On Being Not Dead
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's pretty easy to turn up this complex of beliefs and signaling and ideas: just talk to people about greatly extending the healthy human life span. Your average fellow will disavow such an idea, even if it comes with good health all the way. Oh no, they will say, why would anyone want to live for such a time. I'll be glad to go.
So, in general, people want to be dead. Just not right now this minute.
As to this: some days I talk about it, some days I throw up my hands, and some days I wonder whether or not it is the most insane thing in the mad world. Possibly, possibly not. From a utilitarian perspective, sure, yes, as a widespread belief it has effects going forward (in this age of biotechnology in which we might largely remove involuntary death if we actually cared enough to do that, but the signs so far are that not so many people do) that are worse than war, worse than poverty, worse than all the disasters of a century rolled into one. From the perspective of a metric of craziness of what is believed or adhered to, possibly not as bad as religions, either civic or devotional.
WOW! This really struck me now... Imagine how your behaviour would change if you didn't have this expectation!
Let the deathists buries their dead.
Maybe.
We've never experienced it, so how can you be sure?
To be clear, I THINK my own immortality would be nice, but I can't even be sure about that. Immortality for EVERYONE would fundamentally change our societies. Every human institution is affected by death. Removing it would change everything, unpredictably.
If you can find an English version (or read Spanish), the Immortal by Borges is a good partial exploration of this theme, for an individual.
If you have objections to agelessness through medicine, and many do, then it is probably a good idea to first consider the question above, and then consider your objection in the same terms.
[1] http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2002/12/death-is-an-outra...
The original post was phrased to the effect that anyone who thinks death has a purpose is a priori not just wrong, but very, very wrong.
See, I just changed "good" to "bad" for you, because the question the way it is phrased suggests an opinion.
Personally, I see death as the equivalent of erasing hard drive full of valuable and interesting data. It's a shame people individual knowledge and experience are lost forever.
If as a society we can never come to agreement about immortality being good or bad, it would good to develop a technology to "save" knowledge and "load" it at will.
So when say an Einstein or a Feyman dies, their understand of the theories and technologies would become available for everyone to "download" in their brain - which hopefully would reduce wasted knowledge to a minimum.
Likewise, the same technology could free 15 year+ of a good life quality, currently spent on "education". It seems wasteful to me. Just load the knowledge in your brain, and skip school. Load "experience" too if you believe it is necessary.
A marked of "ideas" and "knowledge" ready to download in a brain. Wow. That would be a dream come true - even if immortality can't be achieved due to lack of consensus.
1. We already know what our society looks like with death. 2. It's easy to imagine the good things that come from a lack of death. We're more likely to underestimate downsides.
When dealing with a complex system, I'm skeptical of change. Following Nassim Taleb's ideas, the onus is on someone proposing a change to show that it will improve the system.
That said, the 'download' idea sounds neat.
I think I can inductively argue that given a set of possible ways of dying or becoming incapable there will always be one or more candidates which everyone would be happy to see eliminated.
There are going to be downsides to increased lifespans, but it's hard to imagine anyone convincingly arguing at any given point in the future "we need to stop increasing lifespans because it's just too hard to get parking spots/nice beachfront land/tenure". Let's suppose hard limits are placed on procreation to offset increasing lifespan, would that be enough? Any restriction which allows people to have one or fewer children each (let's call having a child the old-fashioned way counts as each person making 0.5 children) will cap population — advanced countries drop below replacement without legal enforcement already.
But the problem is that in the real world immortality obviously will not be achieved alone. If society makes the technological leap towards immortality, almost certainly society will have undergone other technological transformations. By the time we achieve immortality, maybe computer-brain interfaces would allow us to live in a virtual reality, maybe capitalism will be dead and automation will be complete, maybe we will have colonized other planets, the list goes on. These changes may obviate the negative effects of immortality on society.
The fact remains that technological progress is inexorable and inescapable. Contrast this against people's attitudes towards changing trends in technology, and people are remarkably stubborn. That people today by and large want to eventually die does not mean that people living in a future society where immortality is taken for granted will also wish to die eventually. Just compare attitudes towards social networking between people who are in their teens, and people who are in their 60s.
We are going to have to face these things with or without immortality, likely this century.
On the other hand, if you had a practical implementation of immortality, today, with no major drawbacks, what subset of the population would actually refuse? I suspect far fewer people would profess a desire to die at that point.
But then, most people live crap lives.
And this is the really sad part.
If one does not believe in another life or an afterlife, life itself might be the most precious thing there ever was.
Just think about the astounding circumstances that have brought your or my specific mind into existence.
Given the uniqueness of every mind on this planet we all should feel honored to be alive with them at the same time.
But what do we do? We make people lives miserable. We waste lives in wars. We let children starve before they even have to chance to use this ordinary gift.
I think future generations will judge us for this.
Edit: Phrasing
Also if you were indeed young forever but everyone else wasn't, it's also not hard to imagine your life would be carefully scrutinised by everyone else for research; which not everyone might like.
An infinite life would be:
1. infinite (obviously)
2. not "understandable" - your mind will evolve infinitely and your future personality/self might end up so different of you present self that you might disagree even on the most basic questions of morality and what's "good" and "bad" (you have to accept that you're actually different persons and the same thing will apply if you "cloned" your mind now and the two minds will meet each other in 1000 years time), and your present self can't even imagine what the future self might become, the actual "self" becomes "not understandable" potentially
3. open ended
4. there's no "final", imaginable "purpose" - because you're future life is beyond the edges of you present imagination, you can't imagine a purpose for life itself (like "be good and go to heaven")), so the purpose of life has to be life itself
...and most people (I call them "un-open minds", to not be superior or mean and to state that I think they have the potential to be "opened") are AFRAID of (1) to (4)... it's against the way they've been brought up and it takes away their "shield" for other fears... imagine convincing a frightened little girl to so skydiving or maybe closer to getting her join the army and become a paratrooper.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
#passive-aggressive
You have a plan for extending human life by ten years? Sure, that seems awesome; if the details are good enough I'd be willing to donate to fund that.
You have a plan for extending human life indefinitely? That's so implausible I'm not going to even look at what it is. Chasing that dream looks a lot like gambling away your savings - worse, your lifetime - chasing after that one big win that's never going to come.
The physics of flight had been understood since Newton; powered flight (which I suspect is what you're getting at, though again that had been done in 1901) was just a matter of making a light enough engine to combine with existing flying technology. There were a long series of incremental steps along the way, e.g. a powered but tethered aeroplane had been flown in something like 1850.
A better analogy for saying you can solve all human ageing would be saying you had a way to cure all diseases before the germ theory had been invented, or claiming you knew how to make a child inherit the best traits of both parents before Mendelev.
I don't think preventing ageing will always be impossible. But it's a pointlessly distant goal to have at the moment.
I know that at some time I have to die. Perhaps it's easier for some people to fool themselves that they accept death because they know it's inevitable. I find it hard to imagine that if actually given the choice all that many people would choose to have a limited lifespan. I'm not saying that they wouldn't, I'm saying I find it hard to believe or understand.
To me death is the greatest injustice of existence.
Sure, everybody says that at some point. But when you're too old, sick and aching, and with your friends/family gone, do you really believe you'll think exactly the same?
But even without that - HELL YES.
See [1] for a philosophical discussion on the topic.
[1] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/happy-ending...
Death is, if anything, what forces people to break out of living other peoples' lives and start living their own. Even death can not do it for all people but without death and the sense of our mortality during our limited days alive hardly more than a few people would face things in their lives and go forward. Theoretically, a majority would probably just opt for postponing things "till tomorrow" for hundreds of years.
I don't think this is so. People cling to life to extreme measures. What they don't like is the actual process of aging, losing relatives and friends, their health, and so on.
That affects what they respond to even if you ask them about "extending the healthy human life span" even if it comes with good health all the way, because the pain of aging is real, whereas the "good health all the way" thing they know to be a pipe-dream.
If you could demonstrably show them the "extension + good health all the way" they would JUMP at it. Especially if it could include their loved ones too (people don't merely want to live, like some primitive organism, they want to live with a certain quality and in certain company).
A CPR instructor once was adamant "your heart stops, you're dead." I pressed him on various edge cases, but he did not relent - and the notion suck with me. Twelve years later, a nurse in the waiting room told my wife "your husband is doing fine; they're stopping his heart now." An hour or so later it was restarted, and a few hours thereafter awoke.
Over the next few years, if not for modern medical technology I'd be dead some four times over. Not such dramatic brushes with the other side, but more reminders that not being dead is, as life progresses, ever more unusual and precious.
Like most things, there is much fear of something until you've been there - and sometimes greater appreciation of not going there. As I stand here writing this and discussing turtles with my toddler, how precious every tiny moment is being here - and how calm the knowledge that, in short order after any moment, I might not be. Nothing bothers me now - except perhaps when someone is unappreciative of the little time we have.
I am sorry for your loss.
Checkout lef.org
Why in the hell philosophy is being so heavily considered here is beyond me though. If hackers really think about life too much, they stop hacking and start living. Hacking is doing but in a way that really isn't changing anything truly permanently. Having kids and providing them with a good environment that they then pass on to their kids and their kids... that is permanent. They won't remember your crappy webapp or your nifty tech startup nor will they give a shit about your talk circuit or the books you wrote on some aspect of some framework that no one will use 10 years from now.
Helping others and raising a family can do real and permanent good. That is being "not dead".
Only one thing sticks out. Beethoven's Great Fugue is not a miracle of the universe.
No, but our ability to enjoy it is.
I think this is another similar case. Hardly anyone really wants to die, but most of us can appreciate that eliminating death would rapidly lead to appalling resource crises, so I can easily see a majority choosing to ban such a technology unless the fairly obvious potential negative consequences can be shown to be resolvable.
Well that and the inevitable 'OMG unnatural, stop playing god'.
Demonstrate that you have a credible strategy for managing the fallout and I'd back you up myself. What you don't get to do is just charge ahead on a wish and a prayer that maybe you can mitigate the consequences. Show some responsibility and actually address the issues, and who knows?
Why should you get to say whether I can live forever? You don't want to, go ahead and die.
That came across as more confrontational than I intended. There will never be a credible strategy until the situation is faced, humanity does not seem to work the other way (with actual foresight).
Our society has laws and I don't know where you live, but I'm a Brit and live in a democracy. The majority will get to decide. There will be ways round it - going to other countries, etc but as a society that's just how we do things. There are things that are more important (to some of us) than one person, or even a group of people, or even everyone living for ever and those things are worth protecting.
Your post does make an amusing (and very sci-fi) idea pop into my head though, that of fugitive, criminal immortals. The idea of an immortal hiding what they are isn't new - it's usually because they don't know how people will react, or they wouldn't be able to fit into society, or they might get experimented upon to find the secret. It seems at least a little novel to have a situation in which it is known that some people will live forever, and by the very nature of having taken on immortality they are necessarily fugitive.
I suppose it's not too dissimilar from some of Asimov's robot stuff.