Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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As far as I can tell, I'm being totally consistent. My point is that people are failing to distinguish between what they want (to live forever) and what they can achieve, and that by doing so they are causing a lot of waste and suffering, not achieving as much as they could.

I agree that a world without aging would be better. I also think it would be a better world if the moon were made of cheese and I could get there by building a tall enough ladder. But if I spend all my life building ladders in service of that desire I'm a fool.

We don't live in a world where people live forever or can avoid old age except by dying young. All composite things decay. There are so far no exceptions, and no solid theory that suggests otherwise.

I am entirely in favor of medical research that seeks to improve and extend human life. But by not coming to grips with our impending deaths, we aren't living as well as we could. Take the guy upthread who thinks he will live forever. People like that check into hospitals every day unprepared for the reality they face. As the article makes clear, that wastes a lot of money and causes a lot of suffering.

The article talks about extending suffering, not life. Few people who think they will live forever expect to do so wheezing with every breath.

Shakespeare's sonnets are artfully composed, and I'd say we've done a decent job of keeping them around and finding uses for them.

Let's review the bidding here. Somebody said "death is a medical failure." I said that it isn't; when you fail to achieve an impossible goal, the failure is in the goal, not the work done. I went on to say that all composite things decay, and that to expect that one is going to be the first exception is folly.

I agree that few people imagining they can have eternal life think that they will suffer. But that's exactly the problem. They haven't thought it through. They don't yet understand what life is. Which is why they are so woefully unprepared to handle the parts that don't match their fictions.

The bit about Shakespeare's sonnets I take to be a counterargument to "all composite things decay". That we have managed to keep 100k of text around for less than half a millennium seems like poor evidence that immortality will soon be ours. People die. Species die. Planets and suns die.

Okay. You do not value death, but you do not believe we can defeat it either. Note that in a strict sense, the second law of thermodynamic says you're most probably right. All there's left is a hope of a very long life. (Which you probably don't think we can achieve either, right?)

It's a long way to go, or at least a very long shot, but a long life is possible in principle. Things decay, but they can be fixed or replaced (even the brain: current physics says that copy-paste transportation actually works —in principle). We just don't know how to do that yet. Now, about my personal immortality, I see little hope short of Friendly AI or cryonics, and even those are a long shot.

I agree that a long life is theoretically possible. I personally suspect that even if we overcome the body problems, neither human brains nor human minds will be able to cope with that, so that anything truly long-lived will be a post-human organism.

I also agree with you that the various theoretically possible techno-miracles likely won't mean much for us than a modestly longer old age. So I think everybody should really come to grips with what dying means. E.g., by filling out a living will and discussing end-of-life issues with family. If it turns out that preparation is wasted, I don't think anybody will complain too much.

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