5 ms·

I do not get why you do not get the appeal. Do you want to die?

by sanxiyn 3y ago

jones6ofMont 3y ago
[dead]
nhinck2 3y ago
Yes, immortality sounds horrible.
- thr-nrg 3y ago
  [dead]
- thriftwy 3y ago
  Do you want to die earlier rather than later, and/or in worse health condition than possible? That's what anti-aging is.
- jack_pp 3y ago
  > Do you want to live forever, Harry?" > "Yes, and so do you," said Harry. "I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers. If you don't want to die, it means you want to live forever. If you don't want to live forever, it means you want to die. You've got to do one or the other... I'm not getting through here, am I." It would be interesting to see how society will change when we can make ourselves permanently healthy. Maybe people who want to die will start taking extreme risks like sky-diving or Russian roulette but the above quote stands imo. If you don't want to live any more sounds to me like you have a psychological problem. I don't mean that 80 year olds, that have a dozen physical problems and struggle to do anything and therefore want to die because life is unbearable, have a psychological problem but if you're young, healthy and still find no pleasure in living then maybe you should see a therapist. Maybe the psychological part of living forever needs to be solved too
  - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    that proof assumes the desire to live will remain constant over time but it will not. parts of the human body will decay and over time the will to live will drop. death is inevitable. by artificially extending your lifespan, you're not becoming immortal. you're taking an event that typically comes as a natural part of life and is out of your control and forcing yourself to choose when it happens. you will have to choose at what point your agony is so unbearable that you no longer want to live. people who are unlucky already have to live that hell in modern times. i don't think people chasing this fever dream have experienced the joy of seeing it play out.
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      If you can't picture yourself giving up an anti-aging treatment without "unbearable agony" forcing your hand, that's your psychological hangup, not everyone else's. A normal person can just decide they're 200 and not really enjoying much anymore and have that be the end of it.
      - jack_pp 3y ago
        Even then, maybe first see a therapist, try some psychedelics or whatever. If you've tried everything and somehow still see no point in living then yeah.. go ahead. I've been depressed a couple of times in my life and saw no point in going further or living but I've talked myself out of it by simply saying, hey, if I do this relatively small thing and then do this thing that gives me pleasure then that's better than literal death. I find it hard to believe a person has experienced everything there is to experience in 200 or even 1000 years. Our set of experiences is what it is because of the short time that we have but it doesn't mean it can't evolve to accommodate a lifespan of 10x or 100x.
      - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
        i'm arguing against the idea of achieving "immortality", not against anti-aging treatments. slowing the progression of aging but maintaining the same trajectory of life and death is a desirable thing. trying to avoid death is not.
- bawolff 3y ago
  To be honest, i've always wondered how many people would actually believe this if given the choice (assuming healthy immortality). It always struck me a bit as the sort of thing people say to be able to live with the fact they are going to die and there is nothing they can do about it. Always easier to accept something out of one's control by pretending it is what you wanted all along.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  Immortality sounds horrible if and only if I'm the only one immortal. Most people don't want to die. I want to learn more, and indulge curiosity for another day. I want to laugh and love and see my family forever longer - I don't think I'd ever wish to leave my loved ones, and I will unsurprisingly mourn their loss. I assume I'm not particularly special in any of this... I think the sudden onset of immortality (especially concentrated on the wealthy) will be catastrophic for society. Imagine Bezos or a Kardashian or someone politically motivated like Murdoch/Soros but immortal? Imagine them being able to spend (and grow) generations of wealth... for generation? For the rest of us, the cost of an opportunity to be immortal will be massive because of course it can be. People today save for retirement, but one day they may save for immortality - or perhaps take out insane loans to fund it. Imagine real estate prices when banks can offer 100y mortgages to a class of rich immortal workers? Imagine trying to advance in your career when someone can get a senior job and work for hundreds of years, especially if they need to fund their 100y mortgage or their immortality procedure - Millennials already complain that boomers won't retire and open up the higher-rung jobs. Immortality would upend society, and likely exacerbate social tensions, but it could also be a great reset in social expectations. Maybe it'd encourage everyone to take a long-term view of their actions. eg. Climate change would impact everyone, so no one would be "too old to care".
silisili 3y ago
Not OP, but my opinion is that I want to die when I'm supposed to, and I want everyone else to also. Time is the great equalizer, and the well to do's should not be able to purchase more. The last time I wrote this opinion, I was met with everything from 'just kill yourself' to 'quit trying to control my life.' Funny bunch here.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  The dying part bothers me less than the aging. I'd be fine dying at the "normal" age, but I'd rather do so with a healthier body than my grandparents. And telling other people when they should die is sorta messed up. Ignore these anti-aging medications, should people be cut off other medicines at a certain point? What's the difference?
  - silisili 3y ago
    I've had all these arguments before, that I don't care to have again. > And telling other people when they should die is sorta messed up I'm not telling other people when to die! I'm thinking more of a societal contract. Which in fairness, seem less and less these days. Like, if I go to the back of a queue, and see you going to the front, and request you go to the back... I'm not trying to control your life. I'm just asking you to acknowledge and respect that we live in a society.
    - boomboomsubban 3y ago
      >I've had all these arguments before, that I don't care to have again. The arguenent of "I don't want to need help going to the bathroom/eating?" Or "I don't want to have effectively a two minute memory?" They're pretty solid arguments to me. >I'm not telling other people when to die! No, you want society to agree with you when people should die. This societal contract already does not exist. Maybe it'd be nice if it did, but you'd still need to answer the question of "should I stop this person from taking medicine because it's time for them to die?"
- snvzz 3y ago
rocket_surgeron 3y ago
It doesn't bother me. Every single one of my ancestors for the last 3.5 billion years has died. It is part of existence. 50, 60, 100 more years? Great! Then I can pile on knee, hip, back, and wrist regeneration surgeries. Then extensive therapy to keep my brain from degrading. Also new teeth and corneas. Oh and the heart is going to need a lot of work if it starts beating for twice as long as it was designed to. Plus constant maintenance for the skin as it soaks up an entire second lifetime's worth of UV. Just a never-ending cycle of expensive, likely painful, time-consuming all-consuming patches on the body to delay the inevitable. Just kill me already. Maybe eventually they'll find a path to immortality. That would be even worse. I imagine the joy would drain out of sunsets if you've seen a billion of them, with them being as noteworthy as every time your eye blinks.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  What if its not constant patches and repair work, but something that slows the degradation entirely so you end up with less health issues up until the point you get cancer and die anyway. But you enjoyed more of that time fitter and healthier.
- powerapple 3y ago
  I would be very happy if my body can stay young and not necessarily live longer. That's what anti-age means right? Not pro-long your life necessarily, but to live younger, so I don't have to care about my knee problem when exercise.
- vidarh 3y ago
  Anti-aging by necessity also means solving the common causes of death and your body falling apart, not just letting them happen but somehow preventing them from killing you.
- pengaru 3y ago
  It's more about "die young, as late as possible" than live forever
- Nursie 3y ago
  > I imagine the joy would drain out of sunsets if you've seen a billion of them, with them being as noteworthy as every time your eye blinks. So you can imagine that rather than see another sunset, you'd die? You can imagine a state of being where you become so jaded, so incurious, that nothing can pique your interest any more, that interpersonal relationships would be better off terminated with biological death than continued, that learning, travel, discovery all lose their meaning and value? Honestly, as with many of these comments, I feel it says more about your present life than those who would like to live longer or indefinitely. And I certainly know people in their 70s who are not ready to settle down and be fitted for a coffin yet, even if their bodies are starting to seriously disagree. I don't imagine they would turn down the chance of a few more decades of relative fitness.
steve_adams_86 3y ago
I don’t think I’m important enough for it to matter, and I’m fairly sure the fact I will die is a significant component of what makes the brief time I have so valuable.
- heroiccocoa 3y ago
  An enormous amount of resources are wasted on treating specific, often rare, individual age-related conditions that doesn't efficiently transfer to other conditions. Clearly, people are hurting and it'd a net positive to society to treat the single underlying cause, and save the resources expended on everything else, for an equal if not improved overall health outcome. Even if you don't consider yourself important to the world, surely you are important to yourself. At least I as an atheist consider my limited time alive here— conscious and healthy— to be infinitely valuable to me personally as it's really all that I have. And I think if your life isn't valuable to you in the same way, there's something wrong. Hence, extending it is a worthwhile goal. Longevity research is difficult and it's not as if a breakthrough improving our lifetime by an order of magnitude is around the corner. So, I see little risk in ambitious research that'll probably only yield humble results anyway, at least until we're reaching 200 years old.
  - steve_adams_86 3y ago
    > Even if you don't consider yourself important to the world, surely you are important to yourself. At least I as an atheist consider my limited time alive here— conscious and healthy— to be infinitely valuable to me personally as it's really all that I have. I agree with this completely, so long as it doesn’t actually cause problems for younger people born into the world. At the moment it’s arguably a good thing that we die and let new generations have their shot at things. I’m only 37 and already excited to see what people in their teens manage to accomplish before I die. By the time the they’re full swing and doing cool stuff, I’ll probably be looking for my keys for a car I haven’t owned for 20 years in a bingo hall. No one will need more of me. Fundamentally though I believe our time is rarely spent as well as it could be, and fixing that might be best to come first. Should I live longer if I don’t cherish it? Should I want more days when I’ve admittedly wasted many? Perhaps the best thing I could do is learn to use the time I have to its fullest. And of course, I go to great lengths to protect my health and lifespan — I want to live as long as I reasonably can, and I want to be able to enjoy it. I don’t think for a second that I should prolong that to any degree which begins to hinder the opportunities and possibilities of younger people, though. Maybe that sounds crazy. I just don’t think I matter more than another person, just like me, wanting all the same opportunities in their own life. I guess I don’t believe old people should be in the way of young people fully living their lives. As long as that’s not happening, sign me up. Until then I’d like to learn to use my time more wisely. On the Shortness of Life totally transformed how I think about longevity and lifespan extension in general. It seems to pale in importance compared to the practice of living better to begin with.
freehorse 3y ago
This question/answer is the standard fallacious response to anybody talking against the anti-aging current. Some people may indeed prefer to die, some people may be religious or whatever, but most people doing the criticism just give extremely low prior probability to not dying due to some technological/medical advance (during their lifetimes at least), so they consider obsessing with something that is virtually impossible for the hope that it will happen a waste of time, of the finite life they have. Then it boils down just to whether one is curious about it, or is curious about any other X subject.
an-honest-moose 3y ago
It's not about not wanting to die. It's about death being inevitable. Everything dies, or breaks down, or decays. That's just how the universe works. The best you'll get is extended life, and that's never going to be enough - there's always going to be someone trying to push that limit out a little further. IMO, what matters more, and what some folks here have brought up, is more healthy years. I think wanting to be fitter and healthier in old age is pretty uncontroversial, but the problem is that it gets rolled up with immortality, because getting to say "We conquered death" would be way sexier than saying "We extended good living by a decade or two (and that's being optimistic)". Immortality has been, and always will be, a fantasy. Better that those resources go to something more productive, like healthcare.
- carlmr 3y ago
  Death is the evolutionary proof that sometimes you need to shut down legacy systems because maintenance has become painful, the system has accumulated too many workarounds, and a rewrite is in order.
  - nocsi 3y ago
    Like a certain generation accumulating too much lead poisoning.
- Nursie 3y ago
  > Everything dies, or breaks down, or decays. That's just how the universe works. Sure, that's entropy, but that's only necessarily true at the level of the whole system, energy inputs can and do reduce local entropy. > The best you'll get is extended life Sounds good, let's start there. 'True' immortality may or may not be a pipe dream, but it doesn't matter if it is. Almost nobody is talking about living absolutely forever, but looking at ways in which greater longevity can be achieved. I'd bite your hand off for another couple of decades on top of whatever my current 'allocation' might be, I don't give a crap if we've "conquered death" or not, but if we can find ways to give the average person more time, that seems like a win. > Better that those resources go to something more productive, like healthcare. How is this not healthcare? There seems to be this backlash against any talk of life extension, that other things matter more, that it's somehow frivolous, or just morally wrong to seek to live longer. It feels to me entirely arbitrary as we already use all sorts of interventions to help people live longer, and to be healthier for more of that time. This is good and wise and virtuous. But some folks seem to have this weird switch in their heads when extending life gets mentioned, that suddenly they're uncomfortable and the whole thing is not to be discussed by preference. And I wonder if it's because they don't want to admit to themselves or others that they are terrified, but have rationalised away their fear as "meant to be, can't be changed". Such talk of extension makes them uncomfortable.
ptsneves 3y ago
For me the anti aging, immortality thing is funny because I think it has been solved for most species: it is called reproduction. Actually surviving is reproducing. If anti aging proponents spent as much time trying to reproduce and making sure their offspring were fit to continue their bloodline with good education it seems to me a good outcome. That is why the education of my children is important: the imprint of intellect self after I imprinted my bodily self in their genes. One could argue, but “hey ptsneves your children are not you thus you will unavoidably going to be eliminated from existence”. And I say, “it is ok and part of physical existence. I accept it.“ Evolution found it worthwhile to have sexual reproduction, meaning clones are a bad fit for eco system disturbances. Evolution also found it fit to restart the cycle from scratch even if it meant an individual would lose experience or ecosystem optimality. This is to protect again local optimae , which is a great path to extinction. The extent of these 2 premises is such that the apex predator on earth reproduces sexually and has a limited life span. Maybe that is survival bias but I think there are good causation ideas behind them. With the above if I really want to be immortal and have my legacy preserved robustly I should use the current system: reproduction with a good emphasis on descendant upbringing and according to my experience. Again, even if I am great in my current eco system I do not presume this experience will work with eco system disturbances, so I accept evolutionary bargains and have children with a partner I believe will fulfil my bodily destiny the most resilient way possible. I even wanted to start a religion where propagation of one’s self through dedication to offspring and community is central. I am tired of a society ruled by geriatric concerns[1]. (I say this as mostly a joke of course, I have more than enough work raising my children much less dabbling in other peoples lives) Ps: none of what I wrote invalidates improvements on longevity. It is just that we already have a basic system for propagation in time. [1] I know extremely young demographics make for crappy countries and quality of life.
- emptyfile 3y ago
  [dead]

I do not get why you do not get the appeal. Do you want to die?

jones6ofMont 3y ago

[dead]

nhinck2 3y ago

Yes, immortality sounds horrible.

thr-nrg 3y ago
[dead]
thriftwy 3y ago
Do you want to die earlier rather than later, and/or in worse health condition than possible? That's what anti-aging is.
jack_pp 3y ago
> Do you want to live forever, Harry?" > "Yes, and so do you," said Harry. "I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers. If you don't want to die, it means you want to live forever. If you don't want to live forever, it means you want to die. You've got to do one or the other... I'm not getting through here, am I." It would be interesting to see how society will change when we can make ourselves permanently healthy. Maybe people who want to die will start taking extreme risks like sky-diving or Russian roulette but the above quote stands imo. If you don't want to live any more sounds to me like you have a psychological problem. I don't mean that 80 year olds, that have a dozen physical problems and struggle to do anything and therefore want to die because life is unbearable, have a psychological problem but if you're young, healthy and still find no pleasure in living then maybe you should see a therapist. Maybe the psychological part of living forever needs to be solved too
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  that proof assumes the desire to live will remain constant over time but it will not. parts of the human body will decay and over time the will to live will drop. death is inevitable. by artificially extending your lifespan, you're not becoming immortal. you're taking an event that typically comes as a natural part of life and is out of your control and forcing yourself to choose when it happens. you will have to choose at what point your agony is so unbearable that you no longer want to live. people who are unlucky already have to live that hell in modern times. i don't think people chasing this fever dream have experienced the joy of seeing it play out.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    If you can't picture yourself giving up an anti-aging treatment without "unbearable agony" forcing your hand, that's your psychological hangup, not everyone else's. A normal person can just decide they're 200 and not really enjoying much anymore and have that be the end of it.
    - jack_pp 3y ago
      Even then, maybe first see a therapist, try some psychedelics or whatever. If you've tried everything and somehow still see no point in living then yeah.. go ahead. I've been depressed a couple of times in my life and saw no point in going further or living but I've talked myself out of it by simply saying, hey, if I do this relatively small thing and then do this thing that gives me pleasure then that's better than literal death. I find it hard to believe a person has experienced everything there is to experience in 200 or even 1000 years. Our set of experiences is what it is because of the short time that we have but it doesn't mean it can't evolve to accommodate a lifespan of 10x or 100x.
    - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
      i'm arguing against the idea of achieving "immortality", not against anti-aging treatments. slowing the progression of aging but maintaining the same trajectory of life and death is a desirable thing. trying to avoid death is not.
bawolff 3y ago
To be honest, i've always wondered how many people would actually believe this if given the choice (assuming healthy immortality). It always struck me a bit as the sort of thing people say to be able to live with the fact they are going to die and there is nothing they can do about it. Always easier to accept something out of one's control by pretending it is what you wanted all along.
vineyardmike 3y ago
Immortality sounds horrible if and only if I'm the only one immortal. Most people don't want to die. I want to learn more, and indulge curiosity for another day. I want to laugh and love and see my family forever longer - I don't think I'd ever wish to leave my loved ones, and I will unsurprisingly mourn their loss. I assume I'm not particularly special in any of this... I think the sudden onset of immortality (especially concentrated on the wealthy) will be catastrophic for society. Imagine Bezos or a Kardashian or someone politically motivated like Murdoch/Soros but immortal? Imagine them being able to spend (and grow) generations of wealth... for generation? For the rest of us, the cost of an opportunity to be immortal will be massive because of course it can be. People today save for retirement, but one day they may save for immortality - or perhaps take out insane loans to fund it. Imagine real estate prices when banks can offer 100y mortgages to a class of rich immortal workers? Imagine trying to advance in your career when someone can get a senior job and work for hundreds of years, especially if they need to fund their 100y mortgage or their immortality procedure - Millennials already complain that boomers won't retire and open up the higher-rung jobs. Immortality would upend society, and likely exacerbate social tensions, but it could also be a great reset in social expectations. Maybe it'd encourage everyone to take a long-term view of their actions. eg. Climate change would impact everyone, so no one would be "too old to care".

silisili 3y ago

Not OP, but my opinion is that I want to die when I'm supposed to, and I want everyone else to also. Time is the great equalizer, and the well to do's should not be able to purchase more. The last time I wrote this opinion, I was met with everything from 'just kill yourself' to 'quit trying to control my life.' Funny bunch here.

boomboomsubban 3y ago
The dying part bothers me less than the aging. I'd be fine dying at the "normal" age, but I'd rather do so with a healthier body than my grandparents. And telling other people when they should die is sorta messed up. Ignore these anti-aging medications, should people be cut off other medicines at a certain point? What's the difference?
- silisili 3y ago
  I've had all these arguments before, that I don't care to have again. > And telling other people when they should die is sorta messed up I'm not telling other people when to die! I'm thinking more of a societal contract. Which in fairness, seem less and less these days. Like, if I go to the back of a queue, and see you going to the front, and request you go to the back... I'm not trying to control your life. I'm just asking you to acknowledge and respect that we live in a society.
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    >I've had all these arguments before, that I don't care to have again. The arguenent of "I don't want to need help going to the bathroom/eating?" Or "I don't want to have effectively a two minute memory?" They're pretty solid arguments to me. >I'm not telling other people when to die! No, you want society to agree with you when people should die. This societal contract already does not exist. Maybe it'd be nice if it did, but you'd still need to answer the question of "should I stop this person from taking medicine because it's time for them to die?"
snvzz 3y ago

rocket_surgeron 3y ago

It doesn't bother me. Every single one of my ancestors for the last 3.5 billion years has died. It is part of existence. 50, 60, 100 more years? Great! Then I can pile on knee, hip, back, and wrist regeneration surgeries. Then extensive therapy to keep my brain from degrading. Also new teeth and corneas. Oh and the heart is going to need a lot of work if it starts beating for twice as long as it was designed to. Plus constant maintenance for the skin as it soaks up an entire second lifetime's worth of UV. Just a never-ending cycle of expensive, likely painful, time-consuming all-consuming patches on the body to delay the inevitable. Just kill me already. Maybe eventually they'll find a path to immortality. That would be even worse. I imagine the joy would drain out of sunsets if you've seen a billion of them, with them being as noteworthy as every time your eye blinks.

Gigachad 3y ago
What if its not constant patches and repair work, but something that slows the degradation entirely so you end up with less health issues up until the point you get cancer and die anyway. But you enjoyed more of that time fitter and healthier.
powerapple 3y ago
I would be very happy if my body can stay young and not necessarily live longer. That's what anti-age means right? Not pro-long your life necessarily, but to live younger, so I don't have to care about my knee problem when exercise.
vidarh 3y ago
Anti-aging by necessity also means solving the common causes of death and your body falling apart, not just letting them happen but somehow preventing them from killing you.
pengaru 3y ago
It's more about "die young, as late as possible" than live forever
Nursie 3y ago
> I imagine the joy would drain out of sunsets if you've seen a billion of them, with them being as noteworthy as every time your eye blinks. So you can imagine that rather than see another sunset, you'd die? You can imagine a state of being where you become so jaded, so incurious, that nothing can pique your interest any more, that interpersonal relationships would be better off terminated with biological death than continued, that learning, travel, discovery all lose their meaning and value? Honestly, as with many of these comments, I feel it says more about your present life than those who would like to live longer or indefinitely. And I certainly know people in their 70s who are not ready to settle down and be fitted for a coffin yet, even if their bodies are starting to seriously disagree. I don't imagine they would turn down the chance of a few more decades of relative fitness.

steve_adams_86 3y ago

I don’t think I’m important enough for it to matter, and I’m fairly sure the fact I will die is a significant component of what makes the brief time I have so valuable.

heroiccocoa 3y ago
An enormous amount of resources are wasted on treating specific, often rare, individual age-related conditions that doesn't efficiently transfer to other conditions. Clearly, people are hurting and it'd a net positive to society to treat the single underlying cause, and save the resources expended on everything else, for an equal if not improved overall health outcome. Even if you don't consider yourself important to the world, surely you are important to yourself. At least I as an atheist consider my limited time alive here— conscious and healthy— to be infinitely valuable to me personally as it's really all that I have. And I think if your life isn't valuable to you in the same way, there's something wrong. Hence, extending it is a worthwhile goal. Longevity research is difficult and it's not as if a breakthrough improving our lifetime by an order of magnitude is around the corner. So, I see little risk in ambitious research that'll probably only yield humble results anyway, at least until we're reaching 200 years old.
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  > Even if you don't consider yourself important to the world, surely you are important to yourself. At least I as an atheist consider my limited time alive here— conscious and healthy— to be infinitely valuable to me personally as it's really all that I have. I agree with this completely, so long as it doesn’t actually cause problems for younger people born into the world. At the moment it’s arguably a good thing that we die and let new generations have their shot at things. I’m only 37 and already excited to see what people in their teens manage to accomplish before I die. By the time the they’re full swing and doing cool stuff, I’ll probably be looking for my keys for a car I haven’t owned for 20 years in a bingo hall. No one will need more of me. Fundamentally though I believe our time is rarely spent as well as it could be, and fixing that might be best to come first. Should I live longer if I don’t cherish it? Should I want more days when I’ve admittedly wasted many? Perhaps the best thing I could do is learn to use the time I have to its fullest. And of course, I go to great lengths to protect my health and lifespan — I want to live as long as I reasonably can, and I want to be able to enjoy it. I don’t think for a second that I should prolong that to any degree which begins to hinder the opportunities and possibilities of younger people, though. Maybe that sounds crazy. I just don’t think I matter more than another person, just like me, wanting all the same opportunities in their own life. I guess I don’t believe old people should be in the way of young people fully living their lives. As long as that’s not happening, sign me up. Until then I’d like to learn to use my time more wisely. On the Shortness of Life totally transformed how I think about longevity and lifespan extension in general. It seems to pale in importance compared to the practice of living better to begin with.

freehorse 3y ago

This question/answer is the standard fallacious response to anybody talking against the anti-aging current. Some people may indeed prefer to die, some people may be religious or whatever, but most people doing the criticism just give extremely low prior probability to not dying due to some technological/medical advance (during their lifetimes at least), so they consider obsessing with something that is virtually impossible for the hope that it will happen a waste of time, of the finite life they have. Then it boils down just to whether one is curious about it, or is curious about any other X subject.

an-honest-moose 3y ago

It's not about not wanting to die. It's about death being inevitable. Everything dies, or breaks down, or decays. That's just how the universe works. The best you'll get is extended life, and that's never going to be enough - there's always going to be someone trying to push that limit out a little further. IMO, what matters more, and what some folks here have brought up, is more healthy years. I think wanting to be fitter and healthier in old age is pretty uncontroversial, but the problem is that it gets rolled up with immortality, because getting to say "We conquered death" would be way sexier than saying "We extended good living by a decade or two (and that's being optimistic)". Immortality has been, and always will be, a fantasy. Better that those resources go to something more productive, like healthcare.

carlmr 3y ago
Death is the evolutionary proof that sometimes you need to shut down legacy systems because maintenance has become painful, the system has accumulated too many workarounds, and a rewrite is in order.
- nocsi 3y ago
  Like a certain generation accumulating too much lead poisoning.
Nursie 3y ago
> Everything dies, or breaks down, or decays. That's just how the universe works. Sure, that's entropy, but that's only necessarily true at the level of the whole system, energy inputs can and do reduce local entropy. > The best you'll get is extended life Sounds good, let's start there. 'True' immortality may or may not be a pipe dream, but it doesn't matter if it is. Almost nobody is talking about living absolutely forever, but looking at ways in which greater longevity can be achieved. I'd bite your hand off for another couple of decades on top of whatever my current 'allocation' might be, I don't give a crap if we've "conquered death" or not, but if we can find ways to give the average person more time, that seems like a win. > Better that those resources go to something more productive, like healthcare. How is this not healthcare? There seems to be this backlash against any talk of life extension, that other things matter more, that it's somehow frivolous, or just morally wrong to seek to live longer. It feels to me entirely arbitrary as we already use all sorts of interventions to help people live longer, and to be healthier for more of that time. This is good and wise and virtuous. But some folks seem to have this weird switch in their heads when extending life gets mentioned, that suddenly they're uncomfortable and the whole thing is not to be discussed by preference. And I wonder if it's because they don't want to admit to themselves or others that they are terrified, but have rationalised away their fear as "meant to be, can't be changed". Such talk of extension makes them uncomfortable.

ptsneves 3y ago

For me the anti aging, immortality thing is funny because I think it has been solved for most species: it is called reproduction. Actually surviving is reproducing. If anti aging proponents spent as much time trying to reproduce and making sure their offspring were fit to continue their bloodline with good education it seems to me a good outcome. That is why the education of my children is important: the imprint of intellect self after I imprinted my bodily self in their genes. One could argue, but “hey ptsneves your children are not you thus you will unavoidably going to be eliminated from existence”. And I say, “it is ok and part of physical existence. I accept it.“ Evolution found it worthwhile to have sexual reproduction, meaning clones are a bad fit for eco system disturbances. Evolution also found it fit to restart the cycle from scratch even if it meant an individual would lose experience or ecosystem optimality. This is to protect again local optimae , which is a great path to extinction. The extent of these 2 premises is such that the apex predator on earth reproduces sexually and has a limited life span. Maybe that is survival bias but I think there are good causation ideas behind them. With the above if I really want to be immortal and have my legacy preserved robustly I should use the current system: reproduction with a good emphasis on descendant upbringing and according to my experience. Again, even if I am great in my current eco system I do not presume this experience will work with eco system disturbances, so I accept evolutionary bargains and have children with a partner I believe will fulfil my bodily destiny the most resilient way possible. I even wanted to start a religion where propagation of one’s self through dedication to offspring and community is central. I am tired of a society ruled by geriatric concerns[1]. (I say this as mostly a joke of course, I have more than enough work raising my children much less dabbling in other peoples lives) Ps: none of what I wrote invalidates improvements on longevity. It is just that we already have a basic system for propagation in time. [1] I know extremely young demographics make for crappy countries and quality of life.

emptyfile 3y ago
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