time that humans have
| lived. We have been continuously changing the environment
| around us to suit our needs and wants. Early farmers burned
| down forests to get fertilized land. We domesticated crops
| and animals and bred them to grow the way we wanted them. We
| built things to make life safer, better and easier.
|
| You could say "that's not how it works" about a tractor or
| wheat with multiple stems from a single seed.
|
| But of course, there will be problems that need to be
| overcome if we ever do figure out ways of extending life. But
| again, there always have been problems with new inventions.
|
| I firmly believe that humanity has the ability to overcome
| problems, develop, learn and improve. And that aligns well
| with wanting more life!
| olalonde wrote:
| It's the good old appeal to nature[0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| You have only considered the consequences of you living
| forever. It wouldn't just be you, it'd be everyone. Well, more
| likely, it'd just be the rich, and you'd just have to hope
| you're rich enough to afford it. And good luck with social
| mobility in a world where the 'generational wealth' doesn't
| need the 'generational' part. You'll find that an internship at
| a company with the potential to eventually give a high-paying
| job in a few decades needs 80 years of experience, three PhDs
| and a personal recommendation letter from at least one
| legendary figure just to make it to interview because you're
| competing in a job market with immortals.
|
| This feels similar to the people who advocate for dictatorships
| because they picture themselves as the dictators, and end up
| having their faces eaten by leopards. Statistically, you're
| overwhelmingly likely to not end up in the elite in this new
| deathless world.
| terryf wrote:
| I'm certainly not part of the elite even in the current
| deathful world :)
|
| And yes, of course there will be issues, difficult ones. But
| life is, was and will always be filled with difficulty,
| obstacles, struggles and failures. Mine certainly is.
|
| However, I believe in progress and overcoming obstacles and I
| believe that if we ever manage to extend life, we will figure
| out ways to make it work.
|
| There is a lot of talk how finding jobs is more difficult
| these days if you are young and do not have experience. That
| real-estate is so expensive that nobody is able to afford it.
|
| And I'm sure it's true.
|
| But I also see a lot of young people succeeding and thriving
| in ways that I could not even have thought of. Therefore, I
| think there is reason to believe that the next generation
| will be able to find a way to make it work. As has every
| generation before.
|
| When I was younger I used to think that situations in the
| world are now radically different from what the previous
| generation had to deal with. And on the first level of
| abstraction, they are! Computers did not exist for the
| generation before me. So of course it was new.
|
| However, that is just the first level of abstraction. Take
| the second level of abstraction and you can look back and
| identify things that are completely new for each new
| generation. I mean, how different was the concept of going to
| work in a factory with a loom from the previous generation
| where machines did not exist at all!
| mathgeek wrote:
| > Therefore, I think there is reason to believe that the
| next generation will be able to find a way to make it work.
| As has every generation before.
|
| It's worth remembering that many generations lost a
| significant percentage of their population to war, death,
| famine, etc. They didn't always find a way to make it work
| without significant death and suffering. Many who died
| probably wouldn't say "we made it work" for their own
| lives.
| terryf wrote:
| This is certainly true, but I don't understand what you
| are trying to say in the context of this thread?
| keiferski wrote:
| Yes I think most people here aren't considering the fact that
| technology is rarely evenly distributed.
|
| Rawls' veil of ignorance is relevant here:
|
| _In the original position, you are asked to consider which
| principles you would select for the basic structure of
| society, but you must select as if you had no knowledge ahead
| of time what position you would end up having in that
| society._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Except in the short term, technology is one of the few
| things that almost always ends being distributed evenly.
| 2000 years ago, the only way to get running water was to be
| Ceaser and command a slave, "Go run and get me water." Now
| one turns a tap. Similar arguments can be made to
| innovations ranging from household appliances to medical
| advances that were only available to the wealthy 50 years
| ago.
|
| You also overestimate the power of entrenched interests and
| underestimate the political agency of those who live in a
| functioning democracy.
| keiferski wrote:
| In broad strokes, you are correct, however in this case
| specifically I'm not so sure. Access to healthcare
| _today_ is extremely unequal. I really doubt it 'll
| become less unequal when immortality is on the line.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Unequal or not, the the bottom quarter today have better
| health care than the top quarter 75 years ago. Technology
| filters down to the masses. We can discuss timelines, but
| the basic fact is indisputable.
|
| You have provided no evidence that the diffusion of
| technology will be different under an extended lifespan
| regime. You just make a bald statement.
| keiferski wrote:
| I'm not sure how that is an argument against my initial
| comment. So the advancements will supposedly drift down
| to the lower classes over time. Society will still be
| unequal, and at that point the people with access to the
| best longevity tech will already be in power.
|
| I'm not sure how I'm supposed to provide evidence of a
| future speculative event, but as I said, _more life_ is
| about as strong as an incentive as is possible. There are
| plenty of examples of powerful technology that didn 't
| become more accessible. Nuclear weapons as a prime
| example.
|
| Now I don't think longevity tech, if such a thing is even
| possible (and I'm skeptical) will be as restricted as
| nuclear weapons. But to think that there won't be massive
| inequalities in access to it + strong power incentives to
| not distribute it seems naive to me.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| If you put nuclear weapons and extended lifespans in the
| same bucket, you've lost the script. Good night.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Ancient Romans had tap water. We get the word "plumbing"
| from Latin. Also, from
| https://www.unesco.org/reports/wwdr/en/2024/s:
|
| > As of 2022, 2.2 billion people were without access to
| safely managed drinking water (SDG Target 6.1).
|
| I don't think this invalidates your general point, but
| your specific example is wrong.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| Thanks for the comment. The Roman water system is indeed
| a marvel and did vastly facilitate access to water for
| the masses. Specifically though, I was referring to
| having easy access to tap water within one's home. That,
| to my knowledge, was not common, whereas today nearly
| everyone in the first and second world has that [1].
|
| [1] "It was very rare for a pipe to supply water directly
| to the home of a private citizen, since Romans would have
| to acquire an official authorization to validate the
| direct tap. Water mostly serviced the ground floor in
| buildings, rarely supplying the upper floors due to the
| difficulty this would provide in the gravity-powered
| system. Residents of apartment buildings who lived in the
| upper floors would have to carry water upstairs and store
| it in their rooms for sanitary uses" from
| https://engineeringrome.org/the-water-system-of-ancient-
| rome....
|
| And yes, there is still many parts of the world still in
| poverty, but that is changing rapidly and doesn't change
| the larger point that technology, by and large,
| democratizes and filters to the poor.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The idea we have of "Generational Wealth" depends on
| compouding returns and compounding returns require perpetual
| economic growth which is something that in a sufficiently
| long timeline is simply not possible.
|
| Also, on capitalism, economic growth is also dependent at
| some level on population growth.
|
| Eternal life would probably require some kind of socialism.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Well, generational wealth only continues to work if you
| continue to provide value, somehow. Your money gets
| inflated away otherwise.
| DennisP wrote:
| Elites are not the only ones who get cancer treatments. Since
| the diseases of aging are extremely expensive, it's even
| likely that national health insurance programs would pay for
| anti-aging treatments. Longer lifespans would also help
| counter lower fertility, which is an economic problem for
| most developed nations.
|
| Long-term, sure, maybe we end up with a social mobility
| problem. But solving that seems less difficult than solving
| aging. Even if we didn't solve it, I'm not convinced it would
| be a bad trade.
|
| Imagine we lived in world with an average lifespan of a
| thousand years but little social mobility. And some prominent
| person said "hey I know how to fix this, we'll just kill
| _everyone_ on their 90th birthday. " I doubt many people
| would consider that a viable solution, rather than a
| ridiculously bad one.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > This feels similar to the people who advocate for
| dictatorships because they picture themselves as the
| dictators, and end up having their faces eaten by leopards.
| Statistically, you're overwhelmingly likely to not end up in
| the elite in this new deathless world.
|
| I don't think I've ever heard of anyone saying this.
| nine_k wrote:
| <<Maturity is when the thoughts of mortality stop to evoke fear
| and start to induce moderate optimism.>>
|
| <<I'm not afraid of dying, I'm afraid of dying pointlessly.>>
|
| (Don't remember the attribution.)
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| note to myself: strictly stick to technological subjects on
| hackernews or accept the suffering from having to read nonsense
| by keyboard philosophers.
| disambiguation wrote:
| It helps if you make a drinking game out of it!
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Reading the comments, it feels like almost everyone here might
| benefit from WeCroak - I definitely recommend it.
|
| https://www.wecroak.com/
| gradschool wrote:
| Are those arguing for immortality assuming that aside from
| physical decline we improve monotonically with age? That's not at
| all clear to me. For example, the general consensus among
| linguists is that the ability to acquire native fluency in a
| language is lost after a certain age. Could there be other less
| obvious deficits in neuroplasticity that people striving for
| immortality would need to address? Sticking with the same
| example, how do we know it doesn't confer some evolutionary
| advantage to repurpose the language acquisition firmware
| (whatever that may be) to more age appropriate ends later? Oddly
| enough, a couple of star trek episodes I'm too lazy to look up
| got me thinking about all this. In one of them, captain Picard
| gets a chance to relive a regrettable incident from his youth and
| ends up ruining his life, and in the other, captain Janeway goes
| back in time to help her younger self and finds out they both
| have something to learn from each other. Relatedly, someone asked
| William Shatner what he wished he knew when he was younger and he
| said a better question would be about what he's glad he didn't
| know. Disclaimer: I had an unexpected sudden cancer scare last
| week so maybe you should discount my comment as a
| rationalization.
| Filligree wrote:
| I agree that these are issues, and I'm willing to spend
| millennia struggling with them.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Could there be other less obvious deficits in neuroplasticity
| that people striving for immortality would need to address?
|
| Isn't that itself a sign of physical decline?
| socialoutlaw wrote:
| Materialistic people are so consumed by the fear of death that
| they yearn for immortality, craving endless time to create and
| acquire more distractions--little toys to appease their restless
| minds. It's ironic that in their quest to escape mortality, they
| lose touch with the essence of life itself. Humanity, as a
| collective, has driven us to this point, where the pursuit of
| material wealt overshadows the potential for deeper connections
| and meaningful experiences.
|
| Our struggle against it reveals this deeper disconnection which
| is evident from the our so many attempts to "enhance" life - to
| extend it further all the way to infinity. We became so
| preoccupied with that task that we often fail to fully embrace
| the current truth: finite life. In this quest to conquer the
| inevitable, we miss the opportunity to find meaning and peace
| within the natural flow of our existence.
| scandox wrote:
| It's clear from many of these discussions that there is an
| unbridgeable discursive gap between the "why on earth would you
| ever want to die" and the "life would become an intolerable
| nightmare" groups. Realistically if we do find ways to extend
| life then people will take advantage of them and all kinds of
| weird consequences will follow, and the two groups will argue
| about just how long life should be while trying not to die.
| Cosmically speaking all that will happen is that human
| development will slow down: after all if it requires a generation
| of human scientists to die so that new ideas can be accepted then
| [1]...
|
| My personal preference is pro-death. I enjoy life but it's
| important to my enjoyment that there is a terminus. The fact that
| it's not under my control also makes me feel calmer - it's out of
| my hands.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
| litenboll wrote:
| What if reluctance to accept new ideas later in life stems from
| mortality in the first place?
| ted_bunny wrote:
| Enough people deny their mortality that I doubt this is the
| case.
| Filligree wrote:
| People can deny their mortality all they like; they're
| still mortal, and things like lower learning rates are
| likely to be genetic.
| scandox wrote:
| Well who knows. My bet is on the very long-lived being fairly
| risk averse. And new ideas are risky.
| waterhouse wrote:
| If you're going to retire in N years, then that gives you
| an upper limit to how much you can benefit from learning
| (or even experimenting with) a new and potentially better
| approach, versus sticking with what currently works for
| you. As N gets smaller, the cost-benefit analysis
| increasingly favors the latter.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I like the concept that because we decline in liquid IQ as we
| age, so our static skill growth is always counterbalanced by
| our intellectual decline, we have never even _seen_ a human
| being in the fullness of its power.
| kiba wrote:
| That is silly. Some people are more adaptable than other and
| are able to change their mind through time.
| throw9474 wrote:
| What if every time you accept new ideas, your old self dies a
| little bit?
|
| Our five year old self is already dead.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I think neuroplasticity is well known to have a physical
| basis. We can probably extend the neuroplasticity of young
| adult and early middle age into longer and longer timespans,
| but all you have to do is watch a teenager or young adult for
| a few days to see that the extreme neuroplasticity of very
| young people definitely comes with some drawbacks.
|
| I don't think I would want a future immortal billionaire with
| access to accumulated generations of power to enter a new
| adolescence with the brain reset that comes along with it.
|
| We need young people to be stupid and brash and occasionally
| fearless and brilliant and unburdened by the lessons (or
| scars) of the past to keep society moving forward but those
| can't be the same people in charge of the world. There are
| roles for both.
| jimbokun wrote:
| In the US at least, young people are a lot more risk averse
| than previous generations.
| Nursie wrote:
| If flexibility and plasticity of thinking are age-related,
| couldn't prevention of ageing maintain that?
|
| I think it's inevitable that such a change would cause big
| social upheavals. I find it highly ironic that those people who
| call this out as a negative often also call out how people
| living longer are change averse.
|
| > I enjoy life but it's important to my enjoyment that there is
| a terminus.
|
| Can I ask why, genuinely?
|
| The fact that I will likely die sometime in the next 50 years
| doesn't make the evening out I have planned any better or
| worse. The band I'm going to see are getting older, but I'm
| going to see them because they're coming to my town and it'll
| be enjoyable. My eventual death has no bearing on it at all as
| far as I can tell.
| voiceblue wrote:
| On the one hand, we enjoy real flowering plants more than
| fake ones, and delight in anticipating their blossoming,
| though it is the fake plants that are ever blooming and ever
| lasting.
|
| On the other hand, the only moment in which you have direct
| control and could actually affect is the current one.
|
| When Pinocchio made his wish, was "agency" all he wanted, or
| was there something more?
| Nursie wrote:
| > though it is the fake plants that are ever blooming and
| ever lasting.
|
| I have recently been envious of a neighbours bushes - they
| flowered uninterrupted for many months, all spring, summer
| and autumn. Fantastic sprays of cream and crimson blooms.
| Both beautiful and long-lasting, I would love to plant
| those over more temporally limited ones that only flower
| for a few days per year.
|
| It is not the permanence that is unappealing about fake
| blooms, nor the brevity that makes flowers beautiful. To me
| anyway. Silk wallpaper with floral prints that has survived
| for hundreds of years in old British castles and country
| homes is no less beautiful for its age.
|
| I'm not sure I see the relevance of your other points. I
| guess we see things very differently.
| dmm wrote:
| > human development will slow down: after all if it requires a
| generation of human scientists to die so that new ideas can be
| accepted then
|
| A worse problem is that whatever generation is in control when
| immortality is achieved will rule the world forever. Falling
| fertility makes this even more likely.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > Falling fertility makes this even more likely.
|
| _Falling fertility_ makes us extinct very soon. The idea
| that the youngest generation, raised by many generations to
| be dismissive or even outright hostile to fertility will, by
| some miracle, be the ones who say "no, I will have 2.1
| children" is silly. And because it's falling fertility and
| not just "stable but below replacement fertility",
| demographic collapse comes quickly. and extinction within 200
| years.
|
| If you're worried about immortality, then the good news is we
| don't even have enough time to figure it out.
| hooverd wrote:
| You can blame older generations for sucking up all the
| housing and holding on until they die.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I could blame them, but about 3 months ago I saw a
| headline here on Hacker News telling us that the
| government of Canada plans on having a population of 100
| million within the next few decades (currently at 30ish
| million). The 70 million difference isn't old people.
| Quite clearly, looks like government policy.
| jimbokun wrote:
| In the US can place much of the blame on local
| governments in progressive cities who refuse to allow
| more housing to be built.
| hooverd wrote:
| Local governments who are voted in by civic minded home
| owners.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| A century ago, Earth had 4 times less humans. We can handle
| quite a few decades of low fertility.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| China deliberately lowered its fertility to a below
| replacement level. A few decades later, they decided they
| wanted to raise it back up higher.
|
| They couldn't. They're not exactly wishy-washy, they
| happen to be one of the most authoritarian regimes on
| this planet, even if they understand the benefits of a
| velvet glove. If they couldn't raise it, why would you
| think anyone else can?
|
| And we're already at sub-replacement. The same people who
| make the next generation of people (as small as it is),
| are the ones who also raise that generation and instill
| their values in them. What does having one child teach
| that child about their parents' values? It teaches them
| that, at most, they should have just one. Or maybe even
| that they should have none at all. Not only is this a
| self-reinforcing problem, it accelerates. You don't have
| a few decades to solve this.
|
| Nor will "evolution" fix it as the other guy said. While
| some still have large families, it's not just the
| parents' own values that are instilled, but that of our
| society collectively. The many who have few or no
| children have far greater influence on the children of
| those families, than those families have on everyone
| else.
|
| Population is counter-intuitive, and none of you
| understand it.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| You're making all these assumptions about how the
| population grows and shrinks on a _tiny_ subset of human
| history. People are not going to disappear as a species
| from social trends like having fewer children. Society
| will change to accommodate the new status quo and reach
| an equilibrium, like it has for the entire history of the
| species. Whatever wipes out humanity, it won 't be that.
| kiba wrote:
| This is based on present trend and the current historical
| circumstance, not an inevitability of our development.
| axus wrote:
| The homo genus has survived huge variations over the last
| 200k years. The likely global warming scenarios are very
| bad but extinction would need a major screwup with AI
| and/or genetic engineering.
|
| Evolutionary processes will prevent total extinction, even
| if "the next generation is raised" one way, new trends will
| emerge.
|
| A population of few thousand is enough for humanity to come
| back. Even if population dropped 50% every 30 years, it's
| still 500 years to get down that low. And we haven't even
| started trending downward yet.
| whythre wrote:
| The good news is those more likely to reproduce are
| automatically selected by evolution... since they are the
| only ones having children in any significant numbers.
| rurp wrote:
| Things don't happen in a vacuum and trying to extrapolate
| current trends 100+ years into the future is a fool's
| errand. A couple decades ago everyone was worried about the
| opposite problem. Neither of us has any idea what the new
| worry will be in a few more decades.
|
| The earth currently has billions more people than are
| necessary to keep humanity going; there's plenty of slack
| in the current system. Yes societies will have to evolve if
| birthrates stay low for a while, but they _always_ have to
| evolve and if populations ever did drop precipitously low
| people already know how to make more babies.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not only that, but the "cure for dying" will surely be priced
| such that only the already-wealthy elite of that generation
| will be able to afford it. It's not going to just be handed
| out to everyone.
| tavavex wrote:
| Why not, actually? Why wouldn't it be at least somewhat
| related to the price of executing that life-prolonging
| procedure? The providers will surely want to sell it to the
| maximum number of customers in all countries.
|
| Even if you argue that this would go against the interests
| of the highest class, what could they do? Technology is
| pretty unstoppable, and individual actors are usually
| pretty bad at conspiring together unless there's something
| in it for everyone involved. Not to mention that there's
| not even a way to define what specific dollar amount moves
| you from "wealthy commoner" to the "wealthy elite",
| especially if taking into account different countries.
| nine_k wrote:
| Why, it just should be required regularly in order to not
| die. Like food.
|
| Recurring revenue is best revenue. Customer's LTV would be
| only limited by astronomical circumstances like the Sun
| turning into a red giant.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I just remembered this great sci-fi book which has a good
| take on these issues:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Buying-Time-Joe-
| Haldeman/dp/038070439...
| pretzellogician wrote:
| "Buying Time" is great! Enjoyable take on longevity
| through technology. I have multiple copies, at least one
| of which is signed by Haldeman.
|
| There was a followup comic book series, which was decent.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There are so many great Haldeman books, particularly the
| ones where he sets out to kill a Heinlein book as did
| "The Forever War" (Starship Troopers) and "Worlds" (The
| Moon is a Harsh Mistress.)
|
| That book popped into my mind; it took two tries to find
| it with Copilot and I was pleasantly reminded of who the
| author was.
| recursive wrote:
| "Altered Carbon" dealt with themes like that. I would
| imagine there are probably a bunch of other sci-fi works
| dealing with it. It's a cool idea.
| ElectroBuffoon wrote:
| The elite will finally meet the long term consequences of
| their past and present decisions.
|
| It will be an spectacle: the true test of how useful wealth
| is against the Universe, compared to other things like
| knowledge or wisdom.
| rurp wrote:
| Yep and ossified control structures aren't exactly known for
| being flexible and well run in the long term. A permanent
| ruling class will almost certainly lead to a major collapse
| at some point, bringing down all of that fancy technology
| with it.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| But you can always end it so why not give option? Options make
| for greatest value
| neuralRiot wrote:
| I think that what most pro-immortality people forget is that
| forever is not just a very long time, our finite thinking does
| not allow us to understand something that never start or never
| ends and that death is life just as light is darkness and heat
| is cold one cannot exist without the other.
| goatlover wrote:
| Immortality isn't a thing, the heat death of the universe
| virtually guarantees that. But nobody seriously thinks
| they're going to live a Googleplex of years. They just don't
| want to be limited to a max 110 year lifespan, where there's
| a good chance you spend the last few years wasting away in
| some nursing home. Why not live a few centuries or even
| millenia until something inevitably kills you? There's way
| more to see and do than any one current lifespan.
| abcde777666 wrote:
| "There is no such thing as death at all for this body. The only
| death is the end of the illusion, the end of the fear, the end of
| the knowledge that we have about ourselves and the world around
| us."
|
| "There is no such thing as permanence at all. Everything is
| constantly changing. Everything is in flux."
| kessog wrote:
| There is absolutely zero scientific, empirical basis for the
| materialist presupposition that nothing happens after we die. So
| why does seemingly every commenter here assume this to be the
| case? With the limitations of the scientific method, we can never
| discover what happens to a human consciousness after death. A
| human consciousness is undetectable in the brain, it isn't some
| loose arbitrarily defined amalgamation of chemicals and
| electrical signals. We will never develop technology sufficient
| to look into a human brain and see the neuronal pathways or
| materia that make up Logic, or Reason, or Ethics, or an
| individual's Sense of Self, and all the concepts that make up a
| human mind, because these things are immaterial, universal, and
| exist transcendent of the material human brain or the scientific
| method.
|
| So why are so many here running on the assumption that what
| happens after death is that consciousness (which can't be
| observed anyway) either disappears, or somehow ends up in a worse
| state than the here and now? This is a baseless assumption.
| Perhaps instead of chasing after the arbitrary religion of
| materialist Scientism, Hacker News readers should study a little
| philosophy and question their presuppositions.
| nhinck3 wrote:
| Basic extrapolation of known facts?
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| Edit: was answering to the wrong comment, sorry.
| keiferski wrote:
| I mentioned this in my reply to another comment,[1] but for
| reference, this attitude is called Positivism and unfortunately
| is a common assumption nowadays.
|
| Another useful concept is _the immanent frame_ , which is an
| idea by the philosopher Charles Taylor in his book _A Secular
| Age._ The basic idea is that society is increasingly becoming
| focused on _this world_ (immanent) and losing interest in
| things outside the "frame", like the afterlife. And so the
| default assumption becomes something like, "There is no
| afterlife and only this life matters," even if there is really
| no scientific or philosophical justification for that belief.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41188210
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism
|
| 3. https://ubcgcu.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/taylor-and-
| imm...
| kessog wrote:
| Thanks for this. If the modern materialist skeptic did the
| basest level of research into their own position, perhaps by
| starting with the likes of David Hume, they would soon
| realise that their position, and most of their
| presuppositions, had already been proven impossible several
| centuries ago (or several millennia ago for some of these
| presuppositions if we look at Aristotle). The lack of even
| the most basic philosophical training in even the modern
| university educated population is frankly appalling.
| EncomLab wrote:
| Sorry - it is precisely a "a loose arbitrarily defined
| amalgamation of chemicals and electrical signals" - in the same
| way that data in a computer is just a bunch of voltages and
| currents. If I load the notes to a song into RAM, those notes
| are just millions of voltages held by capacitors, and if I shut
| off the power those voltages break down into heat and the
| information is diffused into the surrounding air like ink
| washed off a page into a bathtub. Similarly, a living brain
| which also holds those same notes experiences a transfer of
| information to the surrounding environment when it dies.
|
| There is no "woo" here - and to imply that there is woo is
| purely religious, not philosophical.
| kessog wrote:
| A computer is not loose, nor is it arbitrarily defined. A
| computer is extremely precisely and specifically defined, and
| is fully deterministic. A single bit in the wrong place can
| destroy an entire system. A human mind is non-deterministic
| and the analogy of mind and machine is deeply flawed.
| EncomLab wrote:
| It is deeply flawed - all analogies are to some extent or
| another - the point still correlates with observable facts.
| Both systems require energy to function, removal of energy
| causes both systems to stop producing observable functions,
| and there is nothing observable that would indicate either
| system transfers it's functions into another state where
| those functions continue.
| dghf wrote:
| > There is absolutely zero scientific, empirical basis for the
| materialist presupposition that nothing happens after we die.
|
| Isn't it more the point that there is a lack of evidence for
| supposing that something _does_ happen after we die?
|
| Put another way: there is absolutely zero scientific, empirical
| basis for the materialist presupposition that rocks are not
| conscious -- other than that rocks give no sign of being
| conscious, and lack the neurological features that seem, as far
| as we can tell, to be necessary to support consciousness. Dead
| people also give no sign of consciousness and also lack those
| features, at least after a sufficient period of decay.
|
| So if those reasons are insufficient, scientifically speaking,
| to justify an assumption that post-mortem consciousness does
| not exist, they are presumably insufficient to justify an
| assumption that rocks do not possess consciousness.
| kessog wrote:
| If there is, in your view, a lack of evidence for either
| position, then why should you default to the less simple
| position? The simplest position to take would be that there
| is no change in state and consciousness continues to exist.
| The less simple position in this case would be to add an
| additional assumption that the state of consciousness changes
| - in that it goes from existing, to ceasing to exist.
| dghf wrote:
| Sorry, why is stasis a simpler position than change? Change
| happens all the time. Phenomena end. If a match burns out,
| the simpler assumption is that the flame has gone, not that
| it persists in some imperceptible fashion. Likewise, if a
| human body shows no sign of consciousness, and the brain --
| which at the very least seems to be heavily implicated in
| the phenomenon of consciousness -- is showing no activity,
| it seems reasonable to assume, in the absence of evidence
| to the contrary, that consciousness is absent: even more so
| if the brain is decayed or destroyed.
| kessog wrote:
| How do you know that change happens all the time? Are you
| observing all things and all modes of being?
|
| We don't go looking for evidence for all things in the
| same way.
|
| When we ask, "is the match still lit?" we can answer that
| question by observing the match. But that is nothing like
| the way we go about answering questions about the reality
| of natural laws, numbers, the room you are in, past
| events, future possibilities, laws of logic, individual
| identity over time, causation, memories, dreams, or even
| love or beauty. with each of these, we don't always
| attempt to use empirical, visible evidence to prove their
| existence. Only very specific questions about the
| physical universe can be answered with the scientific
| method.
|
| By limiting the question of consciousness purely to the
| observed, physical world, you're making the evidence
| criteria arbitrarily and impossibly narrow, in a way that
| you wouldn't for many other types of question.
|
| Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - this is
| a fallacy.
| dghf wrote:
| > How do you know that change happens all the time?
|
| Because ... it does? Things move. The kettle boils and
| then cools. There's a grey hair that wasn't there
| yesterday.
|
| > By limiting the question of consciousness purely to the
| observed, physical world, you're making the evidence
| criteria arbitrarily and impossibly narrow, in a way that
| you wouldn't for many other types of question.
|
| But we attribute consciousness to other human beings in
| the first place precisely because of physical evidence:
| their behaviours, expressions, speech acts, etc., and the
| apparent correlates of those in measured brain activity;
| and the lack of such evidence is why we don't (usually)
| attribute consciousness to, say, stuffed toys or
| mannequins.
|
| If it is irrational to assume (provisionally, and pending
| the possible discovery of further evidence to the
| contrary) that dead people are not conscious because they
| don't exhibit such physical evidence, it is presumably
| also irrational to assume the same of stuffed toys: after
| all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
| kessog wrote:
| Before I can continue this conversation I'm going to have
| to ask you to please stop downvoting my responses. It
| rate limits my account and prevents me from responding.
| On HN we aren't supposed to just downvote things because
| we disagree with them, this isn't Reddit and it destroys
| any possibility of debate.
|
| "Because it does" isn't an argument I'm afraid. If you
| can use "because it does" so can I. In debate this is
| called begging the question, the question in this case
| being "how do you know that it does?". This also destroys
| any possibility of debate. You need to justify your
| argumentation, otherwise this isn't a debate at all.
|
| So again, how do you know that change happens all the
| time? This is a question of epistemic certitude.
| dghf wrote:
| > Before I can continue this conversation I'm going to
| have to ask you to please stop downvoting my responses.
|
| It's not me who's downvoting you.
|
| > So again, how do you know that change happens all the
| time?
|
| If you're seriously going to argue that change doesn't
| happen --- and happen constantly --- then I don't know
| what to tell you. This very thread is evidence of that:
| first there were no comments, then one, then several. In
| the process of its creation and consumption, millions of
| electrons have travelled from device to device, and
| millions of photons from screen to eyeball, and millions
| of signals from neuron to neuron. And that's just from
| the activities of one small group from one species on one
| planet. I can't say for certain that there's nowhere in
| the universe in a state of stasis: but certainly locally,
| things are pretty busy.
| Xen9 wrote:
| Bayesian socio-evolutionary psychology: Apes have tons of
| delusions. Thus it becomes likely we are also delusional about
| death. On the other hand, unobservable worlds in quantum
| mechanics increase probability of unobservable afterlife.
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| Well we know that the physical brain is the support of mental
| abilities, because brain damage causes loss of abilities. It's
| very reasonable to assume that you can't be conscious without
| your brain.
| elihu wrote:
| Well, it's sort of the simplest explanation to think that when
| we die, our consciousness ceases to exist. This or any other
| hypothesis are un-testable -- at least, they can't be tested
| without dying, which is sort of a problem. And speculating
| about things you can't disprove experimentally feels kind of
| like a disreputable activity to those of us who really like the
| scientific method.
|
| Personally I believe (but can't prove) that there's more to
| consciousness than just electrical signals in my brain, but at
| the same time I'm aware that my physical brain is the organ I
| do my thinking with, and if it's not in a good state then
| thinking is a lot harder. Thus it's hard to imagine my
| consciousness existing separately from my brain. If I didn't
| have access to the usual apparatus I use to do my thinking
| with, then what's left?
|
| Perhaps on some level the situation is like a 2-dimensional
| being not being able to comprehend what it would be like to
| live in three dimensions.
| kessog wrote:
| Is it the simplest explanation? Already by suggesting
| consciousness ceases to exist we're suggesting a change in
| state, and a simpler explanation would be that there is no
| change in state - consciousness, more simply, continues to
| exist.
|
| For your second point, there is a way to prove that
| consciousness exists - by proving the impossibility of the
| contrary. If consciousness does not exist in a non-physical
| space, the very possibility of knowledge at all becomes
| impossible to reckon with. We could not have any interaction
| with metaphysical ideas like logic, reason, mathematics and
| so on. Logic is not present in the material world, yet it is
| universally applicable to all objects. Mathematical
| prototypes (eg. The number 7) cannot be found in the
| particles that make up the physical universe, yet they are
| found in all objects and are present and graspable in all
| minds. If the mind was purely matter, these fundamental
| building blocks for knowledge itself would be inaccessible.
|
| For your 3rd point - I think you are correct. We have no way
| of knowing exactly what an after life might look like.
| dghf wrote:
| > If consciousness does not exist in a non-physical space,
| the very possibility of knowledge at all becomes impossible
| to reckon with. We could not have any interaction with
| metaphysical ideas like logic, reason, mathematics and so
| on.
|
| Why not?
| qsdf38100 wrote:
| > If the mind was purely matter, these fundamental building
| blocks for knowledge itself would be inaccessible.
|
| The potential implications of this take on consciousness
| are fascinating.
|
| This implies that a perfect computer simulation of a
| conscious brain would not be conscious, but only
| appear/pretend to be?
|
| Where does your consciousness come from then? Was it
| hanging around and jumped onboard your brain when it
| developed? Will there be enough consciousness units
| available if we reach 15 billion world population? Or maybe
| those can reproduce or come into existence from nothing?
| Hmmm, so they can be created but never destroyed? So are
| there actually trillions of consciousness units wandering
| somewhere, like a memory leak for minds? Or maybe it's all
| about reincarnation, but, what if the earth is vaporized by
| colliding with another planet? In what beings would all
| these consciousness units reincarnate into? And what part
| of you comes from your consciousness in the first place? Is
| it some vague perception/awareness of existing? Or is it
| your full mind, with memories, logic, langage and emotions?
| But then what is the brain doing if it's not the processing
| supporting these features of the mind? Is it some kind of
| antenna for beyond-physical communication with the actual
| non-physical mind? But then what makes the matter in our
| brain able to perform this communication, special? Could we
| figure this out and get beyond-physical communication in
| the lab?
|
| Sorry for this wall of questions, it's just... much more
| fascinating than the usual boring explanation, where the
| brain, neurones, axiomes and impulses allow information to
| flow and be processed so that you can form thoughts and
| reason about the world and yourself, and where all that
| processing stops with death and that's it, what was
| emerging from it can't go on without it.
|
| It is not only a boring description of what happens when
| you die, it is also very disappointing. I would love for
| some grand cosmic resolution to my life. But I have
| troubles believing that it's actually real, as nice as it
| sounds to me. Wishes of reality, reality of wishes.
| tempfile wrote:
| If consciousness (whatever it is) takes energy to be generated,
| there is no mechanism we can conceive of that would account for
| that energy. Obviously it could be some exotic sensation that
| has nothing to do with the physical world, but if it is then we
| have no idea how to expect it to behave (because nothing else
| we know of is like that).
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I don't know what the big deal is, I'm never going to die. The
| rest of you, however...
| bobim wrote:
| Don't forget that death is a required feature for a specie to
| evolve. It might be the case that immortal organisms lived on
| earth, the fact that we don't see them around just confirms that
| dying is a competitive advantage, not a problem.
|
| We are not the end of evolution, we need to overcome our
| individual desire to stay here an leave to make room for the next
| iteration.
| sbelskie wrote:
| I don't really have an opinion one way or another but why would
| we _need_ to?
|
| There doesn't really seem to be any plausible practical or
| moral imperative to do so.
| jcfrei wrote:
| Completely missing the mark here, sorry to be so blunt. But
| modern medicine has taken away almost all evolutionary
| pressures except for regions where healthcare is not available
| or for some very rare and serious conditions.
| bobim wrote:
| Yes, but if we stop producing new minds with better
| capability we miss the opportunity to get the next Einstein
| that will enable warp drive and save humanity from its fate.
| tavavex wrote:
| If we made sure Einstein's mind never lost its
| youthfulness, why would we need a next generation? Imagine
| the outcomes if any of the well-known, world-renowned
| geniuses got basically infinite time to pursue any projects
| of their choosing. To think of new ideas, build atop what
| they've already discovered. Hell, think of everyone else -
| one could study or research for decades, with professionals
| in their fields joining forces with anyone who studied
| enough to join with them. Needing a constant flow of new
| generations for new innovations seems like a self-imposed
| limitation, not an actual necessity.
| istjohn wrote:
| Darwinian evolution isn't the only way death facilitates
| progress. It's said that science progresses one funeral at a
| time. The long arc of the moral universe Dr. King spoke of no
| doubt bends towards justice more quickly as new generations
| displace the old. It's easier to be "unburdened by what has
| been" when you don't have 100 years of outdated intuitions
| and beliefs clouding your understanding of the present.
| haunter wrote:
| Nor the title or the article has the word "rant" anywhere
|
| > A Nobel Prize winner's brilliant tirade against mortality
|
| Why does the submission has to be editorialized when the original
| is perfectly fine? Whenever that happens on HN I always think the
| OP has an agenda to push otherwise why make an editorialized
| change.
| keiferski wrote:
| Tirade is a synonym of rant. I don't think there's much of a
| change in meaning here.
|
| Tirade: > a long, angry speech of criticism or accusation.
| haunter wrote:
| > I don't think there's much of a change in meaning here.
|
| Thanks to agree that it was unnecessary to change the title
| then
| keiferski wrote:
| The HN title is shorter and avoids the vague author
| description of "Nobel Prize winner" and the biased
| adjective of "brilliant". So it's pretty typical for a HN
| link.
| pvg wrote:
| That title wasn't really 'editorialized' (at least, in spirit).
| The other comment explains the removal of clickbaity stuff but
| another HN title convention is putting the title of the book in
| book review articles which probably drives most of the changes
| here since there's also a length limit.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I read somewhere once that if we removed all disease and
| consequences of old age from the equation, life expectancy would
| be about 400 years, but at some point you would die due to some
| accident, violence, or natural disaster. Wish I could find a
| source on this, maybe an actuary can chime in.
|
| I don't need immortality, but I could do without the long slow
| failing of my body until it gives out around 80 or so.
| KrautFox wrote:
| I don't wanna be a buzzkill but:
|
| I don't see how living (potentially) forever is anything but a
| horrible, horrible ego driven idea with 0 rational thought put
| behind it, you may enlighten me here:
|
| - Unlimited human life expectancy vs limited resources? How would
| that work? - Do we really want the next dictator of XYZ to rule
| forever? - The lack of control young people experience when it
| comes to their own lives (voting, etc) will worsen, if the median
| age is 80+ or older. - Saying stuff like "There should be no
| death" is a clear example to me why humans in general are
| problematic. As long as we consume resources and need space we
| are still part of this ecosystem and cannot just simply change
| the rules of how it all works just because we would like to. - I
| suck at Bingo.
|
| Edit:
|
| I just want to clarify the following:
|
| Don't feel attacked, I am curious to hear your take on this and I
| never said that I am right on this, I know too little to ever
| make that claim. I wasn't aware how emotional this topic is to
| many, this happens to me IRL alot too (I am also aware of why). I
| am just looking for exchange of ideas, i don't need to be right
| on this.
| foxhill wrote:
| so, when do you want to die, then?
|
| really, i'm not trying to be mean here. you assert life must be
| finite, and all i'm asking is how finite it should be.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| While I am all for immortality, an oft given answer I've seen
| is, when I can no longer support myself, physically. That
| means old and frail and unable to walk or move.
|
| With immortality though could also come anti aging, so I'm
| not sure how strong that answer really is.
| financetechbro wrote:
| Life is not life without death. Personally, I don't
| necessarily want to die, I love to live. But also, death is
| the only thing that makes life precious.
| kiba wrote:
| That is just people making meaning out of life experience.
| Fundamentally, there's nothing about death that make life
| precious.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > death is the only thing that makes life precious.
|
| No. Living is what makes life precious. Good memories, good
| food, good friends, good lovers, good music... if it'd be
| possible to continue living forever, until you decide you
| want to take your chances on the existence of an afterlife,
| it'll be no less precious than it is now, when nature just
| takes life from you against your will.
| commodoreboxer wrote:
| I don't agree at all. That's like saying the world is only
| beautiful because it will one day be consumed by the sun. I
| love my life, and it isn't because I'm going to die.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| There is a considerable distance between "all resources are
| ultimately limited" and "thus humans should die at 80, instead
| of 80 trillion when the stars burn out."
|
| See also https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified
| "Transhumanism as simplified Humanism":
|
| > If a young child falls on the train tracks, it is good to
| save them, and if a 45-year-old suffers from a debilitating
| disease, it is good to cure them. If you have a logical turn of
| mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a
| general ethical principle which says "Life is good, death is
| bad; health is good, sickness is bad." If so - and here we
| enter into controversial territory - we can follow this general
| principle to a surprising new conclusion: If a 95-year-old is
| threatened by death from old age, it would be good to drag them
| from those train tracks, if possible. And if a 120-year-old is
| starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore
| them to full vigor, if possible.
|
| Also I don't see how it's ego driven. I want _everybody_ (who
| wants) to live forever. - And while we 're at it, every animal
| who ever lived in every ecosystem has changed things. That's
| kind of what it means to live in an ecosystem - no actually,
| that's kind of what it means to _live,_ period.
| KrautFox wrote:
| Hi,
|
| This is a human centric approach, which i don't subscribe to.
| I am not of the opinion that every human life needs saving as
| it is the most valuable thing there is, as i don't think it
| is, my own life included. I will eventually (maybe even soon)
| die and that's cool with me. And your take on what an
| ecosystem is lacks the simple fact that alot of it was only
| possible the last couple billion of years because organisms
| tend to die, life on earth hasn't adapted to one organsim
| multiplying as much as we do, consuming as much as we do and
| having a really long life expectancy at the same time, it
| won't work.
|
| ego driven as it values human life so much that it ignores
| how much damage it will do, not just to us, but to everything
| in general. We need to figure out a whole lot more before we
| can even consider extending our life expectancy like that.
|
| That's my take on it, but it's okay to disagree, i am not
| married to my opinion.
| kiba wrote:
| _This is a human centric approach, which i don 't subscribe
| to. I am not of the opinion that every human life needs
| saving as it is the most valuable thing there is, as i
| don't think it is, my own life included._
|
| People die of cancer and other diseases everyday, and you
| considered it selfish to want to live? What about the
| impact on loved ones like children or parents?
|
| What about the quality of life? Being healthy is strongly
| tied to living longer.
|
| _ego driven as it values human life so much that it
| ignores how much damage it will do, not just to us, but to
| everything in general. We need to figure out a whole lot
| more before we can even consider extending our life
| expectancy like that._
|
| The damage is from pollution, not necessarily resource
| consumption in and itself. Yes, if the air is bad, we're
| going to die more of lung cancer. The solution is to build
| a society that value clean air, a stable climate, and a
| life support system(biosphere) that isn't steadily being
| destroyed as a byproduct of our consumption.
| KrautFox wrote:
| "People die of cancer and other diseases everyday, and
| you considered it selfish to want to live? What about the
| impact on loved ones like children or parents?"
|
| Not dying due to cancer at 20 and living to be 400 years
| old isn't quite what i would consider in the same realm
| of justification, but your opinion might differs.
|
| And this: " The damage is from pollution, not necessarily
| resource consumption in and itself. Yes, if the air is
| bad, we're going to die more of lung cancer. The solution
| is to build a society that value clean air, a stable
| climate, and a life support system(biosphere) that isn't
| steadily being destroyed as a byproduct of our
| consumption. "
|
| Which is exactly my point in all of this: Are we there
| yet? not even close. Will people try to make living
| forever a reality regardless? i think so.
| kiba wrote:
| _Which is exactly my point in all of this: Are we there
| yet? not even close. Will people try to make living
| forever a reality regardless? i think so._
|
| Nothing says that we are unable to do these projects at
| the same time. The people who could work on anti-aging
| medicine aren't interchangable with the people who are
| working on various aspect of moving society toward an
| environmentally sustainable society. Otherwise this is
| the same argument being made against NASA and research
| into rocketry and spaceflight.
|
| _Not dying due to cancer at 20 and living to be 400
| years old isn 't quite what i would consider in the same
| realm of justification, but your opinion might differs._
|
| Really? Someone's going to cry when their loved one die.
| The older an individual is, the greater their network of
| connections, knowledge, skills, and lived experience. All
| of which are valuable to societies.
| KrautFox wrote:
| Thank you for your answer, you have a valid point in both
| things not necessarily being mutually exclusive. I am
| just scared of what happens if no precautions are taken
| before we proceed with extending our life expectancy.
|
| I don't know if I can fairly argue with your second
| point, I seem to lack the emotional capacity to
| appreciate those things as much as you do. I however
| appreciate that you take the time to present your
| viewpoint, I'll have to reconsider some of my initial
| thoughts regarding this
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| We are the only thing in the universe that _defines_
| damage. Nature doesn't care! That said, if you think a
| world without humans is preferable over a world with
| humans, I'm not sure how to bridge that divide. And if you,
| like me, find a world with humans preferable to one
| without, then that would seem to imply humans are good -
| which at least suggests that more humans, and humans for
| longer, are better.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >I don't see how living (potentially) forever is anything but a
| horrible, horrible ego driven idea with 0 rational thought put
| behind it, you may enlighten me here:
|
| That's exactly what it is, and that's exactly why immortality
| is so appealing to moderns - a sick people whose sense of
| purpose is informed by hedonism and mass media, a people who
| are more concerned with consuming pleasurable experiences and
| doing what their state-corporate media god deems noble, rather
| than serve their children, the wisdom & legacy of their
| ancestors, or God.
| Loughla wrote:
| Oh stop.
|
| The quest for immortality is as old as human culture. Every
| generation has tried. Whether it's through magic or
| pseudoscience or today's actual science.
|
| I think it's a natural state for an individual to want to
| remain existing. Otherwise we would all kill ourselves young.
| kiba wrote:
| Far from it.
|
| The media and culture rationalize death and death inducing
| behaviors including sleep deprivation, getting drunk, working
| and sacrificing one's health for the grind, and hedonistic
| behaviors that ultimately reduce one's lifespan, health, and
| quality of life.
| Eliezer wrote:
| Bad news - there's a 5000-year-old bristlecone pine tree in
| California. On your philosophy you should go burn it down, I
| guess? https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40224991
| telesilla wrote:
| If it's offspring were a parasite that expanded to consume
| all earth's resources, sure!
| dingnuts wrote:
| what a nasty, sad worldview if you think of humanity as a
| parasite
| telesilla wrote:
| Why the assumption I said this about humans? I was
| referring to parasites in the theoretical.
|
| More weirdly, was someone equating a tree's ability to be
| destructive, compared to human's ability to do so. The
| only time I've seen trees be destructive is due to human
| interference, putting them into the discussion new
| ecosystems where they can quickly overcome the native
| plants.
| KrautFox wrote:
| How is that a valid comparison?
| rbanffy wrote:
| Do we have numbers on depression for young trees?
| Vecr wrote:
| Under rational thought it's generally considered that the
| operator of said rational thought should, all things equal, try
| to live forever. It does not say anything else about other
| people.
| Vecr wrote:
| Can someone explain what I said incorrectly? Assuming you can
| either be killed by someone else, be killed in an accident,
| or commit suicide, the rationality of living forever appears
| correct. Avoiding being killed by someone else is generally
| rational, because they probably don't have your best
| interests in mind, demonstrated by them trying to kill you.
| Being killed in an accident won't help anyone. That leaves
| suicide, and I'm not sure who says suicide is generally
| rational.
|
| I can think that if you are going to be tortured to give up
| the secret to destroying the world it might be rational, but
| that's not "with all else equal" and is not a generally
| common situation.
|
| Otherwise, it comes down to the simple math of "the next
| number" or the "successor" function, where applying the
| function "wanting more to be alive tomorrow than dead
| tomorrow" to the current day, applying the successor
| function, then repeating, ends up with an outcome of
| "infinity".
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Rational thought of the 18th century, maybe. David Hume
| thoroughly refuted the notion that the study of "is" could
| lead to an "ought". Immanuel Kant recovered the idea that we
| should be good to each other, but only by assuming that we
| should want good for ourselves. No system of rationality can
| tell you what to want, in a vacuum. (Computers don't, in
| general, want anything, and _won't_ until we tell them to.)
|
| The only people who believe that self-interested behaviour is
| _inherently rational_ are Randian Objectivists, but that
| philosophy 's total nonsense (barely a "philosophy").
| Vecr wrote:
| Have you read _AI Drives_ by S. M. Omohundro? I think it 's
| quite commonly known. The theories that came from it are
| called "instrumental convergence".
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Instrumental convergence only occurs if you want
| something. This has nothing to do with rational thought,
| and everything to do with being an actor with goals in an
| environment.
| Vecr wrote:
| How is it not to do with rational thought? Presumably
| you're an actor in an environment with goals, goals that
| would presumably benefit, at least to some microscopic
| degree, to having someone monitor them for all eternity.
| That means all else being equal, you should try to live
| forever.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Is "all else being equal" a rational assumption?
| Vecr wrote:
| "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white --
| Alfred Tarski
|
| I don't know, is it? If under some conditions it's
| rational to try to live forever, it would be a major
| mistake to get yourself killed without really, _really_
| verifying your situation.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| For an example of a rational actor exhibiting
| instrumental convergence without trying to live forever,
| see Mr. Meeseeks from the Rick and Morty series.
|
| (I hope this counterexample will suffice. I don't know
| how to explain where you're going wrong without saying
| "read all the books I've read" - but hopefully you can
| figure it out yourself. If not, reading David Hume's _A
| Treatise of Human Nature_ might help. (Disclaimer: I
| generally think David Hume is so wrong as to be not worth
| reading.))
| Vecr wrote:
| I can hardly remember what happens in the episode, but I
| don't think anyone says all agents would try to live
| forever.
|
| What I am saying, it that generally, an agent should try
| to live forever _unless the motivation is otherwise
| outweighed_.
|
| Yes I know "the slave of desires" and all, but unless
| those desires are very strange indeed, probably due to
| successful AI alignment, it would be quite common for
| immortality to be rational.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Oh, your understanding of philosophy is from LessWrong?
| That makes more sense. The LessWrong conception of
| rationality as "effective goal maximisation" is not
| standard outside that sphere of influence, but if we use
| the LessWrong dictionary, then yes, you're correct.
| https://www.readthesequences.com/Disputing-Definitions
|
| > _What I am saying, it that generally, an agent should
| try to live forever_
|
| No, you're saying that an agent _will_ try to live
| forever, with caveats. You 're saying nothing about what
| should be the case. (Seriously: when I recommended you
| read that book, it wasn't just me pointing at the pop-
| culture ten-word summary of it. That book is _about_
| this.)
| Vecr wrote:
| Being able to say the word "should" is something I don't
| want to give up. You can say it's just a problem of
| semantics and I should admit to being a nihilist, but I
| think the use of language is important, because it's how
| people get things done. I say "should" because I want to
| be able to judge an agent on how good it is on its own
| terms. For example, if someone tells me their dream for
| the future, I want to be able to tell them they "should"
| work out a reasonable plan, assuming they haven't done so
| already.
|
| I haven't read the sequences (or "Rationality: From AI to
| Zombies" I think the old version was called). I didn't
| get my definition from LessWrong, I think it's partially
| from Bruno de Finetti and partially from old AI
| literature, but I read it from the standard recommended
| books.
| afthonos wrote:
| > - The lack of control young people experience when it comes
| to their own lives (voting, etc) will worsen, if the median age
| is 80+ or older.
|
| This is a really strong status-quo bias shared by many people
| who are pro-death.
|
| Imagine a world where no one dies, but young people were indeed
| very sad, depressed, and generally unhappy because of the
| reasons you stated. Seeing this unfortunate situation, someone
| says "I have an idea. What if we killed everyone over 82?"
|
| There is an almost infinite number of things you could try that
| aren't _that_. The fact that we _happen_ to live in a world
| where an imperfect partial solution to young people being
| unhappy is "statistically everyone over 82 dies" doesn't make
| it a _good_ world; it just means we have to fix unhappy young
| people _in addition_ to fixing everyone dying.
|
| This critique applies to most of your questions, with the
| exception of the finitude of resources. But if we can live just
| until the stars burn out, I'll call that a win over the current
| situation.
| KrautFox wrote:
| Maybe i didn't communicate well enough what i am trying to
| say:
|
| I don't see how it would improve life overall, except for
| duration. I see many areas where life would become worse
| because of it, so i am biased, true.
|
| But your scenario implies that it is already a reality, which
| it is not, and that i would be in favor of killing people,
| which i am not. I am simply suggesting one thing: Maybe we
| shouldn't be able to live as long as we want, maybe we should
| not try to make this a reality.
| afthonos wrote:
| > I don't see how it would improve life overall, except for
| duration.
|
| I think we differ here because to me, if life is good,
| extending duration is enough; it doesn't need to be _even
| better_.
|
| > But your scenario implies that it is already a reality,
| which it is not, and that i would be in favor of killing
| people, which i am not.
|
| I apologize, I tried hard to avoid implying that. I am only
| saying that _if_ we were in my preferred world, very few
| people would advocate to turn it into this one. They would
| try to improve the preferred world in other ways to fix the
| problems that exist there. By symmetry, I argue that it
| means at a minimum that turning our world into that one is
| an improvement. (Though there may be other, different, ways
| to improve it!)
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| RadioLab had a great podcast on this, and their punchline
| was: MARIA PAZ: Chris says, in a world where
| nothing dies ... CHRIS SCHELL: Life essentially
| halts at a standstill. And yeah, everything is alive to exist
| in this new reality, but it doesn't change. It doesn't morph.
| It doesn't evolve. It isn't dynamic. The extravagant,
| extraordinary biomes that we currently have that exist on
| this planet, they all stop. MARIA PAZ: It would be
| as if we were living in a photograph of the world as we know
| it, just frozen in time.
|
| Episode: _Cheating Death_ 9 Feb 2024
| https://radiolab.org/podcast/cheating-death/transcript
| afthonos wrote:
| I believe my critique applies: if you don't want to be
| static, _don 't be static_. You can choose to change
| yourself.
| melling wrote:
| NAH, I've had this conversation 100 times
|
| I just tell people it's completely optional and move along.
|
| Several years ago I suggested we ban immorality debates on HN
|
| https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-...
| FreelanceX wrote:
| Making it optional doesn't solve the issue since it means
| those who choose to consume resources eternally at the
| expense of others are rewarded. In the meantime, those who
| choose to do the "right thing" (dying a natural death) would
| be punished: indeed, dying in a world where others live
| forever seems far more painful than dying where nobody has a
| choice.
| melling wrote:
| Yeah, I expect a lot of people who think dying "gives life
| meaning" will change their minds.
| lackoftactics wrote:
| You make some excellent points about focusing on the
| scientific aspects. However, I don't think we should
| discourage intellectual philosophical debates, as many of us
| here are genuinely interested in philosophy. These
| discussions provide a valuable counterbalance to purely
| technical conversations. By the way, the study mentioning
| 15,000 steps is already outdated. Recent research suggests
| that even 10,000 steps may not be necessary for health
| benefits.
| melling wrote:
| Have at it. Everyone should debate it once, maybe twice.
|
| The universe is a big place. I look forward to exploring it
| with my immortality. Hundred years to the nearest star?
| lossolo wrote:
| > Unlimited human life expectancy vs limited resources? How
| would that work?
|
| Just like today but controlling the population would be
| necessary. Do you want to live forever? Fine, but no children
| until you die. Since people would still statistically die in
| accidents or by suicide, new births could still be permitted.
| As productivity increases over time, everyone would lead a
| better life in a population-controlled world
|
| > Do we really want the next dictator of XYZ to rule forever?
|
| Overthrow him? With infinite time, you have an infinite number
| of attempts. Dictatorships are governed by regimes, not just
| one person. The dictator is merely a manifestation and
| representation of that regime. As history has often shown,
| killing one dictator may simply lead to another, if one dies of
| old age, a successor will take his place.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Imagine people like Napoleon or Ben Franklin still being alive
| and involved in politics. That's pretty neat.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Overall, I agree with you, but, as a fan of the Highlander TV
| series, I find this fun to think about sometimes.
|
| People would still die, just not from natural causes (right?).
| Even today, dictators have more fear of a coup than cancer.
| Long lived species tend to have fewer offspring as well & would
| have to confront the issue of limited resources head on,
| instead of kicking the can to the next generation. I think a
| society that grows up around humans with unlimited life
| expectancy would probably look different than ours does, maybe
| in ways we can't imagine (even today, ritualistic suicide like
| Sallekhana is hard to imagine...). This would be different from
| a situation where people living today suddenly make this
| switch.
| marcheradiuju wrote:
| 'Denial of death' is a nice philosophical treatise on this topic
| by an anthropologist. It's ideas would likely change many of the
| minds of posters here.
| pavlov wrote:
| Look at the gerontocracy that already exists in the United
| States, both the politicians and billionaires like Rupert
| Murdoch. A ruling class will always stick around as long as they
| can.
|
| Do we really want to make those rulers immortal too? Seems like a
| tremendous risk that the cure for death will ossify one
| generation's rule. Those immortal 0.1-percenters who own
| everything will then fear nothing more than a violent revolution
| because they can still be physically destroyed. They'll do
| everything to keep the less fortunate in place under their thumb,
| forever.
|
| The world of immortals would make Nazi Germany look like child's
| play. When death is no longer inevitable, avoiding it can become
| a dominating obsession. Who's to say how many people an immortal
| human would be prepared to kill to ensure his own survival?
| kiba wrote:
| The ruling class is a function of their social class. It is the
| immortality of the social class that is the problem.
|
| If the children inherit their parents' wealth, it is likely
| that the ruling class will persists.
|
| Also, stability and stagnation of social system be factored in.
| More dynamic society can outcompete and ultimately destabilize
| stagnant and morbid societies.
|
| North Korea and South Korea came to mind. The dictator of North
| Korea is younger than South Korea's president who was born in
| the 1960 as opposed to the dictator being born in 1982. The
| dictator continues his family's legacy of ruling over a
| stagnant and increasingly irrelevant country while South Korea
| continues to be a vibrant and dynamic society.
|
| South Korea definitely has problem, notably a looming
| demographic crisis, but it is not an inevitability in how they
| choose to deal with their problem.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| When successful, wealthy people die, they usually pass that
| wealth to more than one person. Those people in turn pass
| their more modest wealth down to more than one person. So it
| goes exponentially until the fortune dissipates. With the
| wealth goes the influence and power. Additionally, most rich
| people will now set up foundations that get the majority of
| their wealth, so the kids lose any claim to that pool of
| money.
|
| The timescale on which this happens today is surprisingly
| rapid compared to the lifespans that many immortality-lovers
| want.
|
| For example, the infamous Rothschild family is collectively
| worth only $1 billion now. That is the whole family, not any
| one individual. A modern example of the beginning of this
| process is the Walton family. Going back further, the
| descendants of many 1600s English barons have middle-class
| lives, but one person from each family retains the fancy
| title.
|
| The only societies that keep concentration of wealth are ones
| with primogeniture and other unequal distributions of wealth
| to children.
| financetechbro wrote:
| Whenever I think about living forever, my first question is...
| who is going to pay for it?
|
| To me, it feels like the idea of living forever, at least in
| modern capitalism (and post 1776), is just a way to keep on
| feeding the capitalism machine.
|
| So is the end game here to be enslaved _forever_ to a job? Unless
| we somehow become enlightened enough to have UBI or simply move
| away from a capitalist system, living forever seems like an
| endless hell for the majority, and yet more opportunity for the
| wealthy to compound their wealth and maintain their reign on
| society.
|
| The real question here is who are true beneficiaries of living
| forever, and how do the rest of us pay for the repercussions.
| vslira wrote:
| All those in favor of eventually dying are welcome to do so at
| their own convenience, after a long and fulfilling life.
|
| To the rest of us, the stars, please.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I believe death is a nuisance. I am tired of burying people I
| love. I already miss the time I won't spend with my family after
| I die - with love comes loss, because we know death is
| unavoidable. Between my wife and I we kind of agree that the one
| who goes first is the lucky one.
|
| Would I enjoy 10 trillion years of life? I don't know. My human
| mind has limits about how much information it can hold. Will I by
| then have forgotten my first love? Will I forget holding my first
| child? Will I have forgotten cuddling up in my mom's lap? Will I
| miss having forgotten these things? If I can still remember all
| those moments, so long in the past, will I still be human in any
| sense?
| VeninVidiaVicii wrote:
| You're way more likely to stop making any new memories.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Then it'd be eternal dementia, a fate probably much worse
| than death.
| kiba wrote:
| We already forget people, places, events, and things even
| as young adults.
| cannonpr wrote:
| I don't think you have any evidence to say that. Our
| understanding of memory and complex evolved neural networks
| like the mind is fairly poor. On top of that, we have more
| evidence of the mind still acquiring new memories and
| choosing to compact or drop irrelevant memories while it
| remains healthy.
| otikik wrote:
| You must have a very good memory, then. I was made painfully
| aware of how not great mine was yesterday.
|
| I met this woman through my wife. It turns out I already met
| this person 5 years ago, because we share a common friend.
| She remembered me quite clearly, but I had completely
| forgotten her, as well as the event where we met.
|
| So far all good, it was 5 years ago after all. However, she
| also told me that we had met before that! 20 years ago!
| Through a work acquaintance of mine this time. We apparently
| did some hiking through the countryside together. I remember
| nothing of that. I don't remember that second acquaintance
| either. Apparently it was the same situation 5 years ago; she
| told me all of this, I apologized for forgetting her and
| everything around meeting her. And then I forgot her. And
| that was only the first time.
|
| To me my memory is not a "bucket that eventually gets full".
| It's more like a "dark corridor". Memories are on the walls.
| As I move forwards, the parts of the corridor behind me get
| eventually darker, until only the brightest memories remain
| visible. I have forgotten most of my highschool classmates. I
| have forgotten most of my past coworkers. I have some
| memories from my childhood, still. But only the very bright
| ones. And they are continuously dimming.
|
| I am completely fine with this. I am still me. I think
| forgetting is part of what makes us human.
|
| Or at least, of what makes me human.
|
| Going back to this person that I forgot twice. Apparently she
| remembers everyone she has ever met, even if just once. I
| have met at least another person with this capacity. I can't
| but consider those people freaks of nature, and in
| consequence a potential danger for society. We should watch
| them closely. And perhaps we should watch you closely as
| well.
|
| At least until I forget all of you again.
|
| I have no doubt in my mind that my memory will never "fill
| up". More like the opposite: the danger is that it empties
| too fast at some point.
| Filligree wrote:
| There's no possible way you will live ten trillion years
| without the human brain becoming well-understood and
| upgradable.
|
| So you're worrying about an impossible scenario.
| hamhock666 wrote:
| You never know, he could be visited by an alien that gives
| him the power of immortality, we don't know what's out there
| makingstuffs wrote:
| He would need to find a new solar system as well
| afpx wrote:
| Assuming science and tech improve exponentially, why wouldn't
| this happen within a century? Unless phenomenon appear that
| violate our understandings of physics, neuroscience seems on
| track. If Musk (or others) can get adoption of even simple
| consumer devices, it's going to be an arms race.
| crystal_revenge wrote:
| > Assuming science and tech improve exponentially
|
| That's a pretty big assumption to make. Science and tech
| seem to improve as a direct function of energy available,
| and in the past few centuries _that_ has been increasing
| very rapidly (I 'm not sure I'd say exponentially though).
| However we're clearly hitting limits both in regard to
| human more energy we can harvest as rapidly _and_ the
| consequences of unsustainable energy usage.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > upgradable
|
| How human would I be then?
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| What is missing in this discussion is the notion of finality or
| end, or _telos_. Without having a sound philosophical
| anthropology, we cannot hope to assess the question of death.
| (Indeed, bad anthropology is at the heart of so many bad
| political orders. If you misunderstand the nature of Man, then
| the political order will be pitted against human beings in some
| manner, by design if not by intention. In the US, the self-
| interested, hyperindividualistic consumer anthropology
| construes human beings as selfish beasts whose highest aim in
| life is to consume, a degradation of the self and a degraded
| view of others as others become objects for consumption.
| Communism and socialism suffer from their own grave errors, but
| an eerie overlap exists between the two.)
|
| So we must first know what it means to be human, which is to
| say, what the actualization of human nature consists of,
| actualization as the satisfaction and raison d'etre of human
| activity. It is the nature of a thing to seek to realize
| itself, to become fully the kind of thing it is. This does not
| necessarily involve conscious, purposeful act. Bacteria do the
| same, and this is by virtue of how they are organized and
| ordered, as well as their operation in accord with this
| ordering. For human beings, it is to become fully human, which,
| again, is the question posed: what is the end of a human being?
| Only in light of human nature can we determine the meaning of
| death, whether death is to be understood as an aberration
| needing a solution, or the natural terminus of human existence.
| If it is the former, then we might ask what, if anything, could
| or should be done about it. If the latter, then we must accept
| it as our natural end against which any resistance is not only
| misguided, but harmful.
|
| To answer this question, we must first recognize that what is
| most essential and definitive about human beings is that we are
| rational animals. Our rationality is not some thing tacked on
| to us, but what it means to be human, and our organization, our
| substance, everything from the operations of the intellect, our
| ability to choose between alternatives freely, and our bodies,
| follows from this fact.
|
| Then, we must determine what it most means for human beings as
| rational animals to attain finality. Classically, the highest
| good is to know and thus experience union with the Highest
| Good. But the Highest Good is infinite. Perhaps by human nature
| a certain finite degree of knowledge of the Highest Good
| suffices, but if the intellect is by its nature open to
| expansion by the act of the Highest Good, then it could,
| indefinitely, spend eternity coming to know increasingly better
| the Highest Good by first becoming indefinitely expanded. This
| would be transcendence, this expansion of the human person
| beyond what is merely given by nature, but which, by nature, is
| open to expansion by the Highest Good.
|
| Of course, we cannot attain this condition ourselves, as we
| cannot engineer our own transcendence. If we could, we would
| already be in possession of the cause, and thus it would
| already be part of our nature and therefore not transcendent
| (the effect is, after all, virtually in the cause; you cannot
| give what you do not have). This makes transhumanism a fool's
| errand, as we can only cripple or deform humanity in our
| quixotic attempts to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps,
| unlike medicine, which only restores what is already due by
| nature, but is for some reason missing and in a state of
| defect.
|
| Assuming this is true, then only eternal life would suffice.
| Anything less, merely life extension, would not change our
| fundamental condition, only postpone what was always
| inevitable. Death would remain an obstacle. But nothing in this
| world attains this eternal state. As I've said, technology
| cannot attain this end. Only the Highest Good would have this
| power, and thus something beyond our power to control and use.
| Furthermore, there is no one on this planet who can be said to
| have received this eternal state, at least no one walking among
| us that we can see. So either this eternal state is possible
| only after death, which means death is not non-existence but
| some kind of transition, or it cannot be attained. The first
| gives reason for at least some hope, the latter is world-weary
| hopelessness, an absurd condition in which Man is condemned to
| seek an end he cannot possibly arrive at by any means, but must
| seek if he is to live.
| kessog wrote:
| Excellent. I tried to get at something similar in a comment I
| made earlier today but was immediately downvoted and thus had
| my account automatically rate limited. It seems questioning
| the materialist presuppositions many hold around concepts
| like life and death can be a sore spot for some on HN. Am I
| correct in thinking you're circling Christian theology,
| specifically the Orthodox Christian idea of Theosis?
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's because anything non-materialist is by definition non-
| physical and thus hogwash bullshit until you can actually
| prove it. By proving it you have made it physical.
|
| There is zero evidence that anything non-materialist
| actually exist, literally zero. But what we do have is an
| island of things people have claimed is non-materialist to
| get smaller and smaller over time. Childish arguments like
| "But you can't prove this rock isn't conscious" is just the
| standard god of the gaps argument in a purple shirt that
| has been done to death.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > "But you can't prove this rock isn't conscious"
|
| My favourite one in this line is "you can't prove there
| isn't an invisible pink unicorn in the middle of your
| living room and we can still agree it's very unlikely to
| be there".
| gknoy wrote:
| Will I forget holding my first child? Will I have
| forgotten cuddling up in my mom's lap? Will I miss
| having forgotten these things? If I can still remember
| all those moments ... will I still be human in any sense?
|
| I've already forgotten most of those things, aside from a few
| fleeting glimpses. I absolutely miss being able to remember
| details about things like childhood, middle school, the first
| months of my kids' lives, the smell of their hair etc. But life
| is still rewarding, my kids and family bring me endless joy
| _right now_, and I don't feel any less human.
|
| If I were able to live another hundred years, I am sure I'd
| forget things from my time now, forget even more details about
| my early life, but would still have plenty of things to keep me
| interested in continuing to live. There are such an abundance
| of things I can think of that would be worth spending decades
| mastering, each of which are less important than my current
| needs, and which I generally have discarded because "it's too
| late by now...". Swordfighting, glass blowing, painting,
| creating music, etc. Imagine being able to find something new
| and interesting, and being able to devote forty or fifty years
| to developing a (current) lifetime's level of expertise in it.
| That sounds like science fiction to me, but if such were
| possible, I'd pick it every time over not having the
| opportunity. Will I still be human in any
| sense?
|
| I feel like we would redefine what "human" means to include our
| new selves. I can't imagine not feeling human, even if it is
| Very Far from my current conceptualization of humanity.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > Between my wife and I we kind of agree that the one who goes
| first is the lucky one.
|
| My wife died. I get to live on with our children, smell
| flowers, listen to music, even fall in love again. I'm the
| lucky one, despite the pain.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I love that egotistical billionaires with a god complex go to bed
| afraid of dying. I wouldn't want to take that away from them.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| I really loathe the hubris of modern people who think we
| shouldn't die like everyone did for millennia before us. Yes, we
| live longer and we have better medicine, stop trying to live
| forever.
| cannonpr wrote:
| I loathe the hubris of modern people that feel they should
| impose their way of life and morals on others.
| foobiekr wrote:
| "you should die because our ancestors did"
|
| "you should be/keep slaves because our ancestors were/did"
|
| etc.
|
| Your logic is weird and false. There's nothing holy about
| dying.
| littlekey wrote:
| Dying is one of the most holy things there is. Every major
| religion is deeply concerned with the question of mortality
| and imo would collapse without it. Christianity means
| basically nothing without the death of Christ, Buddhism
| nothing without the cycle of reincarnation, etc.
|
| Whether that's good or bad is a different question, but the
| point is getting rid of death is not a trivial thing. It
| would cause such huge changes in the human experience that I
| think we'd cease to be human and would become some other,
| different thing.
| ryandrake wrote:
| People suffered through disease for millennia, but that doesn't
| mean we should stop making medicine. People did agriculture
| with horse-drawn tools for millennia, but that doesn't mean we
| should keep doing it.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I don't blame people for trying to live longer, but I can't
| help feeling like there are underlying flaws within us that
| would really dampen the potential of immortality. Namely the
| inability to get along with one another, and our unwillingness
| to help one another.
|
| Immortality would be a neat trick but it can't solve war and it
| can't solve starvation.
| cannonpr wrote:
| I want to live forever. That doesn't mean I want to remain static
| and unchanging or to stagnate. I want death through change, not
| because my mind collapses due to biological causes. If I ever
| stagnate, that's a form of death, and I bet sooner or later I'll
| choose to check out, or become irrelevant enough for society and
| my peers to check me out, directly or indirectly, through social
| exclusion.
|
| I strongly resent those who try to tell me what's best for me or
| predict what will happen if I live a long time. If you think
| death within 40-90 years is best for you, choose that path, stop
| trying to validate your life philosophy by imposing it on others
| and leave the rest of us alone to develop technology and strive
| for something more than what we are today.
| tomalaci wrote:
| Agreed. The amount of people trying to tell that dying is the
| right way of life is baffling. Vast majority of natural deaths
| arent graceful, they often are quite painful and ugly. If we
| develop means to at least extend the average -healthy- lifespan
| that would be a great achievement by itself.
| tavavex wrote:
| Somehow, people in real life are pretty capable of
| recognizing why arguments based around what others think is
| "natural" are completely useless - yet this is ignored
| completely in discussions of prolonging people's lives.
| Suddenly, the natural is all that matters. And here, natural
| means "precisely the current status quo" - no one's eager to
| return to the life expectancy of the past.
| scubbo wrote:
| > The amount of people trying to tell that dying is the right
| way of life is baffling. Vast majority of natural deaths
| arent graceful, they often are quite painful and ugly
|
| Both statements are true, but they are not necessarily
| causally related. _Even if_ all natural deaths were graceful,
| painless, and beautiful, it would still be a horrific
| senseless tragedy that "lives have to end"
| walleeee wrote:
| While I agree with the "live and let live" (or perhaps "die and
| let live") spirit of your latter paragraph, it does not address
| one of the more vivid arguments against your position: that the
| vast network of machinery with which you propose to extend your
| own life may itself be a formidable threat to the long-term
| viability of life on this planet
| cannonpr wrote:
| So generally speaking I don't think extending life will take
| much resources once we figure out the biochemistry of it. If
| it does and that deprives others of their enjoyment of life,
| sure I get it, I will just work to make life extension
| cheaper. However frankly consumerism and an addiction to
| travel and tourism eats up a lot more resources than the
| research and production of high tech biotech etc. If we end
| up with too much population, well I ask for nothing more than
| that my life is valued as much as the life of a baby, so long
| as I remain useful to society, don't value someone's right to
| have a child, more than my right to continue to live.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I was thinking of this book
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Time-Enough-Love-Robert-Heinlein-eboo...
|
| which paints a vivid picture of what somebody might do with a
| few centuries. It's one of the last books that my evil twin
| checked out from the library that I haven't returned yet.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Is anyone actually trying to stop you or others from developing
| the technology? IMO just ignore the haters doesn't sound like
| they can really do anything
| epx wrote:
| Imagine being able to live forever... in the dungeon of a
| dictatorship that is forever as well.
| useerup wrote:
| Death is a moral responsibility. You owe your existence to
| evolution. Evolution would not work if we had to compete for
| resources with all of the organisms that came before us when they
| didn't die off. Death is an integral part of living a bringing
| our species forward. Your responsibility is to make the best of
| your time here. Have fun, love, and contribute to society and
| science if you can. Then die and make room for the next
| generations.
| cannonpr wrote:
| A moral responsibility under which moral framework ? Why do I
| owe anything to my genes or the process that created me nearly
| by accident ? Why do I not have a moral responsibility to find
| a better path than random evolution ?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Evolution doesn't have a "forward". If we were unable to
| outcompete our ancestors, then we simply wouldn't be better
| adapted to our environment than they.
| tavavex wrote:
| Evolution isn't a person, or an entity to be compensated. It's
| a natural process. If humans can surpass it, find a new way to
| improve themselves, then do it. All of this argument seems like
| one extended appeal to nature, combined with some backwards-
| justified reasoning as to why being limited in time is a good
| thing - start with the premise that our lives are short, and
| then find a way to make that sound appealing.
| whythre wrote:
| I don't think you get to 'surpass' evolution with regards to
| increasing life span. Maybe you can retard the process. But I
| think that is just kicking the can down the road.
|
| Its like an old growth forest not being allowed to burn, it's
| caretakers keeping it in media res for as long as possible
| until it eventually burns anyway and the natural cycle
| continues.
| drawkward wrote:
| The insane amount of hubris and entitlement on display among the
| pro immortality crowd here is enough to make me terrified of the
| tech sector.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Living forever is impossible, period. On a long enough timescale,
| any nonzero probability accident will kill you. But actually the
| heat death of the Universe will happen even earlier than that.
| FlacoJones wrote:
| Asimov said this was his favorite thing he ever wrote, and it
| addresses this same idea.
|
| The Last Question - Isaac Asimov - Read by Leonard Nimoy
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XOtx4sa9k4&t=544s&ab_channe...
| knodi123 wrote:
| This is silly. People who talk about wanting to achieve
| immortality aren't talking about doing it through a genie wish
| that gets ironically turned against them, leaving them hovering
| in agony in deep space after the heat death of the universe.
| Any reasonable discussion of immortality really just means the
| end of senescence.
| jewayne wrote:
| I mean, even having your biological age somehow suspended at
| age 30 is a monkey's paw-type wish, especially if all the
| people you love age normally. Your spouse turning into an old
| husk of their former self before your eyes, as your children
| become your peers, then your elders. After awhile, you think
| of your spouses like dogs, knowing each time you take a new
| one that one day they will be gone.
| person101x wrote:
| [flagged]
| scubbo wrote:
| > There is abundant evidence of some kind of life after death.
|
| Is that evidence in the room with us right now?
| coding123 wrote:
| We've made life WYSIWYG
| digging wrote:
| > Every major world religion asserts that it is evident that
| humans have an afterlife. There is abundant evidence of some
| kind of life after death.
|
| I'm sorry but I can't see how the first sentence supports the
| second in any meaningful way. It's easy and pointless to shit
| on religion and I'm not doing that here, but "evidence" is
| something other than common stories.
|
| Consider that the evidence for a non-evolutionary origin of
| humanity is equally abundant, in religious traditions. Would
| you say that evolution is still dubious because so many
| traditional beliefs exist that don't include it? Would you hold
| up "we're molded from clay, because a lot of people said so"
| next to centuries of living and fossil evidence for an
| evolutionary origin of humanity and say, "Well, they both have
| a lot of evidence."?
|
| I believe the source of your confusion is that death is such a
| black box. But the failure of _current_ science to pierce that
| veil doesn 't make non-evidence-based theories any _more
| valid_. It only means, "this is still unknown." Could there be
| an afterlife? Sure, it's possible, but there's not yet _any_
| significant evidence for one.
| person101x wrote:
| > I'm sorry but I can't see how the first sentence supports
| the second in any meaningful way. It's easy and pointless to
| shit on religion and I'm not doing that here, but "evidence"
| is something other than common stories.
|
| > Could there be an afterlife? Sure, it's possible, but
| there's not yet any significant evidence for one.
|
| First off, you can discount "common stories" all you want,
| but even science operates on "common stories", i.e. we use a
| "common" method, record our observations, and make educated
| guesses about what those observations imply, and share our
| results. When we begin to come to a "common" consensus, we
| say the stories line up and that therefore we've likely hit
| upon some truth.
|
| It's so easy to find the evidence I didn't think I'd have to
| mention them. Off the top of my head, we can observe the
| numerous accounts of near-death experiences across cultures
| and religions which share striking commonalities.
|
| Then you can also point to paranormal phenomena also
| universal across cultures and religions.
|
| Another line of thought would be to read some Plato,
| particularly the Phaedo which gives several very convincing
| arguments for the immortality of the soul.
| digging wrote:
| > First off, you can discount "common stories" all you
| want, but even science operates on "common stories"
|
| These are different definitions of common, and that's on me
| for not being precise. "Common stories" refers to "stories
| you hear often, albeit with different
| forms/origins/meanings." Ideas such that they're easily
| repeated, but they're also easy to independently invent,
| because they _don 't rely on verifiable evidence_. The
| "common" methods and stories of science are "common" as in
| "shared." Science operates on the intentional sharing of
| knowledge to build a shared understanding of the world. Two
| different religious concepts of the afterlife are not a
| _shared idea_ , they're just _convergent ideas_.
|
| (Your argument seems to be that they actually _are_ shared
| via a shared seed - an actual afterlife, but we don 't have
| direct _evidence_ of that being true. If it were true, how
| would living people know about it? The assertion that "an
| afterlife exists, because so many cultures talk about it"
| _requires additional assumptions_ about some mechanism of
| transmitting information from the dead to the living, and
| such mechanisms are even _less_ universal than the simple
| existence of an afterlife. Is it angels? Is it ancestral
| memory? Is it astral projection? etc.)
|
| > It's so easy to find the evidence I didn't think I'd have
| to mention them. Off the top of my head, we can observe the
| numerous accounts of near-death experiences across cultures
| and religions which share striking commonalities. Then you
| can also point to paranormal phenomena also universal
| across cultures and religions.
|
| Neither of these are evidence of an afterlife. Near-death
| experiences are not the experiences of immortal souls that
| have exited a dead body, they're experiences of living
| people. Even if you count the experiences of people who
| _literally died_ for a brief period of time, which is what
| I assume you 're actually referring to, we can't say that
| anything they remember experiencing is _certainly_ a
| supernatural experience generated by a soul, instead of a
| chemical process of their brain. Is it _possible_? Sure,
| but where is the evidence that those experiences aren 't
| just physical processes?
|
| > Another line of thought would be to read some Plato,
| particularly the Phaedo which gives several very convincing
| arguments for the immortality of the soul.
|
| Sure, I love me some Plato. Perhaps I'll get to Phaedo
| eventually. In what way is that _evidence_ for the
| existence of an afterlife? I feel you 're quite confused
| about what evidence means.
|
| Let me clarify about science: It does operate on a degree
| of faith. I haven't derived special relativity myself, yet
| I believe it is true. But that's because I'm trusting the
| authority of experts who _have_ done the math. The
| likelihood of them _all_ lying to me, and to the other
| expert opinions I internalize, is vanishingly low. Every
| bit of math and science and logic I _do_ know, agrees with
| the parts I am taking on faith. It is clear at a high level
| to me how the entire story of special relativity comes
| together logically and explains all the evidence those
| experts have used to support it. It 's the _most likely_
| explanation for how everything works, and it 's been tested
| by experts to an insane level of precision. _None of that
| is true of claims that an afterlife exists._ It is only
| speculative.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I'm just here to say that I love the way you have laid
| out this comment and dismantled all the points the other
| person made. It's beautiful.
| jasonjei wrote:
| I am not sure if there's evidence. But reading more about
| physics and the cosmos and the events of the universe happening
| 13.8 billion years ago only increases my faith that there is
| more to our "random" existence.
|
| Too little science leads away from God, while too much science
| leads back to Him". So said Louis Pasteur.
| timwaagh wrote:
| the only thing that is evidence of is that people never wanted
| to die.
| supertofu wrote:
| I'm a religious person reading the comments here with great
| fascination and a _lot_ of sympathy.
| momojo wrote:
| There is no peace in this thread. It grieves my heart.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I'm not an atheist but I have never heard there was ANY
| evidence of life after death. Let alone abundant as you put it.
| dang wrote:
| 1. That is certainly an inaccurate generalization about the
| community here.
|
| 2. Please do not take HN threads into religious flamewar, or on
| generic flamewar tangents generally.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| person101x wrote:
| Fair enough. Thanks for the correction.
| FlacoJones wrote:
| The Last Question - Isaac Asimov - Read by Leonard Nimoy
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XOtx4sa9k4&t=544s&ab_channe...
|
| Even if the longevity obsessed manage Earthly immortality, non-
| existence will forever loom.
|
| Will they be happy with 100 years? 500? 1 million? Non-existence
| remains a theological not scientific hurdle.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| I'm not sure it's the length of our actual lifespan that matters
| as much as how we experience the passing of time.
|
| I believe that our human _experience_ of the passing of time
| intervals is exponential with age.
|
| With this view, if we lived 1 million years, our lives would
| probably still feel too short due to the acceleration of time we
| experience as we age.
| Beijinger wrote:
| I check it out. But isn't this an old story?
|
| "After Enkidu dies of a disease sent as punishment from the gods,
| Gilgamesh becomes afraid of his death and visits the sage
| Utnapishtim, the survivor of the Great Flood, hoping to find
| immortality. Gilgamesh repeatedly fails the trials set before him
| and returns home to Uruk, realizing that immortality is beyond
| his reach."
| evgwugegwhwgeg wrote:
| It's the ego that dies. Awareness is eternal. You the awareness
| is already here and now for eternity.
|
| Ego is the idea of you. The loosely connected memories that you
| consider as you.
| latexr wrote:
| Yale has an interesting philosophy course on death, available
| online.
|
| https://oyc.yale.edu/death/phil-176
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEA18FAF1AD9047B0
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