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We Need to Die

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Re: We Need to Die

#131

Post by ForHackernews »

bee_rider wrote: post #8

Bah, 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 de…

You won't have immortality, but Jeff Bezos & friends might.

How do you feel about dying when your betters won't have to?

Re: We Need to Die

#132

Post by poulpy123 »

> You can see this in retirement, actually. There's real data showing mortality spikes in the years after people stop working. The structure of striving, even when it felt like a burden, was providing something that leisure alone can't replace.

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.

Re: We Need to Die

#134

Post by xeonmc »

zebomon wrote: post #52

The author's argument seems to be a practical one and two-part: 1) without death, there's nothing to motivate us to live life well and 2) unless we live life well, there's no point in living. 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 on…

See also https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Gift_of_Il%C3%BAvatar

Re: We Need to Die

#135

Post by ismailmaj »

I find it a bit too introspective, living in a specific period creates urgency, there is still a (opportunity) deadline.

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.

Re: We Need to Die

#136

Post by ileonichwiesz »

skissane wrote: post #128
mrandish wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Life extension to make people live several times longer? Seems plausible we’ll get there eventually, simply by extrapolating current trends in science and biotechnology, and observing what is possible in other species. 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…

> 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?

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.

Re: We Need to Die

#137

Post by bluefirebrand »

igor47 wrote: post #108
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…

Maybe. There's plenty of science fiction that addresses this. For example the "meths" (short for Methuselah) in altered carbon, who achieve immortality by making backups of their brains that can be spawned to cloned bodies. You could recover from accidents, or roll back to before the obscure disease kicked in

That doesn't sound like immortality to me

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

Re: We Need to Die

#138

Post by voidmain »

I find these arguments unconvincing. But I do think that as an immortal it would be very difficult and painful to adapt to the changes in society and its values over time as an immortal. Eventually you must either join some isolated group like the Amish or else betray everything you love and believe in, over and over and over again, because whatever you think is important, the future will despise and forget it, while inventing new values incomprehensible to you now. Probably I am too opinionated to happily live even a normal human lifetime, but it's hard to imagine anyone so easygoing that a few thousand years of changes wouldn't leave them homeless.

Re: We Need to Die

#140

Post by ileonichwiesz »

ForHackernews wrote: post #131
bee_rider wrote: post #8

Bah, 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 de…

You won't have immortality, but Jeff Bezos & friends might. How do you feel about dying when your betters won't have to?

Agreed. If immortality was discovered tomorrow (or at least some sort of anti-aging treatment), there’s no way it would become available to a regular person. All of us would still age and die, but we’d be ruled forever by ageless ghouls.
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