Why I Want to be Transhuman
dobbscodetalk.com
dobbscodetalk.com
I was once giving some lectures on longevity and immortality. I noticed that people didn't like the idea much, so I actually took a poll of a couple of audiences. I asked how many of you would like to live for 200 years. Almost no one raised their hand. They said because you'd be so crippled and arthritic and amnesiac that it would be no fun. So I changed the question. How would you like to live 200 or 500 years in the same physical condition that you were at half your age. Guess what, almost nobody raised their hand. But when I tried the same question with a technical audience, scientific people, they all raised their hand. So I did ask both groups. The ordinary people, if you'll pardon the stereotype, generally said that they thought human lifetime was just fine. They'd done most of the things they wanted to do. Maybe they wanted to visit the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, but they could live without that. And surely another 100 years would be terribly boring.
How can anybody NOT want to live longer if they were in good health? How can you possibly get that bored?
Maybe its just me, but I can't conceive it.
The problem is the question makes no guarantee of the total quality of those extra years. Health is only part of that quality, actual happiness is another big part that wasn't assured.
200 years where 70%+ of it is spent in a crap job where you're ready to go home before you even show up? No thanks.
80 years where 70%+ of it is spent doing things that you actually like and can be proud of (not always necessarily at work)? Bring it on.
I mean, people seem to like their lives. They aren't committing suicide.
But if you have a choice between living 100 years or living 200 years, and you pick the first option, how is that not exactly like committing suicide.
Brain decay is relevant after you're about 25. Cortical thinning is a very real phenomenon and results in slower responses speeds in elder brains (except for certain types of stimuli, like episodic/experience based recall). There is also some truth in the mathematician's saying that if you didn't make a breakthrough before you're 30, most likely you never will.
Now, there are two counters to this. The first is the "good health" assumption. You can physically be in good health, but unless you stop learning new things and forming new experiences (which involves creating biases to make your judgments and reactions more efficient), your brain is bound to change. For better or worse is hard to say. If you were diagnosed with schizophrenia, for example, expect it to get worse. If you were bipolar, the amplitude of symptoms could worsen as well. (is this in violation of the "good health" assumption? Very likely not -- some of these dysfunctions are very important in creative people). In sum, the things you are currently capable of are a result of a delicate balance of things in your head. Any change in the future does not guarantee anything about your ability to sustain.
The other counter is the "engineering" kind of mentality, where you hedge on the idea that in the future, scientists will discover how to regenerate brain cells. This will probably come true, in some way or another, in this century, and you'd be able to regenerate fresh neurons and repair damaged structures in your brain. You might even be able to gain some unavailable abilities and become native at many many languages. But the flipside is that this flexibility always comes at a price. When you rebuild/repair your brain, the old structures don't remain untouched. This says nothing about your sense of self and its relationship with your current memories and how they shape your ideologies. In other words, if you can rebuild your brain, you could very well become an entirely different person. Now, is this the same person who initially decided to live a very long time?
If you take these ideas into account, living multiple lives is actually not that different from living a single life. Of course, nobody can tell for sure... but you asked.
Though, not to be a wet blanket, even the computers, trans-human intelligences, etc. won't be "immortal" in the sense of living forever. The universe herself will expand so much that her galaxies will all collapse into mega-black holes, which, over the eons, will decay via Hawking radiation, until there will be nothing at all anywhere except photons, at which point time itself will cease since there will be no material particles to measure it, time effectively becomes spacelike at that point.
But between now and that doubtful date, I do wish the transhumanists and their robot companions all the best of luck! :-)