4 ms·

"You're given a decent amount of time on this Earth, already make it count and move on." I hear this all the time, but I still can't wrap my head around it. If

by kwk 14y ago

"You're given a decent amount of time on this Earth, already make it count and move on." I hear this all the time, but I still can't wrap my head around it. If you value life, why wouldn't you want to sustain it? If you're content to die, why don't you get it over with?

graeme 14y ago
I don't know how I feel about immortality or hyper-long lives (not sure which one you meant). It's a complex question. So I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your conclusion. But your argument isn't very good. I've made one that is exactly parallel. "If you value pizza, why wouldn't you eat it forever? If you're content to one day stop eating pizza, why not stop eating it right now?" Replace "pizza" or "life" with "X" and you have a parallel argument. The (potential) answer is that some things change qualitatively over time, or with quantity. Life may be one of them, or it might not. I don't think we're capable of imagining the answer. Everything we know about society is based on humans coming and going in cycles. To change this would change everything. It feels like it would be a good change, but the upsides are easier to imagine than the downsides. "No one wants to die, ergo humanity would be better off without death." is not sound logic. We might be better off without death, but it's truly hard to say.
- zanny 14y ago
  They are tangential arguments. We get more people through reproduction and we lose people to ageing, disease, and trauma. We don't even need to make Americans live longer to realize soon that we need to cut back heavily on the first. Regardless of any new contributions to ageing research, the reality is that in this century we have over a hundred countries yet to enter the first world where births per family nears ~2 and until then medical and social advances in those countries will explode their populations. We are already unsustainable, so the problem of stopping people from spawning more is really unrelated to medical advances in the longevity of first world inhabitants. The population explosion is happening elsewhere but is still a real problem. Not saying first world countries have nothing to work on. We still consume as many raw resources as 3 - 50 Africans depending on where you live. At that, scientific progress is always essential. I don't want to live to be 300 where I spend 225 years a vegetable or that my quality of life still free-falls past 60 like it does today. Extending quality of life has the added benefit of meaning you get more bang for your buck per person - if you spent 30 years training a doctor from birth to functionality, and their quality of life starts slipping 30 years later, you only get 30 prime years from them. If you can keep them at middle-age fitness and well being for 70 years, you get significantly more doctor per time spent on the person.
  - kwk 14y ago
    "We are already unsustainable, so the problem of stopping people from spawning more is really unrelated..." "Extending quality of life has the added benefit of meaning you get more bang for your buck per person..." Amen.
- kwk 14y ago
  "We might be better off without death, but it's truly hard to say." Absolutely. We are simply actors in a complex environment; we have access to limited data points among an equation containing dizzyingly many variables. However, if none of us were to ever press forth for fear of uncertainty, we'd all recede into stasis and eventual extinction. If you're worried about whether or not this planet contains enough resources to sustain an immortal populace indefinitely, which seems to be a common sentiment, that's a different issue entirely. For the record, it doesn't, but neither does it contain enough resources to sustain a mortal populace indefinitely. "I've made one that is exactly parallel. ... pizza ..." Also for the record, this isn't _exactly_ parallel. In your example, if I were to stop eating pizza, I would retain the potential to resume eating it at some later point. The point I was trying to make is that once you're dead, you're absolutely impotent, i.e., unable to effect any further change on reality. For the life of me (pun intended), I can't understand why anyone would be content to forfeit their potential.
  - graeme 14y ago
    Oops, you're right. I should have said "stop eating pizza forever, irrevocably" or "inject yourself with a virus that gives you a fatal allergy to pizza". Or, perhaps I should have picked a non-pizza argument. For a more serious exploration of the issue, you could read "The Immortal" by Jorge Luis Borges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_(short_story) He was an Argentine short story writer famed for taking ideas to their logical conclusion. It's worth a read. The story only discusses an individual immortal in a society of mortals though, not a whole society made immortal.

by kwk 14y ago

graeme 14y ago

I don't know how I feel about immortality or hyper-long lives (not sure which one you meant). It's a complex question. So I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your conclusion. But your argument isn't very good. I've made one that is exactly parallel. "If you value pizza, why wouldn't you eat it forever? If you're content to one day stop eating pizza, why not stop eating it right now?" Replace "pizza" or "life" with "X" and you have a parallel argument. The (potential) answer is that some things change qualitatively over time, or with quantity. Life may be one of them, or it might not. I don't think we're capable of imagining the answer. Everything we know about society is based on humans coming and going in cycles. To change this would change everything. It feels like it would be a good change, but the upsides are easier to imagine than the downsides. "No one wants to die, ergo humanity would be better off without death." is not sound logic. We might be better off without death, but it's truly hard to say.

zanny 14y ago
They are tangential arguments. We get more people through reproduction and we lose people to ageing, disease, and trauma. We don't even need to make Americans live longer to realize soon that we need to cut back heavily on the first. Regardless of any new contributions to ageing research, the reality is that in this century we have over a hundred countries yet to enter the first world where births per family nears ~2 and until then medical and social advances in those countries will explode their populations. We are already unsustainable, so the problem of stopping people from spawning more is really unrelated to medical advances in the longevity of first world inhabitants. The population explosion is happening elsewhere but is still a real problem. Not saying first world countries have nothing to work on. We still consume as many raw resources as 3 - 50 Africans depending on where you live. At that, scientific progress is always essential. I don't want to live to be 300 where I spend 225 years a vegetable or that my quality of life still free-falls past 60 like it does today. Extending quality of life has the added benefit of meaning you get more bang for your buck per person - if you spent 30 years training a doctor from birth to functionality, and their quality of life starts slipping 30 years later, you only get 30 prime years from them. If you can keep them at middle-age fitness and well being for 70 years, you get significantly more doctor per time spent on the person.
- kwk 14y ago
  "We are already unsustainable, so the problem of stopping people from spawning more is really unrelated..." "Extending quality of life has the added benefit of meaning you get more bang for your buck per person..." Amen.
kwk 14y ago
"We might be better off without death, but it's truly hard to say." Absolutely. We are simply actors in a complex environment; we have access to limited data points among an equation containing dizzyingly many variables. However, if none of us were to ever press forth for fear of uncertainty, we'd all recede into stasis and eventual extinction. If you're worried about whether or not this planet contains enough resources to sustain an immortal populace indefinitely, which seems to be a common sentiment, that's a different issue entirely. For the record, it doesn't, but neither does it contain enough resources to sustain a mortal populace indefinitely. "I've made one that is exactly parallel. ... pizza ..." Also for the record, this isn't _exactly_ parallel. In your example, if I were to stop eating pizza, I would retain the potential to resume eating it at some later point. The point I was trying to make is that once you're dead, you're absolutely impotent, i.e., unable to effect any further change on reality. For the life of me (pun intended), I can't understand why anyone would be content to forfeit their potential.
- graeme 14y ago
  Oops, you're right. I should have said "stop eating pizza forever, irrevocably" or "inject yourself with a virus that gives you a fatal allergy to pizza". Or, perhaps I should have picked a non-pizza argument. For a more serious exploration of the issue, you could read "The Immortal" by Jorge Luis Borges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_(short_story) He was an Argentine short story writer famed for taking ideas to their logical conclusion. It's worth a read. The story only discusses an individual immortal in a society of mortals though, not a whole society made immortal.