Why? Death is an important, and probably the least appreciated, aspect of evolution. Humanity can't change if the powers-that-be literally never go away. And that's ignoring finite resources on the planet.
Would you rather live forever or have children?
You can die if you want, but I'd prefer immortality.
> Would you rather live forever or have children?
This is a false dichotomy that is the product of thinking in human terms.
You don't know if immortal beings take up space. Or if they self-replicate. Maybe multiple conscious entities can even combine and then disentangle, for a sort of cerebral experience.
Who knows if we'll be confined to this planet if we don't have bodies? Will we have bodies?
If we don't, we won't even need earth like habitats. The entire solar system works. We might even solve the Jupiter radiation thing.
All of these things are way cooler than kids. Granted it's all a pipe dream, but I'd jump at the opportunity.
It is my hope that anyone who gains "immortality" is quickly assassinated. Death is not something one should be able to run from for very long.
You really think that humanity is going to selflessly and democratically release this technology for all or even most? You really think that the tycoons of today and tomorrow are going to let an opportunity to "live forever" pass them by? When they can continue to hustle and rule their empires towards perpetuity?
There is going to be an class imbalance, and it will be big, because the formerly cliched topics of life and death are the very focus here: the poor will die, and the rich will live on. It will start fires that will grow out of control in ways we have never seen before. Think of the environmental implications -- you think environmental destruction is bad now, wait until the planet ossifies under a parasitic species seemingly incapable of self-destruction, short of the kind of end-of-the-world scenarios that science fiction portrays.
When I look around, I see an infinite universe. Vertical farming, solar, fission, fusion, astroid belt mining... The list goes on. If there's a glass ceiling it's not in sight or maybe it's after we strip the solar system. If I ask myself what the meaning of life is, it seems to me that we are it. Yees - We should use our resources efficiently but we shouldn't be afraid to see where this thing goes.
Also, people said that about the internet, electricity, whatever. 'Only the rich are going to have it, why would they givee it to the poor?' Cause competition creates pressure to lower costs and sell more people on immortality. However, that argument falls apart if some nuclear powered government monopolizes the technology for the reasons you said above.
You are missing the point. And no, you don’t want immortality, not really. You just think that.
The true immortality requires indestructibility, because otherwise you are likely to perish in an accident within a couple of hundred years. But being indestructible is even worse (imagine yourself stuck somewhere for a thousand years).
I'm not sure what consciousness is. I think of it as a transient emergent configuration of neural systems, like waves in an ocean, but I could be wrong.
Are you sure the you that wakes up in the morning is the same you that went to bed? Are you even the same person, moment to moment?
Weights change. Membrane polarizations are in flux. Microtubules, just one component in a deep sea of biochemical complexity, are dynamical.
> The true immortality
These are just words.
Evolution found genes as a solution. That's what your kids are. Humans have done even more with recorded words. I'd like to think that one day we can do the same with thoughts and minds themselves.
I like to imagine a future where you could download part of my mind and experience it yourself.
Legally, yes.
> moment to moment
Some need twenty years to life.
My undergrad was in biochem. I have a decent grasp of how complicated biological systems are. I don't even begin to profess to have adequate understanding. I am not a domain expert.
That said, I don't see how imagining an engineering solution where measurements are taken of a brain's "state" and replicated with an algorithm are metaphysical psuedoscience. It's out of the reach of today's tech for sure, but I'd like to think we'll eventually make progress and one day be interested in solving this problem. Evolution stumbled upon human brains as a solution for propagation. We're all a lot smarter as hill climbing agents than our genes.
I do not think we'll solve this in our lifetimes, but it's so much better to think of than optimizing ad tech, election fraud, and structural inequality.
> philosophically rigorous work
You lost me here. I don't think something has to be philosophically grounded to be identified as a problem space and tackled. Epistemology ontology whatevers don't fuel rockets.
Why not give me immortality but also allow euthanasia? Let me find out and make that decision. (I'm assuming immortality here really means stopping senescence)
A lot of people in this world say that they know with certainty what will happen after death.
For all we know we could already be dead, and Skynet has taken the trouble of resurrecting all of our minds. Right now we could be riding some eternal horror simulation, stuck on the roller coaster ride up, just before the plummet into extreme pain and chaos.
That's an equally valid guess.
Nobody really knows. What I can see with my eyes and reason with my brain leads me to believe my consciousness ends with me. But who knows. Maybe we're all just NPCs in some sufficiently advanced game.
All that I know is that in my worldview there is some problem gradient that leads to engineered immortality. I'm not sure how steep that path is, nor where it lies. It might be towering over us higher than Mt. Everest. But it's there, somewhere, a problem waiting for progress.
Well done.
My mind is teeming with sci-fi / fantasy stories where Christianity is real, but it's a program. And we all live in that matrix. Somehow people find out and attempt to break free... Cue Christian angels and demon themes.
A progenitor being, first intelligence reaching 'Godhood,' uses the material universe it has come to mastery over to clothe intelligences (those being outside of time and our usual matter) with material bodies and imbue those passing a filter function with more power like unto itself, while those not passing the filter get life without the power.
The cosmology is very succinct and was presented by Joseph Smith at a funeral, the sermon has been come to be known as the King Follet Discourse[0].
Smith also preached against the idea of 'ex-nihilo'- creation from nothing. Instead he posited that the universe is material and God is not outside of it:
"Now, the word create does not mean to create out of nothing; it means to organize; the same as a man would organize materials and build a ship. Hence, we infer that God had materials to organize the world out of chaos-chaotic matter, which is element. Element had an existence from the time [God] had. The pure principles of element are principles which can never be destroyed; they may be organized and reorganized, but not destroyed. They had no beginning and can have no end"[1]
Mormonism is the rare religion where there isn't anything incompatible with religiosity and science. Other than the whole no physical proof/requiring faith thing, of course- but the theology itself fits fine within a scientific cosmology.
[0]: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1971/04/the...
I want it on record for that A.I. that I would like to be resurrected even if I lack specific religious views.
My own fear of death is fear of nonexistence (I'm atheist), and of the pain of loss (of myself and loved ones). A little bit physical pain too.
By itself that isn't circular reasoning, it is an appeal to authority.
It is when you are then asked why you trust what rishis and yogis say that things start to bend in on themselves into a circular argument.
A Western (specifically, Judeo-Christian) example:
"I believe X, because the Bible says so."
"How do you know that what the Bible says is true?"
"Because the Bible is the inerrant word of God."
"And how do you know that?"
"The Bible says so."
"And how do you know that what the Bible says is true?"
... etc.
By itself, the first statement is only an appeal to authority, but when you dig into the source of the authority, it (rather quickly) turns into a circular argument.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see...
For many would-be Stalins, the main point isn't the torture, but the kidnapping and incommunicado imprisonment (eg. in gulags).
The utility of torture comes in when you want to ensure the prisoner's compliance when reintroduced to society.
So: please note that immortality by itself doesn't preclude either sequestration nor adversarial behavior modification.
Technical solutions to both of those (integrity checks to detect coercion, restoring from distributed backups, etc.), start to run into the same sort of arms-races we have with internet filtering, botnets, and malware. Except that so far as a totalitarian regime is concerned, the uploaded dissident is the malware, as is any sufficiently advanced freedom-preserving tech.
But yes, all signs point to the idea that death is inevitable. I would just personally like to be able to increase my time in this universe by a few orders of magnitude.
But fiddling with the brain, maybe there's a way to implant the sensation and memories of having lived for thousands of years when it was really only 80. Or maybe implant a couple hundred years and trim the actual life down to 2 or 3 years for ethical reasons if living is so unethical.
Supposing everyone obeyed that, some number of generations in the future, which would be a blink of an eye compared to eternal immortality, you would end up with a strange selection problem of there being very few people in the most recent generations, and most of them having a large overlap in ancestors.
I'm much more appreciative of the fault tolarence that it achieves, but prefer maintaining it in a great state.
But they never go away. Sure, individual people in charge may go away, but the systems are far more resilient than that. Even when Kings existed and held the position for life, the institutions they represented pre-dated them, and in many cases lasted long after they were gone.
Their assets also live on, for the most part, and heirs get a huge headstart, compared to the overall population.
"Progress is made one obituary at a time" is both true and false. People dying of natural causes do enable other people to fill their position, but it is not the only mechanism.
> And that's ignoring finite resources on the planet.
Reproduction is exactly what exhausts resources. And, for now, we don't have a solution. Population aging requires people to reproduce, but they don't age quickly enough. The number of people who are still alive but no longer productive only grows, as does the overall population number. In the past, mortality rate was high enough that this wasn't really a problem, the overall population age was relatively low.
Now, if people are not only immortal but also operating at a level that enables them to be productive, then we only need to reproduce to replenish losses by attrition. We wouldn't have to make a 'savings' tradeoff, except to account for disabilities (if those aren't also fixed). We wouldn't have to save enormous amounts of cash to use when we can no longer work, which means social security requirements would be lower.
Why would not having to have children be a bad thing? Yes, it's been ingrained by both nature and nurture, but is that what most people actually want, or are they just doing what's "expected" of them.
Once there's no need to pass down the family name to the next generation, or to have "someone to take care of you when you are old", and you are young forever(so no 'biological clock ticking'), I bet most people will realize that it is actually a choice, and won't bother.
- We've proven that we change faster culturally than biologically. If this weren't true most Americans still wouldn't be okay with gay people, black people, or pot. Beliefs seem more related to local tribalism than to age. I've seen plenty of older and younger people radically shift (for good or bad) their positions based on who they consider arbiters of truth.
- We've heard this finite resource in the past. It has been solved many times. Fertilizer was the most recent one if you want to go back to 19th century history. We have hydroponics, aeroponics, etc on the way. We can also go into space.
- Every first world country has a population growth below 1 (and are decreasing). The average EU is 0.15% and the US is at 0.5%[0]. There's no sign of it turning around and I imagine immortality would just accelerate this. (People will still kill themselves btw. Accidents will still happen. Bad health. Etc)
- IDK about you, but I'm fine waiting till I'm 100 to have kids if I can live forever. Maybe even 200. I'm unsure, all I know is that if we make such a change that we'll completely reconsider things like adulthood and what we do with our life (how long does it take to live off of passive income?). It will be a radical change no matter what, but also one that seems inevitable. If your argument is that it is going to be bumpy, well if history has taught us anything it is that we don't confront problems until they are problems, so I don't think it'll become any less bumpy. But hey, maybe things like Climate Change won't be existential threats because then "50 years" isn't a long time. Unfortunately we won't know how this changes us until it happens, be that for the better or worse.
I'll leave you with the Fable of the Dragon Tyrant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?end=2018&lo...
Still, while I am sure every single one of us loves the idea of not dying, I am relatively certain that mass immortality does not scale well.