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Arguing for Immortality

59 points by akanet 15y ago

reasonattlm 15y ago
Related: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/08/twenty-minutes-to-argue-that-work-on-radical-life-extension-is-valid-research.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/08/twenty-minutes-to... "If you only had 20 minutes, what would you do to convince an intelligent (college educated or professional) audience of the significance of life extension beyond 120 years?"
- akanet 15y ago
  Neat, wish I had seen this sooner.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - jessriedel 15y ago
    > Luckily, there is no need to convince anyone at all, except maybe to get research grants (but the true purpose of those can always be disguised as ethically clean basic medical research). There would be many orders of magnitude more funding for life-extension research if most people wanted it. In fact, probably 90% of our health funding would be devoted to it. So I think it is a very bad thing that people generally don't want it (or think they don't want it).
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - tapp 15y ago
      Exactly so. The primary killers in the Western world are cancer and heart disease, and very few people argue with the billions of dollars in annual funding that these diseases receive. What is often overlooked is that these are both fundamentally diseases of aging. Research in to retarding aging could easily have the highest ROI (where R is measured in the addition of years of healthy lifespan) of any avenue of research, yet it receives almost none because of societal bias that views it as fringe.
      - orangecat 15y ago
        Yes. Also consider that the long-term fiscal crisis in the US is due almost entirely to promised Medicare and Social Security benefits, which are required because the elderly generally can't be as economically productive and are expensive to keep alive. Cure aging, and the need for those programs is greatly reduced.
rblion 15y ago
My name means Immortal in Sanskrit. :) If no one ever died, the world would overpopulate even faster. Death makes life possible. Death clears the old to make way for the new. In Hinduism and Buddhism, accepting death is a part of the path to enlightenment. Personally, I believe the body can die, but consciousness cannot...so we are already immortal, we just have to re-member it.
- michaelchisari 15y ago
  If no one ever died, the world would overpopulate even faster. If nobody ever died, the whole concept of procreation would change profoundly. With first world countries already in zero or negative population growth, creating an infinite lifespan would most likely further that trend. And in any case, we're talking about longevity, not immortality. You can still get hit by a bus.
  - droz 15y ago
    Doubtful. I envision a "brave new world" styled world. Bunch of people in prime condition, "endless" amount of time to pair with everyone else. I somehow imagine that people will continue to go at it like rabbits.
    - michaelchisari 15y ago
      Well, luckily, your imagination and actual worldwide trends don't line up. As long as we push for women's rights, access to birth control and abortion rights, and move away from economies which encourage large families as sources of labor, we'll be fine, as has already been the case in much of the developed world (and is showing to be the case in the developing world as well).
    - lukeschlather 15y ago
      In Brave New World, contraceptive implants are mandatory, and there's a huge stigma around /not/ having an abortion. The stigma around childbirth is a little scary to think about. But all things considered, I think that a society would adapt to limit births by some means if we achieved clinical immortality. And there are plenty of means to limit birth without stopping sex. Just asking people to sterilize themselves would probably be sufficient, especially since recombinant cloning actually is at least a reasonable thing to talk about with current technology. (Sterilization doesn't mean you can't ever have kids, just that it's going to cost you a fair amount, and you will have a lot of paperwork to do.) The concept of clinical immortality, in contrast, hasn't really advanced beyond the legend of the "fountain of youth."
rfrey 15y ago
I don't consider myself a Mathusian... in fact I regularly use him as a strawman/punching bag when I'm flexing my poli-sci historical muscles over beer. But the experiment has never been conducted with an immortal population, either, and his dire predictions seem a bit weightier with a bunch of 750-year-olds running around.
- michaelchisari 15y ago
  his dire predictions seem a bit weightier with a bunch of 750-year-olds running around. Not if those 750 year olds are in no hurry to have kids.
  - rfrey 15y ago
    They wouldn't have to be in a hurry, they'd just have to be interested - if everybody has one kid at 150 years old, that's still 50% population growth per year when it stabilizes. It's certainly possible that much of the impetus driving us to want children stems from our own mortality, so maybe many people wouldn't want kids after long life became the norm. Or, maybe the psychological imperative would decline enough that some sort of lottery system would actually be acceptable.
    - michaelchisari 15y ago
      And where do you think technology and resource creation and allocation will be in 750 years?
- akanet 15y ago
  I chose not to address societal implications of immortality not because they're not fascinating or relevant, but because people's immediate objections almost never have to do with "what happens to everyone else?" That said I think the population will definitely level out when people realize they have literally forever to have kids and that infinite children are actually a total pain in the ass to care for.
  - 15y ago
presidentender 15y ago
Philosophy of mind can progress, and the immortal can keep up with newly born and educated mortals for a while. Having a few immortals running around is probably not a bad idea, actually, because stores of experience in the form of really old people would be able to give excellent advice. The problem that I foresee is that eventually, philosophy of mind and new schools of thought just won't be able to keep up with the Flynn effect. I've read things that my grandfather and great-grandfather wrote, and while they were not stupid men, they were certainly simpler than my cousins and I. Eventually, the immortal Homo Sapiens would make for an interesting pet at best.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  If an immortal committed themselves to a lifetime (!!) of learning and improvement on the side (though not so much that all you do is learn), I suspect you could eliminate the Flynn effect. I personally believe if our ancestors were simpler folk, it's only because they learned less. The most important upside, assuming it can be managed of course, is that continually keeping an immortal up to speed requires less resources than bringing a newborn up to speed.
- delinquentme 15y ago
  " interesting pet at best " ?
  - delinquentme 15y ago
    nice downvote... how about an explanation?? this quote is fodder.
    - colanderman 15y ago
      Someone (not I) downvoted you presumably because you didn't indicate what was your issue with the quoted material. Do you want a clarification? Do you disagree? Do you think it was a typo? Are you offended? A sole question mark does not content make.
yesbabyyes 15y ago
Death cleans out old ideas. I have a hard time getting over the feeling that an older civilization is also more conservative. Especially a civilization where the people with money and power are the ones who are older. "Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM
- abstractbill 15y ago
  It's possible that older people are more conservative because they are going to die sooner. If everyone was suddenly immortal, old people might start acting quite differently.
- delinquentme 15y ago
  well become better at coping
- orangecat 15y ago
  Once again I defer to an alternate version of Harry Potter: "Uh huh," Harry said. "See, there's this little thing called cognitive dissonance, or in plainer English, sour grapes. If people were hit on the heads with truncheons once a month, and no one could do anything about it, pretty soon there'd be all sorts of philosophers, pretending to be wise as you put it, who found all sorts of amazing benefits to being hit on the head with a truncheon once a month. Like, it makes you tougher, or it makes you happier on the days when you're not getting hit with a truncheon. But if you went up to someone who wasn't getting hit, and you asked them if they wanted to start, in exchange for those amazing benefits, they'd say no. And if you didn't have to die, if you came from somewhere that no one had ever even heard of death, and I suggested to you that it would be an amazing wonderful great idea for people to get wrinkled and old and eventually cease to exist, why, you'd have me hauled right off to a lunatic asylum! http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_...
  - Helianthus 15y ago
delinquentme 15y ago
the big question: " Do we believe this to happen eventually" ... if so, why not within our lifetimes?
- D_Alex 15y ago
  "Why not within our lifetimes" As things stand right now: 1. Funding for science is appallingly low 2. Many of the best minds go into banking, management consulting and law Making this happen within our lifetimes needs prompt ACTION.
- pjscott 15y ago
  Incidentally, even partial progress within our current life expectancies can extend our lifetimes, perhaps enough for more progress to be made which will extend our lifetimes more, and so on. This gives longevity research more runway, which is nice.
  - delinquentme 15y ago
    degreys "longevity escape velocity"
Florin_Andrei 15y ago
I noticed a lot of people confuse "realistic" immortality (which is presumably achievable through advances in medicine, but does not imply an infinite life span - only a very very long one and the absence of mortal disease) with forced (mandatory) immortality (which means you are sentenced to live forever, you can't die no matter what you do). I am perpetually surprised how few people realize that only the first kind can be discussed rationally, while the second kind is at best a purely theoretical hypothesis. So you start talking with them about realistic, scientifically achievable, immortality, and you end up answering arguments against mandatory immortality. WTH? This is probably a topic that does not lend itself to rational discourse, kind of like politics or sex. Most people create this coping mechanism to enable them to deal with the prospect of their own demise, and end up unconsciously hostile to the idea of immortality.
- akanet 15y ago
  My reasoning is that if I can convince someone that even unrealistic immortality is desirable, the rest falls into place. Realistic immortality is also sort of more boring to argue about. Sorry, please don't hate me.
  - pavel_lishin 15y ago
    > Realistic immortality is also sort of more boring to argue about. Not necessarily. People seem to find talking about health care rewarding in some way, and that falls in the immortality discussion spectrum, I think. > Sorry, please don't hate me. You're going to make an awful immortal if you spend eternity worrying whether people will hate you or not.
  - masterzora 15y ago
    I disagree. Personally, I would say no to the unrealistic version, wherein I have no escape clause, every time. I simply value the negative what ifs too strongly negative for it to be a rational wager. However, rationally speaking, the only way you can say no to the realistic version is if you're Catholic or otherwise have a strong (in your own mind) reason to be unwilling to commit suicide. Or if you have some reason you want to be old and decrepit, I guess.
lockes5hadow 15y ago
I agree with everything except for one thing, under disaster scenarios, its not so much a risk that the human race will go extinct as a guarantee. The heat death of the universe is coming.
yters 15y ago
Isn't immortality physically impossible due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Sure, we can live for a much, much longer time. But, "long" is relative, mostly based on what we expect. I.e. now we believe living 80 years is a long time, whereas centuries ago 40 may have seemed a long time. What I'm saying is that surviving until heat death may seem long now, but that's only because it is currently impossible. Such "immortality" may seem very short if we could actually do it. A similar situation is people who always complain they don't have enough money no matter how much they make.
- rsaarelm 15y ago
  Freeman Dyson's got some ideas about how some type of life could keep going for an arbitrarily long time even in an universe undergoing heat death: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson_ad/dyson_ad_index.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson_ad/dyson_ad_index.html
mannicken 15y ago
Death and life are fluid points, not black-and-white absolutes as some like to see them. Then only thing that could distinguish me from a rock is self-awareness. One can argue that self-awareness is enjoyable but he is merely repeating words of gurus who achieved self-awareness. Without the slightest realization of what they are actually saying. In reality, self-awareness requires introspective meditation and there is nothing harder than to sit still for long periods of time without external stimuli. Just like it's easier to code in VB than to subject yourself to abstract concepts of LISP. Most people who consider themselves "alive" are more like imperative biocomputers, programmed for a specific task by educational system. One part of their programming is repeating to everyone "I'm alive". I'm sorry, but most people are coded in Visual Basic whereas only some in LISP.
- jokermatt999 15y ago
  As much as I dislike the phrase... "Obligatory XKCD": http://xkcd.com/610/ http://xkcd.com/610/ I'm pretty sure most people think the same way. It's a rather solipsistic view, isn't it?
  - mannicken 15y ago
    Actually, I'm not truly conscious either. I think self-awareness is like love or a perfect circle, or a perfect line.. an idea that can never be achieved in reality. PS. I am particularly half-conscious since I woke up five minutes ago :))
geoffc 15y ago
Meh, live hard, have fun and then die so the next generation has their turn.
brownbat 15y ago
I like the inductive argument. How much do you hope to die in this coming year? (Definitely / A bit / Not at all?) Living this past year, did it make you less fond of life? Do you really expect people slightly older than you will not reply 'not at all'? The same people who don't want to live forever, I bet we'll find they are perpetually in favor of living 'a bit longer.'
Zakharov 15y ago
What happens if somebody puts you in a barrel full of concrete and dumps the barrel in the bottom of the ocean? Or worse, blasts you off into space? Given an immortal lifespan, it seems inevitable that someone would at some point do this to you. For this reason I wouldn't take perfect immortality. Immortality plus teleportation would work, though.
fishtoaster 15y ago
Seems like it'd get pretty boring after the heat death of the universe.
afterburner 15y ago
Immortality = an eternity of learning. If you love to learn, the benefit is obvious. However, I think a lot of the arguments "against" immortality are perhaps expressed out of subconscious fears of what damage immortality, presumably acquired via money or privilege, would do to society. If everyone had it that's one thing (and still a problem but at least everyone has the same stakes). But what about the more likely scenario that not everyone has it? What if only minority have it?
ams6110 15y ago
Before I clicked the "about me" link I guessed this was written by someone in his 20s. I was right.
- chroma 15y ago
  Kudos for your correct prediction, but if these same arguments were made by someone in their late 40's, would that change their truth value?
dougvk 15y ago
One of the ideas I like to explore when presented with the idea of immortality are the effects of a longer lifespan on our decisions. To me, our lives aren't long enough to really live with the effects of our actions. My optimism makes me think, "If we could extend our lifespan by, say, one hundred years, then people will grub much less for near-term pleasure and focus much longer term" (thus we would start investing more in programs which might guarantee our standard of living instead of leaving it to the next generation). I just wanted to throw this thought at the HN community -- let us know your thoughts!
- nialo 15y ago
  This would eventually get to be true, but it would probably take a stupidly long time: it won't happen until people have actually seen the long term results of things multiple times. Also, short-term thinking is fairly hardwired into humans. That won't go away until it somehow stops people from getting laid, which is amazingly unlikely and would certainly require more than indefinite lifespan.
marcusbooster 15y ago
The biggest argument against immortality is that your chance of ending up in eternal pain goes way up. There are countless scenarios where you end up stuck in the bottom of the ocean, in a cave, maybe in jail, forever and ever.
lukifer 15y ago
Three words: exponential population growth. As much as I'd like to be immortal myself, it might not be a sustainable pattern for us as a species. And if I were around for thousands of years or more, suddenly long-term sustainability of civilization gains a good deal more urgency. It seems likely that affordable immortality would degenerate into a vicious war of all against all, unless it were paired with a Kardashev-II level of efficiency with energy and resources (and possibly even then). (I'm actually with Kurzweil on this one: when consciousness becomes mere information, easily backed up and transferred to other substrates, the concept of mortality will lose meaning.)
goblin89 15y ago
Aren't we already immortal? See, two possibilities exist. 1 There's no life after death: You don't exist before or after your life.[1] You only perceive anything during your lifespan. Since you can't perceive anything before or after, your life is infinite for you. Because when it ends, there would be no you to notice. Of course, such immortality ain't about prolonged lifespan, but it doesn't make it less cool (just maybe slightly off-topic here?). 2 There is life after death: Then you won't die as such, period. So the only problems left with are the inconveniences of aging. I'd like to hear some critique on this, though; the idea seems too bulletproof to me, I don't like it. --- [1] It may be impossible to correctly imagine the condition when there is no yourself, mainly because there would be no yourself in this situation (some kind of catch-22 here).
- akanet 15y ago
  Assign variable X to be the number of years you have been alive, at least to your subjective experience. An immortal will see X go to infinity. A mortal will see it go into the three digits if they're lucky. The fact that you can't perceive your own death doesn't mean you don't die.
  - goblin89 15y ago
    You're right, it isn't about living longer. It's about our cognitive abilities, perhaps. Using your metaphor… I think, variable X is going to infinity _in both cases_. It's just that we operate in an environment where the infinity equals to what is a finite number (two or three digit integer) in another system. Another way to put this: One can't experience anything except one's life. Therefore, life is infinite to person's subjective experience (the only experience available). EDIT: Okay, I think I see where we disagree. In my view, while what you perceive may not be the "reality" in some absolute sense, it is the only reality for you nevertheless. And your death doesn't exist there, much like dragons or wizards. In short, yes, the fact that you can't perceive your own death means that you don't die. You seem to have different point of view.
- tba 15y ago
  Is your claim that mortality is indistinguishable from immortality? Here is a simple counterexample: An immortal can count (by ones, out loud) from 1 to a googol. A mortal cannot.
jonshea 15y ago
It’s a bit of a spoiler to post it here, but Nick Bostrom’s “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” (Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005, Vol. 31, No. 5) is the single most influential essay that I have ever read. It completely changed how I think of aging. http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

59 points by akanet 15y ago

Related: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/08/twenty-minutes-to-argue-that-work-on-radical-life-extension-is-valid-research.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2010/08/twenty-minutes-to... "If you only had 20 minutes, what would you do to convince an intelligent (college educated or professional) audience of the significance of life extension beyond 120 years?"

akanet 15y ago
Neat, wish I had seen this sooner.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- jessriedel 15y ago
  > Luckily, there is no need to convince anyone at all, except maybe to get research grants (but the true purpose of those can always be disguised as ethically clean basic medical research). There would be many orders of magnitude more funding for life-extension research if most people wanted it. In fact, probably 90% of our health funding would be devoted to it. So I think it is a very bad thing that people generally don't want it (or think they don't want it).
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - tapp 15y ago
    Exactly so. The primary killers in the Western world are cancer and heart disease, and very few people argue with the billions of dollars in annual funding that these diseases receive. What is often overlooked is that these are both fundamentally diseases of aging. Research in to retarding aging could easily have the highest ROI (where R is measured in the addition of years of healthy lifespan) of any avenue of research, yet it receives almost none because of societal bias that views it as fringe.
    - orangecat 15y ago
      Yes. Also consider that the long-term fiscal crisis in the US is due almost entirely to promised Medicare and Social Security benefits, which are required because the elderly generally can't be as economically productive and are expensive to keep alive. Cure aging, and the need for those programs is greatly reduced.

rblion 15y ago

My name means Immortal in Sanskrit. :) If no one ever died, the world would overpopulate even faster. Death makes life possible. Death clears the old to make way for the new. In Hinduism and Buddhism, accepting death is a part of the path to enlightenment. Personally, I believe the body can die, but consciousness cannot...so we are already immortal, we just have to re-member it.

michaelchisari 15y ago
If no one ever died, the world would overpopulate even faster. If nobody ever died, the whole concept of procreation would change profoundly. With first world countries already in zero or negative population growth, creating an infinite lifespan would most likely further that trend. And in any case, we're talking about longevity, not immortality. You can still get hit by a bus.
- droz 15y ago
  Doubtful. I envision a "brave new world" styled world. Bunch of people in prime condition, "endless" amount of time to pair with everyone else. I somehow imagine that people will continue to go at it like rabbits.
  - michaelchisari 15y ago
    Well, luckily, your imagination and actual worldwide trends don't line up. As long as we push for women's rights, access to birth control and abortion rights, and move away from economies which encourage large families as sources of labor, we'll be fine, as has already been the case in much of the developed world (and is showing to be the case in the developing world as well).
  - lukeschlather 15y ago
    In Brave New World, contraceptive implants are mandatory, and there's a huge stigma around /not/ having an abortion. The stigma around childbirth is a little scary to think about. But all things considered, I think that a society would adapt to limit births by some means if we achieved clinical immortality. And there are plenty of means to limit birth without stopping sex. Just asking people to sterilize themselves would probably be sufficient, especially since recombinant cloning actually is at least a reasonable thing to talk about with current technology. (Sterilization doesn't mean you can't ever have kids, just that it's going to cost you a fair amount, and you will have a lot of paperwork to do.) The concept of clinical immortality, in contrast, hasn't really advanced beyond the legend of the "fountain of youth."

rfrey 15y ago

I don't consider myself a Mathusian... in fact I regularly use him as a strawman/punching bag when I'm flexing my poli-sci historical muscles over beer. But the experiment has never been conducted with an immortal population, either, and his dire predictions seem a bit weightier with a bunch of 750-year-olds running around.

michaelchisari 15y ago
his dire predictions seem a bit weightier with a bunch of 750-year-olds running around. Not if those 750 year olds are in no hurry to have kids.
- rfrey 15y ago
  They wouldn't have to be in a hurry, they'd just have to be interested - if everybody has one kid at 150 years old, that's still 50% population growth per year when it stabilizes. It's certainly possible that much of the impetus driving us to want children stems from our own mortality, so maybe many people wouldn't want kids after long life became the norm. Or, maybe the psychological imperative would decline enough that some sort of lottery system would actually be acceptable.
  - michaelchisari 15y ago
    And where do you think technology and resource creation and allocation will be in 750 years?
akanet 15y ago
I chose not to address societal implications of immortality not because they're not fascinating or relevant, but because people's immediate objections almost never have to do with "what happens to everyone else?" That said I think the population will definitely level out when people realize they have literally forever to have kids and that infinite children are actually a total pain in the ass to care for.
- 15y ago

presidentender 15y ago

Philosophy of mind can progress, and the immortal can keep up with newly born and educated mortals for a while. Having a few immortals running around is probably not a bad idea, actually, because stores of experience in the form of really old people would be able to give excellent advice. The problem that I foresee is that eventually, philosophy of mind and new schools of thought just won't be able to keep up with the Flynn effect. I've read things that my grandfather and great-grandfather wrote, and while they were not stupid men, they were certainly simpler than my cousins and I. Eventually, the immortal Homo Sapiens would make for an interesting pet at best.

sliverstorm 15y ago
If an immortal committed themselves to a lifetime (!!) of learning and improvement on the side (though not so much that all you do is learn), I suspect you could eliminate the Flynn effect. I personally believe if our ancestors were simpler folk, it's only because they learned less. The most important upside, assuming it can be managed of course, is that continually keeping an immortal up to speed requires less resources than bringing a newborn up to speed.
delinquentme 15y ago
" interesting pet at best " ?
- delinquentme 15y ago
  nice downvote... how about an explanation?? this quote is fodder.
  - colanderman 15y ago
    Someone (not I) downvoted you presumably because you didn't indicate what was your issue with the quoted material. Do you want a clarification? Do you disagree? Do you think it was a typo? Are you offended? A sole question mark does not content make.

yesbabyyes 15y ago

Death cleans out old ideas. I have a hard time getting over the feeling that an older civilization is also more conservative. Especially a civilization where the people with money and power are the ones who are older. "Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent, it clears out the old to make way for the new." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd_ptbiPoXM

abstractbill 15y ago
It's possible that older people are more conservative because they are going to die sooner. If everyone was suddenly immortal, old people might start acting quite differently.
delinquentme 15y ago
well become better at coping
orangecat 15y ago
Once again I defer to an alternate version of Harry Potter: "Uh huh," Harry said. "See, there's this little thing called cognitive dissonance, or in plainer English, sour grapes. If people were hit on the heads with truncheons once a month, and no one could do anything about it, pretty soon there'd be all sorts of philosophers, pretending to be wise as you put it, who found all sorts of amazing benefits to being hit on the head with a truncheon once a month. Like, it makes you tougher, or it makes you happier on the days when you're not getting hit with a truncheon. But if you went up to someone who wasn't getting hit, and you asked them if they wanted to start, in exchange for those amazing benefits, they'd say no. And if you didn't have to die, if you came from somewhere that no one had ever even heard of death, and I suggested to you that it would be an amazing wonderful great idea for people to get wrinkled and old and eventually cease to exist, why, you'd have me hauled right off to a lunatic asylum! http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_...
- Helianthus 15y ago

delinquentme 15y ago

the big question: " Do we believe this to happen eventually" ... if so, why not within our lifetimes?

D_Alex 15y ago
"Why not within our lifetimes" As things stand right now: 1. Funding for science is appallingly low 2. Many of the best minds go into banking, management consulting and law Making this happen within our lifetimes needs prompt ACTION.
pjscott 15y ago
Incidentally, even partial progress within our current life expectancies can extend our lifetimes, perhaps enough for more progress to be made which will extend our lifetimes more, and so on. This gives longevity research more runway, which is nice.
- delinquentme 15y ago
  degreys "longevity escape velocity"

Florin_Andrei 15y ago

I noticed a lot of people confuse "realistic" immortality (which is presumably achievable through advances in medicine, but does not imply an infinite life span - only a very very long one and the absence of mortal disease) with forced (mandatory) immortality (which means you are sentenced to live forever, you can't die no matter what you do). I am perpetually surprised how few people realize that only the first kind can be discussed rationally, while the second kind is at best a purely theoretical hypothesis. So you start talking with them about realistic, scientifically achievable, immortality, and you end up answering arguments against mandatory immortality. WTH? This is probably a topic that does not lend itself to rational discourse, kind of like politics or sex. Most people create this coping mechanism to enable them to deal with the prospect of their own demise, and end up unconsciously hostile to the idea of immortality.

akanet 15y ago
My reasoning is that if I can convince someone that even unrealistic immortality is desirable, the rest falls into place. Realistic immortality is also sort of more boring to argue about. Sorry, please don't hate me.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  > Realistic immortality is also sort of more boring to argue about. Not necessarily. People seem to find talking about health care rewarding in some way, and that falls in the immortality discussion spectrum, I think. > Sorry, please don't hate me. You're going to make an awful immortal if you spend eternity worrying whether people will hate you or not.
- masterzora 15y ago
  I disagree. Personally, I would say no to the unrealistic version, wherein I have no escape clause, every time. I simply value the negative what ifs too strongly negative for it to be a rational wager. However, rationally speaking, the only way you can say no to the realistic version is if you're Catholic or otherwise have a strong (in your own mind) reason to be unwilling to commit suicide. Or if you have some reason you want to be old and decrepit, I guess.

lockes5hadow 15y ago

I agree with everything except for one thing, under disaster scenarios, its not so much a risk that the human race will go extinct as a guarantee. The heat death of the universe is coming.

yters 15y ago

Isn't immortality physically impossible due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Sure, we can live for a much, much longer time. But, "long" is relative, mostly based on what we expect. I.e. now we believe living 80 years is a long time, whereas centuries ago 40 may have seemed a long time. What I'm saying is that surviving until heat death may seem long now, but that's only because it is currently impossible. Such "immortality" may seem very short if we could actually do it. A similar situation is people who always complain they don't have enough money no matter how much they make.

rsaarelm 15y ago
Freeman Dyson's got some ideas about how some type of life could keep going for an arbitrarily long time even in an universe undergoing heat death: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson_ad/dyson_ad_index.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dyson_ad/dyson_ad_index.html

mannicken 15y ago

Death and life are fluid points, not black-and-white absolutes as some like to see them. Then only thing that could distinguish me from a rock is self-awareness. One can argue that self-awareness is enjoyable but he is merely repeating words of gurus who achieved self-awareness. Without the slightest realization of what they are actually saying. In reality, self-awareness requires introspective meditation and there is nothing harder than to sit still for long periods of time without external stimuli. Just like it's easier to code in VB than to subject yourself to abstract concepts of LISP. Most people who consider themselves "alive" are more like imperative biocomputers, programmed for a specific task by educational system. One part of their programming is repeating to everyone "I'm alive". I'm sorry, but most people are coded in Visual Basic whereas only some in LISP.

jokermatt999 15y ago
As much as I dislike the phrase... "Obligatory XKCD": http://xkcd.com/610/ http://xkcd.com/610/ I'm pretty sure most people think the same way. It's a rather solipsistic view, isn't it?
- mannicken 15y ago
  Actually, I'm not truly conscious either. I think self-awareness is like love or a perfect circle, or a perfect line.. an idea that can never be achieved in reality. PS. I am particularly half-conscious since I woke up five minutes ago :))

geoffc 15y ago

Meh, live hard, have fun and then die so the next generation has their turn.

brownbat 15y ago

I like the inductive argument. How much do you hope to die in this coming year? (Definitely / A bit / Not at all?) Living this past year, did it make you less fond of life? Do you really expect people slightly older than you will not reply 'not at all'? The same people who don't want to live forever, I bet we'll find they are perpetually in favor of living 'a bit longer.'

Zakharov 15y ago

What happens if somebody puts you in a barrel full of concrete and dumps the barrel in the bottom of the ocean? Or worse, blasts you off into space? Given an immortal lifespan, it seems inevitable that someone would at some point do this to you. For this reason I wouldn't take perfect immortality. Immortality plus teleportation would work, though.

fishtoaster 15y ago

Seems like it'd get pretty boring after the heat death of the universe.

afterburner 15y ago

Immortality = an eternity of learning. If you love to learn, the benefit is obvious. However, I think a lot of the arguments "against" immortality are perhaps expressed out of subconscious fears of what damage immortality, presumably acquired via money or privilege, would do to society. If everyone had it that's one thing (and still a problem but at least everyone has the same stakes). But what about the more likely scenario that not everyone has it? What if only minority have it?

ams6110 15y ago

Before I clicked the "about me" link I guessed this was written by someone in his 20s. I was right.

chroma 15y ago
Kudos for your correct prediction, but if these same arguments were made by someone in their late 40's, would that change their truth value?

dougvk 15y ago

One of the ideas I like to explore when presented with the idea of immortality are the effects of a longer lifespan on our decisions. To me, our lives aren't long enough to really live with the effects of our actions. My optimism makes me think, "If we could extend our lifespan by, say, one hundred years, then people will grub much less for near-term pleasure and focus much longer term" (thus we would start investing more in programs which might guarantee our standard of living instead of leaving it to the next generation). I just wanted to throw this thought at the HN community -- let us know your thoughts!

nialo 15y ago
This would eventually get to be true, but it would probably take a stupidly long time: it won't happen until people have actually seen the long term results of things multiple times. Also, short-term thinking is fairly hardwired into humans. That won't go away until it somehow stops people from getting laid, which is amazingly unlikely and would certainly require more than indefinite lifespan.

marcusbooster 15y ago

The biggest argument against immortality is that your chance of ending up in eternal pain goes way up. There are countless scenarios where you end up stuck in the bottom of the ocean, in a cave, maybe in jail, forever and ever.

lukifer 15y ago

Three words: exponential population growth. As much as I'd like to be immortal myself, it might not be a sustainable pattern for us as a species. And if I were around for thousands of years or more, suddenly long-term sustainability of civilization gains a good deal more urgency. It seems likely that affordable immortality would degenerate into a vicious war of all against all, unless it were paired with a Kardashev-II level of efficiency with energy and resources (and possibly even then). (I'm actually with Kurzweil on this one: when consciousness becomes mere information, easily backed up and transferred to other substrates, the concept of mortality will lose meaning.)

goblin89 15y ago

Aren't we already immortal? See, two possibilities exist. 1 There's no life after death: You don't exist before or after your life.[1] You only perceive anything during your lifespan. Since you can't perceive anything before or after, your life is infinite for you. Because when it ends, there would be no you to notice. Of course, such immortality ain't about prolonged lifespan, but it doesn't make it less cool (just maybe slightly off-topic here?). 2 There is life after death: Then you won't die as such, period. So the only problems left with are the inconveniences of aging. I'd like to hear some critique on this, though; the idea seems too bulletproof to me, I don't like it. --- [1] It may be impossible to correctly imagine the condition when there is no yourself, mainly because there would be no yourself in this situation (some kind of catch-22 here).

akanet 15y ago
Assign variable X to be the number of years you have been alive, at least to your subjective experience. An immortal will see X go to infinity. A mortal will see it go into the three digits if they're lucky. The fact that you can't perceive your own death doesn't mean you don't die.
- goblin89 15y ago
  You're right, it isn't about living longer. It's about our cognitive abilities, perhaps. Using your metaphor… I think, variable X is going to infinity _in both cases_. It's just that we operate in an environment where the infinity equals to what is a finite number (two or three digit integer) in another system. Another way to put this: One can't experience anything except one's life. Therefore, life is infinite to person's subjective experience (the only experience available). EDIT: Okay, I think I see where we disagree. In my view, while what you perceive may not be the "reality" in some absolute sense, it is the only reality for you nevertheless. And your death doesn't exist there, much like dragons or wizards. In short, yes, the fact that you can't perceive your own death means that you don't die. You seem to have different point of view.
tba 15y ago
Is your claim that mortality is indistinguishable from immortality? Here is a simple counterexample: An immortal can count (by ones, out loud) from 1 to a googol. A mortal cannot.

jonshea 15y ago

It’s a bit of a spoiler to post it here, but Nick Bostrom’s “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” (Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005, Vol. 31, No. 5) is the single most influential essay that I have ever read. It completely changed how I think of aging. http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html