Speak for yourself. I prefer to live forever (assuming healthy), thank you.

> (assuming healthy)

Moments ago, I, too, used to think this way, but then I glanced around at the comments here, and I realize that even if immortal, we'd still have to suffer each other, and that simply just can't go on forever.

With infinite time, we can simply move to other planets or star systems.

Heat death aside, with ‘infinite time’ and probably long before we arrive to affordable interplanetary travel of our squishy forms, we will have found a way to upload ourselves to silicon (or whatever substrate computes the best), where we can do whatever we want on our own little isolated wafers – if that’s what we wanted.

Maybe, but then we need to decide if an upload is you. What matters to me is the continuity of my perception of self. If I spawn a dozen versions of me, I still perceive them as other individuals.

It would involve a transitory step of a direct human computer interface. But tbf, there’s no continuity of perception when you go to sleep and wake up. We have no idea how consciousness works, or whether there really is something as multiple consciousness as opposed to, say, a single thread that traverses all streams consciousness in whatever order

Granted you can also maintain your close circle.

> We experience pain, and want to return that pain

I disagree. We absorb pain for our community/tribe or our own goals. Ideally, we don’t pass it on.

A few hundred years ago people would punish the sick and sometimes throw them into wells, making the rest of the village sick. I wondered if violence could be modeled as a plague. Once you're exposed, you're starting to catch it. Imagine that being violent to violent people spreads this disease.

That resonates with what you said - if we could absorb violence and not pass it on we can contain it. Unfortunately, the western world handles violence with more violence, which is the same as throwing a sick person into the village well.

> A few hundred years ago people would punish the sick and sometimes throw them into wells, making the rest of the village sick.

It kind of reminds me how Fox News selects its presenters. They’d definitely be the ones a sane society would try to punish.

By that same logic non-existence is vastly preferable to living. Life is suffering.

No.

Thanks for showing me the light. Your thorough and convincing argumentant made me see the error of my ways.

From the superliminal school of persuasion brought to us by in the Simpsons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WDi4tAqPkM

Why are you alive then? I hope you continue to stay alive, by the way, I'd just like you to examine your reasons for not having allowed your own death yet.

I wonder if it has to do with the fact that your current lifespan is "natural" and an immortal lifespan is "unnatural". But what's the difference between being alive in 10,000 years, and being alive currently? A person 10,000 years old may believe themself to be immortal but there's fundamentally no difference between being "currently alive" at 10,000 and being "currently alive" at 40. Either way, it's an experience of the present. So what makes living to 10,000 wrong, if living to 40 is right?