Hacker News Reader

Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

> This represents the next phase in human evolution, freeing our cognition and memory from the limits of our organic structure. Unfortunately, it’s also a long way off.

I'm actually happy it's a long way off. Feels like the richer humans would live with cheat codes, and the others wouldn't.

View on HN

I disagree that it is the all or nothing thing the author implies. I say this isn't a long way off, it's something we've been doing for centuries. Writing is a great example of our "freeing our cognition and memory from the limits of our organic structure". We've used a technology to extend our memory and allow others access to that memory. A calculator is another easy to understand example of this principle. I think Heidegger best explains this relationship between us and our technology with his ideas around Das Zeug and ready-to-hand. We are already cyborgs.

Against that I'm quite up for doing away with death. A much less computationally challenging version may not be that far off, more along the lines of an LLM trying to be you rather than a neuron level simulation.

I'd be worried during the brain scan of losing the coin flip and waking up in digital Neura-hell being tortured for eternity for Elon Musk's enjoyment.

I hate that it's a long way off.

Ego death is a brutal suboptimum. It's tragic that any entity brought into and knowing of its own existence has to die and be forever annihilated.

If humanity has only one goal, and that goal was to achieve immortality for all humans henceforth [1], that would be a noble cause for our species.

I hate that those I care about will cease to exist.

Fuck death.

[1] Maybe we get lucky and they master physics, reverse the lightcone, and they pull each of us out of the ether of time with perfect memories to join them. Sign me up. I consent.

I sympathise with you, but I'd take a much more optimistic view on this. If death is oblivion, then you won't be able to feel sad that you don't exist since there won't be a consciousness to interpret these feelings.

If there's consciousness after death (in whatever form), then it is clearly not the end, just a part of a much longer - possibly infinite - journey. Even better!

In either case: it's better to stop worrying about what may come after and enjoy the journey to the fullest!

Hi short_sells_poo, in Hinduism, afaict you - your soul (Ātman [1]) is stuck in a loop of birth-death-rebirth (Saṃsāra [2]). and this is not good, and you live your life in the best way (Dharma [3], Karma [4]) to attain liberation (Moksha [5]), to be one with the God (Brahman [6]), to end the cycle of rebirths.

Thought you might find it interesting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Hinduism) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma_in_Hinduism [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moksha [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman

I appreciate the sympathies. Everything's okay. I'm relatively comfortable with death. Though it still feels like we're in a local optima faraway removed from true nirvana, there's not much we can do about that currently. I don't know if any "speed run" of life today could solve it for those of us presently alive.

> If death is oblivion, then you won't be able to feel sad that you don't exist since there won't be a consciousness to interpret these feelings.

I've also taken this to mean that any pleasure and pain in this life are meaningless on a geological time span. Apart from what comfort we need to keep our mental health while still alive [1], we don't need to optimize for self-gratification, pleasure, or wealth accumulation. It's my excuse for grinding so hard at the few things that bring me meaning.

We're all traversing these gradients differently. The sum of what we learn and build will feed into the next generations. I hope the future is brighter for them than the wildest of we could dream of today.

[1] Time with friends and family; enough resources to not worry about food, shelter, or bills; a fun distraction here or there

> If humanity has only one goal, and that goal was to achieve immortality for all humans henceforth [1], that would be a noble cause for our species.

I kindly disagree :-). I think I'd rather not be immortal but live in a world with nature and animals than be imortal in a jar. Right now we don't manage to be immortal, and we are extinguishing the animals... the worst of both worlds?

Many spiritual and philosophical traditions claim the immortality of the soul. Socrates argues forcefully for it in Phaedo.

Nearly all mystics (and many if not most neuroscientists) also come to the conclusion that our world of the senses is an illusion. This doesn't mean that the illusion doesn't have rigid laws, but it does challenge the materialistic assumption that the soul, or consciousness, becomes nothing at the time of physical/biological death.

If that is too fuzzy and mystical, I'd also suggest reflecting more deeply on the concept of technologically facilitated immortality of physical life on earth. For me, it is clearly a dead end. It can only lead to a complete annihilation of every human value.

> For me, it is clearly a dead end. It can only lead to a complete annihilation of every human value.

could you please elaborate on this? why is it clearly a dead end and why would human values clearly end? any resources you can point to would be great. thank you.

Mortality possibly defines plenty of our behaviour and development: while people usually take the default assumption that we'd go in a positive direction without that constraint, I do not think it's a given.

Just like we can't really predict weather (as another complex system) too far ahead, we can't really predict how something this significant changes brain development — IMHO at least.

Say the lifespan doesn't become infinity, but rather 10x ~ 800years. How do you imagine things to change? It would certainly mean that people can take up much more ambitious projects instead of the usual ~30 year constraint.

I do share your view that positive direction is not a given, but what evidence do we have that it would be worse than right now. Maybe we should be cautious of the risks.

I am simply saying that we don't have evidence either way, though if development of medical knowledge is any proof, we mostly keep learning how much we don't know (if you've ever faced any uncommon and thus unusual medical predicament, you'd know what I mean).

Heck, so much money has gone into preventing hair loss, and there does not seem to be a simple answer to that either ;)

> If humanity has only one goal, and that goal was to achieve immortality for all humans henceforth [1], that would be a noble cause for our species.

Except that's not the goal and never will be the goal. If some immortality technology is ever created, it won't be for all. The Elon Musks, Sam Altmans, and Donald Trumps of the world will live forever. You will die.

> I hate that those I care about will cease to exist.

> Fuck death.

There's a much simpler and more achievable solution to that problem: change your belief system.

Could you elaborate on the belief system?

Are you saying the gp needs to rethink their ideas on death? Wouldn't that be like accepting defeat because the problem is hard?

>I hate that those I care about will cease to exist.

I need to croak so that there's room in the world for my great-grandchildren.

>If humanity has only one goal,

Humanity pursues, best that I can tell, extinction instead of immortality. It has this really weird premature transcendence hangup.

AGI might end up being misaligned. But the first alignment problem: Humans are misaligned

But there won't be any others to would or wouldn't. When human fertility rates drop below 2.1, population shrinks. Each generation is smaller than the last. The inevitable result of shrinking (through fertility decline rather than war/disease/disaster) is inevitable extinction. You have the equality of species oblivion to look forward to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com