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We Need to Die

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Re: We Need to Die

#181

Post by vidarh »

ileonichwiesz wrote: post #136
skissane wrote: post #128

Earlier 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…

We can't even tell for certain the we have existence in time beyond just this moment - our only source of that is a memory of time passing, which we can't validate.

Re: We Need to Die

#182

Post by dartharva »

I agree. I feel that the more we start looking into human enhancement and "fighting against death" we will explore hitherto unknown balances and equilibria in our bodies and nature that may prove to be destructive if disturbed.

When we age after reaching peak adulthood, for example, we see that our bodies lose their strength and our brains dull down. We aren't as ambitious and energetic anymore and get more lethargic. This understandably leads to everyone dreading it and getting up in arms against it (as with Bryan Johnson et al), but what if all this "decline" is actually an innate adaptive defense mechanism to handle and cope with the volume of experience we accumulate over the years? What if our bodies deteriorating as we get old actually has a neglected reason behind it that pertains to the individual too, not just nature? If we were to hypothetically make someone immortal, and if that immortal human were left in the real current world to live out without ageing, what if they actually miss something very crucial to help cope with environments that no longer grow in sync with themselves and eventually become something non-human?

Eastern notions of non-duality - especially Laozi and the Dao - could be useful in these thought experiments. They point out that life and death are not opposites but are states of the same being, and if you were to remove one (death), you'll automatically cease the other (life) from existing.

Re: We Need to Die

#183

Post by dartharva »

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…

People see him living a lifestyle without the "necessary" vices they have gotten accustomed to in their own, and it confuses them. They can't conceive the notion that a man can still be perfectly happy and abundant without those Pavlovian indulgences, because they have never known a world without them.

Re: We Need to Die

#184

Post by [deleted] »

mrandish wrote: post #112
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…

[deleted]

Re: We Need to Die

#185

Post by pyuser583 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #137
igor47 wrote: post #108

Earlier 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…

In the Altered Carbon world there are strict laws against “double sleeving”, but it happens whenever the plot benefits.

One character has an entire island of populated exclusively by herself.

They never go into why it’s illegal. I think it’s implied they know a copy isn’t the original, but they don’t want to think about it. Too unpleasant an idea.

Re: We Need to Die

#186

Post by pyuser583 »

It’s so weird people are talking about immorality being bad without discussing the affect on child rearing and family structure.

Are we going to be fertile our entire lives? Interesting the topic doesn’t come up much. But let’s say we are.

My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (etc) are still alive and producing more siblings, aunts/uncles, etc.

The phrase aunt/uncle would no longer have age implications. In terms of caregiving, my wife, mom, and grandmother might all be pregnant and raising kids at the same time.

In practice, the family tree would be flattened.

Organizations would have similar issues. I’d have to compete against developers with 500 years experience. Even with respecialization, some skills transfer.

If Shakespeare were still alive would we have an Oscar Wilde? Would it matter, since Homer is around too?

In that regard, what language would we be speaking? There are quite a few Ancient Greek speakers still kicking I guess. But Enheduanna is still here too, chanting her Babylonian Hymns to Inana on the synth I guess.

Re: We Need to Die

#187

Post by npodbielski »

Paratoner wrote: post #179
npodbielski wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it. And this argument is plain silly. Does a kid feels urgency of immediate death? Did you when you were sixteen? Like the only thing keeping people all around the world going would be though that they are going to die and they need to do as much as they can before that. This is just radicoulous. If people would be immortal they would just lie down and die because there is no point in leaving! People die on th…

Good reductio, and good showcase of how little you know of your true nature. This is just a disagreement on the fundamental nature and needs of a human being. If you think an eternity would go great for you, more power to you. We'll see when/if that happens who's right, and who's delusional. Its pointless to make my case to transhumanist techbros on this website.

I am not a techbro. I am not a transhumanist.

And I am pretty sure I know more about my nature then you mate.

I think you did not read the article. Author argues that: - people on retirement fade away and die - he need to work - he need to have deadline to actually do the work - he says something that in order to achieve that apparently you need to stop enjoying life ("not eating food he enjoys, not drinking, not doing anything spontaneous")... like why? Why advancements in our technology and medicine that will make our lifespan longer will mean that it will be devoid of spontaneous enjoyment?

Again this is silly and author seems to be living a life when he needs outside stimulus to actually be forced to do something instead of doing things he likes just for himself.

Re: We Need to Die

#188

Post by scotty79 »

> I keep coming back to my own experience with limits. I've recently made a real effort to be more earnest, more sincere, transparent. I think some people find this genuinely offputting, funnily enough. I'm making a trade off - many people may not like it, but to the people that do, it will be even more magnetizing since I am fully embodying the thing they like, the thing that is me.

We are the sum of the roles we play. It's no wonder that people who reject their roles in search of their authentic self often end up as shriveled version of their inner asshole, now it being the only thing for other people to see.

Re: We Need to Die

#189

Post by scotty79 »

kulahan wrote: post #33
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…

I'm with you. The idea of being immortal is terrifying to me. Will I still care about nature after seeing millions of extinctions? Will I still care about life when I see trillions of humans doing human things? Will I even still feel part of the universe as the only permanently unchanging thing? Hard pass. Besides, if we were immortal, we wouldn't have my favorite quote, which feels a bit relevant here. As the great…

I think people who fear immortality are not aware how much a person forgets evey day, week, month, year, decade. 1000 year life wouldn't be significantly different than 100 year life, becaus that few pound of jello in your skull xan hold only so much internally.

Living through 50 extinctions wouldn't be that much different from reading about 50 extinctions. People remember better seeing photographs of event in their lives than actual experiences from their lives.

Re: We Need to Die

#190

Post by skandinaff »

serf wrote: post #99
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…

whenever I imagine immortality en masse I imagine the hobbies that people started experimenting with after exposure to the concept of deathlessness in the short story 'The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect'. that story is flawed for a lot of reasons, but it's interesting to explore what happens if death is essentially conquered. it's hard to judge whether or not society as depicted in that story stagnated.. but it was…

It's a fascinating book indeed, just finished the second chapter, and it is surprisingly accurate in many regards of AI representation, given it's from 1994. Will read on, thank you
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