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Comment by ez77 | Hacker News Reader

if we ever want to move on from this weird intermediary half-state between nature and intellect

I don't know if I follow correctly. Do you feel that solving the life extension puzzle is tantamount to intellectual nirvana? I'd say there is still plenty more to talk about (say [1] and [2], for example), and arguably deeper from a strictly intellectual viewpoint. In fact, I'd say that the fact that I happen to be mortal or not does not tackle any of classical intellectual conundrums.

Then again, the subject of life extension meets with so much hostility it's actually easy to argue that we as a culture are not ready for this yet.

I'm not sure about life extension, but effectively ending retirement would be met with hostility! But then again, we're getting both things (end of retirement/pensions and the resulting unrest) without indefinite life extension.

[1] http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl

[2] http://www.claymath.org/millennium/

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With regards to the retirement problem, that's only an issue because people are still thinking like mortals. Were we immortal I'd expect gap years to replace retirement. Many people would choose to live their lives in cycles, retraining every 50 years for a new job / change of scene, getting to a proficient level, then taking a break for a few years until ready (or out of funds) to retrain & start anew. Once they'd done a few cycles people would likely begin to specialise, picking up stuff they'd touched on in the past & taking it to the next level / mixing it with their other skills. The issues then arising are the capacity of the mind (mind rather than human brain since who knows what form it will have taken by this point). I've assumed that with immortality we maintain physical (if still relevant) and mental fitness, as without those, extending life becomes torturous and pointless, causing people not only to not enjoy their lives, but also to become long suffering burdens on their families, just for the sake of a larger number of sun circuits.

It would make sense to first colonize outer space or, more controversially, sharply control births (or eliminate them altogether), as we would simply run out of space. You need prosperity and an abundance of resources for your cyclic program to work.

> Do you feel that solving the life extension puzzle is tantamount to intellectual nirvana?

Not at all. I'm talking about biological reality. Right now we're not really a part of nature anymore but we're not yet independently functioning entities either. By developing intellect and the deeper consciousness that goes with it, we stopped being a mere collection of genes. In fact, in quite a few respects our genes and our minds have opposing interests now. In order to grow and embrace the aspect that we have minds, we need to totally master the biological substrate that gave birth to us or maybe we even move completely beyond it. In practice, it's probably going to be a combination of the two.

When I say we're hanging in a weird half-state between nature and intellect I'm referring to this kind of existential identity crisis. A lot of people do believe we're first and foremost genomes walking around. A lot of people do believe that this discourse is irrelevant because they have religious views that already have a monopoly on the meaning of life. But at the same time, there are some people who would like to keep moving forward towards a far horizon that we can already glimpse. In fact, for some of us it is an ethical imperative.

In the end, it simply boils down to the value that we assign to a mind, to a consciousness, soul, whatever you want to call the complete essence of a human being. Tell me how valuable a human mind is to you and I can predict your stance on the future development of mankind.

I enjoyed your reply! I wish I could even begin to define a clear position on issues much simpler than the value of a human mind. I'm fairly Platonist even beyond math, so to me any mind is ultimately a more or less gifted spectator, and hence dispensable. That said, I would gladly agree to extend this modest mind's life span indefinitely.

On the other hand, I have my serious doubts about the psychological resilience of human beings under indefinite life extension, even if carried out flawlessly (big if). I would gladly pay a chunk, more than on anything of this kind, to travel in time and see how this would play out.

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