8 ms·

> Any problem gradient with a chance of unlocking immortality should be leaned into. Why? Death is an important, and probably the least appreciated, aspect of

> Any problem gradient with a chance of unlocking immortality should be leaned into. Why? Death is an important, and probably the least appreciated, aspect of evolution. Humanity can't change if the powers-that-be literally never go away. And that's ignoring finite resources on the planet. Would you rather live forever or have children?

DivisionSol 6y ago
Live forever.
Kinrany 6y ago
Trying to help evolution is as stupid as throwing things down to help gravity.
causality0 6y ago
I already don't want children. Immortality for me, thanks.
- apocalypstyx 6y ago
  How do you have immortality in a universe with a finite lifespan? (so far as we understand). Any such thing would require a shift on par with the discovery of the existence of God (an equivalent). So really is it that the singularity isn't just a secularization of Christian apocalypticism at all, but a re-framing of the reality of reality?
  - causality0 6y ago
    Dude I just want to be as happy as possible for as long as possible.
  - NineStarPoint 6y ago
    I know that when I personally say immortality, what I mean is the ability to live for as long as I want. I highly doubt I would want to live as long as it would take to get to the heat death of the universe. I expect somewhere between a 10’000 and a few million years would feel about right, but for all I know it could only be a few hundred, or maybe billions. But yes, all signs point to the idea that death is inevitable. I would just personally like to be able to increase my time in this universe by a few orders of magnitude.
xiphias2 6y ago
There's nothing to appreciate in an unmaintained system with exponentially increasing number of issues that lead to the whole collapse of the processes running the system. I'm much more appreciative of the fault tolarence that it achieves, but prefer maintaining it in a great state.
mcbits 6y ago
Immortality seems like a better problem to have than mortality. Easier to solve if it goes awry. And I would rather live forever (well, indefinitely) than have children, acknowledging that some would prefer the latter or insist on both. But fiddling with the brain, maybe there's a way to implant the sensation and memories of having lived for thousands of years when it was really only 80. Or maybe implant a couple hundred years and trim the actual life down to 2 or 3 years for ethical reasons if living is so unethical.
fossuser 6y ago
> At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don't recall exactly what. And I said: "You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn't being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-seem-and-be-deep https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see...
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Talk about being obvious. I am sure Stalin wanted to live to 100 years. I am also sure people are better off without him.
  - p1esk 6y ago
    Everyone being immortal also means you can't kill your enemies. I imagine that would be quite a problem for people like Stalin.
    - 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
      You can't kill them but you sure as hell can kidnap and torture them for eternity.
      - webmaven 6y ago
        > You can't kill them but you sure as hell can kidnap and torture them for eternity. For many would-be Stalins, the main point isn't the torture, but the kidnapping and incommunicado imprisonment (eg. in gulags). The utility of torture comes in when you want to ensure the prisoner's compliance when reintroduced to society. So: please note that immortality by itself doesn't preclude either sequestration nor adversarial behavior modification. Technical solutions to both of those (integrity checks to detect coercion, restoring from distributed backups, etc.), start to run into the same sort of arms-races we have with internet filtering, botnets, and malware. Except that so far as a totalitarian regime is concerned, the uploaded dissident is the malware, as is any sufficiently advanced freedom-preserving tech.
sharpneli 6y ago
Even with immortality everyone can have one child. It takes two to make one. And the infinite series 1+1/2+1/4+1/8... converges to 2. So the population would just double.
- burlesona 6y ago
  Perhaps but that makes a rather odd assumption that every pair of adults would be allowed to select one mate with which to have one child. Supposing everyone obeyed that, some number of generations in the future, which would be a blink of an eye compared to eternal immortality, you would end up with a strange selection problem of there being very few people in the most recent generations, and most of them having a large overlap in ancestors.
echelon 6y ago
> Death is [...] important You can die if you want, but I'd prefer immortality. > Would you rather live forever or have children? This is a false dichotomy that is the product of thinking in human terms. You don't know if immortal beings take up space. Or if they self-replicate. Maybe multiple conscious entities can even combine and then disentangle, for a sort of cerebral experience. Who knows if we'll be confined to this planet if we don't have bodies? Will we have bodies? If we don't, we won't even need earth like habitats. The entire solar system works. We might even solve the Jupiter radiation thing. All of these things are way cooler than kids. Granted it's all a pipe dream, but I'd jump at the opportunity.
- mssundaram 6y ago
  I can only imagine an atheist or someone who isn't convinced of reincarnation would have this view? I am still afraid of death, but as a Hindu I know that my consciousness survives the death of the body and that I will continue to exist in other universes, planets, for many lifetimes until I realize the truth of existence.
  - echelon 6y ago
    > as a Hindu I know A lot of people in this world say that they know with certainty what will happen after death. For all we know we could already be dead, and Skynet has taken the trouble of resurrecting all of our minds. Right now we could be riding some eternal horror simulation, stuck on the roller coaster ride up, just before the plummet into extreme pain and chaos. That's an equally valid guess. Nobody really knows. What I can see with my eyes and reason with my brain leads me to believe my consciousness ends with me. But who knows. Maybe we're all just NPCs in some sufficiently advanced game. All that I know is that in my worldview there is some problem gradient that leads to engineered immortality. I'm not sure how steep that path is, nor where it lies. It might be towering over us higher than Mt. Everest. But it's there, somewhere, a problem waiting for progress.
    - xamuel 6y ago
      Here's something fun to think about. Instead of evil Skynet, suppose the entity resurrecting long-dead brains is a benevolent entity. As such, it would avoid resurrecting people against their will. How would it determine which people wanted to be resurrected? One method would be to scan the memories for events such as accepting our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. People who did that would be resurrected because it's obvious they want to be resurrected. Atheists who spent their lives preaching oblivion would be left alone, since resurrection would obviously torment them with cognitive dissonance :)
burlesona 6y ago
There’s a valid point that is being overlooked by all the replies here: social change happens almost entirely between, not within, generations. While any individual would prefer to live forever, human progress would likely be greatly reduced if we were not mortal, and did not have the personal imperative to “make something” of our short time on this earth, nor the infusion of fresh perspectives and ideas that come from new generations.
- mordymoop 6y ago
  We don’t have any 500 year olds to look to. If we did, we might find that humans who have lived healthfully and richly for centuries, raised many children, participated in my adventures and pursued many ambitions, might look nothing like the cached expectation of a 100 year old elderly decrepit person, or a 70 year old cantankerous political reactionary. Then again, they might; we just don’t know. I would rather find out, rather than continuing to bury potential wise old elves in the ground because we find the elderly tiresome and unsightly and subconsciously want them permanently out of sight.
- antepodius 6y ago
  How much of that is because your brain starts degrading after 30? 50-year olds are alreasy partially brain-damaged.
outworlder 6y ago
> Humanity can't change if the powers-that-be literally never go away. But they never go away. Sure, individual people in charge may go away, but the systems are far more resilient than that. Even when Kings existed and held the position for life, the institutions they represented pre-dated them, and in many cases lasted long after they were gone. Their assets also live on, for the most part, and heirs get a huge headstart, compared to the overall population. "Progress is made one obituary at a time" is both true and false. People dying of natural causes do enable other people to fill their position, but it is not the only mechanism. > And that's ignoring finite resources on the planet. Reproduction is exactly what exhausts resources. And, for now, we don't have a solution. Population aging requires people to reproduce, but they don't age quickly enough. The number of people who are still alive but no longer productive only grows, as does the overall population number. In the past, mortality rate was high enough that this wasn't really a problem, the overall population age was relatively low. Now, if people are not only immortal but also operating at a level that enables them to be productive, then we only need to reproduce to replenish losses by attrition. We wouldn't have to make a 'savings' tradeoff, except to account for disabilities (if those aren't also fixed). We wouldn't have to save enormous amounts of cash to use when we can no longer work, which means social security requirements would be lower. Why would not having to have children be a bad thing? Yes, it's been ingrained by both nature and nurture, but is that what most people actually want, or are they just doing what's "expected" of them. Once there's no need to pass down the family name to the next generation, or to have "someone to take care of you when you are old", and you are young forever(so no 'biological clock ticking'), I bet most people will realize that it is actually a choice, and won't bother.
A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
I don't exactly identify with the parent post, however, I do not think humanity as a whole would wield immortality well. It is not impossible that I watched Altered Carbon a little bit too much and internalized its message a little too well. Still, while I am sure every single one of us loves the idea of not dying, I am relatively certain that mass immortality does not scale well.
godelski 6y ago
- Several species have longer lifetimes than us. Doesn't seem to be a large disadvantage. - We've proven that we change faster culturally than biologically. If this weren't true most Americans still wouldn't be okay with gay people, black people, or pot. Beliefs seem more related to local tribalism than to age. I've seen plenty of older and younger people radically shift (for good or bad) their positions based on who they consider arbiters of truth. - We've heard this finite resource in the past. It has been solved many times. Fertilizer was the most recent one if you want to go back to 19th century history. We have hydroponics, aeroponics, etc on the way. We can also go into space. - Every first world country has a population growth below 1 (and are decreasing). The average EU is 0.15% and the US is at 0.5%[0]. There's no sign of it turning around and I imagine immortality would just accelerate this. (People will still kill themselves btw. Accidents will still happen. Bad health. Etc) - IDK about you, but I'm fine waiting till I'm 100 to have kids if I can live forever. Maybe even 200. I'm unsure, all I know is that if we make such a change that we'll completely reconsider things like adulthood and what we do with our life (how long does it take to live off of passive income?). It will be a radical change no matter what, but also one that seems inevitable. If your argument is that it is going to be bumpy, well if history has taught us anything it is that we don't confront problems until they are problems, so I don't think it'll become any less bumpy. But hey, maybe things like Climate Change won't be existential threats because then "50 years" isn't a long time. Unfortunately we won't know how this changes us until it happens, be that for the better or worse. I'll leave you with the Fable of the Dragon Tyrant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY [0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?end=2018&locations=EU-US-GB&start=1960&type=shaded&view=chart https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?end=2018&lo...
RhodoYolo 6y ago
There's a story about a dragon that was posted on here on HN that deals with the issue of solving death and answers your question quite elegantly. Anyone else read that who can find the link? Found it:https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

DivisionSol 6y ago

Live forever.

Kinrany 6y ago

Trying to help evolution is as stupid as throwing things down to help gravity.

causality0 6y ago

I already don't want children. Immortality for me, thanks.

apocalypstyx 6y ago
How do you have immortality in a universe with a finite lifespan? (so far as we understand). Any such thing would require a shift on par with the discovery of the existence of God (an equivalent). So really is it that the singularity isn't just a secularization of Christian apocalypticism at all, but a re-framing of the reality of reality?
- causality0 6y ago
  Dude I just want to be as happy as possible for as long as possible.
- NineStarPoint 6y ago
  I know that when I personally say immortality, what I mean is the ability to live for as long as I want. I highly doubt I would want to live as long as it would take to get to the heat death of the universe. I expect somewhere between a 10’000 and a few million years would feel about right, but for all I know it could only be a few hundred, or maybe billions. But yes, all signs point to the idea that death is inevitable. I would just personally like to be able to increase my time in this universe by a few orders of magnitude.

xiphias2 6y ago

There's nothing to appreciate in an unmaintained system with exponentially increasing number of issues that lead to the whole collapse of the processes running the system. I'm much more appreciative of the fault tolarence that it achieves, but prefer maintaining it in a great state.

mcbits 6y ago

Immortality seems like a better problem to have than mortality. Easier to solve if it goes awry. And I would rather live forever (well, indefinitely) than have children, acknowledging that some would prefer the latter or insist on both. But fiddling with the brain, maybe there's a way to implant the sensation and memories of having lived for thousands of years when it was really only 80. Or maybe implant a couple hundred years and trim the actual life down to 2 or 3 years for ethical reasons if living is so unethical.

fossuser 6y ago

> At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don't recall exactly what. And I said: "You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn't being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no." https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-seem-and-be-deep https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see...

Koshkin 6y ago
Talk about being obvious. I am sure Stalin wanted to live to 100 years. I am also sure people are better off without him.
- p1esk 6y ago
  Everyone being immortal also means you can't kill your enemies. I imagine that would be quite a problem for people like Stalin.
  - 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
    You can't kill them but you sure as hell can kidnap and torture them for eternity.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > You can't kill them but you sure as hell can kidnap and torture them for eternity. For many would-be Stalins, the main point isn't the torture, but the kidnapping and incommunicado imprisonment (eg. in gulags). The utility of torture comes in when you want to ensure the prisoner's compliance when reintroduced to society. So: please note that immortality by itself doesn't preclude either sequestration nor adversarial behavior modification. Technical solutions to both of those (integrity checks to detect coercion, restoring from distributed backups, etc.), start to run into the same sort of arms-races we have with internet filtering, botnets, and malware. Except that so far as a totalitarian regime is concerned, the uploaded dissident is the malware, as is any sufficiently advanced freedom-preserving tech.

sharpneli 6y ago

Even with immortality everyone can have one child. It takes two to make one. And the infinite series 1+1/2+1/4+1/8... converges to 2. So the population would just double.

burlesona 6y ago
Perhaps but that makes a rather odd assumption that every pair of adults would be allowed to select one mate with which to have one child. Supposing everyone obeyed that, some number of generations in the future, which would be a blink of an eye compared to eternal immortality, you would end up with a strange selection problem of there being very few people in the most recent generations, and most of them having a large overlap in ancestors.

echelon 6y ago

> Death is [...] important You can die if you want, but I'd prefer immortality. > Would you rather live forever or have children? This is a false dichotomy that is the product of thinking in human terms. You don't know if immortal beings take up space. Or if they self-replicate. Maybe multiple conscious entities can even combine and then disentangle, for a sort of cerebral experience. Who knows if we'll be confined to this planet if we don't have bodies? Will we have bodies? If we don't, we won't even need earth like habitats. The entire solar system works. We might even solve the Jupiter radiation thing. All of these things are way cooler than kids. Granted it's all a pipe dream, but I'd jump at the opportunity.

mssundaram 6y ago
I can only imagine an atheist or someone who isn't convinced of reincarnation would have this view? I am still afraid of death, but as a Hindu I know that my consciousness survives the death of the body and that I will continue to exist in other universes, planets, for many lifetimes until I realize the truth of existence.
- echelon 6y ago
  > as a Hindu I know A lot of people in this world say that they know with certainty what will happen after death. For all we know we could already be dead, and Skynet has taken the trouble of resurrecting all of our minds. Right now we could be riding some eternal horror simulation, stuck on the roller coaster ride up, just before the plummet into extreme pain and chaos. That's an equally valid guess. Nobody really knows. What I can see with my eyes and reason with my brain leads me to believe my consciousness ends with me. But who knows. Maybe we're all just NPCs in some sufficiently advanced game. All that I know is that in my worldview there is some problem gradient that leads to engineered immortality. I'm not sure how steep that path is, nor where it lies. It might be towering over us higher than Mt. Everest. But it's there, somewhere, a problem waiting for progress.
  - xamuel 6y ago
    Here's something fun to think about. Instead of evil Skynet, suppose the entity resurrecting long-dead brains is a benevolent entity. As such, it would avoid resurrecting people against their will. How would it determine which people wanted to be resurrected? One method would be to scan the memories for events such as accepting our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. People who did that would be resurrected because it's obvious they want to be resurrected. Atheists who spent their lives preaching oblivion would be left alone, since resurrection would obviously torment them with cognitive dissonance :)

burlesona 6y ago

There’s a valid point that is being overlooked by all the replies here: social change happens almost entirely between, not within, generations. While any individual would prefer to live forever, human progress would likely be greatly reduced if we were not mortal, and did not have the personal imperative to “make something” of our short time on this earth, nor the infusion of fresh perspectives and ideas that come from new generations.

mordymoop 6y ago
We don’t have any 500 year olds to look to. If we did, we might find that humans who have lived healthfully and richly for centuries, raised many children, participated in my adventures and pursued many ambitions, might look nothing like the cached expectation of a 100 year old elderly decrepit person, or a 70 year old cantankerous political reactionary. Then again, they might; we just don’t know. I would rather find out, rather than continuing to bury potential wise old elves in the ground because we find the elderly tiresome and unsightly and subconsciously want them permanently out of sight.
antepodius 6y ago
How much of that is because your brain starts degrading after 30? 50-year olds are alreasy partially brain-damaged.

outworlder 6y ago

> Humanity can't change if the powers-that-be literally never go away. But they never go away. Sure, individual people in charge may go away, but the systems are far more resilient than that. Even when Kings existed and held the position for life, the institutions they represented pre-dated them, and in many cases lasted long after they were gone. Their assets also live on, for the most part, and heirs get a huge headstart, compared to the overall population. "Progress is made one obituary at a time" is both true and false. People dying of natural causes do enable other people to fill their position, but it is not the only mechanism. > And that's ignoring finite resources on the planet. Reproduction is exactly what exhausts resources. And, for now, we don't have a solution. Population aging requires people to reproduce, but they don't age quickly enough. The number of people who are still alive but no longer productive only grows, as does the overall population number. In the past, mortality rate was high enough that this wasn't really a problem, the overall population age was relatively low. Now, if people are not only immortal but also operating at a level that enables them to be productive, then we only need to reproduce to replenish losses by attrition. We wouldn't have to make a 'savings' tradeoff, except to account for disabilities (if those aren't also fixed). We wouldn't have to save enormous amounts of cash to use when we can no longer work, which means social security requirements would be lower. Why would not having to have children be a bad thing? Yes, it's been ingrained by both nature and nurture, but is that what most people actually want, or are they just doing what's "expected" of them. Once there's no need to pass down the family name to the next generation, or to have "someone to take care of you when you are old", and you are young forever(so no 'biological clock ticking'), I bet most people will realize that it is actually a choice, and won't bother.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago

I don't exactly identify with the parent post, however, I do not think humanity as a whole would wield immortality well. It is not impossible that I watched Altered Carbon a little bit too much and internalized its message a little too well. Still, while I am sure every single one of us loves the idea of not dying, I am relatively certain that mass immortality does not scale well.

godelski 6y ago

- Several species have longer lifetimes than us. Doesn't seem to be a large disadvantage. - We've proven that we change faster culturally than biologically. If this weren't true most Americans still wouldn't be okay with gay people, black people, or pot. Beliefs seem more related to local tribalism than to age. I've seen plenty of older and younger people radically shift (for good or bad) their positions based on who they consider arbiters of truth. - We've heard this finite resource in the past. It has been solved many times. Fertilizer was the most recent one if you want to go back to 19th century history. We have hydroponics, aeroponics, etc on the way. We can also go into space. - Every first world country has a population growth below 1 (and are decreasing). The average EU is 0.15% and the US is at 0.5%[0]. There's no sign of it turning around and I imagine immortality would just accelerate this. (People will still kill themselves btw. Accidents will still happen. Bad health. Etc) - IDK about you, but I'm fine waiting till I'm 100 to have kids if I can live forever. Maybe even 200. I'm unsure, all I know is that if we make such a change that we'll completely reconsider things like adulthood and what we do with our life (how long does it take to live off of passive income?). It will be a radical change no matter what, but also one that seems inevitable. If your argument is that it is going to be bumpy, well if history has taught us anything it is that we don't confront problems until they are problems, so I don't think it'll become any less bumpy. But hey, maybe things like Climate Change won't be existential threats because then "50 years" isn't a long time. Unfortunately we won't know how this changes us until it happens, be that for the better or worse. I'll leave you with the Fable of the Dragon Tyrant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY [0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?end=2018&locations=EU-US-GB&start=1960&type=shaded&view=chart https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?end=2018&lo...

RhodoYolo 6y ago

There's a story about a dragon that was posted on here on HN that deals with the issue of solving death and answers your question quite elegantly. Anyone else read that who can find the link? Found it:https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html https://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html