I don't think I'd want to live forever, but I think the time we get is far too short. I want to see an end to scarcity and poverty. I want to see thriving colonies on Mars. I want to see us figure out superluminal travel and visit other star systems.
Sure, we may also annihilate ourselves in the next century, but I'd rather be optimistic about these things, and it bums me out that I almost certainly won't be around to see them.
I've spent a lot of time on Alcor's website, reading about cryopreservation, and have considered signing up. But I'm worried about what could happen if it works. The culture shock of waking up even a century after your death sounds difficult to handle, let alone many centuries. Aside from being a small window to the past, what of value would I have to a future society? Would I feel without purpose, and wish I hadn't done it?
Actually I think trying to eliminate death (at least if we're talking about letting people live >1000 years or choose when they die) is extremely bad and will have awful, awful consequences.
You think inequality is bad now? Can you imagine what it will be like when people can amass power and fortunes for thousands of years? How progressive do you think our views on race and sex would be if there were still people voting who were 800 years old? Or science, for that matter (science progresses one funeral at a time, as they say). House prices are astronomically bad where I live... how bad will it be when houses are held forever?
Old age and death create the space for our lives to be young and free, albeit for a short glorious period. I don't doubt it will eventually happen, and the world will become a far more static, miserable place as humanity pushes endlessly forward in our quest to avoid pain and grab all we can for ourselves instead of trying to enjoy life for the ephemeral experience it is.
2. It is arguable that life and freedom are meaningless if we are doomed to lose everything we ever have and are in the end, after such a short amount of time.
3. "Enjoying life for the ephemeral experience it is" is something we do out of hard necessity. I'd take a bit less enjoyment as opposed to, well, not existing at all. Even then, enjoyment and long lives do not have to be mutually exclusive should we solve our problems in time.
Relying on death to solve problems with our government and politics is like relying on a nuclear bomb to heat your dinner. It'll work, it'll also cause immense pain and suffering.
We can and should solve these problems in a separate thread. Alternatively phrased, if power was already stagnated and concentrated, and you had a button to start killing ~100 million random people a year to "solve" this problem, it would be insane to press it. We must find alternative solutions.
But we don't do it. We sit here worrying about dying and trying to ensure we will live forever instead of enjoying the time we do have alive. Read experiences of people who suddenly find out they are going to die relatively soon- the richness of their life takes on a whole new dimension.
These are problems to solve independently of death.
And why do you have 100% faith they will be solved? Is that how the world generally tends to work? Or will things just get worse and people will blame it on the government instead of the thing that changed and allowed things to be bad?
This happens all the time. Technology comes in, makes peoples lives shit, "It's not a problem with the technology it's how we use it". What does that matter if we're not capable of using it better? If the world is going to be shit if people can live forever, then people living forever is shit.
It is arguable that life and freedom are meaningless if...
If you look at how people behave, it is actually the opposite- things don't have value unless they are scarce, limited. We value our life and youth because it runs out.
This is a false dilemma. People can enjoy the time being alive while optimizing for the long term.
Exercising increases our health and make us enjoy life more.
Read experiences of people who suddenly find out they are going to die relatively soon- the richness of their life takes on a whole new dimension.
This is a rationalization or terror management. Moreover, the richness of life should come before having to face one's own mortality.
We always have a choice of living life to our fullest, or don't at any given time, immortal or mortal.
This doesn't change the fact that using death to solve inequality is like using a nuclear bomb to heat your dinner. We ought to find a better solution and solve it independently.
I do not understand your pessimism. Historically speaking, humanity tends to solve the problems it encounters. A look over the past few centuries alone reveals this. We'll solve this problem too.
I'm not saying it will solve inequality, I'm saying it is preventing it from being far, far, far worse than it already is. Do you feel like we're solving the inequalities we currently have enough to unleash something that will make things one hundred times worse? Knowing that once it is unleashed it will be almost impossible to reverse?
is like using a nuclear bomb to heat your dinner.
You're proposing that we remove the nuclear bomb that has been heating the food we've been eating for the last 1 billion years and assuming we'll just figure out something else.
I do not understand your pessimism. Historically speaking, humanity tends to solve the problems it encounters
I guess my pessimism stems from a different perspective of what it means to "solve our problems". I look around the world as it is today and I don't feel like we genuinely have solved any of the problems at the core of human existence.
So pessimistic. Basically all tech (except perhaps certain weapons advances) improves our lives. Yeah doomscrolling sucks but is it worse than watching the grass grow while you get drunk on the porch a hundred years ago? (Assuming you had a porch, or booze for that matter.) Yeah biased AI sucks, but is it worse than overtly racist societies from 50 years ago? We certainly can and must keep improving our collective lot in live, but "all is shit" is fundamentally lacking perspective.
> We value our life and youth because it runs out.
No, we value life because it affords us agency and positive experience. We value the memory of youth for its limited responsibility, higher fecundity, and being earlier in our life's decision tree.
Do you think the Amish live a life vastly inferior to yours?
As a matter of focus, we should solve those other problems first, especially since increasing life expectancy is already having bad effects, both in wealth and power concentration. Eg. Boomers not retiring, and not dying, so gen x and millenials have bad careers and nowhere to live
For another rephrasing, if I had the option to go back in time, and prolong the life of all the slave owners and the people they enslaved, I wouldn't subject the poor people to 1000 years of torture.
I'm calling bullshit on "time constraints as meaningfulness" too. That's just the subjective time dilation we experience during stressful situations, like in sports.
We have so many aphorisms to sooth the fear of death, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily true in a post-mortality culture.
Wealth isn't zero-sum, and so it's always weird to see people arguing about how bad inequality is.
If the standard of living isn't improving, that's a problem we should address. If the standard of living is improving and the rich are getting richer, why is that an issue?
From perspectives of history, intuition, and statistics, it's clear that inequality and overall quality of life aren't inversely correlated as many today believe they are.
> House prices are astronomically bad where I live... how bad will it be when houses are held forever?
I imagine someone will get bored of a house after a few decades, certainly after a century, and so they won't be held forever. Additionally, as the population increases, we'll create new housing.
Don't want to live forever means what? You can't know what your desire and wants will be in 20 years, let alone 100 or 500 years. It's like asking a person when they will go to a bathroom in 20 years.
Humanity's genetics will naturally deteriorate without death.
And humans haven't been subject to natural selection for ages. Pretty much the entire civilization is a cushion between you and forces of nature. Even mastering fire and learning to shoot an arrow from a bow were major developments away from natural selection.
In the unlikely event it does work, there'd at least be a handful of people - it'd be pretty unlikely to be the only success story I think. Downside risk seems small?
The person you replied to specifically said that they don't care for immortality. People are simply advocating for death on their own terms, instead of the pathetically short lives we have today.
[0]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see...
There's no (physics based) reason we have to die, just like there was no reason for all the deaths in child birth in early human history. It's a failure of our current capabilities.
I don't know if any of the claims in Lifespan [1] hold up, but if they do stopping aging may be easier than people previously thought. Either way - I'm hoping we figure it out sooner rather than later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
Most likely outcome of immortality as humans currently are would be stagnation and power being concentrated in a few hands
Regardless, it's still not a reason to die. You could argue that progress is meaningless with death.
Finally, progress being slowed down is something we can solve independently of death. I think it's a good idea to find alternative solutions to stagnation than literally dying - that's like solving an issue with your OS by throwing your whole computer in the trash.
Alternatively phrased, if power was already stagnated and concentrated, and you had a button to start killing a couple million random people like clockwork every year to "solve" this problem, it would be insane to press it.
If stars cannot sustain themselves forever, how can we compete? We are far more complex with a far smaller energy budget.
On a more relatable scale, humans do grow in complexity, order, and capability in their early years, until eventually decay turns the tide toward the end of our natural lifespans. It would be rather odd if it's physically impossible to re-activate those growth and healing mechanisms—much more likely that we just haven't figured out how yet.
[Edit: I'm amazed at the posts saying it's not worth trying to live longer because you'll never outlast A STAR. It's not a competition people!]
Seriously though, what is the point? You're gonna have the same fomo with death in the future as you do now.
We've already found out how to reactivate those growth and healing mechanisms. Have children, then grand children, then great grandchildren, etc. Each generation gets its own activation
I'm sure my ancestors worried constantly about their next meal because starvation was a very real possibility, but luckily I don't think about starving even though it's technically still possible. I hope that in the future the same is true of disease and non-accidental death.
The point is having as much time as you want to do the things that interest you. Nobody should be forced to live when they don't want to, and nobody should be forced to die when they don't want to. Pretty simple really.
> We've already found out how … Have children
Come on now, we both know that a legacy isn't remotely the same as not dying.
[0] https://www.nia.nih.gov/about/budget/fiscal-year-2021-budget
Today anti-aging solutions are likely within reach should we concentrate research and funding in a massive push to solve the issue.
We ought to abandon our fatalistic outlook (that existed solely due to prior necessity) and sprint towards this goal with every fiber of our beings.
To me, this makes a virtue of necessity. We have deep philosophies around death only because it's inescapable. But if we could change that, then we could also change those philosophies.
The first thing that's going to be immortal when death isn't inescapable is Kim Jong Un. No thanks, if you want to see a world without death read Altered Carbon
Knowing humanity, though, it probably would be.
This is especially true when you looked at some of our oldest myth such as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The grim black traditions of my culture are almost self centered by comparison.
Also, doesn't physics and the Big Bang rule out this eternal recurrence idea? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
For your second point, I don't think physics rules out the big bang "recurring" because it does not deal with time before time. The big bang theory is not at all in conflict with cyclic conformal cosmology or eternal expansion.
Now pray it never happens?
After you die, your consciousness fades, and so do all your desires and regrets.
To me, death is the ultimate respite.