What's wrong with not wanting to die?
Not wanting to die is fine, I think more importantly, not wanting to age and gradually become a burden towards end of life is also natural. Not wanting to be lost and missed (nevertheless hoping that you've done well enough to be missed). The idea of being bedridden and helpless is more scary to me than death.
But not wanting to die __ever__ can be driven by narcissism. If no one dies or gets old then we never make way for the next generation. If the cure is widespread you get overpopulation, if it is limited you get a class divide, never aging fantastically rich immortals and a semi-permanent underclass. Neither seems fantastic. What are the rules? Do you give something up to be in your 20s forever?
Generational change seems like a strong force for good in a lot of ways, to me at least. It can be harder to rewire a neural network than it is to start fresh.
Note that any non-magical intervention will likely be 'increasing longevity' not granting immortality. And even if that were the case, there's always the heat death of the universe. There's no escape from reality closing, you'd probably have a difficult time sustaining biological life-forms long before the universe is dark and cold. I doubt it would be pleasant. What is the storage limit for a brain anyway?
Personally I find some cold comfort that everything I do is meaningless and will be forgotten. I will once rest and be gone. So will everything.
At the risk of repeating myself: imagine a world where everyone was ageless by default, and they started to experience issues like inequality or overpopulation. What would that world's top scientists come up with? Would it be "kill everyone above a certain age"? I doubt it, because that would be very silly, and anyone seriously suggesting it in that world would be considered obviously insane. There are a lot of better options that don't require mass early death; these problems aren't inevitable.
>there's always the heat death of the universe. There's no escape from reality closing, you'd probably have a difficult time sustaining biological life-forms long before the universe is dark and cold. I doubt it would be pleasant.
This has always struck me as a very, very odd argument. Assuming protons decay, we're talking ~10^37 years until physics starts getting in the way. That's 10^27 times longer than the age of the universe. An entity observing those timescales would have time to see entire solar systems grow, mature, and die a billion billion times over, without exhausting even a billionth of that duration. Sure, such an entity would run out of stars to observe, and biology would get tricky, but computation wouldn't cease, and fundamentally that's all that's needed for a rich existence. It's an eternity nested in an eternity nested in an eternity. And if protons don't decay...
It's not infinite, but as a human, the distinction is completely irrelevant. Whatever a human would become on those timescales can decide what it wants to do later- for now, I'd just like more than a measly 100 years. It's not like we're wishing on a monkey paw.
And it would most definitely not be "infect everyone with a pathogen that causes their bodies and minds to deteriorate over several decades".
The ‘heat death argument’ is not about 100 years vs. a billion years, it is about the inevitability of things. Even if you live a very very long time it will still not be forever, and we all have to make peace with that whether we like it or not. It comes for us all inevitably. It isn’t even an argument it is more of a tautological statement.
Make no mistake if there were some longevity potion and I were offered it I would absolutely take it. But that doesn’t change the fact that some things are inevitable and that it isn’t clear cut that me or anyone living for an extremely long period of time is a ‘net good.’
Perhaps longer, healthier lives would allow more people to find their way out of poverty. Perhaps people would be less neurotic about accumulating massive amounts of wealth and power if they didn't have to worry about a limited lifespan. Maybe we'd all be more concerned about the future of our planet and of humanity in general if we knew we were going to be there to see it in another 50, or 100, or 10,000 years.
The heat death argument is also a bit absurd when you consider the relative timespans we're talking about. Why trade billions of years for 100 just because they're both finite? If we were talking about dollars it would seem more concrete. And given a billion years who's to say what's possible?
I didn’t say generational death was the only way for society to advance, I said it was a “strong force.” Sure, possibly people become less selfish now that death is not a foregone conclusion, but now you also have to plan for an infinite retirement, or work forever. There’s no promise of utopia. More likely than not things stay the same, the status quo isn’t really that great for a lot of people.
The heat death argument is about the inevitable end of things. Yes I would take more time and yes it would be great to not get old, but you have to settle your own finiteness and make peace with that. Even with some miracle technology being something that will eventually not be is simply what it means to exist.
One part is emotional: attempted empathy
Current, alive me regrets not seeing the continued beauty of humanity on continental plates in O'Neill cylinders in belt nations strewn around the Sun inhabited by trillions, but I take solace in something "higher than myself" or more significant, stepping out of myself, than my own experience: the experience of everyone else.
As in: don't be so self-obsessed; it sucks that you won't be there to see miracles in the year 3,000, but countless future generations will, so that suck is only a drop of bad in an infinite ocean of good. Be grateful for what you are here for, and be happy for other people, whether they exist now or not.
NIN, In This Twilight, black-is-really-white shit na mean xD
The second part is more rational: deprecation of consciousness
This one's harder to think or talk about and more philosophical and probably has veins running into the first part. I kind of feel like, "objectively", all consciousness is unified in its reductive, anthropic-principle-nothingness. All consciousness seems to be is a runtime with memory data. In the future, or when you wake up tomorrow, is your consciousness then still "your" consciousness? Still the same consciousness as now? And, if not, what's the difference between that and the consciousness of a completely separate person? Think a clone or an uploaded, digital clone (a la the game Soma), whose experience you don't share and, despite being a clone, seems as alien to your qualia as any non-clone. But they're still a clone. So then extend that to other people. Fetishizing your own consciousness is like fetishizing the NAND gates in the SSD that your OS runs on. In the end, it's just as good as another OS running on different hardware.
These two things make my death a miraculously beautiful, globally happy ending, rather than a bleak, local tragedy. It's just a shift in focus, and I think a sober, reasonable one.
... Until heat death, when everyone dies, but that's even farther out. xD And, hey, we don't even know what the majority of matter or energy in the Universe are yet; that buys some leeway in being tied down to predicted cosmic tragedies, r-right??
AND if you're feeling so astrophysicsy, there's always the emergency lever of multiple universes, which inductively follows the same reasoning for self-among-others, just at a slightly larger scale.
I like your second analogy and I agree with it. Imagine yourself as a micro thread. You’ve terminated, now there’s room for another micro thread.
But it’s hard not to fetishize our own consciousness I am of course, the center of my own universe.
But if we can keep the same processes longer without degradation and upgrade the hardware to support more of them, then maybe we should?
Couldn't it also be driven by deep, abiding curiosity? This seems to me at least as likely as narcissism as a motivation.
Completely untrue. Maybe as an individual, but your impact on other humans is the biggest difference. Particularly if you have children, there is no equivalence.
It's difficult to take a consistent position that holds both "I don't want to die early" and "I don't care if I die". It requires an arbitrary judgment on what constitutes 'enough' life.
Imagine a pill that gives you 10 years of good health and freedom from aging. No tricks, no evil genies, no monkey paws. It's completely free and universally available. It's not a one time offer. You can change your mind later as many times as you want. How many people would actually refuse that pill and choose to die at a 'natural' time?
Based on how much we spend on medicine, I'd guess very few, and that seems like a clear preference for being alive.
Are you fine with dying today?
We want to live when life is good, because life is good. If you are enjoying your life today, and want to keep living because of it, then you are going to want to keep living when you are in your 70's.
But you don't worry about it now, because you are young.
To be fair though, my comment was way too broad. I should have clarified that I mean a constant, overbearing dread of the prospect of death is super unhealthy. Make life suck, and effectively shortens it in the experience of the scared one. (source: did that for a long time, got healthy, stopped being scared. Sample size of 1. :-D )
Reading your siblings, you're projecting your own feelings onto a completely reasonable feeling that most people have: with another hundred years of experience, what's possible?
As for projection, not so much - I've not really had any significant fear of death, aside from instinct to avoid certain demise. :-)
Instead it's more that I've only ever seen "I'm at peace with the idea of dying" and "desperately clinging to anything that can prolong my life, even if only by a little." Admittedly, that's my anecdotal experience of the people with whom I interact, and I did indeed present a false dichotomy. :-\ Again, my apologies there.
In the proper logical sense, "not wanting to die" is only technically negated as "wanting to die". Quite literally the definition of negation - introducing a "not" in front of whatever the thing is. So that's my oops.
It's a weird place though, because the negation of "at peace with the idea of dying one day" is "NOT at peace" with the same. Which implies fear. Which... I dunno, I've reached my limit now. :-)
Death is a weird concept to consider in a neutral / rational manner, eh?
Aging is a set of complex bio-physical-chemical processes. We have actually made a lot of progress in recent decades understanding how this happens. There is no fundamental reason we won't be able to better understand these processes and then mitigate them heavily, if not entirely.
Aubrey de Grey is one of the scientists leading these efforts and his work, along with others, is very interesting. It seems to me there is real potential here. There are many difficult hurdles, but I find it plausible we might overcome them to an extent where it is possible to significantly extend the human lifespan.
If course, if this actually happens, there will be massive social, political, and economic consequences. I'm not exactly sure how that would play out. I'm a bit of an optimist, so I imagine there would be some sort of new non-dystopic paradigm that arises.