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Comment by sampl | Hacker News Reader

Interesting point, and well put--thanks.

Maybe there's a distinction to be drawn between "inherent part of the human condition" and the "default state", as you have described it. Attempting to change something "inherent" seems worthless, but default is merely waiting to be overwritten with something better.

For ex: death is inherent in the human condition, we cannot avoid it and must deal with it. Nakedness is only the default state, and is pretty easily solved.

Back to economics: maybe scarcity is inherent, but "social tragedy" may be merely a very solvable default.

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Not the best example :). Death seems inherent on the timescales of the lifetime of the universe, but on our timescales, it's merely a default. There's nothing in physics or biology saying we can't solve that; it's just an extremely difficult challenge that we didn't solve yet. I mention it because if we classify it as default, not inherent, it means we can and should be doing something about it.

But keeping appropriate timescales in mind, I agree with the conclusion - for given constraints, there are things that are inherent and not worth attacking, and then defaults that are merely attractors for the system state.

> I mention it because if we classify it as default, not inherent, it means we can and should be doing something about it.

Should? You're assuming that mortality is a problem. Extreme longevity or immortality would certainly change the human condition, but it's purely speculative to think it would be better in some objective, widely-accepted sense. Not every "default" is something waiting to be fixed.

Eliminating the biggest cause of sadness and suffering (not to mention, economic loss) sure sounds like something that would be widely accepted as good. There's a reason why almost every religion offers some kind of afterlife.

There's a good argument to be made that the assumption of mortality is baked into so many things in our economy that it would break down if people suddenly started to live much longer on average. But that, again, is a default - some state attractor. Something we can try to work around.

I respect your point of view, but I disagree with you. I suspect that people in general would be divided on the issue -- and the 'pro-death' faction (!) have not merely accepted, sheepishly, the limits of our existence without any reflection on the matter.

As a speculative anecdote, imagine spending ten thousand years missing a child who died in an irreversible accident. (Would childbirth even be permitted in such a future? How would overpopulation be addressed?) Or the dampening economic and sociological effects caused by a millegenerian population's entrenched resistance to change. Or the possibility that longevity is only available to the wealthy, or the drudgery of being stuck in a boring job for millenia...

Longevity doesn't necessarily solve sadness, suffering, and social ills -- it just shifts the goalposts.

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