We Need to Die(willllliam.com) |
We Need to Die(willllliam.com) |
(surprising that the text doesn't mention it)
I suspect our education system is at fault. Too many children in the modern western society grow up completely isolated from philosophical thinking and the teachings of both ancient as contemporary philosophers. As a consequence they never get exposure to the various deep, tragic, hilarious, and most-of-all diverse ways that we as humans have tried to build meaning into our fleeting lives, triumphant or struggling.
To me, this quote from the article best showcases the status quo:
> And here's what I've been circling around: I think the only reason any of this is true is because of death. Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely.
If you agree with that, I cannot stop you. But maybe I can shake you just a little with a different, more individualistic viewpoint:
Whatever life you have, in whatever circumstances, is the one and only life that you do have. The way it has been is the only way that it can ever be, but the future is whatever you make of it, and it cannot be anything else.
Whatever you experience in life, is all that there is to experience. If you yourself don't climb a mountain, you will never know what climbing that mountain is like. And if you hear a tree fall in a forest but then forget about it, it no longer has made a sound.
Nobody else can do this experiencing for you: much like you didn't directly experience your parents' lives, your children won't directly experience yours. But as long as you yourself are alive, you get to experience your parents and children through the only single way that you can: through yourself.
And so to accept death for yourself is to accept the end of all experience that has ever been. It is to accept death not only yourself, but also for your parents, children, all the climbed mountains and sounds of fallen trees, and all life and the universe itself. For once the one singular entity in the entire universe that has been capable of experiencing is gone, it's as if nothing had ever existed.
So try to stick around and keep experiencing? There really isn't, and hasn't ever been, anything else.
Post-mortem survivalists may disagree.
Sorry but that's hilariously wrong. If it was true life expectancy would have decreased with the lowering of age of retirement, but we saw the reverse over the last century.
Mortality spikes after retirement because we are reaching our end of life after retirement,
As for the main thesis, I actually changed my mind over the years. While I wanted (and sometimes felt !) to be immortal when I was young, now that I'm old, sick and tired and that a lot of family and some friends are already dead, I'm much less eager to live eternally.
In terms socio economic issues of immortality, the Altered Carbon books (or the first season on Netflix), paint a somewhat bleak picture how immortality makes the rich and powerful even more privileged. Not to say it’s all bleak, but I would certainly say it’s dystopian overall.
Well, I'd like to get rid of the old way of thinking that death is good :p
And can you imagine a world where current leaders are still in power 1000 years later?
Leaders generally don't rule for life in functioning countries, and the mortality of individual Kims has not helped the people of North Korea.
I think of how it'd be something tech billionaires and autocrats would use to oppress us forever.
How are these people currently oppressing you, and how would the existence of longevity treatments make that worse?
I guess you'd say most people in the world don't live in functioning countries then? China, Russia, much of the middle east and Africa are not democratic and sometimes the death of a dictator is the only way to move them forward. USA and many democracies in the west are also backsliding so maybe soon few people will live in a "functioning country".
Counterpoint on Kim: The death of Stalin or Mao Zedong released a death grip on their respective countries. You can't ignore that getting rid of natural death would make individual centralization of power a worse problem.
>How are these people currently oppressing you, and how would the existence of longevity treatments make that worse?
Just one example: Trump using sanctions to block the ICC from doing it's job (and thus letting people in Gaza die and blocking steps of justice against Israel). The fact is that the centralization of power in modern times into individual hands is already unprecedented. Old people are already ruling the world and they'd do everything to rule it forever.
There's a popular cope answer to this "that wont be the case with me".
But unless you already have either a concrete footing in enjoying the small things in life just for themselves, or a greater mission that falls outside the line of work you'll retire from (like being an activist, or a hobbyist programmer or musician or something), then it absolutely will be the case.
Susan Ertz. Anger in the Sky. Hodder & Stoughton. 1943
Even if our lifespans become merely 200 years, imagine if the generation of the US Civil War era were still in power. Great age plus health equals social petrification.
Tell me you're from the US without telling you're from the US. They're always keen to police over other people's lives, it's so noticeable when you're not from that culture.
As with almost every other "controversial" topic, the answer to this one is: let people who want to die, die, and let people who want to live, live.
_nobody_ needs to die, even assuming quality of living is maintained with age, and that one can live 1000s of years, that decision belongs to the self /jk
srsly, how is this an issue if everything in the Universe eventually dies, why wouldn’t we?
I remember little else (I wish I could to find it and read it again), but those shifts of perspective seem entirely plausible and revealing of how we look at life.
The biggest reason we need to die, or create entirely different power structures, is to ensure no one can amass resources and power to rule forever. However bad a psychotic despot is, at least now, death will come collect him. Imagine an effective eternity with Putin and the oligarchs as your country's leader, just getting better and better at impoverishing the country for their own gain.
1. I am young enough that a sense of mortality is not a true motivation to start things now. While I know about my mortality, I do not, in the visceral sense, believe it. My motivation to start things now instead of later is to experience the rewards sooner, not a foreboding panic of losing finite time. I suspect this is true for at least very many people.
2. The argument doesn’t survive a simple inversion test. Let’s concede every single disadvantage immortality might bring— lack of motivation, innovation, housing. Suppose we already live in that world. Would a reasonable solution be to introduce a massive, rolling holocaust (i.e. introduce into this world the concept of death)?
And not only death, but aging. Even if that society decided (wrongly IMO) that nobody should live longer than 100 years, it would be insane to enforce that by making everyone's bodies and minds deteriorate over several decades.
It always would: fatal accidents would still be a thing. So would:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_att...
Then there'd always be the risk of a gigantic asteroid hitting the earth.
Stuff like that.
Which makes me wonder: if there was no more aging and no more illness and accidents and terror attacks / crimes were basically the only way to die, how would society deal with those?
I take we'd focus on preventing accidents / safety even more? For at the moment there's definitely some "we're not going to live forever anyway, so it's just bad luck if an accident happens".
And what about suicide? Taking your life when you're going to die anyway is one thing, taking it out when you're near immortal is something else altogether.
We are the sum of the roles we play. It's no wonder that people who reject their roles in search of their authentic self often end up as shriveled version of their inner asshole, now it being the only thing for other people to see.
Cool man, don't try and live forever.
Maybe people who haven't had their innate curiosity beaten out of them will get more resources to explore.
I just can't help seeing the same moral panic in this as I see in arguments against UBI.
It's like how many people with fuck you money have you met? I would say: "Trust me, humans do just fine without external deadlines or want." but it only takes like 30 seconds to find countless real people whose lives trivially destroy the whole line of argument.
How about this obvious counter point, making long term, 100 year research investments makes way more sense to any person who has the chance to see them pay off.
Right now this type of longterm thinking has only a few hive entities (RCC, governments, research labs) who can operate this way and we'd get a lot more exploring done if we can enable whatever percentage of the population was born with unbound curiosity to explore to their merriment.
Other commenters here are doing that too, more or less. But yeah, no one's proposing forced immortality. We have a cultural habit of assuming our right to choose for everyone else, we see people doing it even when they're actually advocating for universal rights to choose.
If you're sufficiently bored at age 450 or 45, go ahead and end your life. Your life belongs to you, not to other people. Just don't harsh the mellow of the person who's happy reading books until age 45,000.
I treasure the time I spend with my kids. I can see that this season will be over soon. This won't be my whole life, but it will be a significant fraction of my life. If I were immortal, this would be a tiny blip in the inconceivably far past for 100% of my life.
You may think I could start again every 100 or 1000 or million years, but if a nonzero fraction of people did that, that would be exponential growth. Even ignoring resource constraints, you cannot sustain exponential growth of any kind in a 3D universe.
A universe with kids necessitates a universe with death.
And having a simulation of ourselves in a different media is a different game.
My concerns are more practical:
- How do we make sure power-wrestling bad leaders don't halt generations, currently old age gives us a soft reset.
- How do we cope with suffering? With no clear end in sight I expect more mental health problems. And I'm unsure we can remove those issues without striping the humanity out of people, I would for sure hate to be turned into a calculator with qualia.
However I feel nonetheless there is so much awesomeness to experience here on this earthly realm too, and too little time even in a perfectly “good” life to take it all in. Even if someone’s life starting from birth to death at a ripe old age happens to fall perfectly min-maxed in place served with a silver spoon.
The choices we make have meaningful and value in large part because we sacrifice a fraction of our finite time and attention in order to do them. But once you have infinite time, then the value of everything you do becomes zero.
lotta people in this thread with anti-life beliefs
Spending half your life writing a book makes that book more meaningful than spending a tenth of your life doing it. But you can only write two of the former versus ten of the latter.
Either way, this is a simple and dumb mathematical model, not a literal equation for calculating the actual value of a life's work.
We already live so much further past what our lifespan "in the wild" would be. Even ~75yrs is already excruciatingly long. I don't understand people who want to prolong it even further.
>[because without death], we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows?
is a pretty lame reason for everyone to die. Maybe the author is depressed and wants the threat of death to get stuff done but I like doing things.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be.
Endeavor to touch and see everything. Therein, you'll discover quite a lot about you and all else.
That's been my concern; that solving mortality for individuals might be a death sentence for the species.
Never dying ever is definitely a weird thing to consider, but that's not possible even theoretically. Eventually all the energy in the Universe will reach maximum entropy and nothing will be alive.
But I am very suspicious of anyone who is sure that 75 years is the optimal meaning-to-lifespan ratio.
How is that a bad thing? Are you the same person you were when you were 15? Of course not. Is it the case for when you were 20 or 30? No. The whole point of living is to learn, gather new experiences and grow. Would you stop doing that because you are immortal? No.
I think author is caught too much in his work whatever it is. Me, personnally would love to meet my grandkids and their kids. Learn and try do new things for dozens of years.
Would this be bad to see the wolrd or even other worlds if we could be able to visit other planets?
I think the main problem is that people are getting old and unhealthy. My grandpa was living for 92 years and I saw that he is miserable. He was fine mentally but his body was failing him. Imagine getting up in the morning and everything hurts. You try to go to the bathroom but your hand are shaking. That is the problem.
At some point you just do not want to live anymore. Because it is just suffering.
> How is that a bad thing?
The point isn't that it's bad, but that it's equivalent to dying and then someone else taking your place. So if it's OK for your character to change fundametally over the span of your life, then it must also be OK for you to die at some point and yield the stage to the next generation.
Yeah, that's not eternity. And if you read the article at all you'd know the argument is not against life extension, it's about having constraints, horizons, and deadlines to give meaning and urgency to things.
Like the only thing keeping people all around the world going would be though that they are going to die and they need to do as much as they can before that. This is just radicoulous.
If people would be immortal they would just lie down and die because there is no point in leaving! People die on their retirement because they have nothing to work on! And author need the deadline to actually do some work! Those arguments sounds like rants of workaholic with procrastination problems. By the gods! If I would live forever I would live for 200 hundred years in one place and build water mile and garden. The move to some beach and learn surfing. And then maybe I would built a boat and move to another continent. Learn climbing. And then fencing. And then maybe I would join university and become math proffesor. Or join rock band. Or just knit some socks for grandkids. Possibilities are endless.
I do think there’s a risk of societal stagnation if we all stick around forever. But, maybe we can make a deal—if we all end up immortal, we can make a threshold, maybe even as young as 80 or something, and have people retire and stop voting at that point. Let society stay vivacious, sure. Give us an end point for our toils, definitely, and a deadline for our projects.
Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.
I don't think any one source made it click for me, but I think some combination of watching The Good Place, Sandman, and a lot of Black Mirror got me really stretching my imagination of what it would feel like to be truly immortal. I had a moment that felt like my horizons had been expanded very slightly when I felt this severe dread for maybe half a second. A feeling of being inescapably trapped.
There's also this PC game called The Coin Game that's just a solo-dev making lots of arcade games. They exist on an island where you have a home and some hobbies and a few arcades and I think even a mall. But the entire island is devoid of humanity. There's just a bunch of robots. I don't know if the game has a backstory, but the one my brain filled in is that this is a sort of playground for you to live in forever... and it's got a San Junipero feel, but far more bleak. Gave me the chills. I'm happy to be mortal.
I just disagree with both postulates, and that's fine. The author can go on thinking that life needs to be something specific in order for it to be desirable. I myself like being productive. I also like eating fast food every once in a while. I think I'd be able to go on living (with some happiness to boot) if I never had another productive day or another McD's burger ever again.
Life can be its own end. If we manage to end death by aging, someday there will be children who have never known another world, and they'll marvel at all the death-centric thinking that permeated the societies of their past.
> His argument is precise: the desires that give you reason to keep living (he calls them categorical desires) would either eventually exhaust themselves, leaving you in a state of "boredom, indifference and coldness", or they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway. Either way, the You that wanted immortality doesn't get it. You just die from a lack of Self rather than through physical mortality.
I never understand this type of critique of Johnson. It's framed like he's suffering daily for his project, but the guy sounds happy as a clam - especially contrasted with his pre-Blueprint podcast with Lex Fridman.
Seems like he's doing something right.
My hope for anyone who dedicates their lives to this kind of work are able to let go if they reach their deathbed without a solution, because if they can't, that would be a deeply painful way to leave this world.
He’s going to spend the remainder of his life obsessing over something he cannot control, and then he’s going to die at a normal age (or probably earlier) any way
But honestly he just seems like a guy enjoying a fun project. He seems calm and happy in his videos.
Barring any hidden issues with chronic depression, it would be unlikely that he's unhappy. He's very well off financially, has a nice beautiful girlfriend who's with him in his journey, he sleeps a ton, works out, eats well and in general experiments with life.
I would argue that how you view yourself is not what makes life worth living. Life is enjoyable and peaceful without desire or identity. Wanting to extend your life isn't a maladaptation. Your identity--maybe as a software developer, or as a good romantic partner, or as a virtuous person--is the real maladaptation. It results in attachment and thus eventual suffering. If you get fired from your software developer job, your ego takes a hit. If you get into a fight with your partner, you feel indignant.
You really don't need an identity to love one another or ambition to do hard things. We have an inner drive to be creative completely outside of how we view ourselves. We feel love naturally. You'll enjoy life without desires or Self.
I much prefer a beautiful arc to a drawn out, translucent life
your comment reeks of fear of fear of death, a yearning for permanent enlightenment, and an inability to feel the every day pain of life
But this is false - even if we were a sovereign observer only, the universe is constantly changing and evolving, species go extinct, the seasons are never the same. And we are not just observers, we are also actors - we have opportunities to create today which will not be available in the future. You cannot create the Internet today, it already happened. You cannot spend arbitrary time traveling to and fro across the galaxy to talk to friends, the molten iron geyser you wanted to see at Betelgeuse will no longer be running by the time you get there. Perhaps time motivates us, but our death is not the only thing which limits time.
If I get to live to 200, I still won't worry about it. If I get to live to 1,000, maybe I might start to think about it. Fortunately, by then, I will have had 1,000 years of experience to maybe come up with better answers than now.
Can you imagine the hubris of telling someone who has lived for 10,000 years that death is good because you can't think of what you'd do with that time?
Moreover no one is talking about making it impossible to die. No one is going to force you to live forever.
And that's the real problem for the nay-sayers. They know that they don't have to live forever if they don't want to. They just don't want other people to live forever. They want to live in a world where other people die.
And imagine the North Korean or Russian dictators (or American "President") having access to the technology.
I'll take eternal life even if Putin gets it, thanks
I don’t identify with anything written here.
> Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows?
because I want to. Don’t you have things you want to do? Don’t you have desires? I don’t want to do it tomorrow, I want to do it now.
> When everything is possible, and nothing is urgent, with no real consequences for time misspent, what do you even care about?
Same thing I care about now - seeking pleasure. There are so many positive, enjoyable, pleasant, pleasureable, exciting, thrilling, gratifying, enlightening, edifying, joyful, enriching, uplifting experiences - I could spend a lifetime pursuing them and never even come close to enjoying them all. Even if I had a thousand lifetimes, by the time I finally finished off the list I started with, there would be exponentially more that had been added since I started.
In all honesty, reading this, I think something is wrong with the author. He does not love life the way he ought to, and that’s a shame, and I resent that he’d project that weakness, as if it’s somehow insightful or laudable or applicable to me.
It's a lot easier to accept death if you believe it's a natural, necessary, good thing. And since we're all going to die, this post-hoc rationalization makes us feel better.
Some counter-shower-thoughts:
Are children's lives vacuous and despondent? They have no sense of mortality, no sense of limits, no comprehension even of the fleeting nature of their childhood, and honestly they aren't really striving for a goal the way an Everest climber, or even the average salaried worker, is. Maybe there's more to the meaning of life than striving towards a lofty-yet-grounded-and-pinpoint goal?
Are dogs and cats given longer legal lifespans than humans because they seem happy enough without this vaunted sense of mortality and strife?
Why are Everest summiters or retirees left without goals to strive for, when they've only achieved one or less? That's tangential to Williams' proposition! Is it not because they have too little time left before their "dead"line to forge and pursue a new one, particularly given the toll of aging on mind and body? That seems like the opposite of the point the author's trying to prove.
That aside, I think longevity-skepticism is still mostly adaptive. I haven't seen any concrete progress and the people who are true believers are a. getting their hopes up and b. tend to be really gullible/easy to manipulate. We should ideally be skeptical enough to avoid those traps but hopeful enough to pursue genuinely promising research.
Or maybe people stop working because their health was declining?
I'm not sure it's transparently bad that we could defer everything indefinitely. Why would that matter? Also, it's not certain that we would. Perhaps we would get very bored and then be spurred to action.
When we age after reaching peak adulthood, for example, we see that our bodies lose their strength and our brains dull down. We aren't as ambitious and energetic anymore and get more lethargic. This understandably leads to everyone dreading it and getting up in arms against it (as with Bryan Johnson et al), but what if all this "decline" is actually an innate adaptive defense mechanism to handle and cope with the volume of experience we accumulate over the years? What if our bodies deteriorating as we get old actually has a neglected reason behind it that pertains to the individual too, not just nature? If we were to hypothetically make someone immortal, and if that immortal human were left in the real current world to live out without ageing, what if they actually miss something very crucial to help cope with environments that no longer grow in sync with themselves and eventually become something non-human?
Eastern notions of non-duality - especially Laozi and the Dao - could be useful in these thought experiments. They point out that life and death are not opposites but are states of the same being, and if you were to remove one (death), you'll automatically cease the other (life) from existing.
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
may the name of the Lord be praised.”church fathers say that creation fell because of the fall of man
> Without the finality of death, life seems to lose its meaning. Not only do we need to die, we are compelled to die, we should die
deadlines help. the soul is eternal and there is a deadline for the body
> [Job] somehow reconciles this tragic finality with transcendent faith
he later falls into despair when things get worse, who wouldn’t, but he is made well after he is humbled. this golden moment of humility forges him into a true person, winning him heaven not death
“If you die before you die, then when you die you won’t die.“ Death to the world is the last true rebellion.[1]
It's also the ultimate equalizer. Everyone is born, everyone dies. There's no amount of wealth, luck, work, or misfortune that happens in life that changes this. We all end up as dust.
As my own life progressed, the feeling of novelty became harder to find, and then less important. Grief became easier, death became lighter.
As I deepened my investigation into the nature of my own experience, I started to realize that "I" do not exist in the way that I originally assumed, and I started to wonder what we're even talking about when we talk about death. Who or what is dying?
The self, time, and consciousness are not well-understood in philosophy, science, or the experience of most people, and as such, most conversations about immortality are really about something else.
That's because it's inevitable and at that point they've been sick or infirm for years to decades.
No one has run the real experiment because they can't: put that person in the body of a healthy 20 year old and see if they still feel that way. Except we already kind of know the answer because we regard being suicidal in your 20s as mental illness.
Maybe, maybe not. Either way, the experiment would be interesting indeed.
This has been my experience as well. When I was 20, I couldn't understand why someone would be ready to die outside of extreme illness or depression. Now, at 40, I am beginning to understand. I'm not ready to die yet, but I can envision myself being there someday. This world is tiring and I can understand how a person would reach the point where they welcome an end to their story.
if my body and mind were falling apart and all my friends/family went before me maybe I'd be ready... but I see that as a huge argument in favor of immortality since I want people I care about to be alive and healthy
And notice, these aging apologia are always written from the perspective of someone who hasn't had to actually deal first-hand with the worst consequences aging has to offer. It's never a chronically sleep-deprived caregiver tending to a parent with a neurodegenerative disease who needs assistance with basic tasks like getting out of bed, going to the bathroom, bathing, and dressing themselves. This guy, from his bio, did a few startups, and now does market research, and impudently thinks he has "wisdom" or "life lessons" to give.
> And here's what I've been circling around: I think the only reason any of this is true is because of death. Without that horizon, we could defer everything indefinitely. Why start the difficult journey today when you have infinite tomorrows?
Caregivers have already deferred everything indefinitely, because they have no choice. And the "deadlines" of aging he celebrates are easily just as demotivating; e.g., after a certain point, why bother going back to college for that PhD, or learning Mandarin? You'll be too old by the time you're done.
-- The Great Dictator by Charlie Chaplin
Are we going to be fertile our entire lives? Interesting the topic doesn’t come up much. But let’s say we are.
My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (etc) are still alive and producing more siblings, aunts/uncles, etc.
The phrase aunt/uncle would no longer have age implications. In terms of caregiving, my wife, mom, and grandmother might all be pregnant and raising kids at the same time.
In practice, the family tree would be flattened.
Organizations would have similar issues. I’d have to compete against developers with 500 years experience. Even with respecialization, some skills transfer.
If Shakespeare were still alive would we have an Oscar Wilde? Would it matter, since Homer is around too?
In that regard, what language would we be speaking? There are quite a few Ancient Greek speakers still kicking I guess. But Enheduanna is still here too, chanting her Babylonian Hymns to Inana on the synth I guess.
It's cute to think that simply creating some digital representation of us would be a solution to such a problem when one of the founders of the internet has spoken at length about the dangers of hardware compatibility and media obsolescence putting much of today's data at risk from being inaccessible tomorrow.[0]
Nothing, and I mean nothing, is immune to the decay of time.
0: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092...
We’d have to be maintained. Maybe that could be part of the deal. Humans are always changing anyway, so I think we’d couldn’t be left entirely at rest. Maybe we should be run slowly, to just to make sure things are still working. Then we don’t have to worry about at-rest type bitrot.
Unfortunately, that's only available for premium max customers. Also you should know, plus is now standard.
Your idea obviously doesn't work. You're basically advocating for something like Chronic lymphocyte leukemia at the society level (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_lymphocytic_leukemia).
The main problem with extended lifespan will not be that some people will amass extreme wealth and power while living centuries, and they'll oppress the younger generations, who will not have a fair chance in life.
The much more likely problem will be that old people will not adjust to the new technologies. Lots of them will be victims to "pig butchering" schemes. Or they'll simply be illiterate in the new ways of life. If medicine makes tremendous progress, we might end up with a good chunk of our society being elderly, healthy, but socially unadjusted and estranged. Especially with more and more people being childless. Imagine someone who is 110 years old, with no living relatives, secluded in a nursing home, not knowing how to use the internet, or whatever the equivalent of that will be at that point in time.
These people deserve pity. But to they need to "make way for new generations"? That feels a bit eugenic to me.
It’s all a bit fanciful of course—we’d basically be setting up an emulation of various spiritual beliefs, and there’s no reason to believe anybody would go along with the constraints. But it is fun to think about.
that story is flawed for a lot of reasons, but it's interesting to explore what happens if death is essentially conquered.
it's hard to judge whether or not society as depicted in that story stagnated.. but it was wholly different.
And how is that supposed to happen once the rich and powerful who finance and own the rights to that immortality tech succeed in their research?
In a world where basic health care is barely accessible in the US and under constant attack, how is immortality supposed to be given to the common men and women? Through asinine "work requirements", like Medicaid? Through UnitedHealthcare's insurance?
I feel like this is a modern version of believing in souls. You are matter, not data. If you find a way to simulate yourself on a computer, this will not prevent you from experiencing death. And if that's the case, what's the point? Stroking your ego with the knowledge that a simulation of you will stick around for some time after you give up the ghost?
How do you feel about dying when your betters won't have to?
Imagine a society where everyone has a ball and chain permanently attached from birth. It would be just a part of life. Some thinkers might write articles about how much better things would be if a way could be found to get rid of the ball and chain. Others would come up with arguments for why the ball and chain is actually good, or even necessary. The limitation on movement gives life a purpose. The resistance helps build strength.
Looking at such a society from the outside, we'd find the latter arguments ludicrous. How can it possibly be better to stuck with a major physical restriction your entire life? If anyone said we should start doing this to all our children, they'd be run out of town.
If humanity does solve the problem of death, I doubt it will be absolute, in any case. Aging might be stopped, maybe added resistance to disease and injury, but nothing is going to allow you to survive hugging a detonating nuclear bomb, or any number of other physically extreme events. If you decide forever is not for you, then you'd be able to make that choice.
You have to have some kind of belief in that situation that dying has a special purpose, or something happens after you die so that you’re rewarded.
It’s the same as the suffering of a medieval peasant, which they thought was so important. Nowadays we have eliminated that. Was it really giving them such an important meaning and rich life? No, they just thought it did to cope.
Besides, even if we cured aging it wouldn’t mean we’re trapped living forever, you’d be guaranteed to get killed some other way anyway.
It is pointless to look at such beliefs (murder is bad, we should be good to others, etc.) from the viewpoint of a standalone individual, and it is fine for humans do not really exist that way. These beliefs stop being “sour grapes” or rationalising failure as soon as you see the anthill behind the individual ants.
The “goodness of death” belief is one of such, indeed part of many religions, and perhaps the ultimate tradeoff. Is it merely a rationalisation of one biological inevitability, or does it reflect a whole set of constraints we operate under? Realistically, it has always been so that individuals go away for the society to continue. Otherwise there quickly would not be enough food, would it? If somebody refused to die, would they have to be exiled or murdered? If we all stopped dying, would we be able to evolve and adapt, or would we be more liable to be wiped out as a species? To get rid of the concept of death and ensure society’s sustainability given constraints, you’d also need to get rid of our drive to reproduce, and already at that point we are looking at something very different to what we are.
Is it merely a vestige? Is it no longer necessary to die for societal benefit today? IMO not really, unfortunately: if society would unravel without death, which I think it would, then the “deathist” belief remains sound.
Getting out of this predicament, in my opinion, requires one of the two: 1) infinite energy and/or other technology that is not yet available and might be unattainable, or 2) by changing a number of things about how we live, ditching the unsustainable (absent infinite energy) idea that the only right direction is constant growth of production, consumption, etc.
I am mildly skeptical about the former (happy to be proved wrong). Regarding the latter, I am curious as to whether humans would slowly achieve extended lifespans naturally, if they eliminated factors that pressure them to fade away. (It does go contrary to the idea that the purpose of all life is energy dissipation. Sustainable peaceful society with long lifespans, likely much lower birth rates, does not strike me as particularly efficient at that.)
Ah, he saw the time-knife
Hard pass. Besides, if we were immortal, we wouldn't have my favorite quote, which feels a bit relevant here. As the great mind of our time, Bill Watterson says: "There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want."
Living through 50 extinctions wouldn't be that much different from reading about 50 extinctions. People remember better seeing photographs of event in their lives than actual experiences from their lives.
A society that has the ability to provide infinite life, will for sure have the ability to inject this caring feeling back.
Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein" explores this feeling.
Cory Doctorow's wonderful sci-fi book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" explored exactly this in interesting ways. In the book people in the future can live essentially forever by transferring their consciousness into new bodies. They can also back up the contents of their consciousness, something most people do nightly but certainly before doing some dangerous extreme sport. Doing dangerous things without backing yourself up is considered tantamount to suicide since you lose all the memories and personal growth, essentially the person you became since your last backup.
People do get bored and will sometimes choose to "deadhead" for hundreds of years at a time, which is putting yourself into stasis and skipping those centuries. The book is full of provocative ideas about how practical immortality might actually work on a personal and societal level.
Mind uploading? That’s a whole other level of sci-fi. It isn’t extrapolating what we already have, it is waving your hand and declaring “as far as we know it isn’t physically impossible so why wouldn’t we get there eventually?”
Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are?
Death is a certainty. No amount of technology can change that even theoretically. We don't even have reason to be confident that the universe itself is eternal, let alone any component of it.
It might look like immortality to outside observers, but I don't see how it is the same thing
Any process that could theoretically allow me to exist at the same time as my future self must clearly not be me anymore
So any kind if "mind backup" is a copy. A clone with a copy of my memories absolutely cannot be me. We would somehow need to be able to transfer my consciousness into a clone body
It seems very likely to me that consciousness is actually a side effect of a physical network in the brain and cannot actually be separated from the biological brain to move to an artificial brain
He sounds like a different person now.
My goal is not just death but I want to die and be reborn as an Egyptian pharaoh.
Those damn fools who don't want to die and be reborn as whatever they want to be!
I don't think this is a reason to avoid research on aging, but immortal dictators could certainly be a downside.
If one can make a good argument that people living forever would have too many downsides in the long run, one might reasonably not want others to live forever. This is similar to environmental policies. Even though one may not live through most downsides of current bad environmental policies, one may still want good environmental policies for the sake of their children.
There was a time (not even that long ago) when 50% of kids died before the age of 5. I can totally imagine people saying back then that this was the "natural order of things" and that allowing every kid to live would be disastrous to the environment.
My philosophy is that we should allow (and even enable) people to live as long as they want. I wish that were not controversial, but here we are.
This is one of the three foundations of existential intelligence (or wisdom).
We all know what the ruled do when they get really pissed. The prospective ghouls know it very well too.
I'd be thrilled to have another handful of centuries though. It doesn't have to be forever to be valuable
One character has an entire island of populated exclusively by herself.
They never go into why it’s illegal. I think it’s implied they know a copy isn’t the original, but they don’t want to think about it. Too unpleasant an idea.
And I am pretty sure I know more about my nature then you mate.
I think you did not read the article. Author argues that: - people on retirement fade away and die - he need to work - he need to have deadline to actually do the work - he says something that in order to achieve that apparently you need to stop enjoying life ("not eating food he enjoys, not drinking, not doing anything spontaneous")... like why? Why advancements in our technology and medicine that will make our lifespan longer will mean that it will be devoid of spontaneous enjoyment?
Again this is silly and author seems to be living a life when he needs outside stimulus to actually be forced to do something instead of doing things he likes just for himself.
One could imagine this, but it wasn't a serious position that anyone actually held. I think discomfort with immortality, especially on consequentialist grounds, is a more legitimate concern
The most notorious case was probably Dr. Harry Haiselden, who refused surgery for some newborns with severe defects because letting them die was good for the species.
But, again, this is a philosophical/ethical argument. I believe that, in general, if people don't want to die, we should help them not die. I get that utilitarians are uncomfortable with that, but that's why I'm not a utilitarian.
If that is immortality then we may as well call it a tautology and say we're already immortal. None of the things that make people who they are need to be preserved to achieve it so we're realistically already there.
Living an absurdly long time I can get behind. Billions of years, trillions of years, unimaginable numbers of years, sure. That could happen. But immortality isn't an option, everything eventually dies off unless we play semantic games where there aren't any properties of the thing that need to be preserved. And maybe even reality has an expiration date for all we know, which would render the whole project moot.
For some people, the idea that their present conscious moment might eventually be left permanently without any future extension is terrifying-but provided that doesn’t happen, they might be neutral (or even positive) about the prospect of the contents of that consciousness eventually becoming so radically transformed that it becomes a completely different person, or even something which transcends human notions of personhood, albeit ultimately still continuous with the person they are now. For other people, that prospect is terrifying. It really depends on what one is most attached to - the mere continuation of one’s own consciousness, or its distinctive contents that makes you you.
This is a solved problem, guillotines worked wonders for this back in the day.
You don’t need sci-fi mind backups for that. How certain are you that when you go to sleep tonight, the person who wakes up tomorrow will be „actually you”? How certain are you that all your memories were lived by „actually you”?
The answer, I suppose, is that we don’t know what „actually you” even means, how consciousness works, or why you’ve even got a (seemingly) continuous internal experience.
I view life (in the philosophical sense; consciousness) as the stream of subjective experiences (qualia) that arise out of life (in the biological sense; neurons and such). Right now my life consists of a collection of sustained interest in this discussion, a little hunger, the qualia of seeing the screen and the realization that I'm sitting a bit uncomfortably. In a few moments "I" will be a collection of other ephemeral qualia.
There's no "real" continuation between one experience and then next, just like there's no real continuation between my past "self" and my future "self", but they're both extremely useful illusions. I'll eat to subside that hunger that was registered a moment ago or change my position to get comfortable. I'll be responsible for "my" previous actions, as well. I'll basically be able to function as a temporally continuous being.
On the topic of immortality, I'd like to be virtually immortal so I can pursue my goals indefinitely. If I stop having goals or feel like I've had enough, I could always kill myself. My goals arise from my ethics, my biological needs and probably many other things. Why would I be OK with biology and death preventing me from achieving my goals at some arbitrary age?
So for me "immortality" is both being able to continue the illusions of self indefinitely (which I admit, feels good intrinsically), and being to continue the pursuit of my goals indefinitely. The goals seem to actually have more "real" continuity than "I" do.
The most troubling thing with immortality is the biological imperative to live that makes suicide so hard. But I think after a few centuries many people will reach that point. It's not a bad thing, it's just a personal choice.
We can already change the maximum lifespan of some other species. Why shouldn’t we expect to gradually be able to do it for more species? And then what makes humans special that we couldn’t eventually do the same for humans?
And my point was-no matter how hard human life extension is, mind uploading is many orders of magnitude harder. The first, it seems likely in principle that we could achieve it if only we knew the right genetic changes to make-now, you may be right that in a thousand years we still won’t work out in practice exactly what they are-but human life extension has a certain kind of theoretical in principle feasibility which could well coexist with practical infeasibility; mind uploading lacks even that level of theoretical in principle feasibility.