In all seriousness I find that to be an unconvincing argument; isn't it better to have that choice rather than let it be made for us? Where would we be if Newton and Einstein were still alive? The only argument for aging I've ever liked is that culture just can't really advance without it- old people (on the whole! many older people are fantastic and very progressive) eventually seem to stop catching up to the rest of society. But still, it seems like insufficient reason to let brilliant people die.
Einstein and Newton contributed a lot but they were part of a historical trend, not genetic hail marys who ushered mankind from one epoch to the next.
"...it seems like insufficient reason to let brilliant people die."
This is - look, you can't argue that someone has the right to live based on their life achievements. This is like the ultimate perversion of the 'american drem' delusion - just achieve great thing and you can live forever.
Unfortunately Johnny never did crack the Navier-Stokes equation so instead of given the Immortality Treatment he became fertilizer in the end
>This is - look, you can't argue that someone has the right to live based on their life achievements. This is like the ultimate perversion of the 'american drem' delusion - just achieve great thing and you can live forever.
I'm very anti-libertarian and totally against the idea that the ends justify the means wrt achievement. However geniuses do exist, and their productivity is very often cut short by death or age. As a race we would have been able to gain immensely if a few hundred people had lived a decade or two longer.
In addition, you don't get to pick who lives on and who doesn't. Think of all the people you would find to be very culturally backwards that would still be alive and hold a lot of power.
Getting to choose to live longer = good. I'm not trying to argue against that. I'm just trying to point out the benefits that natural death provides to society, because these benefits are something I personally plan to think carefully about as the choice to live longer and longer becomes an option.
Is the assumption that each generation is better than the last?
And as long we are talking about scientists, Feynman said this in his speech:
"The ideas I wish to describe are old ideas. There is practically nothing that I am going to say tonight that could not easily have been said by philosophers of the seventeenth century. Why repeat all this? Because there are new generations born every day. Because there are great ideas developed in the history of man, and these ideas do not last unless they are passed purposely and clearly from generation to generation."
It's not like we'll run out of brilliant people. There are always new ones being born. I think it's much better to have the opportunity for new brilliant people to rise with a different point of view from having been raised in a different environment in a different time.
If Newton were alive, would Einstein's theories ever have seen the light of day?
If (happy to be proven wrong here) we can assume that this trend has to do with an age-related decrease in brain functionality, maybe this could be mitigated anyway.
Or you could also point on the other end of the spectrum ? What if Attila or Stalin were still alive? Would that be a good thing for humanity ?
[....]
If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one. There is an infinity of difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.
[....]
For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
- Kundera, from the first chapter of The Unbearable Lightness of Being; mistakes mine, typed hastily from my dead-tree copy for want of a quickly DuckDuckGoable digital one.
(yes, it goes on to wrestle with many of the objections/concerns you should already have about the small snippet above)
No. No, when cells multiply uncontrollably, that's called cancer.
So, right now, in fact it's unchecked population growth that's much more akin to a cancer, than any hypothetical immortality.
As for unnecessary (or less important) things taking up resources; how many people do you know who have had their appendix and gallbladder taken out?
unchecked population growth is indeed a problem, what impact do you suppose it will have on the population when people keep living longer and longer, and a few of them are essentially undying?
in your comment, are you meaning to speak metaphorically or am I reading into it too much. the symbolic reading of your words suggests that certain people might have the status of a gallbladder. did you mean to imply that?
As far as I know, there are two paradigms about ageing: There is a biological clock inside us or it's only entropy acting (damage accumulation).
Both would start in the moment of conception. So, what it means "once it has started"?
Could be reversed with a heart transplant?
We can now take data from a computer and synthesise DNA for a cell from basically nothing, load that DNA into a 'blank' cell and start it up, making it grow and replicate - almost like making life!
We can use CRISPR/Cas9 to accurately cut and paste active DNA anywhere we want with high precision.
All these tools are ready, we just have to work out how to use them
CRISPR/Cas9 is more precise than technologies before, but still not perfect: http://www.nature.com/news/enzyme-tweak-boosts-precision-of-...
These things have a way of being impossible until they are not. It used to be impossible to communicate with someone a great distance away, then we invented the telegraph. It used to be impossible to see someone at a great distance, then our seemingly-unrelated breakthroughs in network technology brought us easy consumer video chat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_medicine_and_medic...
Based on what data ? Read newspapers back in the 80s, we were going to solve every disease by the year 2010 or so. But for the most part medicine has not evolved by huge leaps. Sure, we have made some important drug discoveries, but by far and large we are notoriously bad at predicting what we can achieve in a set span of time.
Not all the time. If you die in your sleep, it's either painless or you have no time to realize what's occurring. Not everyone dies from a 2 years fight with cancer.
These would need to be addressed independently of prolonging life. That there is no real mention of them when talking about prolonging life makes me shake my head - living at 200 with destroyed joints and a mind which is failing due to Dementia or alzheimers doesn't sound like much fun to me.
Indeed, cartilages and joints get damaged because of prolonged usage, and not just aging. If we were to live much longer, we would have to also tackle how to make such factors less a problem to maintain an active lifestyle beyond age 100.
You upload a brain into a computer and you might have exactly this.
The physical body - and the physical environment we live in - are just variables that can be gradually altered. Even if the brain is optimized towards a particular environment, it doesn't mean it won't handle a different one.
They do exists as beings, yes, but different beings than the ones who possessed (or would have possessed) those limbs.
The question is not one of necessary conditions for "being-hood", it is one of identity via continuity.
As for being a different being, I personally wouldn't mind. I'm not the same being I was yesterday, or last year, anyway. For instance, over the past few years, I have many parts of my teeth removed and replaced with artificial components. I do not feel worse because of that.
At what point are you not you?
Bionic organs? limbs? New bones, artificial blood? Neuro-prosthetic interfaces or implants? "Biologically integrated coprocessors"?
I'm Genuinely curious where you choose to draw the line since it's not often discussed from a personal standpoint it's usually just the philosophical arguments that get discussed in what I've read.
Creating an exact copy of me wouldn't make me experience the world from two different perspectives at the same time. It would just create a new human being that, allegedly, would be a "copy" of me (or so people would say).
To me, it would just be another person walking around. There wouldn't be any essential difference between this person and an adult child of mine.
So if you kill the original - maybe because the procedure is destructive or because it's a consciousness-saving emergency measure - the "copy" would have a pretty good claim to be a continuation of you.
But I'm not interested in legacy style immortality. I don't care at all if a separate version of me continues to exist – I want to be continuous with the physical substrate I now occupy. In other words, we are all Ship's of Theseus, and that's fine, but a perfect replica of the Ship breaks my internal narrative of continuity.
To distinguish: If a form of "immortality" supports the possibility of another copy of me existing simultaneously with the current incarnation, then it is not the immortality I'd desire.
Responding to the parent, I would much prefer slowly replacing my neural hardware with circuitry to wholesale scanning and instantiation in another substrate.
Summarize: Identity is (partially) a function of substrate. Change the substrate in a discontinuous fashion, and identity itself becomes discontinuous. I call that discontinuity (one form of) "Death".
I don't expect that anti-aging research is going to significantly extend my own lifespan or healthspan. Biology is really complicated. But that doesn't justify sugar-coating age related morbidity and mortality. They are really bad. The only thing worse than death is great pain. Old age deals out both: pain and death. It torments and finally kills you. People trying to defeat death may be delusional about their prospects for success, but they are at least trying to do the best thing humans have tried to do in generations.