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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> Why not, actually? Why wouldn't it be at least somewhat related to the price of executing that life-prolonging procedure?
Odds are we're talking about a suite of many procedures, some of which are intrinsically very expensive and that humanity doesn't have the resources to provide to everyone. But if it's really cheap...
> The providers will surely want to sell it to the maximum number of customers in all countries.
The maximum profit point isn't likely to be just above that really cheap price. People would be willing to give a significant fraction of their wealth for a magic bullet life extension, and most of the world's population has no wealth. Providers' ability to perform price discrimination isn't going to be perfect.
> Why not, actually? Why wouldn't it be at least somewhat related to the price of executing that life-prolonging procedure?
If it's anything like medical procedures that exist today, it sounds like at least in the US it will be impossible to afford without insurance, and therefore employment. "You can live forever, as long as you work forever" is exactly the amount of depressing I'd expect from real life.
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.
> The elite will finally meet the long term consequences of their past and present decisions.
It will be a spectacle: the true test of how useful wealth is against the Universe, compared to other things like knowledge or wisdom.
This is casting categories of people in very rigid and binary terms. Wisdom and knowledge is not more prevalent amongst the non-elite is it? Isn’t it distributed more evenly?
Thanks to their power, their decisions affect many. Those decisions are taken sometimes blindly, even if they could pay for good advice, sometimes knowing it's only for own benefit in short term at the expense of the rest. In the later case, they have knowledge, but decide to act anyway, as long term they will be dead. Any bad or good decision by a poor nobody will have a lot less impact.
Iain M. Banks probably said it best. "I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s worth noting that the they only put population control measures in place because their prior policy of encouraging massive population growth backfired horribly due to the strain it wrought on society’s carrying capacity.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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
It isn’t obvious to me that that is given. An alternative would be that the breadth of parallel ideas would expand, more competition. There could then also be more depth because individuals behind groundbreaking ideas can build on their cognitive foundations for longer.
One major change, which it thibk would be a positive is that we will be directed to thibk more long term. With extreme life extension, the cosmos also becomes smaller because we could travel and explore space and time more extensively.
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.
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.
What is silly? Your statement can be true at the same time...
And just to be clear, I did not mean that it's the sole reason that people refute new ideas, I was just opening up the possibility that without mortality we might still have progress without relying on generation shifts.
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.
Just my 2 cents - "why on earth would you ever want to die"
Because its the end of any worry, doubt, suffering, fear, uncertainty. Because its over. And youll be dead, so you wont be able to feel what youre missing out on.
The finality of death is a beautiful and comforting eventuality in my opinion.
I know a lot of people share similar sentiments but I doubt many feel that way when they’re on their deathbed.
Personally, I don’t want to die. There’s so much to do, see, and experience. One lifetime isn’t even close to enough, and that only got worse since I had children.
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.
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.
> There's way more to see and do than any one current lifespan.
Perhaps this a personal view but I had conversations with elder people and most will tell you the same, a very long life (even a healthy one) is quite boring and depressing, you start to see the same patterns again and again, everything and everyone you loved dissappear and the essence of humanity doesn’t change. Same play, different actors and costumes.
Different people are different. For some people everything is so boooooooring already at high school. For other people, it's "vita brevis, ars longa".
> everything and everyone you loved disappear
Perhaps with immortality, there would be less of this?
Maybe I am just too young to understand the wisdom of the old people. I am almost 50, so in the optimistic case I might get the same amount of time again. That is definitely not enough to see all the things I want to see, try all the things I want to try, learn all the things I want to learn.
I imagine that when your health becomes shit, life sucks and you get tired of it. Good immortality should come with perfect (or at least average, from out current perspective) health. That includes mental health.
But if someone believes that he already understands everything and it's all just the same patterns over and over again... dude, where are all your Nobel prices? Maybe your life is boring because you don't try new things.
I’m in you age bracket and I wouldn’t say I find life “boring”, I find it recurrent, to me being able to communicate instantly from one end of the world to the other but being unable to understand our neighbor who thinks differently and losing the sense of “community” to become just individuals living closely in isolation to be able to travel in minutes what used to take months but at the expense of destroying our own environment and poisoning the future of our own descendants is no evolution. As Mahatma Gandhi said: “There’s more to life than increasing its speed”
I'm sure some people feel that way, but I also know not everyone does. I have to wonder how much of that is a consequence of aging. Anyway, life extension can be a choice, once it's available.
Effective immortality is very much a thing for everyone at present. Given immortality means living forever, if you cannot access experience before your life, and you cannot access experience after your life, then for all purposes your life is forever as far as your experience goes, and your experience is all there is for you.
“Semantics” is simply “meaning”. If something has a different meaning, the equation no longer solves the same way.
If you feel defensive and want ways to put someone down, you can replace “semantics” with “sophism” or something like that.
> I'd rather live a few centuries than tell myself that.
But you can’t, can you? So might as well look into what life, death, and immortality might really be, beyond the naive and wrong intuitions we have picked up from fiction books about vampires.
Unless you believe in life after death (which I would not blame you for as many do, among scientists included), there is no span of time available to you in which you are not alive.
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.
> 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.
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.
>it's called Excession, and it is even better than you imagine.
I'd advise not startin with Excession but with Player of Games. Read from there. You'll get to Excession on time with plenty of background knowledge of how stuff works.
Reading Excession as book 1 will leave you ultra confused.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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?
Me? I already clean my own toilet. My partner sometimes makes me coffee, but I make my own too. I don't eat much beef, but I don't mind slaughtering my own chickens.
Honestly, if I had the time I'd be able to enjoy doing a lot more "menial" labor than I currently do. Living a simple life is nice, but because everything in modern society is tied to competition and the outcomes determine my standard of living, I am forced to constantly level up just to tread water.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
It's a departure from what we previously worried about - people not having food to eat.
Look at the definition of "low food security" - the most extreme food insecurity the USDA measures.
Low food security — These food-insecure households obtained enough food to avoid substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake by using a variety of coping strategies, such as eating less varied diets, participating in Federal food assistance programs, or getting food from community food pantries.
"obtained enough food to avoid substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake". So none of these people actually didn't have enough food to eat, they just had to change how they got their food.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
For me the problem is not death itself, but the steady decline that usually comes before it. Biologically immortal humans would still die eventually, but there wouldn’t be decades of old age before death.
I didn't exist for billions of years before I gained consciousness as a child. I'm sure I won't mind not existing for billions of years after my system expires.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
> 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 =)
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...
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
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.
> 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.
> They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present
If that's actually how you define "partaking in the present" then I truly pity you. There is far more to life than obsessing over the latest silicon valley bullshit machine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> I will never understand people who say that mortality is what gives life a meaning.
Same here. I wonder why they don't give even more meaning to their life by killing themselves right now.
Oh wait, it doesn't work that way. Death gives a meaning only when it is in a distant future... or some other excuse like that. But for some people, that future is now, or very soon. They would probably also prefer to have a "meaningful" death later rather than now.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> And yet you value the unwritten futures of existing people
I can personally experience aging: Every change to my body after the mid 20s sucks. A life of the same length without aging is still an improvement. Unwinding the last 15 years of aging on my body would still be an improvement, even if aging continued normally and lifespan wasn't increased as a side effect.
I have no problem working towards improved quality of life, but I think we should start with the low-lying fruit of improving the quality of life of poor young people rather than old rich people. But either way that's very different from working to extend longevity.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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?"
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.
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"?
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.com/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.
> 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.
> 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.
> Yes really, and tautologically regardless of if it's piecemeal or sudden.
You don't have to do it all from scratch. First variation can be built by humans, then the rest can be maintained by machines long term. It's like bootstrapping a compiler versus having compiler write/build itself and hardware.
> 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.
You aren't a Von Neumann replicator. Or at least not a useful one. No human can construct hammer, chairs and PCs given sequence of DNA. Unless you have to learn it yourself, which defeats the purpose, or you have to raise a new one from scratch for 18 years.
Previous statement indicated that they are necessary for full automation, implying they are useful when it comes to generating artifacts useful for humans.
> 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.
Sun is stable? Could have fooled me. How are the solar flares?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I agree with the spirit of your argument but maybe not the villains you've chosen. Given legislative capture is absolutely a thing I think your criticism is more effectively pointed at the individuals and organizations responsible for funding reelection campaigns for the politicians that aren't obviously servicing the needs of their notional constituency.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AGI singularity is science fiction and, while interesting, none of that research comes close to biological immortality in humans. Don't deceive yourself.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
“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]
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.
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.
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.
Elias Canetti is best known for “Crowds and Power”, which is best known as the inspiration of the poem “On Reading ‘Crowds and Power’” by Geoffrey Hill.
Canetti had only written that one book when he got the Nobel Prize, and was mostly unknown.
It’s hard to imagine the Nobel Committee elevating an obscure journalist, giving him the highest honor for a writer, and then him returning to perpetual obscurity.
If it was in a fictional book, it would be dismissed as unrealistic.
"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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
Ideally? As human as you want, whatever that may mean. Not as human as you're forced to be, or as inhuman as the economy or social forces push you to be...
There are many and varied problems we'll be facing. I just don't think "Immortality without any of the supporting technologies" is one of them.
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.
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.
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.
The human mind is subjectively indestructible, I.e. impervious to physically perishing (it is purely mathematically operational.) The body, that uniquely mapped to the person, can be reanimated indefinitely relying upon tissue engineering and neuroscientific knowledge progressing in unique human brain cell networks and respective central nervous system action.
We are less than 2 decades away from digitally migrating to a doppelgänger body.
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?
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.
Prove that it isn't just signals in the brain then. Untill then the best you can say is we don't know. a few hundred years ago people might have said pain is non-physical but look how that turned out. Just because we don't know now how it works is not an argument that it is non-physical.
In fact there is evidence it is physical. We have been able to decode low fidelity images of stuff people are imagining using brain imaging. That would never work if imagination is non-physical.
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”.
Some mathematics is hogwash. Some isn't. The game of mathematics is to define some axioms and sees what falls out of that. If your axioms are chosen such that they match reality it's not hogwash. For example boolean algebra is made physical in, among others, digital circuits. That's why mathematics also isn't considered a physical science by most.
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.
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.
> 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"
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
No, it's not silly. Immortality = staying alive for an infinite amount of time.
Since this is not possible, the best we can hope for is living for a long, but finite amount of time. Which is infinitely short compared to true immortality.
To put it another way, with true immortality you will never be one minute from dying. Without immortality, you 100% will, sooner or later. This is the qualitative difference between the two.
> No, it's not silly. Immortality = staying alive for an infinite amount of time.
Words mean what we mean them to mean. When most people talk about trying to find a way to achieve mortality themselves, they are talking about biological immortality. Which means what I said - freedom from aging.
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.
Having your biological age suspended at 30 doesn't preclude death. You can always kill yourself whenever you want. If you don't want to, it's because you think there's a reason to keep living.
> After awhile, you think of your spouses like dogs, knowing each time you take a new one that one day they will be gone.
I still love my dogs with all my heart, treasure the time I have with them, mourn them when they're gone, and still find happiness in my life. And still choose to adopt new ones on occasion.
Plus, I'm not sure why you think, in this scenario, that the immortality technology is only available to me and not any of my loved ones.
The book Permutation City explores some concepts of immortality that would be immune to the heat death of the universe.
In the book consciousness does not have to be chronological in time or on any specific biological or synthetic hardware. It just has to be encoded in a physical state somewhere, and the next state can be anywhere else in time or space.
One example is a person who deliberately set their consciousness on a loop, doing his favorite activity, climbing a skyscraper too tall to see the bottom or the top. Permanent flow state, not quite sure how long he has been climbing, feeling an adrenaline high.
It may seem like a boring life, but for that person it's indistinguishable from a normal life that happens to be doing that action in the moment.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The vast majority of healthcare spending is incurred at the end of life, because when death really approaches, almost everyone wants to avoid it. People who are explicitly pursuing immortality are just thinking on a long-term basis instead of only reacting once they face the reality of mortality, in their impending death.
But amongst the popular left, there seems to be an aversion to competency and rationality, as they are symbolically linked to high status and social dominance. This anti-rationalism, born from a desire to challenge existing power structures, leads to a disdain for those who work deliberately to eradicate aging and illness—as the effort is a reflection of a rational, results-oriented mindset.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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…
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
The feeling off "self" is not an illusion, we all or most of us have it. But it is just a word and one whose meaning is not very well defined, it is like you say "whatever it is". Which kind of hints at that we don't really have a good definition for it.
I am "me" and the definition of "me" is what I am. Somewhat cyclical right?
If you lost all your thoughts and memories, what would be left? You can call that "self" but is it the same "self" as what you thought of yourself as before losing all thoughts and memories?
There are people suffering from schizophrenia who alternate between different "selves". At least to their experience those are totally different "selves" which need not be aware of the other selves at all. So would it mean there are multiple "selfs" within one brain?
I'm only talking about myself, since I'm talking about what I can't deny rationally, i.e. the fact of my own conscious experience. I can't speak for schizophrenics. I don't think you need a definition for your self in the sense that I'm talking about. Like you said, how would such a definition work? Definitions aside, I can't deny the fact of that self, even though I could by a slim margin doubt literally anything else.
I'm talking about the essential process of experiencing whatever comes to pass in my mind and senses. That process would surely continue if my memories disappeared. If all thoughts, memories and senses disappeared, well I can hardly say what would happen. All I can say for certain that my experience is happening right now, and it's not contingent on any particular thought, memory or sense.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
> 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.
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!
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)
HN is so narrow-minded because of its implicit and irrational committment to atheism.
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.
Sure, the exact nature of that life has been debated throughout human history; but the idea that life and consciousness terminates into the void is truly a modern invention, and I'd argue is caused by first-world humans being more incredibly alienated from the experience of being human than it has ever been in history.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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).
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.)
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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".
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?
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> - 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.
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.
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.
> 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!)
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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").
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.
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.
"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.
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.))
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.
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.)
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.
> I say "should" because I want to be able to judge an agent on how good it is on its own terms.
Again, not standard use of language, but unobjectionable once it's explained. (That's also how I like to use the word, but it's not often understood by those around me.)
> I haven't read the sequences
Oh, then pretend I referenced later Wittgenstein instead. (He made the point better.)
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Interesting. Though now looking at his 2.5k word obituary it does seem that his daughter was given the honors of being mentioned in a single parenthetical for existing.
I was mistaken because I couldn't find any mention of children from his Wikipedia. I suppose theres only so much space in an article, and what would you cut? The section that lists the famous women with whom he cheated on his wife? No way!
'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.
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.
Heat death aside, with ‘infinite time’ and probably long before we arrive to affordable interplanetary travel of our squishy forms, we will have found a way to upload ourselves to silicon (or whatever substrate computes the best), where we can do whatever we want on our own little isolated wafers – if that’s what we wanted.
Maybe, but then we need to decide if an upload is you. What matters to me is the continuity of my perception of self. If I spawn a dozen versions of me, I still perceive them as other individuals.
It would involve a transitory step of a direct human computer interface. But tbf, there’s no continuity of perception when you go to sleep and wake up. We have no idea how consciousness works, or whether there really is something as multiple consciousness as opposed to, say, a single thread that traverses all streams consciousness in whatever order
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.
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?
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There used to be more age difference between husbands and wives. Men who outsmarted and out gunned the competition to live longer got to reproduce a lot more… evolution does select for men who reproduce more later.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
(Replying to this comment rather than your latest, as that's been downvoted out of existence.)
> In that case sorry for the accusation.
No worries.
> With this you haven't given me epistemic justification, you're just telling a story. How do you know that the past happened at all on your criteria of what constitutes reasonable evidence? It isn't material. You can't touch the past, you can't pick the past up and move it. You can't actually observe it at all. If the only evidences we are allowed to use are physical evidences, it's impossible to know that the past wasn't just an illusion. The point is that in your criteria for what constitutes reasonable evidence, knowledge of anything becomes impossible - all things could simply be illusory.
While that's great for stoned conversations at 3am, it's not very useful.
If I'm going to come to any reasoned conclusion about the world at all, I have to make certain working assumptions, most fundamentally that my perceptions, memories, and my powers of reason are all more or less generally reliable (e.g., I'm currently in my kitchen, and not on top of Mount Kilimanjaro; I was born and brought up in 20th-century Britain, not 14th-century Vietnam; if X implies Y and Y implies Z, then X does in fact transitively imply Z). Obviously, these are all subject to the proviso that I may be (and often will be) mistaken in any specific instance.
If I don't make such assumptions -- if I just conclude that I can never know anything about the world, not even provisionally -- then what's the point in doing anything? I may as well just sit here and rot. After all, my life (and my growing hunger and thirst pains) are all just illusions, for all I know.
Finally, if you're going to insist that something as basic as the existence of change needs to be demonstrated with "epistemic certitude" for any debate, then such debate is going to be needlessly prolonged and tiresome -- and arguably in bad faith, as the very existence of a debate is predicated on the existence of change.
I hope this comment is actually readable, because someone, totally ignoring HN guidelines on flagging, keeps downvoting and flagging my comments seemingly just because they disagree. I'd prefer if they engaged in the debate instead of simply shutting it down so that none of us can learn anything.
I'm not saying it's impossible to know anything about the world, I'm making an internal critique of your worldview. I'm saying that in your worldview, which seems to be pure materialism, it is impossible to justify epistemic claims about the world. To reduce thousands of years of philosophy to "stoned conversations at 3am" is disingenuous and, forgive me, points to a lack of understanding of the history of philosophy on your part.
These aren't just points I'm pulling out of thin air, I'm simply rehashing dialogues and arguments made by the likes of Aristotle and David Hume - arguments which have not been refuted since, at least in the public domain. I urge you to read about Hume's theory of Induction, and the Is/Ought distinction. You could also do well to read Aristotle's dialogue with the sophists.
>While that's great for stoned conversations at 3am, it's not very useful.
What is "useful" in a purely materialist worldview? How can the objective "usefulness" of something be ascertained in a world where nothing objective exists, since universals and objectivity are in the domain of metaphysics?
> If I don't make such assumptions -- if I just conclude that I can never know anything about the world, not even provisionally -- then what's the point in doing anything?
Exactly! You've hit the nail on the head. In a purely material universe, where to know anything is impossible without "pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps" (so to speak) in terms of metaphysics, there is absolutely no reason to do anything. The universe becomes totally without meaning, aka "Disteleological".
But then this creates a paradox - if everything is meaningless, even the claim that everything is meaningless becomes, itself, meaningless. This is an impossible position to hold, and is self refuting.
So the only other position we can hold is that there are metaphysical concepts, and that they do hold ontological status (they exist) and relate to our universe. To suggest that consciousness, which is as invisible and untouchable as logic, yet has a similar effect on the physical world, isn't one among these metaphysical concepts is absurd.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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