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Life extension research isn’t going to make anyone immortal - it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few thousand years the odds you w

by skissane 11mo ago

Life extension research isn’t going to make anyone immortal - it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play, and after a few thousand years the odds you will succumb to one or the other becomes quite high. Suicide is likely to be another major factor, including active suicide (possibly styled as euthanasia), the passive suicide of choosing to stop all this life extension wizardry, and intentional recklessness soon resulting in accidental death. Finally, for all we know there is a long tail of obscure disease processes that only kick in after lifespans no one has as yet ever reached-and even though that too might eventually be solved, if it takes you a thousand years to find the first case of such a disease, how many will die from it before you find a cure?

igor47 11mo ago
Maybe. There's plenty of science fiction that addresses this. For example the "meths" (short for Methuselah) in altered carbon, who achieve immortality by making backups of their brains that can be spawned to cloned bodies. You could recover from accidents, or roll back to before the obscure disease kicked in
- bluefirebrand 11mo ago
  That doesn't sound like immortality to me It might look like immortality to outside observers, but I don't see how it is the same thing Any process that could theoretically allow me to exist at the same time as my future self must clearly not be me anymore So any kind if "mind backup" is a copy. A clone with a copy of my memories absolutely cannot be me. We would somehow need to be able to transfer my consciousness into a clone body It seems very likely to me that consciousness is actually a side effect of a physical network in the brain and cannot actually be separated from the biological brain to move to an artificial brain
  - BobaFloutist 11mo ago
    Yeah for my money true immortality requires fantasy, or religion. I'd be thrilled to have another handful of centuries though. It doesn't have to be forever to be valuable
  - pyuser583 11mo ago
    In the Altered Carbon world there are strict laws against “double sleeving”, but it happens whenever the plot benefits. One character has an entire island of populated exclusively by herself. They never go into why it’s illegal. I think it’s implied they know a copy isn’t the original, but they don’t want to think about it. Too unpleasant an idea.
mrandish 11mo ago
> it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play Cory Doctorow's wonderful sci-fi book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" explored exactly this in interesting ways. In the book people in the future can live essentially forever by transferring their consciousness into new bodies. They can also back up the contents of their consciousness, something most people do nightly but certainly before doing some dangerous extreme sport. Doing dangerous things without backing yourself up is considered tantamount to suicide since you lose all the memories and personal growth, essentially the person you became since your last backup. People do get bored and will sometimes choose to "deadhead" for hundreds of years at a time, which is putting yourself into stasis and skipping those centuries. The book is full of provocative ideas about how practical immortality might actually work on a personal and societal level.
- leethargo 11mo ago
  And we know how reliable normies are with the backup of their personal data...
- skissane 11mo ago
  Life extension to make people live several times longer? Seems plausible we’ll get there eventually, simply by extrapolating current trends in science and biotechnology, and observing what is possible in other species. Mind uploading? That’s a whole other level of sci-fi. It isn’t extrapolating what we already have, it is waving your hand and declaring “as far as we know it isn’t physically impossible so why wouldn’t we get there eventually?” Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are?
  - ileonichwiesz 11mo ago
    > Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are? You don’t need sci-fi mind backups for that. How certain are you that when you go to sleep tonight, the person who wakes up tomorrow will be „actually you”? How certain are you that all your memories were lived by „actually you”? The answer, I suppose, is that we don’t know what „actually you” even means, how consciousness works, or why you’ve even got a (seemingly) continuous internal experience.
roenxi 11mo ago
To even consider "immortal" as possible suggests someone hasn't had a lot of formal math training. Infinity is rather large. In an infinite amount of time, any possible conjunction of circumstances that could cause an immortality system to fail will happen. Talking in thousands, millions or even billions of years doesn't even need to be rounded to be basically zero when compared to eternity. Death is a certainty. No amount of technology can change that even theoretically. We don't even have reason to be confident that the universe itself is eternal, let alone any component of it.
- strogonoff 11mo ago
  We don’t know what we don’t know.
- sungho_ 11mo ago
  You are confusing ‘thinking it is possible’ with 'being certain of it.'
  - roenxi 11mo ago
    I don't think I am. What would the path be to thinking it is possible? In the best case scenario where everything we know about physics turns out to be wrong and the universe miraculously allows complex eternal patterns to form it'd still eventually end up as some entity that thought a completely different way, had a completely different form, and has a very limited understanding of the concept of "what I am" because it'd have to keep changing parts of itself due to unexpected circumstances. It'd be a ship of Thesius to the point where there wasn't even a memory of what a ship was any more. A severe Alzheimers patient would be the same person they always have been compared to what an eternity of change would bring. If that is immortality then we may as well call it a tautology and say we're already immortal. None of the things that make people who they are need to be preserved to achieve it so we're realistically already there. Living an absurdly long time I can get behind. Billions of years, trillions of years, unimaginable numbers of years, sure. That could happen. But immortality isn't an option, everything eventually dies off unless we play semantic games where there aren't any properties of the thing that need to be preserved. And maybe even reality has an expiration date for all we know, which would render the whole project moot.

igor47 11mo ago

Maybe. There's plenty of science fiction that addresses this. For example the "meths" (short for Methuselah) in altered carbon, who achieve immortality by making backups of their brains that can be spawned to cloned bodies. You could recover from accidents, or roll back to before the obscure disease kicked in

bluefirebrand 11mo ago
That doesn't sound like immortality to me It might look like immortality to outside observers, but I don't see how it is the same thing Any process that could theoretically allow me to exist at the same time as my future self must clearly not be me anymore So any kind if "mind backup" is a copy. A clone with a copy of my memories absolutely cannot be me. We would somehow need to be able to transfer my consciousness into a clone body It seems very likely to me that consciousness is actually a side effect of a physical network in the brain and cannot actually be separated from the biological brain to move to an artificial brain
- BobaFloutist 11mo ago
  Yeah for my money true immortality requires fantasy, or religion. I'd be thrilled to have another handful of centuries though. It doesn't have to be forever to be valuable
- pyuser583 11mo ago
  In the Altered Carbon world there are strict laws against “double sleeving”, but it happens whenever the plot benefits. One character has an entire island of populated exclusively by herself. They never go into why it’s illegal. I think it’s implied they know a copy isn’t the original, but they don’t want to think about it. Too unpleasant an idea.

mrandish 11mo ago

> it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play Cory Doctorow's wonderful sci-fi book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" explored exactly this in interesting ways. In the book people in the future can live essentially forever by transferring their consciousness into new bodies. They can also back up the contents of their consciousness, something most people do nightly but certainly before doing some dangerous extreme sport. Doing dangerous things without backing yourself up is considered tantamount to suicide since you lose all the memories and personal growth, essentially the person you became since your last backup. People do get bored and will sometimes choose to "deadhead" for hundreds of years at a time, which is putting yourself into stasis and skipping those centuries. The book is full of provocative ideas about how practical immortality might actually work on a personal and societal level.

leethargo 11mo ago
And we know how reliable normies are with the backup of their personal data...
skissane 11mo ago
Life extension to make people live several times longer? Seems plausible we’ll get there eventually, simply by extrapolating current trends in science and biotechnology, and observing what is possible in other species. Mind uploading? That’s a whole other level of sci-fi. It isn’t extrapolating what we already have, it is waving your hand and declaring “as far as we know it isn’t physically impossible so why wouldn’t we get there eventually?” Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are?
- ileonichwiesz 11mo ago
  > Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are? You don’t need sci-fi mind backups for that. How certain are you that when you go to sleep tonight, the person who wakes up tomorrow will be „actually you”? How certain are you that all your memories were lived by „actually you”? The answer, I suppose, is that we don’t know what „actually you” even means, how consciousness works, or why you’ve even got a (seemingly) continuous internal experience.

roenxi 11mo ago

To even consider "immortal" as possible suggests someone hasn't had a lot of formal math training. Infinity is rather large. In an infinite amount of time, any possible conjunction of circumstances that could cause an immortality system to fail will happen. Talking in thousands, millions or even billions of years doesn't even need to be rounded to be basically zero when compared to eternity. Death is a certainty. No amount of technology can change that even theoretically. We don't even have reason to be confident that the universe itself is eternal, let alone any component of it.

strogonoff 11mo ago
We don’t know what we don’t know.
sungho_ 11mo ago
You are confusing ‘thinking it is possible’ with 'being certain of it.'
- roenxi 11mo ago
  I don't think I am. What would the path be to thinking it is possible? In the best case scenario where everything we know about physics turns out to be wrong and the universe miraculously allows complex eternal patterns to form it'd still eventually end up as some entity that thought a completely different way, had a completely different form, and has a very limited understanding of the concept of "what I am" because it'd have to keep changing parts of itself due to unexpected circumstances. It'd be a ship of Thesius to the point where there wasn't even a memory of what a ship was any more. A severe Alzheimers patient would be the same person they always have been compared to what an eternity of change would bring. If that is immortality then we may as well call it a tautology and say we're already immortal. None of the things that make people who they are need to be preserved to achieve it so we're realistically already there. Living an absurdly long time I can get behind. Billions of years, trillions of years, unimaginable numbers of years, sure. That could happen. But immortality isn't an option, everything eventually dies off unless we play semantic games where there aren't any properties of the thing that need to be preserved. And maybe even reality has an expiration date for all we know, which would render the whole project moot.