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I believe that brains in jars is the only acceptable path to immortality, but reading about it still unsettles me.
by bobsmooth 3y ago
I believe that brains in jars is the only acceptable path to immortality, but reading about it still unsettles me.
- DoctorOW 3y agoI still haven't been sold on a need for immortality. We have people live longer than they like now. Why extend any further past this?
- the__alchemist 3y agoCome back to this when you're old, or another circumstance where your life is failing. You might not have the same mindset as when death seems like something in the distance that is happening to other people, or you far in the future.
- DoctorOW 3y agoI've talked to multiple people who feel more or less ready to die. This reinforces my point.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoI've talked to multiple people who want to live forever, at various stages of their lives. Our comments therefore cancel out. (Our of curiosity, the people you talked to - were they elderly, in failing bodies, with failing minds, seeing nothing in their personal future but slow and steady degradation? Might they think differently if their quality of life could be improved?)
- throwanem 3y agoI saw you palm that card. Not being able to die is just not being able to die. Rejuvenation is a different, and I suspect a considerably harder, problem.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoRE (): one also needs to filter out the religious folks who believe in some kind of an afterlife, as they likely expect that to be a better deal than anything humans can come up with on their own.
- DoctorOW 3y agoYes these people were particularly elderly, but immortality is not a cure for being elderly. It effectively exasperates the condition.
- lab14 3y agoWhy not?
- DoctorOW 3y agoThere's a finite amount of resources, experiences, and overall joy that life offers. Infinite life loses its appeal after those returns diminish.
- rnk 3y agoI think we have enough resources to go around now. We just don't allocate them fairly. People and companies like making money and resist change, resist other technologies and sabotage them politically, as an example.
- NL807 3y agoWhat if you can reset some of your experiences?
- ux-app 3y agopeople generally get tired of life because their body is failing. I'm sure you could find exceptions where people were just ... bored ... and ready to die, but this would be the extreme minority. >There's a finite amount of ... experiences I very much doubt that is the case in anything but the most pedantic, philosophical sense.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoPersonally I don't want to live forever. Though one might argue people only live longer than they wish to because their body falls apart around their consciousness, or they are faced with losing their consciousness slowly (such as Robin Williams)
- com2kid 3y agoI can easily plan out a few hundred years of activities. Let's say I have a 500 year lifespan, all except the last 10 or so with health and vigor. Well at that point, the opportunity cost of skill mastery becomes tiny. Spend 20 years learning to become a really great piano player, and another 15 learning parkour. Master 3 or 4 martial arts, that is a good 20-30 years each. Homestead for a decade or two, doing everything from scratch by hand. Spend a couple decades doing volunteer work. 1 minute of ideas and I'm up to 150 years so far. I agree that need to achieve a post-scarcity society, which would involve a lot of uncomfortable trade-offs. E.g. if we just have food that we can 100% automate the production of and that doesn't cause any ecological harm, we'd dramatically limit what food exists for human consumption. Same goes for transit, consumer goods, and so forth. I honestly think that if humanity wanted to, we could transition to post scarcity in a few decades using today's technology, but it would be a drop in quality of life for the first world (no more steaks!) so there is no real motive by those with power and money.
- quesera 3y agoI can easily think of 150 years of things to do simply as a brain in a vat. Sure there are sensory inputs I'd miss. But as long as IO in the form of text and/or audio is working, with or without augmentation, I'm confident it would be worth a try. Vision would be a nice to have.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoI would not give up my agency in such a way. "No please don't!" Said the brain nobody was listening to anymore...
- happytoexplain 3y agoYou, personally, probably won't be sold on it - the concept is straightforward, so it's not like there's much you could be missing. If we manage it in your lifetime, you can simply die and let live.
- hurryer 3y agoWhat's wrong with uploading to a robot body.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoA copy of me isn't me, despite it thinking it is.
- hurryer 3y agoYour atoms are being replaced all the time, at some point none of your original atoms are still present, yet somehow you feel no discontinuity.
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoI believe I am more than just the sum of my atoms, and part of me is spiritual. A scan of my physical makeup won't capture my immaterial soul.
- spartanatreyu 3y agoIt's just a faster Ship of Theseus
- I_Am_Nous 3y agoI hope they have Metroid style power armor in there!
- bobsmooth 3y agoExactly. No way I'm getting in a Star Trek teleporter either.
- GolfPopper 3y agoBut the you of next year isn't the you who is reading this thread, either. And the you reading this thread isn't 10-year-old you. You think you have continuity of experience, but do you really? If the copy of you thinks it has continuity of experience, what's the difference, really?
- Daub 3y ago'Brain in a jar' was the name of my hard drive when I was young.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- throwanem 3y agoThere are worse things than dying.
- bobsmooth 3y agoThat's why it's unsettling. They can keep the brain alive but not communicate with it.
- throwanem 3y agoThere exists a school of thought which may or may not intend as a serious proposition that the optimal individual response, to an incontrovertible demonstration of working human mind uploading technology, is immediate suicide by means guaranteeing fine mechanical disassembly of the brain, or at least a significant fraction of the neocortex. This seems like being somewhere in the same broad category of problem.
- postalrat 3y agoBad jar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PUIxEWmsvI&t=92s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PUIxEWmsvI&t=92s Good jar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqaAs_3azSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqaAs_3azSs
- 01100011 3y agoI'm disappointed that the only reference to Futurama in the comments is a tangential one. Anyway, brains in jars are still meat. They're still cells which succumb to the steady accumulation of errors and cellular junk. Brains in a jar may be easier than keeping a full body alive, but I suspect only slightly.
- brandall10 3y agoI'm more disappointed there's no reference to early 80s Steve Martin movie "The Man with Two Brains", as he literally wanders around talking to a brain in a jar.
- robocat 3y agoThe history of the cliché goes way back before Futurama: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat Or I just read: Therefore the logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle. - written by George Orwell ~1937 in a book intended for general audience - he avoids uncommon or unclear metaphors. http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/11.html http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/11.html
- muratti 3y agoThe problem of living forever reminded me of this quote: “Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment