Not only is death necessary for new generations, it kind of gives meaning to the time we do have.
So… I'm open to the idea that we should know how to care for the dying instead of merely prolonging their misery. Everyone reading these words will die one day. Better get used to it!
Why do you think limited time give us meanings?
If we had all the time in the world, literally, we could eventually learn to make decisions that are truly good instead of local conveniences.
Why don't we just choose what's the most meaningful thing to us, right now?
Moreover, I think living for a really long time allows us to be more ambitious.
If you knew you would live until 300 and remained reasonably "young/healthy" during that time you probably wouldn't start a family as soon.
A few months ago, this was one of the biggest quotes around the internet. For a lot of people, death is a catalyst to do something that matters. In the biography, Jobs talks a lot about how he's in a hurry because he feels like he's going to die young.
I have a limited time on earth, yet I chose to spend it with you. Cuddling on this couch. Watching a movie. I think by the finite nature of our existence it imparts a little bit of significance to any sacrifice we might make to our own utilitarian maximizing.
Have there been an earthquake or your place would be ate alive by fire, you would be running away like crazy and the last thing on your mind would be to cuddle on your couch.
Further there is not much you can do to postpone the judgment. Sure you can break up with your loved one and lock yourself in a library for 10 years, grasp some wisdom, perhaps invest money or built a company, sell it ten years later for half a billion $ and invest all your money strictly into life-extension projects, but by now most likely you know the probability of achieving all this is so small, that you would rather cuddle on your couch just for a little bit longer.
this is the extremely short version/recipe to leave forever:
1. clone yourself. work with this guy who is very close to succeed [1]
2. once your clone is 25 years old and therefore stop growing, undergo a brain translation. Now, before you start laughing look here: [2] This is Dr. White [3] undergoing successful monkey brain transplantation in... seventies! I think 40 years later technology got much more advanced.
So the result would be your 80 years old brain (assume it was still quite healthy) in 100% matching DNA body of 25 year old. IF you don't get brain cancer, or other brain disease, you have another 50, 80 years to go. Now, going further only certain parts of the brain makes up for your identity. Most likely only memory. Fast forward another 40 years in the future, knowing how to connect broken nerves again why not cut only small part of your brain that is you therefore transplanting only your identity and limiting size of your old body in the new one.
Now, you can call me a conspiracy theorist, but if to overcome problems here is just a matter of time (by that I mean more time == less money + less engineers working on the problem. less time to resolve problem == more money to throw at the research + more engineers working on it), then I believe it is fairly plausible that elites like Rothschild family having billions of dollars for their disposition already have these technology available. Just ask yourself -- if you already have trillions in the bank, and building another successful company or buying another factory is boring to you AND the same time the only thing you are sure of is that one day you are gonna die, then it is obvious you will spend all your resources to "postpone the judgment".
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panayiotis_Zavos
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb3Zi0DenaE [viewers discretion advised]
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._White
* I didnt want to go into the obvious legal issues here: cloning humans, "stealing" someones body, putting another "human" in 80 years old body therefore shorting their life, etc.
We are getting really into science fiction now. Perhaps if you could somehow monitor and capture every single signal sent from human brain to its body from the moment brain formed itself (I know there is a flaw here...), then if you could record that transmission for 25 years, perhaps (Im really in year 2350 now, I think) you could program a computer that would re-play that transmission into a growing body (to mimic brain) and as a result at age 25 had a healthy body without human brain. This, I think, would cut-off all skeptics that believe Soul is attached to mind, not body itself.
So, while convoluted, your solution sounds like it is acceptable. Be careful however to play a record of a past life, instead of, say, actually simulating a brain in a silicon chip, Gunm style. Because that simulation would most certainly be a soul as well (I don't believe in philosophical zombies).
Edit: nevermind.
There are no implications to flights of fantasy, there is no soul, the body is a complex biological machine and there's no reason we can't either learn to prevent the machine from breaking or learn to grow another for spare parts.
And I think it's only fair. Though the word "soul" is mostly used in conjunction with dualistic assumptions, it has a deeper meaning that is fairly independent of dualism: Your soul is whatever makes you who you are. Your soul is what really matters about you. Whether the soul is separate from the body and survives it is another question.
I also have a specific reason to use that word: its emotional impact. For instance, one reason I think we should stop death is because it means the destruction of the soul. Even a devout Christian would understand my concerns (and go on to reassure me, but that's another story).
I don't want to let religion hijack this word.
For the same reason, I don't like to say "passed away", "gone", or "departed". Plain "died" is more accurate.
[1]: I'm not the only one. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/191761 (Argument by authority, I know, but really, this view looks sound.)
Imagine that every time you say soul, nearly everyone hears "immortal soul", because that's basically the truth. Find a better word to communicate what you really think, soul is not that word. The truth is what you're describing is "mind", not soul. It may be pretty to redefine a word, or take a different personal meaning, but it does not aid communication, it hampers it and deceives those who aren't willing to dig deeper into a discussion.
Nevertheless, how do I talk about true death to a believer in immortal souls? The best path I found so far is something like "imagine that your soul is actually destroyed when you die". It focuses directly on what I want to talk about: true death, the real deal, not some half-death with an escape hatch.
The advantage with this approach is that it emphasises the common ground between monotheists and transhumanists: true death is simply not acceptable. Therefore if it is a problem, and we have any chance of fixing it, then we must take that chance.
It also avoids some problems: If I say we don't have (immortal) souls, then he may soon draw conclusions I'm totally not about (worst case, he could think I'm a nihilist). If I avoid the word "soul" altogether, he could think I'm afraid of the afterlife.
Conversely, one could believe in the afterlife, and be able to imagine a world without it at the same time. Or a world where there is an afterlife, but where souls can actually be destroyed, or dissipated into the aether. I can recall at least 2 such stories: the anime Bleach, and The Night's Dawn Trilogy novel. I'm sure there are other examples.
Now, I reckon I can't help someone who can't even play the "what if" game.
I will politely disagree with your premise.
The robots should be identical to the human body at least skin deep. Our skin could be a synthetic material very close to the real thing. We will need none of the organs that currently keep us alive.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocular_prosthesis
ok, eot for me.
ok hang on: second though: I am not sure if I would gave up on a please of fng for an eternity without it :)
edit: so it boils down to question: how long can brain live, given we provide it perfect conditions (lets say: pure perfectly controlled air, all the vitamins it needs in regulated doses, etc etc)
The clone will be you, and you will be the clone. It will be like going to sleep and waking up in the virtual reality environment. From the clones perspective it will feel like the original you since it has all the memories of the original up to the point before you went to sleep. You just have to make sure that the original you is destroyed if and only if the virtual you is created successfully and with no corruptions. Otherwise there might be problems between the real you and the clone.
Side note: I believe there was an episode in Star Trek where something like this would happen. Star Trek made a treaty with an alien race to allow them to visit their planet via teleportation over huge distances. The thing is that they would not really teleport the person but rather they would create an exact clone at the destination and destroy the original.
The question is: who will be waking up?
Basically the same issue is with a hypothetical teleporter. To teleport you from here to somewhere else we scan all the atoms in your body and digitize that information. Now we send the data over the internet to another place on earth. We rebuild you there. At the same moment that we use a defibrillator to put life into the new you, we shoot the old you in the head with a gun.
So you'd step into such a teleporter?
I haven't seen a convincing answer to these questions of consciousness/soul/identity. Perhaps there really is no difference between going to sleep and dying, it's just that in the former instance the old body is reused for new identity. Perhaps there is no persistent identity at all; in every moment in time there is a single separate identity. Perhaps time itself is an illusion: perhaps the universe is just one single snapshot in time. There are so many possibilities and I have no idea how one would even start to formulate a testable hypothesis. Does anyone have a recommendation for reading more about this topic?
An identical copy of you. If it is not identical then it wouldn't be you.
>>So you'd step into such a teleporter?
If the new me is identical to the old me I think I would. The new me is not supposed to notice anything different other than I woke up in a different place. The old me should never wake up once the new me has woken up.
>> consciousness/soul/identity
Being able to create an identical you assumes that you are your brain and nothing else.
As far as I can see stepping in such a teleporter basically amounts to suicide. Whatever is happening in another part of the Earth doesn't change a thing from the perspective of the guy getting shot.
So suppose we change the story a bit: we don't create a new copy of you, but we still shoot the old you. For you (the old you) this isn't any different than the previous story. Would you still go for this?
This is true if you include your sense of self as your entire body. However, I think I will have to decide that my sense of self is my memories stored in my brain. If you look at it from that perspective than as long as my memories, and everything else at the sub-conscious level, is persisted across any medium then I'm still alive. The body then becomes a vessel. However, I think I will still like to have my body so I might as well replicate that also.
Of course, I think this is a choice people will have to make themselves since it is true that the original you dies, as you state. The original body of yourself dies, but not your memories. I guess you could think of your memories as your soul. As long as those are alive, you are alive.
>>So suppose we change the story a bit: we don't create a new copy of you, but we still shoot the old you. For you (the old you) this isn't any different than the previous story. Would you still go for this?<<
Of course not. Why would anybody do that? I'm not sure what is the point you are trying to make here. Notice that in this case not only has my body died, but also my memories. So as far as the universe is concerned I'm truly dead.
If for whatever reason a new me cannot be created than I expect the original me to be woken up. The old me must only be terminated if the new me is created successfully.
Its still incredibly amazing question: what IS conscious. where is it stored and how can it be transferred. what will happen if you make a copy of it? can you make a copy?
That view is known as perdurantism (opposed to endurantism).
> Perhaps time itself is an illusion: perhaps the universe is just one single snapshot in time.
Not sure what you mean here, but if you're assuming determinism then you're scientifically wrong (which is to say that there's now a scientific answer to what was historically a philosophical conundrum). The universe is indeterministic. This is more because of entropy ("determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time") than chaos theory (which is still deterministic). Ilya Prigonine is notable for emphasizing this worldview as a third departure from Newton, first two being quantum mechanics and general relativity.
> Does anyone have a recommendation for reading more about this topic?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Like_a_Dinosaur_(The_Oute...
I really don't give a shit if my ego continues to survive forever. I only care about this particular instantiation because under my (to be frank, likely to be flawed) interpretation this is the only "I" I ever perceive.
This gets more complicated because we don't have any guarantees on the continuity of consciousness as it is (when you awoke this morning, are you still the "same" person?)… but barring any more cogent arguments I'm gonna stick to it.
Not necessarily. Look at the problems in the world. How many of them are because we've forgotten history? Every time I read something new in history I'm struck by how this has all happened before and we're making the exact same mistakes again. I would submit that if we lived forever, we would be colonizing planets by now.