Sounds like someone just entered their midlife crisis and is presently in the nihlism stage of acceptance
We Need to Die
151–160 of 190 posts
Re: We Need to Die
#152> they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway. 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 w…
> > they'd evolve so completely that you'd become a different person anyway.
> 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.
Re: We Need to Die
#153> 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…
Agreed on Bryan Johnson. Before I actually watched a bit of his content, I just thought he had nutjob vibes and looked weird. No offense intended, if possible.
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.
Re: We Need to Die
#154This article says that our limited time on Earth encourages us to be ourselves. That our eventual death is necessary for our ambitions, desires, and accomplishments (which then produce a concept of Self) and that those things are what make life worth living. 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 l…
Similar to knowing when to call it quits as a director, i see lifespan the same
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
Re: We Need to Die
#155> 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…
Agreed on Bryan Johnson. Before I actually watched a bit of his content, I just thought he had nutjob vibes and looked weird. No offense intended, if possible. 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'…
Agreed! In the Lex Fridman podcast from a few years ago that I referenced, he talked quite a bit about his depression - he was near suicidal for 13 years, IIRC.
He sounds like a different person now.
Re: We Need to Die
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 memo…
I think there's no "you", just an illusion that there's this uninterrupted "you"-ness from birth to death. It's a very useful illusion for the most part.
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.
Re: We Need to Die
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
Yeah for my money true immortality requires fantasy, or religion.
I'd be thrilled to have another handful of centuries though. It doesn't have to be forever to be valuable
Re: We Need to Die
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
This was famously the view of Social Darwinists. Herbert Spencer, for example, argued that nature should eliminate the weak. He said: "If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die."
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.
Re: We Need to Die
#159This article says that our limited time on Earth encourages us to be ourselves. That our eventual death is necessary for our ambitions, desires, and accomplishments (which then produce a concept of Self) and that those things are what make life worth living. 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 l…
That's the kind of lovely feeling I get out of an acid trip, but that doesn't translate as well into daily life. This view of the ego as the enemy, and Ego Death as the Enlightenment, doesn't get us anywhere other than fighting ourselves, I'm sorry.
Re: We Need to Die
#160Earlier 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…
What trends are those? So far there has been zero progress on increasing maximum human lifespan.