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Comment by suifbwish | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating when individuals of such advanced intelligence are not obsessed with immortality. Either They believe it is not possible or they are secretly a god trying to escape the boredom of already having long since achieved it.

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Or maybe they are horrified with the idea of living forever...

Or they have realized that immortality is actually a dumb idea. Either you talk about real immortality where you live forever. And forever is a really long time. Or you talk about being able to decide when to die. In which case dying accidentally today becomes much more expensive so you become obsessed about avoiding accidental death today and miss the whole point of living a longer life...

Quoting a character in one of Stanisław Lem's stories, "People do not really want to live forever -- they simply do not want to die." Always struck me as a rather profound take on the whole immortality deal.

Von Neumann definitely didn't want to die. According to Wigner: "When Jancsi realized that he was incurably ill, his logic made him conclude that he would cease to exist, cease to have thoughts. The full content of this was incomprehensible to him and it horrified him. We all know this and try to accept it, but it is always difficult. It was heartbreaking to watch the frustration in his mind when the hope was gone. His fate was unavoidable to him, but it was still unacceptable."

His friends and colleagues were very disappointed that at the very end he turned to religion to help him cope with his fears. He even had a priest visit him for last rites. (Source: A Beautiful Mind)

To add another source, Greg Evan's Permutation City is what drove home for me how profoundly inhuman immortality is.

I think it's incredibly arrogant to talk with such certainty about biological immortality. It's not something we can fathom at this time.

You are suggesting that death is somehow less dumb when you don’t know anything about the true existential nature of what that is.

If you get philosophical, I don't think you can really know anything about anything. However, in practice I have every reason to assume that I have been practically dead i.e. non-existent for the vast majority of the lifetime of our universe (and whatever universes there may have been outside our one, whatever that may mean.) And I do not recall being non-existent that bad... Dying, that's another thing, that I know nothing about and am not looking forward for it - quite yet. But I know that the amount of things I want to do here is finite. And based on knowing myself and the feelings of quite a few old people, I am quite sure that when those would be done, I would be happy to let go. (Only small thing that I might want from approximately infinite life, would be to know how this life story here on earth/universe ends.)

Well said

Sometimes I wish von Neumann had gone into another field, such as genetics.

He basically did.

He was creating frameworks for understanding self-replicating systems before the nature of DNA had been determined.

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