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Comment by mihaifm | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I’m missing something, but how can immortality, even a theoretical one be achieved? Say you find a way to cure all diseases and reverse aging, you can still be killed or die in an accident. Say you find a way to transfer your consciousness to a machine (ignoring all philosophical implications). That machine can still be shut down and destroyed. All you get is just a longer life, which still ends at some point. And given the fact that it’s not time that actually matters, but the perception of time, one might still view their life as being short.

I find the article a bit naive, this question lies deep in the realm of philoshopy. What if technology and life merge at some point? It’s not hard to imagine that technology and life might become indistinguishable in the far future.

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The quest for immortality isn't a 0 or 1 objective. Using technology to reduce or reverse aging is one aspect. Using technology to reduce the accident fatality rate is another aspect. E.g, what was the car fatality rate 100 years ago and what is it now when you account for safer cars and better medical tech.

Unless you bypass the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Greg Egan's Permutation City provides a possible example), technology will get us asymptotically closer to true immortality. But even if we don't reach true immortality, reducing suffering caused by our current level of mortality is a noble goal.

I disagree that technology will get us asymptotically closer to true immortality. It is far more likely that technology gets us asymptotically closer to a theoretical maximum lifespan that is determined by our relationship with the environment. Radical changes to our form might extend that theoretical maximum, but it is not clear that someone who wants immortality would be satisfied with a form radically different from human.

As an example, an entity with a fractured consciousness that spans tens of thousands of lightyears (yet not necessarily dispersed enough to be considered immortal) would have a radically different concept of self. If one was uncomfortable with the concept of a few dying for the many, in order to perpetuate the species, then a dispersed consciousness devoid of a self seems equally unpalatable.

Think of backups and redundancy, f.i. like in Battlestar Galactica (the reimagened one from 2004) and the Cylon resurrection ships. They had immortality by instantly uploading, as long as there was coverage by a resurrection ship/ark in range.

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