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Alternately: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/05/lazy-immortality.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/05/lazy-immortality.... Wouldn't it be ni

Alternately: http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/05/lazy-immortality.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/05/lazy-immortality.... Wouldn't it be nice to wake up and find that we were all immortal? That would save a whole lot of work, uncertainty, and existential angst - and we humans are nothing if not motivated to do less work. The best of us toil endlessly in search of saving a few minutes here and a few minutes there. So it happens that there exist a range of metaphysical lines of thought - outside the bounds of theology - that suggest we humans are immortal. We should cast a suspicious eye upon any line of philosophy that would be extraordinarily convenient if true, human nature being what it is.

gwern 15y ago
He doesn't actually believe it: > I personally reject the proof because I don’t believe all the premises, but if the premises are revealed to be true, then I would accept that death is unattainable. Most take the _Permutation City_ argument as a _reductio_ about computational theories of identity, and a challenge to figure out what computations really are since simple theories lead to such odd consequences. (This is how Boltzmann brains were received as well.)
3pt14159 15y ago
Interesting. I did some heavy searching for "statistical immortality" before writing the piece, but I failed to find someone who had written about it before. Thanks for the link.