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We Need to Die

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Re: We Need to Die

#111

Post by igor47 »

GMoromisato wrote: post #95
polivier wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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 pol…

Sure, I agree with that. But at that point it becomes a philosophical/ethical argument: should we allow certain people to die (or even kill them) to benefit others? 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 p…

> 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"

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

Re: We Need to Die

#112

Post by mrandish »

skissane wrote: post #101

Life extension research isn’t going to make anyone immortal - it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few thousand years the odds you will succumb to one or the other becomes quite high. Suicide is likely to be another major factor, including active suicide (possibly styled as euthanasia), the passive suicide of choosing to stop all this life extension wizardry, and intentional recklessness s…

> it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play

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.

Re: We Need to Die

#113

Post by joegibbs »

Waterluvian wrote: post #11

There have been many, many stories over the millenia that try to empart the wisdom that mortality is necessary. Some present it as being a gift. 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…

Most of those stories are just sour grapes. Dying has been the biggest fear for all of history for most people, and especially back then people were losing their family and friends at young ages.

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.

Re: We Need to Die

#114

Post by roenxi »

skissane wrote: post #101

Life extension research isn’t going to make anyone immortal - it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few thousand years the odds you will succumb to one or the other becomes quite high. Suicide is likely to be another major factor, including active suicide (possibly styled as euthanasia), the passive suicide of choosing to stop all this life extension wizardry, and intentional recklessness s…

To even consider "immortal" as possible suggests someone hasn't had a lot of formal math training. Infinity is rather large. In an infinite amount of time, any possible conjunction of circumstances that could cause an immortality system to fail will happen. Talking in thousands, millions or even billions of years doesn't even need to be rounded to be basically zero when compared to eternity.

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.

Re: We Need to Die

#115

Post by mock-possum »

What do you mean ‘we’

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.

Re: We Need to Die

#116

Post by RagnarD »

WA9ACE wrote: post #80
wat10000 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems absurd to argue that death is necessary or good when there is exactly zero experience with the alternative. 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…

Unless such anti-aging style immortality solution was widely available, you would much more likely end up with a situation similar to In Time (2011). The poor fighting for continued survival, while the wealthy live forever.

Argues for becoming wealthy.

Re: We Need to Die

#117

Post by blargey »

The headline argument hinges on the size of infinities to assert that you'll run out of goals to live for eventually, and thus will eventually become vacuous and despondent over an infinite timeline. But this reliance on infinities is also why they cannot propose a concrete age limit for the Logan's Run Law their gut so desires. May that remain the case for infinity.

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.

Re: We Need to Die

#118

Post by dwroberts »

joshmarlow wrote: post #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…

> Seems like he's doing something right

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

Re: We Need to Die

#119

Post by euroderf »

Arodex wrote: post #10

Immortality 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…

Agreed. Lack of turnover of property (in all forms) is a danger. Monotonically increasing wealth concentration.

Re: We Need to Die

#120

Post by euroderf »

Arodex wrote: post #64
Palomides wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's kinda weird that you think modern capitalism/mode of wealth is a harder problem to solve than literal immortality I'll take eternal life even if Putin gets it, thanks

"Imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever"

Inheritance of precarity.
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