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I don't wanna be a buzzkill but: I don't see how living (potentially) forever is anything but a horrible, horrible ego driven idea with 0 rational thought put

I don't wanna be a buzzkill but: I don't see how living (potentially) forever is anything but a horrible, horrible ego driven idea with 0 rational thought put behind it, you may enlighten me here: - Unlimited human life expectancy vs limited resources? How would that work? - Do we really want the next dictator of XYZ to rule forever? - The lack of control young people experience when it comes to their own lives (voting, etc) will worsen, if the median age is 80+ or older. - Saying stuff like "There should be no death" is a clear example to me why humans in general are problematic. As long as we consume resources and need space we are still part of this ecosystem and cannot just simply change the rules of how it all works just because we would like to. - I suck at Bingo. Edit: I just want to clarify the following: Don't feel attacked, I am curious to hear your take on this and I never said that I am right on this, I know too little to ever make that claim. I wasn't aware how emotional this topic is to many, this happens to me IRL alot too (I am also aware of why). I am just looking for exchange of ideas, i don't need to be right on this.

foxhill 2y ago
so, when do you want to die, then? really, i’m not trying to be mean here. you assert life must be finite, and all i’m asking is how finite it should be.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  While I am all for immortality, an oft given answer I've seen is, when I can no longer support myself, physically. That means old and frail and unable to walk or move. With immortality though could also come anti aging, so I'm not sure how strong that answer really is.
- financetechbro 2y ago
  Life is not life without death. Personally, I don’t necessarily want to die, I love to live. But also, death is the only thing that makes life precious.
  - kiba 2y ago
    That is just people making meaning out of life experience. Fundamentally, there's nothing about death that make life precious.
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    > death is the only thing that makes life precious. No. Living is what makes life precious. Good memories, good food, good friends, good lovers, good music… if it’d be possible to continue living forever, until you decide you want to take your chances on the existence of an afterlife, it’ll be no less precious than it is now, when nature just takes life from you against your will.
  - commodoreboxer 2y ago
    I don't agree at all. That's like saying the world is only beautiful because it will one day be consumed by the sun. I love my life, and it isn't because I'm going to die.
FeepingCreature 2y ago
There is a considerable distance between "all resources are ultimately limited" and "thus humans should die at 80, instead of 80 trillion when the stars burn out." See also https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified "Transhumanism as simplified Humanism": > If a young child falls on the train tracks, it is good to save them, and if a 45-year-old suffers from a debilitating disease, it is good to cure them. If you have a logical turn of mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a general ethical principle which says “Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad.” If so – and here we enter into controversial territory – we can follow this general principle to a surprising new conclusion: If a 95-year-old is threatened by death from old age, it would be good to drag them from those train tracks, if possible. And if a 120-year-old is starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore them to full vigor, if possible. Also I don't see how it's ego driven. I want everybody (who wants) to live forever. - And while we're at it, every animal who ever lived in every ecosystem has changed things. That's kind of what it means to live in an ecosystem - no actually, that's kind of what it means to live, period.
- KrautFox 2y ago
  Hi, This is a human centric approach, which i don't subscribe to. I am not of the opinion that every human life needs saving as it is the most valuable thing there is, as i don't think it is, my own life included. I will eventually (maybe even soon) die and that's cool with me. And your take on what an ecosystem is lacks the simple fact that alot of it was only possible the last couple billion of years because organisms tend to die, life on earth hasn't adapted to one organsim multiplying as much as we do, consuming as much as we do and having a really long life expectancy at the same time, it won't work. ego driven as it values human life so much that it ignores how much damage it will do, not just to us, but to everything in general. We need to figure out a whole lot more before we can even consider extending our life expectancy like that. That's my take on it, but it's okay to disagree, i am not married to my opinion.
  - kiba 2y ago
    This is a human centric approach, which i don't subscribe to. I am not of the opinion that every human life needs saving as it is the most valuable thing there is, as i don't think it is, my own life included. People die of cancer and other diseases everyday, and you considered it selfish to want to live? What about the impact on loved ones like children or parents? What about the quality of life? Being healthy is strongly tied to living longer. ego driven as it values human life so much that it ignores how much damage it will do, not just to us, but to everything in general. We need to figure out a whole lot more before we can even consider extending our life expectancy like that. The damage is from pollution, not necessarily resource consumption in and itself. Yes, if the air is bad, we're going to die more of lung cancer. The solution is to build a society that value clean air, a stable climate, and a life support system(biosphere) that isn't steadily being destroyed as a byproduct of our consumption.
VoodooJuJu 2y ago
>I don't see how living (potentially) forever is anything but a horrible, horrible ego driven idea with 0 rational thought put behind it, you may enlighten me here: That's exactly what it is, and that's exactly why immortality is so appealing to moderns - a sick people whose sense of purpose is informed by hedonism and mass media, a people who are more concerned with consuming pleasurable experiences and doing what their state-corporate media god deems noble, rather than serve their children, the wisdom & legacy of their ancestors, or God.
- Loughla 2y ago
  Oh stop. The quest for immortality is as old as human culture. Every generation has tried. Whether it's through magic or pseudoscience or today's actual science. I think it's a natural state for an individual to want to remain existing. Otherwise we would all kill ourselves young.
- kiba 2y ago
  Far from it. The media and culture rationalize death and death inducing behaviors including sleep deprivation, getting drunk, working and sacrificing one's health for the grind, and hedonistic behaviors that ultimately reduce one's lifespan, health, and quality of life.
Eliezer 2y ago
Bad news - there's a 5000-year-old bristlecone pine tree in California. On your philosophy you should go burn it down, I guess? https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40224991 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40224991
- telesilla 2y ago
  If it's offspring were a parasite that expanded to consume all earth's resources, sure!
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    what a nasty, sad worldview if you think of humanity as a parasite
    - telesilla 2y ago
      Why the assumption I said this about humans? I was referring to parasites in the theoretical. More weirdly, was someone equating a tree's ability to be destructive, compared to human's ability to do so. The only time I've seen trees be destructive is due to human interference, putting them into the discussion new ecosystems where they can quickly overcome the native plants.
- KrautFox 2y ago
  How is that a valid comparison?
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Do we have numbers on depression for young trees?
Vecr 2y ago
Under rational thought it's generally considered that the operator of said rational thought should, all things equal, try to live forever. It does not say anything else about other people.
- Vecr 2y ago
  Can someone explain what I said incorrectly? Assuming you can either be killed by someone else, be killed in an accident, or commit suicide, the rationality of living forever appears correct. Avoiding being killed by someone else is generally rational, because they probably don't have your best interests in mind, demonstrated by them trying to kill you. Being killed in an accident won't help anyone. That leaves suicide, and I'm not sure who says suicide is generally rational. I can think that if you are going to be tortured to give up the secret to destroying the world it might be rational, but that's not "with all else equal" and is not a generally common situation. Otherwise, it comes down to the simple math of "the next number" or the "successor" function, where applying the function "wanting more to be alive tomorrow than dead tomorrow" to the current day, applying the successor function, then repeating, ends up with an outcome of "infinity".
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  Rational thought of the 18th century, maybe. David Hume thoroughly refuted the notion that the study of "is" could lead to an "ought". Immanuel Kant recovered the idea that we should be good to each other, but only by assuming that we should want good for ourselves. No system of rationality can tell you what to want, in a vacuum. (Computers don't, in general, want anything, and _won't_ until we tell them to.) The only people who believe that self-interested behaviour is inherently rational are Randian Objectivists, but that philosophy's total nonsense (barely a "philosophy").
  - Vecr 2y ago
    Have you read AI Drives by S. M. Omohundro? I think it's quite commonly known. The theories that came from it are called "instrumental convergence".
    - 2y ago
afthonos 2y ago
> - The lack of control young people experience when it comes to their own lives (voting, etc) will worsen, if the median age is 80+ or older. This is a really strong status-quo bias shared by many people who are pro-death. Imagine a world where no one dies, but young people were indeed very sad, depressed, and generally unhappy because of the reasons you stated. Seeing this unfortunate situation, someone says "I have an idea. What if we killed everyone over 82?" There is an almost infinite number of things you could try that aren't that. The fact that we happen to live in a world where an imperfect partial solution to young people being unhappy is "statistically everyone over 82 dies" doesn't make it a good world; it just means we have to fix unhappy young people in addition to fixing everyone dying. This critique applies to most of your questions, with the exception of the finitude of resources. But if we can live just until the stars burn out, I'll call that a win over the current situation.
- KrautFox 2y ago
  Maybe i didn't communicate well enough what i am trying to say: I don't see how it would improve life overall, except for duration. I see many areas where life would become worse because of it, so i am biased, true. But your scenario implies that it is already a reality, which it is not, and that i would be in favor of killing people, which i am not. I am simply suggesting one thing: Maybe we shouldn't be able to live as long as we want, maybe we should not try to make this a reality.
  - afthonos 2y ago
    > I don't see how it would improve life overall, except for duration. I think we differ here because to me, if life is good, extending duration is enough; it doesn't need to be even better. > But your scenario implies that it is already a reality, which it is not, and that i would be in favor of killing people, which i am not. I apologize, I tried hard to avoid implying that. I am only saying that if we were in my preferred world, very few people would advocate to turn it into this one. They would try to improve the preferred world in other ways to fix the problems that exist there. By symmetry, I argue that it means at a minimum that turning our world into that one is an improvement. (Though there may be other, different, ways to improve it!)
melling 2y ago
NAH, I’ve had this conversation 100 times I just tell people it’s completely optional and move along. Several years ago I suggested we ban immorality debates on HN https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-be-banned-from-hacker-news-immortality/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-...
- FreelanceX 2y ago
  Making it optional doesn't solve the issue since it means those who choose to consume resources eternally at the expense of others are rewarded. In the meantime, those who choose to do the "right thing" (dying a natural death) would be punished: indeed, dying in a world where others live forever seems far more painful than dying where nobody has a choice.
  - melling 2y ago
    Yeah, I expect a lot of people who think dying “gives life meaning” will change their minds.
- lackoftactics 2y ago
  You make some excellent points about focusing on the scientific aspects. However, I don't think we should discourage intellectual philosophical debates, as many of us here are genuinely interested in philosophy. These discussions provide a valuable counterbalance to purely technical conversations. By the way, the study mentioning 15,000 steps is already outdated. Recent research suggests that even 10,000 steps may not be necessary for health benefits.
  - melling 2y ago
    Have at it. Everyone should debate it once, maybe twice. The universe is a big place. I look forward to exploring it with my immortality. Hundred years to the nearest star?
lossolo 2y ago
> Unlimited human life expectancy vs limited resources? How would that work? Just like today but controlling the population would be necessary. Do you want to live forever? Fine, but no children until you die. Since people would still statistically die in accidents or by suicide, new births could still be permitted. As productivity increases over time, everyone would lead a better life in a population-controlled world > Do we really want the next dictator of XYZ to rule forever? Overthrow him? With infinite time, you have an infinite number of attempts. Dictatorships are governed by regimes, not just one person. The dictator is merely a manifestation and representation of that regime. As history has often shown, killing one dictator may simply lead to another, if one dies of old age, a successor will take his place.
deadbabe 2y ago
Imagine people like Napoleon or Ben Franklin still being alive and involved in politics. That’s pretty neat.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dfxm12 2y ago
Overall, I agree with you, but, as a fan of the Highlander TV series, I find this fun to think about sometimes. People would still die, just not from natural causes (right?). Even today, dictators have more fear of a coup than cancer. Long lived species tend to have fewer offspring as well & would have to confront the issue of limited resources head on, instead of kicking the can to the next generation. I think a society that grows up around humans with unlimited life expectancy would probably look different than ours does, maybe in ways we can't imagine (even today, ritualistic suicide like Sallekhana is hard to imagine...). This would be different from a situation where people living today suddenly make this switch.

foxhill 2y ago

so, when do you want to die, then? really, i’m not trying to be mean here. you assert life must be finite, and all i’m asking is how finite it should be.

satvikpendem 2y ago
While I am all for immortality, an oft given answer I've seen is, when I can no longer support myself, physically. That means old and frail and unable to walk or move. With immortality though could also come anti aging, so I'm not sure how strong that answer really is.
financetechbro 2y ago
Life is not life without death. Personally, I don’t necessarily want to die, I love to live. But also, death is the only thing that makes life precious.
- kiba 2y ago
  That is just people making meaning out of life experience. Fundamentally, there's nothing about death that make life precious.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  > death is the only thing that makes life precious. No. Living is what makes life precious. Good memories, good food, good friends, good lovers, good music… if it’d be possible to continue living forever, until you decide you want to take your chances on the existence of an afterlife, it’ll be no less precious than it is now, when nature just takes life from you against your will.
- commodoreboxer 2y ago
  I don't agree at all. That's like saying the world is only beautiful because it will one day be consumed by the sun. I love my life, and it isn't because I'm going to die.

FeepingCreature 2y ago

There is a considerable distance between "all resources are ultimately limited" and "thus humans should die at 80, instead of 80 trillion when the stars burn out." See also https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified "Transhumanism as simplified Humanism": > If a young child falls on the train tracks, it is good to save them, and if a 45-year-old suffers from a debilitating disease, it is good to cure them. If you have a logical turn of mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a general ethical principle which says “Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad.” If so – and here we enter into controversial territory – we can follow this general principle to a surprising new conclusion: If a 95-year-old is threatened by death from old age, it would be good to drag them from those train tracks, if possible. And if a 120-year-old is starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore them to full vigor, if possible. Also I don't see how it's ego driven. I want everybody (who wants) to live forever. - And while we're at it, every animal who ever lived in every ecosystem has changed things. That's kind of what it means to live in an ecosystem - no actually, that's kind of what it means to live, period.

KrautFox 2y ago
Hi, This is a human centric approach, which i don't subscribe to. I am not of the opinion that every human life needs saving as it is the most valuable thing there is, as i don't think it is, my own life included. I will eventually (maybe even soon) die and that's cool with me. And your take on what an ecosystem is lacks the simple fact that alot of it was only possible the last couple billion of years because organisms tend to die, life on earth hasn't adapted to one organsim multiplying as much as we do, consuming as much as we do and having a really long life expectancy at the same time, it won't work. ego driven as it values human life so much that it ignores how much damage it will do, not just to us, but to everything in general. We need to figure out a whole lot more before we can even consider extending our life expectancy like that. That's my take on it, but it's okay to disagree, i am not married to my opinion.
- kiba 2y ago
  This is a human centric approach, which i don't subscribe to. I am not of the opinion that every human life needs saving as it is the most valuable thing there is, as i don't think it is, my own life included. People die of cancer and other diseases everyday, and you considered it selfish to want to live? What about the impact on loved ones like children or parents? What about the quality of life? Being healthy is strongly tied to living longer. ego driven as it values human life so much that it ignores how much damage it will do, not just to us, but to everything in general. We need to figure out a whole lot more before we can even consider extending our life expectancy like that. The damage is from pollution, not necessarily resource consumption in and itself. Yes, if the air is bad, we're going to die more of lung cancer. The solution is to build a society that value clean air, a stable climate, and a life support system(biosphere) that isn't steadily being destroyed as a byproduct of our consumption.

VoodooJuJu 2y ago

>I don't see how living (potentially) forever is anything but a horrible, horrible ego driven idea with 0 rational thought put behind it, you may enlighten me here: That's exactly what it is, and that's exactly why immortality is so appealing to moderns - a sick people whose sense of purpose is informed by hedonism and mass media, a people who are more concerned with consuming pleasurable experiences and doing what their state-corporate media god deems noble, rather than serve their children, the wisdom & legacy of their ancestors, or God.

Loughla 2y ago
Oh stop. The quest for immortality is as old as human culture. Every generation has tried. Whether it's through magic or pseudoscience or today's actual science. I think it's a natural state for an individual to want to remain existing. Otherwise we would all kill ourselves young.
kiba 2y ago
Far from it. The media and culture rationalize death and death inducing behaviors including sleep deprivation, getting drunk, working and sacrificing one's health for the grind, and hedonistic behaviors that ultimately reduce one's lifespan, health, and quality of life.

Eliezer 2y ago

Bad news - there's a 5000-year-old bristlecone pine tree in California. On your philosophy you should go burn it down, I guess? https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40224991 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40224991

telesilla 2y ago
If it's offspring were a parasite that expanded to consume all earth's resources, sure!
- dingnuts 2y ago
  what a nasty, sad worldview if you think of humanity as a parasite
  - telesilla 2y ago
    Why the assumption I said this about humans? I was referring to parasites in the theoretical. More weirdly, was someone equating a tree's ability to be destructive, compared to human's ability to do so. The only time I've seen trees be destructive is due to human interference, putting them into the discussion new ecosystems where they can quickly overcome the native plants.
KrautFox 2y ago
How is that a valid comparison?
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Do we have numbers on depression for young trees?

Vecr 2y ago

Under rational thought it's generally considered that the operator of said rational thought should, all things equal, try to live forever. It does not say anything else about other people.

Vecr 2y ago
Can someone explain what I said incorrectly? Assuming you can either be killed by someone else, be killed in an accident, or commit suicide, the rationality of living forever appears correct. Avoiding being killed by someone else is generally rational, because they probably don't have your best interests in mind, demonstrated by them trying to kill you. Being killed in an accident won't help anyone. That leaves suicide, and I'm not sure who says suicide is generally rational. I can think that if you are going to be tortured to give up the secret to destroying the world it might be rational, but that's not "with all else equal" and is not a generally common situation. Otherwise, it comes down to the simple math of "the next number" or the "successor" function, where applying the function "wanting more to be alive tomorrow than dead tomorrow" to the current day, applying the successor function, then repeating, ends up with an outcome of "infinity".
wizzwizz4 2y ago
Rational thought of the 18th century, maybe. David Hume thoroughly refuted the notion that the study of "is" could lead to an "ought". Immanuel Kant recovered the idea that we should be good to each other, but only by assuming that we should want good for ourselves. No system of rationality can tell you what to want, in a vacuum. (Computers don't, in general, want anything, and _won't_ until we tell them to.) The only people who believe that self-interested behaviour is inherently rational are Randian Objectivists, but that philosophy's total nonsense (barely a "philosophy").
- Vecr 2y ago
  Have you read AI Drives by S. M. Omohundro? I think it's quite commonly known. The theories that came from it are called "instrumental convergence".
  - 2y ago

afthonos 2y ago

> - The lack of control young people experience when it comes to their own lives (voting, etc) will worsen, if the median age is 80+ or older. This is a really strong status-quo bias shared by many people who are pro-death. Imagine a world where no one dies, but young people were indeed very sad, depressed, and generally unhappy because of the reasons you stated. Seeing this unfortunate situation, someone says "I have an idea. What if we killed everyone over 82?" There is an almost infinite number of things you could try that aren't that. The fact that we happen to live in a world where an imperfect partial solution to young people being unhappy is "statistically everyone over 82 dies" doesn't make it a good world; it just means we have to fix unhappy young people in addition to fixing everyone dying. This critique applies to most of your questions, with the exception of the finitude of resources. But if we can live just until the stars burn out, I'll call that a win over the current situation.

KrautFox 2y ago
Maybe i didn't communicate well enough what i am trying to say: I don't see how it would improve life overall, except for duration. I see many areas where life would become worse because of it, so i am biased, true. But your scenario implies that it is already a reality, which it is not, and that i would be in favor of killing people, which i am not. I am simply suggesting one thing: Maybe we shouldn't be able to live as long as we want, maybe we should not try to make this a reality.
- afthonos 2y ago
  > I don't see how it would improve life overall, except for duration. I think we differ here because to me, if life is good, extending duration is enough; it doesn't need to be even better. > But your scenario implies that it is already a reality, which it is not, and that i would be in favor of killing people, which i am not. I apologize, I tried hard to avoid implying that. I am only saying that if we were in my preferred world, very few people would advocate to turn it into this one. They would try to improve the preferred world in other ways to fix the problems that exist there. By symmetry, I argue that it means at a minimum that turning our world into that one is an improvement. (Though there may be other, different, ways to improve it!)

melling 2y ago

NAH, I’ve had this conversation 100 times I just tell people it’s completely optional and move along. Several years ago I suggested we ban immorality debates on HN https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-be-banned-from-hacker-news-immortality/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/stories-that-should-...

FreelanceX 2y ago
Making it optional doesn't solve the issue since it means those who choose to consume resources eternally at the expense of others are rewarded. In the meantime, those who choose to do the "right thing" (dying a natural death) would be punished: indeed, dying in a world where others live forever seems far more painful than dying where nobody has a choice.
- melling 2y ago
  Yeah, I expect a lot of people who think dying “gives life meaning” will change their minds.
lackoftactics 2y ago
You make some excellent points about focusing on the scientific aspects. However, I don't think we should discourage intellectual philosophical debates, as many of us here are genuinely interested in philosophy. These discussions provide a valuable counterbalance to purely technical conversations. By the way, the study mentioning 15,000 steps is already outdated. Recent research suggests that even 10,000 steps may not be necessary for health benefits.
- melling 2y ago
  Have at it. Everyone should debate it once, maybe twice. The universe is a big place. I look forward to exploring it with my immortality. Hundred years to the nearest star?

lossolo 2y ago

> Unlimited human life expectancy vs limited resources? How would that work? Just like today but controlling the population would be necessary. Do you want to live forever? Fine, but no children until you die. Since people would still statistically die in accidents or by suicide, new births could still be permitted. As productivity increases over time, everyone would lead a better life in a population-controlled world > Do we really want the next dictator of XYZ to rule forever? Overthrow him? With infinite time, you have an infinite number of attempts. Dictatorships are governed by regimes, not just one person. The dictator is merely a manifestation and representation of that regime. As history has often shown, killing one dictator may simply lead to another, if one dies of old age, a successor will take his place.

deadbabe 2y ago

Imagine people like Napoleon or Ben Franklin still being alive and involved in politics. That’s pretty neat.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dfxm12 2y ago

Overall, I agree with you, but, as a fan of the Highlander TV series, I find this fun to think about sometimes. People would still die, just not from natural causes (right?). Even today, dictators have more fear of a coup than cancer. Long lived species tend to have fewer offspring as well & would have to confront the issue of limited resources head on, instead of kicking the can to the next generation. I think a society that grows up around humans with unlimited life expectancy would probably look different than ours does, maybe in ways we can't imagine (even today, ritualistic suicide like Sallekhana is hard to imagine...). This would be different from a situation where people living today suddenly make this switch.