Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

> We all find our own solutions to the problem death poses.

No! No body does this. People make up excuses. People spin death to be a positive, often under some guise of Deep Wisdom. People come up with all sorts of ways to cope with death, but calling any of them a solution is just false. Death is a vile, atrocious thing, the biggest enemy humanity has.

We don't say that slaves all found solutions to slavery. Or that everyone finds solutions to domestic abuse. Or solutions to dementia or Alzheimer's. Death is a far greater evil.[1] So how disgusting is it to say everyone finds a solution.

I admit the author probably didn't intend to imply this, but it's exactly that kind of thinking that we should be aware of and fight. Just because it seems inevitable, we should not make it socially acceptable to give up and view death as anything but the wickedness it is.

1: Yes there are atrocities worse than death, but many of those involve death, or are worse because of the limited timespans caused by death. Apart from having your mind destroyed, I'm guessing most things would be healed by rather long periods of time, than sufferers would prefer a period of suffering+long OK life, vs suffering+death.

View on HN

A world without death is a world where flowers never change into fruit, a world where fruit never change into a new plant. Remember there's a theory of the universe ending in heat death, where entropy is maximum, where there is no more change possible. To prevent death is to prevent change, and you bring about a world, in the long term, becomes changeless, like a giant museum, flowers and fruit and plants stay in the same state and never age, caterpillars never turn into butterflies, where squid never mate and reproduce, everyone immersed in their VR, day after day, for eternity. Philosophically, what difference is that to the heat death of the universe then?

The experience after death is exactly the same as the experience before birth. Was it a vile, atrocious thing you weren't born until you were? Death is about returning to that state. The disintegration of your mind is the mirror image of the creation of it. A world where you have left without right, top without bottom, beginning without end is like the universe before the big bang, or the universe after the heat death, where we, you, me, and everything else, is returned to being one.

Lengthening life span? That's a different matter. But I can tell you, you will never stop death from happening. It's perfectly acceptable to accept death will happen, and more isn't always better. ;)

Sorry if it wasn't clear I was referring to death of intelligent life.

Heat death of the universe is definitely a problem but for a later time. I think having lifespans on the terms of millions of years or longer is qualitatively different than what we have now.

I don't find the before-birth argument very compelling. I just don't see how it's relevant.

You want society to view death as being wicked rather than acceptable. Since death is inevitable (either on millions of years or a decades scale), and it isn't that horrible of a state to return to anyway, viewing death as a kind of wickedness is like telling a Christian to accept he is going to hell, and make life miserable. I think it's important for people to be allowed to accept the inevitable, to accept they will return to a state that isn't that vile or wicked.

I just shake my head at:

> Since death is inevitable (either on millions of years or a decades scale)

Think of the difference even a single order of magnitude would make. The Founding Fathers would still be here to settle the arguments about what exactly they meant in this or that amendment when the Supreme Court argues guns or personhood, for instance.

They fact that you completely disregard the difference between decades and millions of years because if someone is eventually going to die anyways, it's all the same....just wow.

> The Founding Fathers would still be here to settle the arguments about what exactly they meant in this or that amendment when the Supreme Court argues guns or personhood, for instance.

Would we really want that? They would be elevated to an even greater stature than they are now when they're dead, greater than what they probably wanted individual men to be in the government they devised[0]. They could become corrupted, or change their minds, so that "what the Founding Fathers wanted" becomes an actual moving target, rather than just something that can appear to change by us debating it. What's the point of writing a law if you plan to indefinitely query the writer on what they "really meant"? Why have a representative government at all, if the Founding Fathers are so great that they did everything perfectly and they are still around to run it for us?

Maybe it's better that people die, and all we're left with is our memories of them, or written statements of their ideas or accounts of their deeds. We pick up what we find useful from them, and have the freedom to discard what isn't. Every political movement has a built-in time limit based on the deaths of its most powerful leaders. Greater diversity in people and thoughts grows, because we don't have the luxury of keeping them the same forever. Many mistakes will die with their creator, and everyone else can move on.

Longer lives would amplify the negative effects of human frailties, just as you hope it would amplify the positive effects of smart and noble people. It's possible the Founding Fathers' ideas were only good for 50-100 years around their lives, and that as rigid adults they would be unable to formulate better versions for the changing world.[1]

The world would be a vastly different place without death, or with much longer lives. I think it's naive to simply assume it would be better. I've explained some reasons it could be worse, but I'm open to more detailed analysis of why it would be better (for humanity collectively, not just the recipients of longer lives.)

[0] Though to be fair, maybe they would have thought differently if they planned to live hundreds, thousands of years.

[1] Assuming immortal or very long-lived people become "set in their ways" as we do now. How much of this is internally self-generated, based on watching our "biological clock" tick away? To be fair, maybe we would behave differently in this respect if we had more time. Or, maybe we would just reach peak open-mindedness (or whatever the metric) at 300 years instead of 30.

I understand the practical issues with older generations lasting forever, but I think it's better for society to place limitations on these matters, rather than nature placing the permanent limitation of death.

Presidents have 4 year terms. Why can't people have 80 years where they're allowed to vote, and then lose that right forever? Or maybe they can be sent to a separate society where they're permitted to vote and debate things that apply to their own sphere, but must still follow universal laws set by a "central society", to prevent deeply immoral actions. For example, maybe alcohol is permitted to be permanently illegal in their society, but they still aren't allowed to lynch people or prosecute people without due process.

These are certainly very difficult problems to solve, and there are many counter-arguments to that particular. But I think there are solutions to these issues other than death, and I think many of those solutions are much preferable to death.

A society that adapts to become biologically immortal will find their own ways to adapt to dealing with zeitgeists and progress.

>A society that adapts to become biologically immortal will find their own ways to adapt to dealing with zeitgeists and progress.

I don't think so. That is just wishful thinking. Our current society cannot even produce leaders who are remotely capable of solving current problems. And a group of immortals, once in power, cannot be trusted to not try to remain in office indefinitely using the powers they already have. They can subtly influence society and people with their power so that they can continue in power without actually rigging the elections..

Hopefully their immortality would put in perspective the usual bullshit most politicians care about. Short-term decisions and wealth-seeking is in a big way driven by both short life and short office terms.

True, it's a bit idealistic. I absolutely agree there is serious potential for mis-use here.

However, I think the benefits of life longevity are very serious, and if we can overcome some of the issues they cause, we should do everything in our power to find new ways to extend life longer and longer (or at least provide it as an option for people).

In the next 100+ years when this starts looking a little more feasible, hopefully people will have better perspective and insight into these issues, and will establish ways of allowing society to progress and not be anchored by a group of early-immortal voters, legislators, or perhaps tyrants.

>A society that adapts to become biologically immortal will find their own ways to adapt to dealing with zeitgeists and progress

I think that the adaptation phase would be a very turbulent one,because we would experience the giant gap between reality and our heritage. Most our motivators, values and culture in general are founded around the idea that we do not have that much time (think about stuff like taking care of others, parenthood, work-life balance, achievements etc.) Without the time constraints many of these would become obsolete. But they're "hard wired" inside our organisms. And would cause problems just like adrenaline rushes and other (once useful) reactions to stress cause problems today.

>Maybe it's better that people die, and all we're left with is our memories of them, or written statements of their ideas or accounts of their deeds. We pick up what we find useful from them, and have the freedom to discard what isn't. Every political movement has a built-in time limit based on the deaths of its most powerful leaders. Greater diversity in people and thoughts grows, because we don't have the luxury of keeping them the same forever. Many mistakes will die with their creator, and everyone else can move on.

Fantastic points. I was about to type something along the same lines when I saw your reply. You said it much better than I could have.

That's exactly the Deep Wisdom. Ask yourself - do you want to die? We'll all have your memories. Do you want your father or your mother to die, and if they already did, are you happy about it? Why were you mourning?

Death is bad, it's scary and meaningless, and we construct really complex and elaborate excuses to deal with it.

You're conflating wanting death and accepting that it will happen, in both the case of oneself and family/friends. You think that "acceptance" is some BS we cooked up because we had no other choice, and that's a fine position, but don't caricature acceptance as actively wanting death.

> do you want to die?

No. I also want an infinite supply of resources (for me, and for everybody else, why not), the ability to experience any scenario I can dream up with any people I want even if they don't want it, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. The inevitability of death is perhaps a classic denial, but there are infinite other ways you can't always have what you want. (At the risk of sounding defeatist, trite, and in favor of The Order of Things.) If you could wave a wand and force any person to love you, would it be meaningful? If you were guaranteed to get whatever you wanted in any other sphere? Maybe I'm rambling here, but the point is, how will removing death solve all the other problems that come with billions of autonomous agents with generally incompatible wills existing together in a single, inherently meaningless universe with (probably) immutable physical laws and finite time, matter, and energy?

OK, so solving death is an incremental improvement, and thus may be worth it to some... but perhaps I've described a reason not everybody is going to be obsessed with it -- it's just one form of a vastly large general problem.

Also, I'm wondering what "more people car[ing]" about eradicating death would look like to you. The article discusses "digitizing the brain", there are thousands of scientists and dollars spent on eradicating certain cancers and other diseases, and many other sciences that could be applied to this problem. You're welcome to fund/conduct your own research, but apparently other people have more pressing concerns.

> Maybe I'm rambling here, but the point is, how will removing death solve all the other problems that come with billions of autonomous agents with generally incompatible wills existing together in a single, inherently meaningless universe with (probably) immutable physical laws and finite time, matter, and energy?

> OK, so solving death is an incremental improvement, and thus may be worth it to some... but perhaps I've described a reason not everybody is going to be obsessed with it -- it's just one form of a vastly large general problem.

You answered it yourself. It won't. Removing death will just solve the problem of death. But having more time to live and study would probably be a big step in the direction of solving other problems.

> I also want an infinite supply of resources (for me, and for everybody else, why not), the ability to experience any scenario I can dream up with any people I want even if they don't want it, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.

Well, you can't get absolutely everything you imagine, but that doesn't mean it's not worth going after things you can. Getting rid of death is something we could get. Full omniscience and omnipotence maybe not, but a subset of it is something worth aiming for, and personally I am going to try. That's what science and technology is for - multiplying our power, both collective and individual.

If death is so noble and necessary, why should anyone have a problem with murder? Why should we bother trying to cure diseases? Do you think the world was twice as dynamic and full of vitality 100 years ago, when the global average life expectancy was half what it is today?

I don't think making people immortal would "prevent change" because there are plenty of kinds of change that don't involve ending a person's life without their consent. Is that not obvious?

Death happens, if not now then when entropy is at maximum, and birth happens too. Murder happens, and people angry at murders also happen. Diseases happen, and cures for diseases happen also. People go to work late happens, people go to work on time happens too. People fall in love and is rejected happens, and people fall in love and is reciprocated happens also. If you were to tell me what life is, that's life. That's vitality. You can have both left and right, good and bad, or nothing. There is duality, and then there is oneness, and you can't have one without the other. Life is duality, non-life is oneness. Maximum oneness is maximum entropy.

> If you were to tell me what life is, that's life.

That boils down to "life is stuff happening", which is true, useless, and does nothing to answer the question posed. It is trivially obvious that it's impossible to stop all death, or even all human death, so I think it's also obvious that what's being talked about is not the elimination of death, but the elimination of the current main cause of death, which is aging.

I was replying to MichaelGG's statement:

Just because it seems inevitable, we should not make it socially acceptable to give up and view death as anything but the wickedness it is.

As I said before,

    Lengthening life span? That's a different matter.

EDIT: Reply to below, that's a good explanation, thanks. I don't think I could come up with it so clear and succinct, if I could I would have!

Yes, I was trying to address specifically that I think you are arguing a points with is somewhat orthogonal to the current discussion, because both are using similar terms to mean different things. Your terminology is more correct (you are addressing death as a specific concept, and it's inevitability), while they are addressing age extension, possibly to it's logical conclusion a the end of the universe, but using "death" to denote that, when it's obvious there are other causes of death that cannot be stopped.

In other words, I think there is no real difference of opinion, just a difference in terms making it seem so. This appears to have been exacerbated slightly through your flowery description of your point, which I take to be: "Death of is impossible to stop in the end, and giving the false impression that it is may be harmful. That said, if we can retard it in humans to a large degree, that's useful. Additionally, death serves a useful purpose in many systems, so we shouldn't lose sight of this."

That's the current unavoidable state, yes. What if diseases could all be prevented though? Is life no longer "life" if an all-cure is produced?

>The experience after death is exactly the same as the experience before birth. Was it a vile, atrocious thing you weren't born until you were? Death is about returning to that state.

This argument never really re-assured me. I know it's most likely the case that that's what happens, but it brings me no peace of mind. The issue is not the state transition or the fear of "where I will be". My issue is the permanent loss of all potential future utility to oneself, to loved ones, and to the world at large. Before I was born, there was no concrete potential. After you are already alive, you are forever erasing proven potential.

This is why it can be ethical to kill an early-stage zygote, but it isn't ethical to kill an infant.

It is important to accept what is and isn't possible, but this discussion hypothesizes a world where what isn't possible can actually be possible. And in that world, I think biological immortality (no death by aging or disease) is far preferable to mortality. I think death is a powerful evil in this world, except in cases where someone chooses to die of their own free will.

I feel that you're strawmanning the original post by changing it from something like "death is necessary" to "death is good". Clearly there's a difference between a body becoming frail vs. somebody intentionally fatally injuring it. There's also a difference between stopping disease and stopping aging (well, at least if you define aging as not a disease, which I think is fair since AFAIK it has a different mechanism than disease.)

> there are plenty of kinds of change that don't involve ending a person's life without their consent

Is "without consent" another reference to murder, or just the fact that most people don't want to die? I assume the latter. How do you know that the kinds of change that do happen, aren't mostly because death as we know it exists and subtly influences all our decisions? Maybe there really would be less change without death.

This is an interestingly twisted line of thinking. RE aging vs. disease, how the two are different? Aging looks exactly like a genetic disorder that slowly kills you, the only difference being that this is the single disease we all share.

As for "death is good" vs. "death is necessary", I disagree and it looks to me that "necessary" comes out of trying to come to terms with the fact it's inevitable. You could argue in the past in the same way that diseases are necessary for various reasons, and yet we decided to cure them instead, invented antibiotics and hygiene and other medicine.

> Clearly there's a difference between a body becoming frail vs. somebody intentionally fatally injuring it.

Comparing to murder may not be the best. Try comparing to accidents. Both dying of old age and of an accident is unintentional. Yet as a society we accept the former while rejecting the latter. This is strange and IMO happens only because we know we can prevent accidents, but we don't know how to prevent aging. Yet.

We'd already know if more people cared instead of delegating the problem to deities or thinking it's Good to die because it's the Natural Order of Things.

We'd already know if more people cared instead of delegating the problem to deities or thinking it's Good to die because it's the Natural Order of Things.

And it's socially acceptable for people to choose that. People ought to be allowed to delegate the problem to deities, and they ought to be allowed believe in a myth for death, and allowed to believe it's part of the natural order of things.

We should never make it socially unacceptable.

I'm not advocating banning religion here, I'm only expressing my wish more people cared about solving death - especially those who just give up and accept it as "natural order". But still, this is just a social attitude that people acquire as they grow up, and with contemporary science and technology we should revisit that attitude, since we're finally capable of making concrete progress towards life extension.

Until we can easily send billions (at least) to other worlds, be it in Solar system or further away, death is +- necessary, like it or not.

This planet can feed many more people than it does now, without famines. But there is a limit, and looking how most people just don't care about these things as long as they get their paycheck and can watch their favorite TV show, let's be realistic.

Honestly, I don't see what's all the fuss with death - I am atheist/agnostic, so no hope for some eternal afterlife (but happy to be proven wrong :)). But in no way I find it disturbing or worrying, just human business as usual (there have been roughly 120 billions of human deaths already, and I am not special anyhow). It's actually quite nice to be perfectly OK with death internally, it brings peace with oneself and the world on more than one level.

I suppose I mean "necessary" more as "necessary to the way life works right now." Existence with immortality or very-long life expectancy could be completely different in ways we can't fathom, so I'm opposed to the idea of automatically accepting it as more desirable than what we have now. (Yes, this is a conservative and somewhat closed-minded position. If nothing else I hope people will come up with a detailed vision of what conquering mortality would look like, rather than just assuming it will be better.)

On the disease comparison, admittedly I was only thinking of viral and bacterial disease. Death is much like a genetic disorder we all have. On the other hand, isn't "health" usually defined as how a "normal" person's body works? If death is normal, then it can't be a disease. OK, enough semantic games. ;) I still see a qualitative difference between keeping a body healthy enough that it doesn't die until that universal process wears it down vs. something earlier.

I'm not sure I agree with the idea that society accepts death and rejects accidents. Is the grief of accidental death really universally distinguishable from that of old age or illness? On both sides, you'll have anger/sadness it happened so soon, or reluctant acknowledgement that it was going to happen some day and we can't predict it or prepare.

(The following is somewhat OT in the context of "uploading the brain":) On grievous injury, I don't know if commenters have been including vastly improved ability to recover from those in "immortality." I wonder though, if fatal injury were the only way to die, would it cause people to lock themselves away in a bubble to live forever, rather than risk dying? Maybe in the first stages of the science, the body will still get frailer as the years pass, so that sudden accidental death becomes more likely the longer you live. Would such an eternal sheltered existence, lived in constant fear of losing it one day, be worth having? If not, why do you want it? If so, why is it really that different than what you already have? After 1,000 years are you going to say "I've accomplished enough, experienced enough, that I am now more comfortable with possibly dying than I was when I was 25."?

Presumably the likelihood and number of possible accident scenarios will decrease over time, so maybe most people won't worry too much. Murder could still be a big fear/threat though.

I can understand that conservative view, and while I personally feel that "not dying" is obviously better than dying, one can't deny that a lot of systems that underpin our civilization depend, implicitly or explicitly, on the fact that people generally don't live longer than 100 years. Therefore just suddenly making people not age (or age much slower) would likely cause a very bad disruption and possibly lots of suffering. This topic needs to be discussed and "detailed vision of what conquering mortality would look like" needs to be specified, but personally I don't think those issues are a showstopper, or something that should discourage us from fighting death.

> I'm not sure I agree with the idea that society accepts death and rejects accidents. Is the grief of accidental death really universally distinguishable from that of old age or illness? On both sides, you'll have anger/sadness it happened so soon, or reluctant acknowledgement that it was going to happen some day and we can't predict it or prepare.

The difference is that an accident is treated as an unnecessary death. After it happens, changes are introduced to improve safety and to make sure such accident doesn't happen again. Yet in case of aging, we're just accepting death and moving forward, and only few of us ask how we could make so that such deaths don't happen anymore.

As for your last paragraps - I don't think that longer lifespans will necessarily make people more risk-averse than they're already are. Why would someone choose a sheltered life having 1000 years in front of him and not choose such life having perspective for only 50 more years? I would expect people to start caring about (what we now call) long-term effects of decisions because the consequences would come within the lifetime of the decision maker.

I think you are overestimating the importance of biological nature of live and underestimating the nature of intelligence.

This article talk about brain simulation, so bodily death is implied, so bodily-able people could still communicate with their bodily-dead friends.

No. Death is really not that bad; to be dead is no more evil than not to exist, because to be dead is to not exist. Dying itself is evil in that it causes grief to others still living; but while grief is painful, I do not think anyone would compare the evil of suffering grief to the evil of suffering slavery.

One might argue that death is bad on counterfactual grounds: if a person had not died, they could still be alive and happy, and isn't that better than them not existing? But this argument leads to the Repugnant Conclusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox)! So be very careful if you take this line of argument that you understand what you are saying.

I happen to be a total-happiness utilitarian, and do accept the repugnant conclusion. But ultimately all this means is that death is a mirror-image of birth - it ceases one hopefully-happy life; birth begins one. There is grief attached to death and joy attached to birth, but apart from that there is just as much imperative to maximize births as there is to prevent deaths - and one of these is far easier. This is, however, a deeply counterintuitive position that I don't expect many others to share.

This isn't Deep Wisdom. It's just utilitarianism, taken seriously.

If you can hypothetically prevent death and also increase birth rates (without causing problems resulting from overpopulation), wouldn't you be increasing both average and total happiness?

Sure. I'm not opposed to ending death, and certainly not to work on extending healthy lifespan. I just don't think it qualifies as humanity's greatest problem.

>Death is a vile, atrocious thing, the biggest enemy humanity has.

You have a time on this earth. When it is up, you make way for new generations. What is atrocious about it? What is atrocious and vile is the longing of some people for living indefinitely. We have a name for things that does not die and multiply uncontrollably. Cancer. Human beings are already cancerous in nature by their disregard/disrespect for everything that has been given by nature. Now you want to perpetuate that indefinitely by not dying?

>Just because it seems inevitable, we should not make it socially acceptable to give up and view death as anything but the wickedness it is.

Socially acceptable? Death? You put it as some kind of social custom that we obediently follow.

>People spin death to be a positive, often under some guise of Deep Wisdom.

Deep wisdom? How much wisdom do you need to see that the resources are limited? Human beings have no right to even want to live indefinitely until they have figured out how to live the limited time we got here without fighting and killing each other, how to live and expand without reckless destruction of nature/environment, how to expand life to other worlds, planets etc etc.

> Socially acceptable? Death? You put it as some kind of social custom that we obediently follow.

Because we do. We mourn and go on, and we expect to obediently die when our time is up. Your whole comment is the reflection of that custom.

If it weren't for it, then any reasonable human would be doing everything in their power to get rid of death entirely. As a civilization we'd be probably already done, but we aren't, because almost everyone is used to death as a "natural order of things" and/or delegates ending it to a deity.

> Human beings have no right to even want to live indefinitely until they have figured out how to live the limited time we got here without fighting and killing each other, how to live and expand without reckless destruction of nature/environment, how to expand life to other worlds, planets etc etc.

Human beings have all the rights they give themselves, there's no external entity to tell us what we're allowed or not allowed to do. Maybe you want to die. Go ahead then, nobody will stop you. But I, and many others, don't. Living is better than being dead. And it doesn't mean being in conflict with limits of our planet, maybe if people lived longer than ~80 years they'd actually start thinking about the long run, since they'd have a stake in it. Part of the reason we're exploiting the planet so much is that because we're not going to be around to see the consequences.

>because almost everyone is used to death as a "natural order of things"

It is. That you don't like it doesn't make a difference.

It is. But so is polio, and so was the smallpox. So was dying of common cold. And so is warfare, since living things are in constant state of war with each other.

We are the first beings on this planet with capability to transcend it all. We invented aspirine, got rid of smallpox, are in progress of eliminating polio, and we do our best to limit war and destructive competition. We're the first living things to decide what's Good and what's Bad, and we know that natural order of things is not Good, it's just the default.

> natural order of things is not Good, it's just the default.

Ok. But human beings are horribly short sighted. Something that may appear beneficial in the short term and on a small scale. but may turn out to be horrible in the long term and on a larger scale.

We have eliminated some diseases. But we have also created new, much horrible and powerful ones. We have discovered antibiotics, but that have also created disease causing agents that are resistant to them.

When ever we change something fundamental, that has resulted in the creation of much bigger evil. I think this is because we don't have capability to see the whole picture. We look at a small portion of it and think. "hey, we can make it better". But ends up messing up the bigger picture making it grotesque. So my point is, this is not an easy decision that should be made so lightly.

> We have eliminated some diseases. But we have also created new, much horrible and powerful ones. We have discovered antibiotics, but that have also created disease causing agents that are resistant to them.

> When ever we change something fundamental, that has resulted in the creation of much bigger evil.

I disagree with the assertion. Sure, sometimes we screwed things up big time (e.g. climate), but sometimes the change really was for the better. For instance, even though we're facing super-germs, life is much better for everyone than before we had antibiotics. Sure, we may end up defeated by the resistant germs, but it's not certain - that's why we have to push science and technology further, develop new methods like bacteriophages, because we can keep up with nature and have it our, better way.

> I think this is because we don't have capability to see the whole picture. We look at a small portion of it and think. "hey, we can make it better". But ends up messing up the bigger picture making it grotesque. So my point is, this is not an easy decision that should be made so lightly.

That I will agree with. We often suck at seeing the bigger picture. That doesn't mean we're screwed, because a lot of things can be dynamically adjusted and fixed as needed, but it does mean we should be careful with significant interventions into established systems. Death itself, for instance, is something that underpins a lot of our social structures and systems, so it is something we need to be extra careful about, but it doesn't mean we can't, or shouldn't change it.

Longer lives would help people be more sustainable because the problems of future generations would become problems of this generation.

I have thought about this. How do people who are at the heads of large corporations okays destruction and pollution of environment. Is it because they don't care about the world their kids will inhabit? Or they just don't understand the seriousness and view it that way.

If it is the former (which I really doubt), then longer lives can help. Or else, it will be just the same.

A more realistic answer might be publically funded companies are answerable to the masses (people who buy shares), and the masses only care about the quarterly reports. And again, longer lives will not help much here. Because you buy a share for you to make a profit out of it. Even if the public is fully aware of the environmental issues, I am not sure people will take that into consideration while buying shares.

Again, longer lives won't help us there.

Life is filled with suffering..death is an end to that. The end of suffering is a vile evil? I know this logic is common, but it always confuses me.

"Life is filled with suffering" - and joy. Sure, if you only take one half of what life is then ending that miserable experience sounds like a perfect idea, but there's the other half too and that's the reason most people prefer life to death.

Is it really a 50/50 balance for you between joy and suffering? Do you think that's the case for most people? Also, my claim was a weak one - simply that death is not the most vile thing imaginable/humanity's greatest enemy, because, at the very least, it does represent an end to suffering. In fact, I believe suffering is our biggest enemy..

I agree that suffering is a bigger enemy than death.

Unfortunately any viable technology for brain uploading would also allow bad actors to simulate huge amounts of suffering and conceal it from detection. I guess some technologies really are too scary to be released into the world, unless we can create a central benevolent overseer first.

What about "non-consensual death is the most vile thing"? Or maybe not "the most vile", but "an extremely vile thing". In this hypothetical new world, people may still choose to die if they will it.

Also, presumably in this future world, most suffering will be greatly, greatly reduced through other advances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com