The biggest argument against immortality is that your chance of ending up in eternal pain goes way up. There are countless scenarios where you end up stuck in the bottom of the ocean, in a cave, maybe in jail, forever and ever.
Arguing for Immortality
71–80 of 92 posts
Re: Arguing for Immortality
#72Before I clicked the "about me" link I guessed this was written by someone in his 20s. I was right.
Kudos for your correct prediction, but if these same arguments were made by someone in their late 40's, would that change their truth value?
Re: Arguing for Immortality
#73Death cleans out old ideas. I have a hard time getting over the feeling that an older civilization is also more conservative. Especially a civilization where the people with money and power are the ones who are older. "Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM
I'm pretty sure the benefits would outweigh any perceived drawbacks: 1. Like elves in Tolkien's works, people who can only die by disease or by being slain might be much more careful about starting wars that could kill them (politicians probably wouldn't, but those who have to do the fighting might). 2. Imagine a world where the Einsteins, Hawkings, etc. don't die just as they've come to master their field, but conti…
1. Interesting. They certainly might be more careful. But then another (bored?) group of people may develop warrior's mindset. Given infinite lifespan, these guys might invent very destructive weapons, so ‘careful people’ may not have a chance against them.
Immortality would really complicate things.
Re: Arguing for Immortality
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Robert Mugabe, forever .
I guess I've been too brief in my reply, but no one has addressed the elephant in the room. "Revolutions" in Libya and Egypt we saw recently aren't frequent occurrences. Many dictators in history have stayed in power until the day they died. Yet, they are some of the people most able to afford "immortality". Previously, if you had a very evil and capable dictator, the populace suffers his rule for at most half a doze…
Would you be willing to set off a tactical nuke in Harare if you knew it would kill Mugabe? Let's say you predict the nuke will kill 1,000,000 people.
150,000 human beings die every day. About 100,000 of those are age-related. No dictator can hold a candle to that. Dropping that nuke is equivalent to delaying a cure for aging by 10 days. And yet you want to delay a cure indefinitely? That would condemn billions to the grave.
Re: Arguing for Immortality
#75Three words: exponential population growth.
As much as I'd like to be immortal myself, it might not be a sustainable pattern for us as a species. And if I were around for thousands of years or more, suddenly long-term sustainability of civilization gains a good deal more urgency. It seems likely that affordable immortality would degenerate into a vicious war of all against all, unless it were paired with a Kardashev-II level of efficiency with energy and resources (and possibly even then).
(I'm actually with Kurzweil on this one: when consciousness becomes mere information, easily backed up and transferred to other substrates, the concept of mortality will lose meaning.)
Re: Arguing for Immortality
#76Aren't we already immortal?
See, two possibilities exist.
1 There's no life after death:
You don't exist before or after your life.[1] You only perceive anything during your lifespan. Since you can't perceive anything before or after, your life is infinite for you. Because when it ends, there would be no you to notice.
Of course, such immortality ain't about prolonged lifespan, but it doesn't make it less cool (just maybe slightly off-topic here?).
2 There is life after death:
Then you won't die as such, period.
So the only problems left with are the inconveniences of aging.
I'd like to hear some critique on this, though; the idea seems too bulletproof to me, I don't like it.
---
[1] It may be impossible to correctly imagine the condition when there is no yourself, mainly because there would be no yourself in this situation (some kind of catch-22 here).
Re: Arguing for Immortality
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I've been too brief in my reply, but no one has addressed the elephant in the room. "Revolutions" in Libya and Egypt we saw recently aren't frequent occurrences. Many dictators in history have stayed in power until the day they died. Yet, they are some of the people most able to afford "immortality". Previously, if you had a very evil and capable dictator, the populace suffers his rule for at most half a doze…
Would you be willing to set off a tactical nuke in Harare if you knew it would kill Mugabe? Let's say you predict the nuke will kill 1,000,000 people. 150,000 human beings die every day. About 100,000 of those are age-related. No dictator can hold a candle to that. Dropping that nuke is equivalent to delaying a cure for aging by 10 days . And yet you want to delay a cure indefinitely? That would condemn billions to t…
And yet you want to delay a cure indefinitely?
Re: Arguing for Immortality
#78Aren't we already immortal? See, two possibilities exist. 1 There's no life after death: You don't exist before or after your life.[1] You only perceive anything during your lifespan. Since you can't perceive anything before or after, your life is infinite for you. Because when it ends, there would be no you to notice. Of course, such immortality ain't about prolonged lifespan, but it doesn't make it less cool (just…
Assign variable X to be the number of years you have been alive, at least to your subjective experience.
An immortal will see X go to infinity. A mortal will see it go into the three digits if they're lucky. The fact that you can't perceive your own death doesn't mean you don't die.
Re: Arguing for Immortality
#79Aren't we already immortal? See, two possibilities exist. 1 There's no life after death: You don't exist before or after your life.[1] You only perceive anything during your lifespan. Since you can't perceive anything before or after, your life is infinite for you. Because when it ends, there would be no you to notice. Of course, such immortality ain't about prolonged lifespan, but it doesn't make it less cool (just…
Assign variable X to be the number of years you have been alive, at least to your subjective experience. An immortal will see X go to infinity. A mortal will see it go into the three digits if they're lucky. The fact that you can't perceive your own death doesn't mean you don't die.
You're right, it isn't about living longer. It's about our cognitive abilities, perhaps.
Using your metaphor… I think, variable X is going to infinity _in both cases_. It's just that we operate in an environment where the infinity equals to what is a finite number (two or three digit integer) in another system.
Another way to put this: One can't experience anything except one's life. Therefore, life is infinite to person's subjective experience (the only experience available).
EDIT: Okay, I think I see where we disagree. In my view, while what you perceive may not be the "reality" in some absolute sense, it is the only reality for you nevertheless. And your death doesn't exist there, much like dragons or wizards. In short, yes, the fact that you can't perceive your own death means that you don't die. You seem to have different point of view.
Re: Arguing for Immortality
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
the thing about Eliezer's rather snide take on cognitive dissonance is it doesn't really address the issue at hand. people dying does clear out old ideas. the leopard doesn't change his shorts. or at the very _least_ you could make an argument that people can be changed, that old hard-line racists can be won over, instead of claiming that any idiot who thinks immortality might have its seamy side is just displaying '…
>people dying does clear out old ideas. the leopard doesn't change his shorts. First, that's not necessarily true. Old ideas persist across generations even today. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, etc. etc. Second, new ideas are not necessarily valuable anyway. Having just moved to the SF Bay Area, let new age religions and whatnot be exhibit #1. There's something to be said for passing the test of tim…
The reason why older people 'cling' to old ideas is that as we age our neural pathways become calcified along current paths and connections, making it more difficult to change our minds about something. If aging were inhibited, presumably that problem would be one of the ones solved as well, so people's minds would remain as agile and flexible as they were in young adulthood, indefinitely, and hence able to change and adapt new ideas.
That's quite a leap of faith, IMO. It might be so that clinging to old ideas is a chemical "problem", or it might be how the brain works.
When studying other people, I come to the understanding that around 30 years of age, many people have decided on an ideology, decided which music they enjoy, what food they like, and many other interests. When presented with new information which might require change in that internal model, many people seem to ignore the new information rather than changing their model, because changing our internal model is hard, and it becomes harder the more elaborate our model of the world is. So, the older we get, the more elaborate our models, and the more reluctant to change we grow.
I'm know people are different - I am fighting this kind of stagnation in my mind every day - but I'm not convinced that the people who are most likely to become immortal are the ones that are the least prone to stagnation. I'm afraid it's quite the opposite.