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> This conversation is going in circles. Has anyone brought up “death gives life meaning”? A platitude uttered by people who believe they have no way out, and

> This conversation is going in circles. Has anyone brought up “death gives life meaning”? A platitude uttered by people who believe they have no way out, and are desperate to make themselves feel better about that. Not necessarily a bad thing, so long as there really is no way out, but catastrophic once that changes. Destroying death will lose us something, most certainly; there are any number of great works of art and philosophy that would never have been created without the pressures and emotions it creates. But none of that, I think, can even remotely make up for the sheer awfulness of the downside. There has to be a better solution than this creeping horror.

melling 9y ago
I imagine immortality will be optional. If it creeps you out, there will be other options...
- vidarh 9y ago
  The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [1] (full text available for free; be warned it's extremely violent and sexual) is an interesting novel where immortality is not optional: An AI was "let loose" with a variation of Asimovs laws of robotics, and interpreted the requirement not to let anyone come to harm through inaction as requiring it to literally end death. The main character is a woman that feels it left her life without meaning, and who in response started gruesome competitions involving designing the most outrageous ways to die. Or rather, getting as close to the moment of death as Prime Intellect will let them before reviving them. [1] http://www.localroger.com/prime-intellect/ http://www.localroger.com/prime-intellect/
freeflight 9y ago
> A platitude uttered by people who believe they have no way out, and are desperate to make themselves feel better about that. Imho it's way more desperate trying to find "a way out of death" by defining it as something that could be "destroyed" (how to destroy the unexisting?), instead of simply accepting that literally nothing lasts forever, most certainly not rather fragile biological life. There's nothing "creepy horrific" about it unless you make it so. Our biological lifespans are in large parts responsible for forming our subjective views of the universe, making us ask for a purpose of that limited existence. If we'd ever reach a state where that doesn't matter anymore, then we've most likely left our biological shells behind and reached a level of consciousness which we couldn't even imagine right now. I'm not sure if such a state would even still be perceived by us as "being alive" and not rather as simply "existing".
goldfeld 9y ago
No one has ever had a way out, but many have believed they did over the centuries.

melling 9y ago

I imagine immortality will be optional. If it creeps you out, there will be other options...

vidarh 9y ago
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect [1] (full text available for free; be warned it's extremely violent and sexual) is an interesting novel where immortality is not optional: An AI was "let loose" with a variation of Asimovs laws of robotics, and interpreted the requirement not to let anyone come to harm through inaction as requiring it to literally end death. The main character is a woman that feels it left her life without meaning, and who in response started gruesome competitions involving designing the most outrageous ways to die. Or rather, getting as close to the moment of death as Prime Intellect will let them before reviving them. [1] http://www.localroger.com/prime-intellect/ http://www.localroger.com/prime-intellect/

freeflight 9y ago

> A platitude uttered by people who believe they have no way out, and are desperate to make themselves feel better about that. Imho it's way more desperate trying to find "a way out of death" by defining it as something that could be "destroyed" (how to destroy the unexisting?), instead of simply accepting that literally nothing lasts forever, most certainly not rather fragile biological life. There's nothing "creepy horrific" about it unless you make it so. Our biological lifespans are in large parts responsible for forming our subjective views of the universe, making us ask for a purpose of that limited existence. If we'd ever reach a state where that doesn't matter anymore, then we've most likely left our biological shells behind and reached a level of consciousness which we couldn't even imagine right now. I'm not sure if such a state would even still be perceived by us as "being alive" and not rather as simply "existing".

goldfeld 9y ago

No one has ever had a way out, but many have believed they did over the centuries.