We Need to Die
willllliam.com
We Need to Die
1–10 of 190 posts
Re: We Need to Die
#2I'd be a von neumann probe if I could be eg. Bobiverse
Re: We Need to Die
#3> Bryan Johnson is an interesting case here. If you take the longevity project to its logical end, you get someone who's stopped living in order to keep living - for the most part not eating food he enjoys, not drinking, not doing anything spontaneous, all in service of more years.
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.
Re: We Need to Die
#4In sum, the author proclaims that without human death, nothing people do has a time limit so people wouldn't have any incentive to do.
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.
Re: We Need to Die
#5I've had this (often drunken) conversation many times, I think mortality is fundamentally ingrained in not just the human condition, but the fabric of our universe. 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. This memento mori makes every day, ironically, worth living. One of my favorite verses from the Bible is Job 1:21, where he somehow reconciles this tragic finality with trascendent faith:
“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.”Re: We Need to Die
#6The author talks about the how the certainty of death ultimately coming to all of us (sooner or later), gives us drive.
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.
Re: We Need to Die
#7One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his expierence as a universal truth without providing any grounding.
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.
Re: We Need to Die
#8Bah, nah, I’ll take immortality thanks. I want to see where it all goes.
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.
Re: We Need to Die
#9> 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? Just as you "remember your death" to really live life, perhaps we need the deadline to do the work at all. Death is what pulls us out of pure consumption and into pursuit. You could call it "just a deadline", but I disagree. It's what makes us begin.
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.
Re: We Need to Die
#10Immortality is absolutely not compatible with our current capitalistic social system. Whenever you see startups and rich guys financing research in that domain, there is never any talk about giving it away to hoi polloi like you and me. Death is the last economic redistribution system still standing - and when you see they are doing everything they can to nullify any inheritance tax, you can imagine they don't intend to give away anything - fortune, position, power - once they become immortal.
And imagine the North Korean or Russian dictators (or American "President") having access to the technology.