Transhumanism: Treating death as a problem
Having spent some time reading @David Pearce on the Transhumanism thread, which ended not long ago, I notified myself of a tendency of Transhumanists or individuals seeking to extend their lifespan, as simply not accepting death as a forgone conclusion or brute fact about existence. What a stark difference from the antinatalist threads that I have seen around and about on this forum.
What do you think will it take for humanity to look at death as a problem that needs to be circumvented with technology or longevity extension type ideas?
It seems to me that Transhumanists treat life with more optimism than other people who desire to live a predefined lifespan without concern about extending it as much as possible.
What do you think will it take for humanity to look at death as a problem that needs to be circumvented with technology or longevity extension type ideas?
It seems to me that Transhumanists treat life with more optimism than other people who desire to live a predefined lifespan without concern about extending it as much as possible.
Comments (152)
Both the pessimism that says trying is hopeless and the optimism that says it’s unnecessary are just lazy excuses not to try, and in doing so to guarantee failure. I’m extremely proud of transhumanists and techno-progressivists more generally, like @David Pearce, for having the courage to dare to at least try to fix the biggest of problems that have always been either seen as hopeless inevitabilities or excused away with happy fantasies as not real problems at all. They’re sort of a manifestation of Camus’ Absurd Hero in that way, too.
Bravo to anyone with the gall to look Death straight in the eye and say “Fuck you, and the pale horse you rode in on.”
Oh, and I guess to answer your actual question:
Quoting Shawn
First and foremost the general excuses for defeatism (quitting) need to be vanquished. I call these broadly “dogmatic transcendentalism” (roughly the religious mindset), “cynical relativism” (basically radical skeptics cum effective nihilists), and most dangerously “dogmatic relativists” (“Postmodernists”) and the “transcendent cynics” (what Postmodernists call “Modernists”) who are doomed to collapse into them. In short, we need people to get on board with the idea that doing something, in general, in every context, is both possible and necessary, neither useless nor hopeless.
I was just trying to specify it as a term, and this almost definitionally means they are neo-Epicureans, no?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Well, as these sample populations didn't exist in the 2000's, only around some kind of, dare I say, 'fad' with avoiding accepted existential norms. But, I think it's mostly economical, in how these things are becoming possible?
In that they’re altruistic hedonists, and generally anti-superstitious, “materialist” pragmatists, they’ve definitely got a lot in common yeah, though I don’t know that that’s enough on its own to define them.
Quoting Shawn
I’m not sure what you mean about those populations not existing in the 2000s; the religious have been around for tens of thousands of years, the radical skeptics for thousands, the “Modernists” for hundreds and the Postmodernists for decades.
You are right though that this kind of progress against the oldest of foes like death itself are only now on the verge of technological possibility, but striving to make them technologically possible should have been a driving goal for the whole history of humanity.
Well, I suppose the question is going to be whether just due to recent events T-Humanism is having a fad or whether at any other point in history was this promoted. I mean, alchemists or the search for the Holy Grail were things Kings only got access to, yet nowadays in a short period of time we might see these things become a reality that can be bought at a sufficient price.
Now, the question would be, would you jump on?
There a many arguments for and against.
Couple of ones against here:
Does the threat of, and inevitability of death make the act of living life more beautiful / meaningful?
Or, would we eventually become bored and nihilistic immortals? What could that then lead to? Detachment? Desensitization? Would we "act out" because of said boredom? Would we "act out" in destructive ways?
Overpopulation would also become a major problem. We would need to look at expansion beyond one planet, surely.
Or, in the case of life extension as opposed to actual immortality, you'd have the problem of huge ageing populations. Couple of points on the consequences of an ageing population:
1. Creates a decline in the working age population and can have detrimental effects on the economy - e.g. decline in productivity, higher labor cost, reduced business expansion and reduced international competitiveness. Will a supply shortage also push up wages? Will this lead to wage inflation?
2. Increase in health care costs. This is already a major problem in many parts of the world, including mine (Australia). This is due to an increase in the dependency ratio as you get older, with all the co-morbidities and chronic diseases that may come along with it, compounded further by the shortage in the working age population group (point 1).
E.g. Population projections for Australia suggest that there will be four million people aged between 65–84 years by 2022 with rapid acceleration of some age groups (over 65, over 85) in the next ten years...The Government spends around $10 billion per annum on the aged care sector, with around two-thirds of this expenditure directed to residential aged care...due to population ageing, demand is expected to outstrip supply in the next 30 years. Irrespective of where or by whom aged care is provided, Australia is facing a serious workforce shortage..
Source:
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BriefingBook43p/ageingpopulation
In my opinion, extending life expectancy further and / or prolonging it indefinitely has its fair share of philosophical and practical problems. It would be irresponsible to strive for this goal without planning for and resolving the issues that it would create. Or are we assuming a technological utopia here?
I only read a little from Pearce's thread and although he is obviously extremely intelligent, I don't take transhumanism too seriously. It seems to me that they over-estimate what science can do. Then again, I may be very wrong on this topic.
Death is a problem. Perhaps it's the ticket necessary for life. The problem if human beings could live forever, would be boredom. Irrespective of all the technologies that could be offered as a solution for boredom, I think that it can't be overcome in the long term.
I'm not sure I can articulate the intuition behind my argument, but that would be the problem more than death itself. I suppose transhumanists might do good in what they're after, but something about living forever or for a very, very long time is suspect to me.
Antibiotics & public health infrastructures since the late 1800s, for instance, have been doing the job (e.g. average life expentancy has at least doubled, IIRC, in less than a century). Sterilized obstetrics, family planning, (eugenics), cryogenics, early cancer detection, etc since the middle of last century. The only "problem" is humanity's impatience with how gradual developments are and so far the lack of "radical breakthroughs" for solving "the death problem" once and for all.
:up: However, the connection between transhumanism and natalism isn't quite as straightforward as one might think. Immortality is quite obviously going to lead to a huge space/resource crunch - how many people can the earth sustain (carrying capacity of a habitat). Both antintalists and transhumanists may want to stop procreation but obviously for entirely different reasons. - for one, it's too painful, for the other it's overcrowding.
That is a good point. I guess there have always been a mix of defeatism, and Absurd defiance of the so-called “inevitable”.
Quoting Shawn
I’m personally hesitant to be an early adopter of any new technology, and especially hesitant about invasive medical interventions, but if the time comes that it’s either risk a new technology or die, life is worth the risk. I just hope I live long enough to get to make that choice.
Quoting CountVictorClimacusIII
No.
Quoting CountVictorClimacusIII
If so, that is another problem to be fixed. We’re talking about transforming the whole human experience for the better, not just prolonging it as it already is. We could fix boredom etc too, make it so that everyone is always happy just to be alive and wondrously fascinated with whatever is going on at the moment, though still to varying degrees depending on the situation.
Quoting CountVictorClimacusIII
If so, that’s a good thing. Labor is undervalued right now.
Quoting CountVictorClimacusIII
Not assuming one, but aiming for one. “Utopia” shouldn’t be a dirty word; we should be aiming for utopia, but in a practical way. You do raise other problems that will need addressing, but better to survive to face those problems than just die so that we don’t have to face them.
Quoting Manuel
Boredom is a product of the brain, and a fairly basic one too. If our technologies include making changes to how our brains work, curing boredom should be simple. Not by making new stuff to entertain us, but by letting us not get bored with stuff we already have, letting us feel happy and grateful for all the good things we have no matter how long we’ve had them.
Quoting TheMadFool
Assuming about half of the current world population do not already have children, if all of them had one child, as did each of their children, etc, and starting now nobody ever died again, global population would stabilize at around 1.5 times what it currently is in about half a century (technically still growing at a rate of like 0.5 people per decade globally, but that’s negligible for a very long time). Out of 8b people currently, the 4b who aren’t parents yet have 2b kids right now (and we’re up to 10b), then in 20ish years those 2b have another 1b kids (and we’re up to 11b), and then 20ish years later they have another half a billion (and we’re up to almost 12b now), and then the last half billion are slowly filled in over many more generations.
I was rather troubled by some of what I read on transhumanism because it would seem to be about extending life as far as possible for certain people. As it is people are living so much longer, and I am not against this, but it does affect the use of resources. I really don't know how long the transhumanists would wish to extend life too, whether it would be another 100 years or what, because it seems a bit vague. At one point, in the discussion, I noticed a remark that by the next century most people will be transhumanists, and that made me wonder how that would stand with the ongoing environmental crisis. There would be so many people on the earth.
It is interesting that the transhumanists are wishing to extend life indefinitely and, on the other hand, antinatalism is suggesting that it is better for future generations not to be born at all. I think that there may be a link, which is about maintaining life indefinitely for the living with total disregard for future generations.
As far as the future of humanity is concerned, there are so many problems, climate change and the likelihood that petroleum will run out. The death of the human race stands out as a mythical possibility, although I don't know if this would ever be global. Transhumanism appears to be wishing to overcome death, for individuals. At one point, David Pearce spoke of head transplants and I wondered how far would human beings go to try overcome death. Is the human ego so intent on continuing indefinitely? I try to keep an open mind to transhumanism but I do wonder about the underlying rhetoric of transhumanism, and I won't be queuing up for a new head when my own becomes worn out.
I was thinking about the issue of suicide when I wrote my own response, because I was reading an exploration of the topic in Camus's 'The Rebel' yesterday. Camus was speaking of the idea of metaphysical rebellion, and, in some ways, both transhumanism and suicide appear as forms of metaphysical rebellion, one in protest against death and one in protest against life.
Seems relevant although I don't know how you'll take it.
[quote=Albert Camus]There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.[/quote]
Any ideas what the absurdist Camus meant? What's the difference really between someone who takes faer own life and someone who doesn't? We're all, as you once jocularly put it, in the same boat! I have a rejoinder to that - some are in first class and the rest of us are in third class and that might be the difference between life in the lap of luxury, intoxicated as it were with the pleasures life has to offer and thus addicted, we want to live...one more day, just one more day while those at the bottom, who barely manage to scrape a living are much relieved by thanatos knocking on their crumbling doors if they have on that is.
My own personal superstition religion, which is proof of nothing, goes like this...
Consider a baby, and a very old person. Both exude some kind of undefinable "specialness". In my personal superstition religion, that's a taste of the "other side" leaking over in to this world around the edges.
Or, if you prefer, consider the act which evolution declares the most important, procreation. At the moment of orgasm everything we consider to be "me" is totally obliterated, and we couldn't be happier about it. Except that, um, we are in that moment in some place beyond mere happiness. In my personal superstition religion this is reality rewarding us for trying to create new life, with a little taste of death.
And anyway, most of us are mostly dead most of the time already. We spend most of our time on this Earth not focused on reality, but on our thoughts about reality, an immeasurably smaller cardboard cutout imitation of the real thing.
One is dead, and the other isn't?
Did I win anything?? :-)
Did you factor in exponential population growth? You need to be careful when you use math to make predictions. :point: Mars Climate Orbiter Once bitten twice shy but...there's a sucker born every minute.
You won the prize but you may not like what for. :lol:
Dissolution of the material body is inevitable.
Those that are scared or paranoid about death invent all sorts of narratives to avoid it. Do you want to avoid sleep as well!!??
Lack of self esteem,hubris and ruling class materialism causes folks to invent narratives that would make Terry pratchett blush.
Seems like a religion shaped hole...
:-) :-)
If every person has one child, as I stipulated, then population doesn't grow exponentially, it grows... logarithmically? Sorry it's 4AM and I should sleep. The whole point is that people can keep having kids, but so long as they have kids at below "replacement" levels, then it doesn't matter if the old generation stays around without getting "replaced", the total population converges to some limit instead of diverging to infinity. (If the old generation was still dying, then population would instead be shrinking, as it is in many first-world populations).
And his answer to that question was "Fuck that noise, suicide is for quitters... and make-believe fairy-tales are for quitters, too."
There's an odd sort of reality of life which is almost a sort of paradox. The individual living being in the extreme complexity of its existence, as a delicately balanced organism, is very susceptible to death. We all run the risk of dying on a daily basis. Death may be waiting for you around any corner, or curve. But life in general, as a beautiful vast array of all sorts of different organisms, is extremely robust, and resilient in consequence to the occurrence of any possible extermination events.
The beauty of life is found in its diversity, and this provides its strength. Take a look at all the different colours of flowers there are, and think about how difficult it would be to produce such an extensive array. And that's just one simple property, colour.
The fragility of the individual, although it results in the death of each and every one of us, is not a weakness however, because this is the means by which life tests all the different boundaries of the the environment which it inhabits, thereby producing all the diverse individuals which provide its overall strength. We ought not seek to limit diversity, because that would be a self-imposed weakness, making the vulnerability of the individual, universal.
Antinatalists recognize that creating children with a progressive genetic disease is morally problematic. Aging ravages and then kills its victims. But “hard” antinatalists haven’t faced up to the nature of selection pressure. Inevitably, natalists will inherit the Earth. So I’d urge antinatalists to swallow hard and embrace the transhumanist agenda. Defeating involuntary aging, death and suffering may take centuries. Yet as far as I can tell, the project is scientifically and sociologically viable – just dauntingly ambitious.
Unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, mature humans can rationalise and practise adaptive preference formation (aka "sour grapes"):
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/americans-live-forever-immortality-study-b1862042.html
(“Only a third of Americans want to live forever, with men more likely than women to take ‘immortality pill’ Responses varied based on the age a person would be “frozen” at if they were given immortality")
Barring revolutionary breakthroughs, I’m less optimistic than Aubrey de Grey about timescales for defeating aging:
https://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/story/is-there-a-cure-for-aging
But even if we don’t personally benefit, I think we have a responsibility to ensure that our successors don’t undergo the miseries of senescence and bereavement.
Quoting David Pearce
Is it rational to seek to eliminate death in the absence of any proof that life is better than death?
It seems nature has made a firm decision that death is an important part of reality. Every single creature ever born has died. And we are smart enough to over rule nature on this point?
The issue is sustaining being grateful for a very, very long time. I'd think we'd need a different type of brain to be able to do that.
Only mass 'biological immortality' has Malthusian consequences, and so this prospect would be accessible exclusively to "elites & 1%ers" unless, however, a nonbiological alternative (e.g. "mind uploading" ...) can be developed.
An eye-opener. Thanks for making me aware of other...less conventional...ways we could immortalize ourselves. A time will probably come when immortalizing someone is going to shift from the familiar - books, statues, buildings, foundations, etc. - to the novel - mind uploading, consciousness transfer, and other future tech means of extracting the mind out of the brain, preserving it and moving it to a new medium.
But the problem, to quote Wittgenstein, is that "Death is not an event in life". Even if we share a Benatarian pessimism about the human predicament, we should have compassion for aging humans tormented by increasing decrepitude and their own mortality – and the loss of loved ones. Defeating the biology of aging is morally imperative.
In contrast to Darwinian life, transhuman life will seem self-evidently wonderful by its very nature.
Yeah, but "life", by which you presumably mean the process of evolution, is dumb. It needs diversity to survive because it cannot and does not predict the future. We're not so limited and it does us no good to mystify evolution.
Besides our culture has already sidelined evolution, regardless of there still being genetic recombination.
Out of psychological curiosity, do you think this is an unconscious process in the field of medicine, that people want to live longer, yet docilly accept death as an eventuality? I mean, I know that the great transformation of the industrial era resulted in this doubling of lifespan; but, what's inherently driving it forward?
I'm not too sure if the Malthusian explosion is really a phenomenon that humanity would experience if overcrowding occurs, whatever that means.
This sounds very much like a sentimental assertion, or a coin flipping problem. Isn't the issue then to enhance life rather than obey norms about how it happens or proceeds?
That's an interesting question. Is meaning important to continue living a wholesome life, I think, yes.
I think the issue is perplex. In some manner antinatalism doesn't need convincing, as much as living longer also doesn't need convincing, and yet as you say the natalists inherent the Earth.
What do you think about the relationship about evaluating life itself for the antainatalist and transhumanist?
Whaddaya mean? The Malthusian Trap
Sorry, I just don't believe in the Malthusian Trap.
I think that I really know some people who wish to live forever. I believe that people have varying degrees of ego strength. Some barely have enough to carry on at all, because they have been broken by harsh experiences. With the people who really seem to wish to live forever,I do wonder how this would change in the face of adversity. Regarding the transhumanists, I can't believe that the truly extended life is not going to come without a few nasty side-effects.
As for people per se, we don't want to die – no living thing "wants" to cease living – and we mostly live in denial of our own personal death even as we're constantly reminded of it by others dropping dead all around us daily. Mortal means awareness that you can die at any moment and will die eventually. Thus, religiosity and spirituality, magic and mysticism, arts and myth (E. Becker).
"The future is uncertain but the end is always near."
Even an "immortal" is mortal as well as finite and uncertain: death, or worse, by misadventure is an ever-present prospect (re: biological immortality), decisions always exclude other choices/options and, not only are there always known unknowns, the future is necessarily constituted by unknown unknowns. People reflexively don't want to die – however, we should be careful what we wish for – yet there are worse things than ceasing to be, no doubt, such as desperation to quit life (for whatever reason/s) but we cannot because we're immortal. If and when "immortality" is technologically achieved, let's hope it comes with an easy-to-flip, easy-to-reach (though secret, or subjective / interior) off-switch.
:up:
Do you think there's a duty to reduce deaths in the world due to aging or does this entirely rest with the individual?
Yup. Personally, I never understood the quest for immortality.
Suppose transhumanism is obtained by a group who eventually become the only living group of individuals. This group thereby perfects the ideal of self-preservation at the individual level, such that there is no destruction, decay, or ill that can naturally occur for any individual within this group. How would this resolve the problem of interpersonal conflict, including activities such as sabotage, betrayal, manipulation, enslavement, rape, theft, and so forth, to not mention the yet viable possibility of murder - even if it only occurs through the extermination of a program that was once an uploaded consciousness? To unendingly live with the possibility of such activities, if not their actuality, doesn’t seem to me to resolve anything.
The notion of salvation via immortality of the self - even if the goal were to not be illusory, this as transhumanists claim - doesn’t seem to remedy the issue of undue suffering. I’m reminded of Sartre’s “No Exit” here. (For the record, I’ve never been able to buy into the notion of heaven as a place devoid of suffering for similar reasons. Nor am I an anti-natalist.)
Quoting 180 Proof
:100:
From Gilgamesh to "The Tower of Babel", "El Dorado" to Frankenstein, "Muad'Dib" to "Lestat" ... what greater quest could there be? Transhumanism is just the latest "Tree of Knowledge" ideology for undertaking anew that species quest for (or back to?) the "Tree of Life". Of all the windmills on our horizons, none seem to loom larger than 'my death' to go tilting at ...
Quoting 180 Proof
I don't want to live forever, just don't want to die before physical laws, so to speak, pull the plug.
:death: :flower:
For the physicalist, I don’t know. Although I could envision a quest for global harmony a la good old fashioned humanism, one that is accordant to nature as-is.
For the non-physicalist, such as for them Buddhists that maintain self to be a metaphysical (rather than physical) illusion, the experience of a self can be conceived of as that what brings about - hence in some sense causes - samsara, the latter in part being unending vacillations of pleasure and pain that equate to dissatisfaction. Here, the ultimate quest can be the liberation from this unending dissatisfaction via, for lack of better words, some means of transcendence, whereby the experience of a self ceases - this while not leading to oblivion. Yea, I know, not to be taken seriously by physicalists (although physicalists can also maintain the self to be an illusion). And this is just one person’s interpretation of Buddhist aspirations. Nevertheless, here the ultimate quest precludes the notion of a perfected preservation of the *self* and, hence, immortality of the self. Arguably leading to more selfless behaviors while in no way being nihilistic.
I'm not convinced that that's true, but if it is: okay, let's make ourselves a different type of brain, and in the mean time survive long enough to do so.
Quoting David Pearce
:up: :100:
And some of us, myself included, have been fortunate enough to experience glimpses of what that "self-evidently wonderful by its very nature" view of life is like. They're called various things like "peak experiences", "mystical experiences", or "religious experiences". I've had them here and there over the course of my entire life, but it wasn't until 2019 that I experienced a prolonged period of the opposite kind of thing -- an unprovoked nearly year-long period of abject existential dread -- that I realized the significance of them.
That there's something entirely interior to the mind, regardless of actual circumstances in the world around oneself (though it can also react to them, of course), that's something like a... I think of it visually as a water pipe connected to a basin, where the basin is sort of one's emotional being and the water is wellness.
And the pipe can either drain water out so that no matter how much emotional wellness gets poured in from the outside it's never enough and one feels helplessly emotionally empty and like nothing could ever possibly make life worth living no matter how good things might be outside in the actual world, like just living at all is inherently awful and nobody should ever be subjected to it.
Or, the pipe can pump water in instead, to fill up the basin to overflowing, so that no matter how much of an emotional drain things outside are, one is still always filled up with emotional wellness, so just being alive at all feels worthwhile, and whatever problems there might be outside, one feels happy to go out and fix them, to take that overflowing well of wellbeing and pour it out onto the rest of the world until everything outside is as good as one feels inside.
I take it that part of the transhumanist vision is to enable everybody to feel the latter way all the time, and make it so that nobody ever has to feel the former way.
Quoting Shawn
I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but the point is very much to enhance life, yes. To make life feel worth living, and to enable people to continue living it.
https://www.alcor.org/
I'm hesitant to say that living longer isn't going to automatically make you feel happy; but, rather that long term plans of living that do not incur death are going to be hard to determine whether one wants to pursue new things.
Death anxiety is quite a strong motivator, but, once you eliminate it, what do you think would be the new prevailing motivator to pursue in life?
I'm unsure if I understand you again, but I didn't mean to suggest that living longer will automatically make anyone happier (though relieving death anxiety is something that could make people suffering from it happier). Making people happy just to be alive is a separate thing from enabling them to continue to be alive.
Quoting Shawn
I think most people are already motivated by things other than avoiding death. Having a persistent fixation on death is psychologically abnormal and unhealthy; a normal healthy mind finds a variety of things interesting and meaningful and pursues them for their own sake, not just because they will be instrumentally useful in avoiding eventual death.
Also, supposing that one needs a specific motivation is kind of putting the cart before the horse, and indicates a mentality where, in that metaphor I used in my last post, the pipe drains rather than fills, so you need to find something to keep filling yourself up with. If we can instead let everyone have a pipe that fills them to overflowing, it's not a question of needing something to motivate you, because your motivation comes from inside: it's just a question of where you're going to pour your overflowing positivity, and anything at hand will do.
Learn things just for the sake of learning them. Accomplish things just for the sake of accomplishing them. Teach others for the sake of teaching, and help them accomplish their goals too, just for the sake of helping. Reach out to harness all the resources and information of the universe, and then spread them far and wide to everyone else too. That project is probably infinite, but even if it's not, then you can just rest contented at having finally "won at the universe", and look back happily on all that you've learned and achieved, contented forever after.
No.
Why not?
If so, that is another problem to be fixed. We’re talking about transforming the whole human experience for the better, not just prolonging it as it already is.
Fixed. How?
If so, that’s a good thing. Labor is undervalued right now..
Sure. How would that change with several billion immortals? - actually, if estimates are correct, about 11.2 billion at peak:
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth
Not assuming one, but aiming for one. “Utopia” shouldn’t be a dirty word
Fair. So, what does this realistically achievable and sustainable technological utopia actually look like? How are the very real problems I've described (and others), going to be solved?
Personally, I find it difficult to see transhumanism being more than just a positivist, simplistic, model-driven, conceptual / analytic perspective on reality. Sure, models are great, but they lack a holistic, and therefore realistic, grasp of the complexity of our actual reality. Models after all, are full of assumptions.
Why would it? What is meaningfulness or beauty, and why would the inevitability of death add that to life?
Quoting CountVictorClimacusIII
Of course I don't know all of the details of exactly how to fix everything, or I would be out there fixing it myself. We don't even know the details of how to go about living forever yet. But the topic is whether it's worth trying to live forever, and if the reason not to try is that there could be problems as a consequence of succeeding, the possibility of overcoming those problems is the natural counterargument. We're talking about what to aim for, not the specifics of how to get there.
Quoting CountVictorClimacusIII
Interesting! In the same post you're responding too I made a back-of-my-ass calculation on what world population would stabilize at if right now a cure for mortality was found and also from now on everybody had exactly one child, and I estimated about 12 billion. Pleasing that an actual data-driven estimate is so close, too.
I was struck by this and related comments in your posts.
What, if anything, then makes lobotomizing oneself bad, granted that it will lead to greater degrees of unperturbable happiness for the remainder of one’s days? Assume that the lobotomized individual will be well taken care of and will live a longer than average life. Else, that they will immortally live as such.
Simply being happy to me seems to be an insufficient goal. As another type of example, mass murders who've committed and continue to commit "perfect crimes" can also be said to live happy lives, and if they obtain immortality while so doing they'd be so much the happier. Should we then change our brains into such mindsets?
I'm not sure. I think I'm brining into focus the issue of knowledge of living longer, going to college at 40 or resuming a job at 60... These are the unknowns I'm trying to grapple with in regards to how life would look like for some person with a 200 year life-span...
Quoting Pfhorrest
All true, but that's just hard to find an occupation that would be inherently rewarding, apart from perhaps book reading, education, and work, which are paramount to life, no?
Yes, well that's the best I found on the internet. It is mostly according to their statement "vitrification".
I don't think that that can be granted. The peak experiences I have had, which are what I imagine is more in the ballpark of the aim of transhumanist mind-alteration, feel the opposite of what I imagine a lobotomy would feel like, assuming a lobotomy would feel something like drunkenness or sedation. During a peak experience I not only feel more calm and happy and tranquil and accepting but I also feel smarter and more aware of both myself and the world around me, I take passionate interest in everything and find it all wondrous and fascinating, and I want to learn and to create, to find and build connections between everything. It's both peace and joy. Just being numbed into emotional painlessness, if that's what a lobotomy would even do, sounds like a much less desirable state of mind than that; even setting aside the dis-utility of being unable to take care of oneself, as in your scenario.
Quoting javra
Murderers are making other people unhappy (the people who get murdered, and anyone who might miss them), even if they never have to answer for their crimes. It's therefore better that they not murder, and so better that they not want to murder, and it would be worse if our brains were made such that we wanted to murder too. Given that someone already is a murderer, though, it's not somehow an improvement of the situation if he's a really unhappy murderer rather than a cheerful murderer.
I grant what you're saying. What I was alluding to, through both examples, is that what you are grateful for experiencing and seem intent to further experience is what a layperson might term a heightened, or raised, consciousness. Which encompasses far more than mere happiness and longevity of lifespan. And without which happiness and longevity, I'll argue, lose their value.
The ideal of manipulating brains so as to invoke heightened consciousness, however, presupposes that one already knows a) what the zenith of this heightened consciousness (if there is one) consists of and b) how to biologically alter brains to produce it; rather than, say, producing something akin to drug-induced altered states that deviate from such heightened consciousness. So, were one to have one's brain preserved in some manner after death and then restructured at some future point in time when such understanding might be obtained, the transhumanist brain-alteration that would occur would render the person to not be the you which you are now. Like altering the brain of a particular frog (for lack of a better example) so that it obtains the awareness of the average human, the being in question that would emerge from the operation would not be the initial being that craves immortality as the self it knows itself to be.
Maybe more succinctly, immortality of self requires a stagnation of selfhood; whereas, I'm thinking, mortality of self is required for the evolution of selfhood in general. Here, one grants other selves their moment in the sun just as past selves have granted you this opportunity. With each generation learning from the last.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I of course agree with this. But if an individual's happiness alone is the goal, on what grounds would it be better for the happy murderer - who obviously harms others - to not murder?
I'll again aim at raised consciousness being a good that excels the goodness of individual happiness. Nebulous as this notion of raised consciousness likely is, I'll nevertheless argue that it in part is where one finds portions of oneself in others and treats these others as extended aspects of one's intrinsic self. This raised consciousness thereby leads to empathy. But empathy can lead to one's suffering when others suffer. The greater one's general empathy, the greater the number of people whose suffering will impact one. So again, a mere individualistic happiness doesn't seem to suffice as an objective, for the happy murderer is far more happy than the person who holds empathy for not only people on the other side of the world (like children in Yemen) but for future generations yet to come (think global warming as an example).
With that in mind, there's a nuance to note about who benefits from this situation the most, meaning the rich and powerful. It seems to me that money can indeed provide for happiness if not realize it in the extension of one's life-span.
May I ask for your opinion, @David Pearce?
I was pondering over this and found a very apt description for what you describe on Wikipedia called the Hedonic Treadmill.
It seems to me that for the majority of people experience a deficit in happiness in that it cannot be granted easily or without any issues with regards to economics. Yet, it's my personal belief that throughout time, economics is finding a way to make happiness less scarce at affordable levels.
What do you think about the Hedonic treadmill?
Why would it? What is meaningfulness or beauty, and why would the inevitability of death add that to life?
It's a matter of perspective. We view these concepts in a subjective way, depending on a multitude of factors, for example, our unique historical, social and cultural contexts. So, how can a transhumanist approach then reliably take an objective stance on any of these concepts to then say, "ok, we can provide gradations of "bliss" in any number of ways "en masse" so nobody suffers, and we can all experience equal amounts of joy etc."
The way you view and experience joy or suffering, could be far different to how I view and experience joy or suffering. The human experience is uniquely individual in may ways. I don't see how transhumanism takes that into consideration.
We're talking about what to aim for, not the specifics of how to get there.
That's the problem, and what I alluded to in the final paragraph of my last point. It's idealistic to the point of being pure fantasy. Without tangible specifics on the how of doing things it's not realistically applicable. Let alone sustainable. It's basically just saying, hey don't worry about it mate, technology will sort everything out in the end for everybody. Don't worry about the nitty gritty, it's not important.
...I estimated about 12 billion. Pleasing that an actual data-driven estimate is so close, too.
The data driven estimate I provided arrives a state of unsustainability with out planet's natural resources. Some research suggests the Earth could only sustainably support roughly 2 to 3 billion people.
https://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/3_times_sustainable
https://worldpopulationhistory.org/carrying-capacity/
However, this number is contested. The article below suggests that the majority of studies settle around less than 8 billion (still well below the 12 billion suggestion).
https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/how-many-people-can-earth-actually-support
So what do we do with all these extra people? Especially if they're immortal.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for the evolution and progression of humanity as a species. To be all we can be. I just question schools of thought that don't provide specifics, and settle on blanket statements with questionable evidence to back up their claims.
It's not "the self" that is "immortal" – ageless or unaging – just the substrate upon which mind is instantiated. That substrate would be either organic or synthetic; mind (i.e. "the self") is a dynamic and continuous process, not a perdurant thing, that would supervene and output thoughts, feelings & experiences as long as its substrate (body) operated and did not age or dysfunction. "Perfect preservation of the substrate", I think, is what "immortality" consists in and thereby enables the continuity of self-awareness (mind).
I agree that it's a heightened or raised consciousness. But the value of that is that it's a more pleasant, more enjoyable, state of mind; and besides that intrinsic value it's also instrumentally valuable to higher functioning and so the pursuit of further value (like, say, continuing to live to experience such a heightened consciousness).
Basically, it's a kind of happiness, and a happier kind of happiness than a lobotomy, which was my point.
Quoting javra
From what I've read, some drug-induced states are basically the same, and there's even a current exploration into using low doses of psychadelics to treat depression because they cause exactly that opposite feeling of everything being hopeless and meaningless. The brain is a physical thing, and I would expect that whatever transhumanist intervention would improve our mental states would be a physical intervention, including a chemical once since our brains are electrochemical. (Post-organic mental substrates, if they become a thing, would of course need to have that implemented differently).
Quoting javra
Who ever said it was any one individual's happiness? It's everybody's happiness. Hedonists aren't (all) egotists.
Quoting javra
In my experience that's not the case, and though I've heard often that it is the case for many others, apparently it doesn't have to be since it seems not to be in my case.
One of the things that has somewhat consistently pushed me into peak experiences in my life is when emergencies happen to other people that I care about and I am able to do something to help. That's not to say that "it makes me happy" when people I care about suffer, but rather that the act of helping turns on that kind of "raised consciousness", which in turn feels good.
Case in point, my girlfriend's parents are both suffering some severe medical issues at the moment, girlfriend is having to take care of them both way more than she usually would be, and she's really stressed out and sad about all of that. I'm not happy that any of that is the case and if I could wave a wand and make it not the case I would in an instant. But because I'm currently unemployed I've had plenty of time to help their whole family out and take at least some of the stress off of them, and doing so pushes me into that state of peace and joy and overflowing positivity: I'm literally happy to help. I don't see them suffering and feel like suffering is thereby thrust upon me too, darkening my day, but rather I see them suffering and well up with love and caring, which feels good to me, not bad.
Quoting Shawn
I think that that's a good insight, connecting the hedonic treadmill to my notion of the "emotional drain pipe". The converse possibility of an "emotional fill pipe" is consequently a rebuttal to the use of the hedonic treadmill concept as an argument against hedonism more broadly.
Quoting CountVictorClimacusIII
Sure, which is why people are out there researching the specifics of how. What we're talking about is whether or not they should be doing that. Your position seems to be "it's not clear that you can succeed, so maybe you should stop trying". That's exactly the kind of defeatism I was talking about earlier. My argument isn't "success is inevitable", just "it's worth a try".
Quoting CountVictorClimacusIII
Either figure out a way to sustain them, on Earth or elsewhere, or else (if we fail at that) a lot of people will die. But the status quo is already "everyone will die". So what's the downside in trying?
The way I first stumbled into my manta/motto of "it may be hopeless but I'm trying anyway" was the last time I was employed, a little over a decade ago, where I was always hesitant to apply for many jobs because of fear of rejection, until it occurred to me: the worst that can happen is I won't get the job. But the status quo is already that I don't have the job. So, it can't hurt to try...
Oh! If that's how you're going to come at the issue, no problemo! Whatever floats your boat.
G'day!
How does stipulating the self to be contingent on material substrata deny the self's intent to preserve the substrata for the sake of the particular emergent self’s immortality (or perfected self-preservation)?
Quoting javra
--------
Quoting Pfhorrest
Everybody? Including the optimal happiness of all murderers? I'm not one to subscribe to this, maybe for obvious reasons. I have a hunch you don't subscribe to it either.
I thought @180 Proof had already addressed that adequately.
Quoting javra
People who are currently murderers should both be stopped from murdering and also be enabled to be optimally happy. Causing the murderers to suffer doesn't improve anything intrinsically, only instrumentally (and then still only arguably) as a means of getting them to stop murdering.
Punitive "justice" is just injustice. People suffering isn't good, even if those people cause other people to suffer.
In his post about the self being contingent on material substrata? How?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Here's one concrete example: Some humans have been known to lunge with knives at bystanders, such as in dark alleys, so as to gain cash that wasn't theirs. Lack of immediate punitive justice in such situations leads to bystanders being killed. In at least cases such as these, how would the punitive justice be injustice when it saves the lives of bystanders?
By "it" I assume you are referring to the notion of a self. Hence, the self which is specified in a situation is irrelevant to the notion of what becomes immortal?
Or is a self's desire for immortality illusory and only the material substrata which emanates this illusion is determinative with respect to the topic? If this is what you intend, I'll pass for now.
"it's worth a try"
Fair. I'm all for trying too. Trying with one or both eyes open is better than trying blind though. What could go right for humanity would be revolutionary, what could go wrong however, would be catastrophic. I'd argue for the trying to be done with some solid foundations - or trying responsibly / with appropriate due diligence.
Either figure out a way to sustain them, on Earth or elsewhere.
Elsewhere would probably be the way to go. If we assume that everything that transhumanism is trying to do could be possible some day, then we can also assume that extraplanetary colonization could also be possible to sustain us.
Oh, it looks like I somehow mixed up those two threads of conversation... I'm not sure what happened, but sorry about that. But to respond to your actual point that I mixed up with the different point: I don't see why one generation necessarily has to go away completely in order for another to "have their day in the sun" (modulo the question of how to sustain that many people at all), or how that relates to issues of selfhood. If I could quietly retire to a little cabin in the woods (or a virtual version thereof) and spend eternity learning everything there is to learn and helping to teach and guide anyone in need of it, I don't see how that would stop any new kids from having more or less the same individual childhoods, growing up, becoming their own people, having their own adventures, friendships, families, and eventually retiring to their own virtual cabins in woods or whatever suits them, just like they could if I was just dead and buried.
Quoting javra
You're talking about deterrence, which I did already admit was an (arguable) instrumental good that could come of it. I'm talking about whether it's intrinsically, not just instrumentally, good for such attackers to suffer. Say for instance it was shown that punishment did not have a significant deterrent effect, or just that other methods were more effective than deterrent punishment at preventing muggings. What if it was more effective to prevent muggings by helping the muggers solve whatever problems led them to need money so bad they'd kill for it? Wouldn't that be the better thing to do? Or would that be bad because then a "bad person" got rewarded instead of punished? I foresee that someone might say that that would encourage more muggings to get that help, but we could of course just make that help available on request, no mugging required, and easily solve that problem.
(I'm reminded of an incident several weeks ago where a homeless-looking man at a laundromat was throwing a fit and hitting one of the dryers, scaring several other customers. My girlfriend was with me and was really irritated by him, and complaining to me about him like how dare he ruin our laundromat experience like that. Meanwhile I figured he was angry that the machine ate his money and he probably didn't have any more and now had to deal with wet laundry with nowhere to take it. I wanted to just give him some change to make the situation better for everyone -- fix the guy's problem and calm him down for the sake of all the bystanders -- but the girlfriend and I split the cost of our laundry change, and she didn't didn't want to spend money on an "asshole" like him, even though we each independently have enough money to dry the poor dude's laundry tens of thousands of times over.)
Quoting CountVictorClimacusIII
I agree completely.
Quoting CountVictorClimacusIII
I have no objections to offworld living, but I do question the practicality and necessity of it. The middle of the Sahara, the South Pole, and the bottom of the ocean are all far more hospitable places for human life than anywhere that isn't on Earth. The technology that would be necessary for sustained human habitation anywhere besides Earth would also be sufficient to open up many, many currently uninhabitable parts of Earth to human habitation. Basically take your space station or Mars habitat or whatever you're thinking of, and just build it in the desert... and don't bother to launch it. Then people can just drive there instead of taking rockets. Much more convenient.
Circumvented? As in prevented entirely or otherwise postponed for hundreds of years? Peace and civility. Purpose and prosperity. The more you look around the world and at raw human nature and conflict you get kind of a "gazing into the abyss" effect imo. All the corruption, greed, strife, envy, rage, indifference, and violence, compounded by the fact many people will simply scoff at any such scrutiny and say "that's life pal" or "that's just human nature", really makes you hope for something greater.
The idea of an afterlife is exciting and encouraging. Not too encouraging one would hope.. but satisfactory enough to be content with the time nature gives us.
People have a inclination for this already. We want to stay fit, healthy, and avoid things that are hazardous to our existence.. usually. Most people will opt for surgery if it has a reasonable chance of success to prevent death or prolong life. So the seed is and has always been there.
I'm sure there's a clear divide between people who would "want to forfeit their natural body to live forever in a computer simulation (albeit one indistinguishable from reality)" and those who simply wouldn't mind taking a life-extending pill or maybe a small implant that slows aging and gives you a few extra decades to play around with. People do that already with vitamins and pacemakers.
This is hyperhumanism.
Quoting David Pearce
"6.4311 Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits."
Wittgenstein's quote indicates the logical inexpressibility of death as 'eternal oblivion' from the perspective of Tractatarian phenomenalism, which as a maximally empiricist theory of meaning is unavoidably both solipsistic and presentist. For such doctrines, all propositions about change, including so-called 'temporal passage', reduce to observational change relative to a present that only exists in the sense of a logical construct. The quote therefore doesn't appear relevant to arguments for defeating biological ageing, and if anything appears to undermine it.
As the quote indicates, presentists have no motivation to biologically preserve their own life for the purpose of avoiding eternal oblivion, given that they understand eternal oblivion to be nonsense. For the presentist, the present already is their immortality, implying that there isn't a moral imperative to prevent ageing. At most transhumanism offers the presentist a potential happiness-gradient following strategy for seeking a 'local optima' of happiness relative to their current circumstances. A presentist with an appetite for risk however, could rationally decide to abandon happiness gradient following and instead resort to nature's evolutionary search strategy, by committing suicide and hoping for a favourable rebirth, depending on his beliefs in karma.
Yes. Mastery of our reward circuitry will ensure the darkest depths of transhuman life are richer than today's "peak experiences".
Other things being equal, it's better to be rich than poor.
But compare e.g.
https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-happiness-report
The hedonic rank of Indonesia, India and Mexico is unintuitive, to say the least.
If we are morally serious about ending suffering, we'll need to tackle its biological-genetic roots.
In practice, almost all intellectual and moral progress depends on false belief, namely the existence of enduring metaphysical egos.
If pressed, one may disavow any such a belief:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#parfit
Such insights are fleeting.
... that committing atrocities or acts of kindness are identically psychologically motivated, no?
I am extremely unclear how long the transhumanists would try to extend life, and I am not really sure it would work completely, short of having a complete body replacement. My mother used to wonder how bodies would look in heaven, and I wonder the same about transhuman bodies. Would they look artificial, rather like steampunk robots?
A qualified version of psychological hedonism may be true. But the commission of atrocities is a function of ignorance. Full-spectrum superintelligences could impartially weigh all possible first-person perspectives and act accordingly.
It seems to me that things aren't as bloody and hellish as say perhaps 1500 years ago in the world.
I think times are at an all time low of violence and bloodshed.
Circumvented in the manner that to stave off death for as long as possible.
Speaking from my experience with peak experiences, one absolutely can be full of bliss regardless of what's going on outside of oneself, and yet still have sensible preferences between atrocities and acts of kindness.
It occurs to me now that perhaps this relates to another topic I'm commented on before: empathy as a supposed origin of morality. I've commented in the past about how I generally don't actually feel bad about other people's suffering, but nevertheless I'm completely committed to alleviating their suffering as much as I reasonably can, not because I'm emotionally driven by the need to stop this thing that's making me feel bad, but because I've intellectually reasoned that that is the thing to do.
Writing that out now, I can hear how that sounds like some cringey "hurr I'm a smarty who thinks with my intellect not with my feelings", but I can't think of a better way to put it. I literally don't feel bad for other people, but I still decide to help them anyway. So, there's some kind of motivation to commit acts of kindness rather than atrocities besides that atrocities feel bad.
Actually, now that I write that out, I realize that even though I don't feel bad at seeing other people suffer, I would feel very bad about causing other people to suffer on purpose. But even if it wasn't the case that causing people to suffer made me feel bad, if it merely diminished the degree of otherwise constant good feeling, that would still be a motive not to do it.
Yeah but, anecdotes aside, my reply addressed "mastery of the reward circuitry ..." with which any sort of "experience" happens and motivates seeking / reproducing it. Such "mastery" can turn any perception or behavior into a "peak experience". Any, or rather every "experience" – even boredom, even e.g. slow amputation without anaesthesia / pain-killer – because "experience" is output of perception-memory-biases through our "reward circuitry". Psychosurgery, it seems to me, that results in (btw, whose?) "mastery of the reward circuitry" would give every autocrat / theocrat a permanent hard-on.
The same technology could, of course, be used to different ends, that could have the consequences that you fear, but nobody here is advocating that.
:grin:
I here that.
For my part, I find that when people's ideas become a tangled confusion between the reality of science and of science-fiction, they do a grave disservice to the PR of empirical sciences, if nothing else.
Direct interventions to enhance emotional well-being could enrich everyone's default quality of life. For sure, whether we consider using drugs, genes or electrodes, such tools could also be abused. But we need a a serious ethical debate. Do we want to conserve our existing reward architecture indefinitely? Or aim for radical hedonic uplift?
In my work, I've focused on hedonic set-point recalibration (rather than crude happiness-maximisation) not least because recalibration is salably conservative. Thus if, for example, you're a rugged individualist and active citizen – or maybe even a natural rebel resistant to authority – then re-engineering yourself with a higher hedonic set-point won't make you docile.
Contrast the effects of long-term opioid administration or Huxley's fictional soma.
It's counterintuitive. But "disincentives for (i.e. intrinsic negative feedback of) antisocial and immoral behaviors" can play out just as effectively within the upper and lower bounds of even a vastly higher hedonic range than today's norm. Leave aside here my wilder transhumanist speculations on future life based on information-sensitive gradients of superhuman bliss. Focus instead on today's genetic outliers - "hyperthymics" with an unusually high hedonic set-point. OK, I don't know of any rigorous quantitative study to prove it, but there's no evidence that hyperthymic people are more prone to antisocial and immoral behavior than their neurotypical counterparts. Sure, people with mania are prone antisocial and immoral behavior. But that's because (as in chronic unipolar depression) their information-signaling system for good and bad stimuli has partially broken down.
Ethically speaking, I think we should aim for a hyperthymic civilization.
My mind is blown! What an awesome statement this is. This belongs into the category of assertions that upend established norms - ways of thinking that's become so ingrained in people that we can't, as some say, see past the majority opinion on them, that itself being a function of tradition, culture, mindsets, and so on. It appears that humanity has spent the better part of its existence on this planet either complaining about death or, some would say, doing something about it. In other words, there really was no doubt that, we were all 100% certain that, death was/is/will be a problem. I wouldn't go so far as to say mortality isn't a thorn in our side but, all things considered, some of us, like the OP, had the good sense to get up and ask, in a crowd convinced that the Grim Reaper is enemy no. 1, "are we sure?"
I won't go into the whys and hows Thanatos isn't the dreaded foe we make fae out to be; others will do a better job of it. Instead I'll tell you a thought-provoking joke (its a spinoff of another I listened to on TikTok). This is going to sound slightly wicked but I have no choice. The joke: We all want our enemies dead. That simply means we want death to, well, work for us and that, in a sense, simply means death is the enemy of my enemy and as the ancient proverb goes, the enemy (death) of my enemy is my [i]friend :rofl: Death could be a powerful ally, no? :rofl:
[i][url=https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cqUhO8IMyIY]"Everybody wants to go to heaven
But nobody wants to die"[/url][/i]
which is the essence of the transhumanist daydream.
That single sentence is the logic bomb designed to blow up in theism's achilles heel (the unverified/unverifiable nature of its claims); upon detonation, the blast radius should be big enough to obliterate the entire theistic world.
As for transhumanism, they, at the very least, are doing the utmost to keep it real! Kudos to them.
:scratches head:
To go to heaven in the religious sense you have to die. But the transhumanist is saying we can have a heaven on earth AND not die. So the lyric is inapt.
It'll probably take many many billions (trillions?) of dollar$ (or euro€) of discretionary spending to hoover up all the best, world-class, researchers around the globe working in hundreds of labs to meliorate mid/late-life crises of Bezos & co who are seriously financing the latest technotopian-crazed iteration of "Gilgamesh's quest" (which actually just might cash-out down stream ... :chin:)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/04/1034364/altos-labs-silicon-valleys-jeff-bezos-milner-bet-living-forever/
NB: If you're a functionalist-embodied cognitionist, then it's the substrate, baby! :nerd:
Quoting 180 Proof
Link to a sketched premise for a story where I link "cancer" to "immortality / longevity" as an unforeseen consequence (curse? blessing?). Definitely a biotech cautionary tale I wish I was smart (talented) enough to write.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/feb/17/if-they-could-turn-back-time-how-tech-billionaires-are-trying-to-reverse-the-ageing-process
I imagine the fail safe for being bored to death could be this .
Even the idea of not dying can lead us to have suicidal thoughts due to their paradox. When you are aware that our life is limited you tend to value it more
Most of the people don't know how to avail time. They are always wasting it on worthless things. Another paradox: feeling timeless could lead us to not use the time properly.
If you say so. That's not my interpretation. We lose memories, like dead cells, daily throughout our entire lives; ecology-situated, embodied subjective – phenomenally self-aware – continuity is, as far as I'm concerned, "the soul".
I don't think it's either noble or ignoble to want to live forever, but I can see the scenario becoming one where we're forced to go on, just because we won't be able to admit there's any justification for death.
I mean, look at assisted suicide...
But you won't have continuity in your system. People over 100 yr old would forget all their childhood. If you forget your childhood, who are you?
So in your system our souls would die to save our aging bodies.
I'd rather make children and die, than live forever and forget who I am in the company of other very old and forgetful people. I guess I just don't love old people the way I love children.
Once we've solved death and we become immortal, we can't have anymore children. Where's the space? So, just as the situation improves on a world, suffering becomes a thing of the past, natalism, paradoxically, stops being viable or reasonable. Odd that, given how the promise/guarantee of eternal life is, unequivocally, an invaluable gift you can bestow on the living.
Oh! But nostalgia is one of the most beautiful feelings of humans ever. It seems to be poetic and philosophical. Remember the classic Latin phrase: tempus fugit :flower:
I am interested in Transhumanist philosophies, and would consider myself a techno-optimist, for sure. And while I don't intend to live forever, I would like to live longer than is possible today. All of this is quite extropian, in my opinion at least.
Bret, I am jealous of how you see the life of long term distance. I am more existentialist (Kierkegaardian) on my own.
I think life is liveable when it is really worthy. It not depends on life expectancy
Guilty as charged.
Quoting 180 Proof
That would not be mine, as it would imply a world without children, and without novelty. In any case your memories would die, hence you would slowly die too. There's no escape.
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
Peter de Vries
Dear friends, I want to quote and share this phrase of Yukio Mishima. (?? ???) with you:
The Japanese have always been a people with a severe awareness of death. But the Japanese concept of death is pure and clear, and in that sense it is different from death as something disgusting and terrible as it is perceived by Westerners. :death: :fire:
Quoting Olivier5
Quoting Olivier5
:roll:
EITHER your immortals are allowed to have children, in which case overpopulation ensues after a few eons, OR they are not allowed to have children, in which case their world is not worth living in. It's a dead world anyway, where a child is never born.
:chin:
And thus they won't be able to have children... You see? So your assumptions aren't that different from mine.
I don't need much imagination to picture what you have in mind, Proof, as I too saw Jupiter Ascending.
This one sounds so interesting. I will check it out. Are you referring to Kazuo Ishiguro (????????) right? The Nobel Prize of 2017.
Quoting 180 Proof
That's death's nickname. Life is about the not-so-eternal springing of the radically new.
:fire:
Quoting Olivier5
Do you work in sales or advertising, O? How decadent (e.g. commodity fetish) of you ... :mask:
"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present." ~L'Homme révolté
No, I don't.
Any other deep interrogation of yours I can help you with?
Death, then, must be genius of the highest order! Life, then, a total schmuck!
Jokes aside, death can be a valuable ally against Algos (pain) unchained/unleashed: oh how welcome Thanatos must be in fiery hell!