I've been looking in to it a lot lately and I've been wondering whether we may be close ot the answer in this century. I've seen possible leads in quantum physics (For immortality of consciousness), neuroscience, and transhumanism. What are you guys thoughts?
http://www.cracked.com/article_18708_5-reasons-immortality-would-be-worse-than-death.html
most of these seem easily negatable and someof them only apply if onlyone person is immortalor it's meant tobe a secret Also, others could be fixed by simply finding means to perserve consciousness without havng to deal with the body. I'm just looking in to this because the Idea of my consciousness simply "not being" freaks me out to no end.
Again I turn to my favorite Harry Potter fanfic (http://hpmor.com/):
Quote"Death is bad," said Harry, discarding wisdom for the sake of clear communication. "Very bad. Extremely bad. Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem."
The Headmaster was staring at him as though he'd just turned into a cat.
"Okay," said Harry, "let me put it this way. Do you want to die? Because if so, there's this Muggle thing called a suicide prevention hotline -"
"When it is time," the old wizard said quietly. "Not before. I would never seek to hasten the day, nor seek to refuse it when it comes."
Harry was frowning sternly. "That doesn't sound like you have a very strong will to live, Headmaster!"
"Harry..." The old wizard's voice was starting to sound a little helpless; and he had paced to a spot where his silver beard, unnoticed, had drifted into a crystalline glass goldfish bowl, and was slowly taking on a greenish tinge that crept up the hairs. "I think I may have not made myself clear. Dark Wizards are not eager to live. They fear death. They do not reach up toward the sun's light, but flee the coming of night into infinitely darker caverns of their own making, without moon or stars. It is not life they desire, but immortality; and they are so driven to grasp at it that they will sacrifice their very souls! 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."
The two cultures stared at each other across a vast gap of incommensurability.
"I have lived a hundred and ten years," the old wizard said quietly (taking his beard out of the bowl, and jiggling it to shake out the color). "I have seen and done a great many things, too many of which I wish I had never seen or done. And yet I do not regret being alive, for watching my students grow is a joy that has not begun to wear on me. But I would not wish to live so long that it does! What would you do with eternity, Harry?"
Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."
"I did not understand much of that," said Dumbledore. "But I must ask if these are things that you truly desire so desperately, or if you only imagine them so as to imagine not being tired, as you run and run from death."
"Life is not a finite list of things that you check off before you're allowed to die," Harry said firmly. "It's life, you just go on living it. If I'm not doing those things it'll be because I've found something better."
My only real problem with transhumanism is that it's not immortality; you're dying and creating a duplicate of yourself. There's no continuity; it's not actually YOU. You're still dead. Continuity would be something like, gradually replacing each of your brain cells with nanites or something. THEN you could have true immortality.
Quote from: tnu on May 01, 2014, 10:16:04 AM
most of these seem easily negatable and someof them only apply if onlyone person is immortalor it's meant tobe a secret Also, others could be fixed by simply finding means to perserve consciousness without havng to deal with the body. I'm just looking in to this because the Idea of my consciousness simply "not being" freaks me out to no end.
Not to mention that there's nothing wrong with #3. It just means you'll continue to learn and grow. If you can't do that, then what's the point of immortality to begin with? And the mind's a LOT more flexible than they're making it out to be.
Let's see now...
#5 only applies in the unlikely event that you don't have the ability to rewrite your genome. It looks very much like being able to do that it going to be an absolute requirement to maintain the same biological body indefinitely, so that one doesn't really work. Moreover, any plausible technological immortality seems to imply the ability to also arbitrarily change your own physiology and physiognomy, so the objection doesn't come up in a realistic assessment.
#4 can only apply if the effect is a one-off, unreproducible phenomenon. Pretty much definitionally, any kind of technological immortality won't be.
#3 assumes that it won't be possible to improve your brain as you need to. See the second reason why #5 doesn't really apply.
#2 is just a minor variation in the expression of the underlying problem of #3, with the same solution.
#1 is only a problem if you have a kind of immortality that makes it impossible for you to die. However, that's just talking about magic. Any kind of technological immortality is going to still leave you able to die, just without you having to die because your physiology is breaking down due to shortcomings inherent in a natural physiology. This gets at a very basic error in talking about immortality: You can't actually have classical, true immortality, which is the inability to die. What you might be able to get is far superior: Being unaging and hard to kill. If you find yourself unable to find anything interesting to do (and that seems unlikely in as big and weird a place as the universe, but it might happen) or are trapped in an inescapable place of torment, you can still die.
#4 & #5 only apply if it's a one person thing, true.
Unless the brain's capacity is infinite (it's not)--or the nanites used to replace it's space--is unlimited, #3 still applies.
Still hasn't really done anything to refute #2 or especially #1--the big ones. Math is math for #2 and if continuity is maintained there isn't a way around it. Ditto for #1, given the probabilistic nature of getting eventually stuck they noted.
@Evensgrey--#4, #5 only apply if you're the only person with it. #3,#2 still apply if given the reasons I listed above. And given your thoughts on Number 1 just sounds like moving the goal posts--if you can ever die, it is not immorality, by definition.
Quote from: Travis Retriever on May 01, 2014, 10:48:34 AM
Unless the brain's capacity is infinite (it's not)--or the nanites used to replace it's space--is unlimited, #3 still applies.
It doesn't have to be. The brain is constantly rewiring itself, abandoning old connections for the sake of making new ones.
Quote from: Travis Retriever on May 01, 2014, 10:48:34 AM
#4 & #5 only apply if it's a one person thing, true.
Unless the brain's capacity is infinite (it's not)--or the nanites used to replace it's space--is unlimited, #3 still applies.
Still hasn't really done anything to refute #2 or especially #1--the big ones. Math is math for #2 and if continuity is maintained there isn't a way around it. Ditto for #1, given the probabilistic nature of getting eventually stuck they noted.
@Evensgrey--#4, #5 only apply if you're the only person with it. #3,#2 still apply if given the reasons I listed above. And given your thoughts on Number 1 just sounds like moving the goal posts--if you can ever die, it is not immorality, by definition.
$5 and #4 are irrelevant to any discussion of technological immortality because such systems are definitionally not limited to a single individual.
#3 and #2 assume you cannot keep adding capacity indefinitely. This is false. If you can keep altering things, which you will have to be able to do in order to just stay alive indefinitely, you can improve your brain as much as you need to in any way you need to. This might make you into a freak in the long term, but that's inherent in the nature of transhumanism in any case.
#1 is based on an assumption of magic immortality that renders you unable to die. This simply cannot happen in reality by definition, and is in any case not relevant to any technological immortality.
Quote from: evensgrey on May 01, 2014, 12:45:33 PM
$5 and #4 are irrelevant to any discussion of technological immortality because such systems are definitionally not limited to a single individual.
#3 and #2 assume you cannot keep adding capacity indefinitely. This is false. If you can keep altering things, which you will have to be able to do in order to just stay alive indefinitely, you can improve your brain as much as you need to in any way you need to. This might make you into a freak in the long term, but that's inherent in the nature of transhumanism in any case.
#1 is based on an assumption of magic immortality that renders you unable to die. This simply cannot happen in reality by definition, and is in any case not relevant to any technological immortality.
#1--no, it's based on the definition of immorality--being unable to die.
#2,3--it's based on math, and no, you're making the positive claim of infinite capacity; you prove it--I am not assuming. Shane is the only one to have addressed my criticism well on these (and even then it's still a bit iffy for #2).
#4,5 were already addressed in my previous post which I did concede would not be relevant for situations where immorality is a common/norm thing. Did you read it or not?
Quote from: Travis Retriever on May 01, 2014, 01:06:55 PM
#1--no, it's based on the definition of immorality.
There are different definitions and kinds of immortality. The one relevant to this discussion is the John Oldman kind, where you live a long time and don't age beyond 35 or so, and can heal damage and disease, but could still die, say, in an explosion.
That's different from the Jack Harkness kind, where you just keep on living no matter what, you even self-repair after an explosion.
#1 seems to be talking about the Torchwood: Miracle Day kind, where even if your head's cut off, you're still alive and aware; if you're put in a car when it's crushed, you live trapped in the car forever (or until Torchwood cancels Miracle Day).
And all of those, of course, are distinct from the God kind, where you're all-powerful etc.
Quote from: MrBogosity on May 01, 2014, 01:13:53 PM
There are different definitions and kinds of immortality. The one relevant to this discussion is the John Oldman kind, where you live a long time and don't age beyond 35 or so, and can heal damage and disease, but could still die, say, in an explosion.
That's different from the Jack Harkness kind, where you just keep on living no matter what, you even self-repair after an explosion.
#1 seems to be talking about the Torchwood: Miracle Day kind, where even if your head's cut off, you're still alive and aware; if you're put in a car when it's crushed, you live trapped in the car forever (or until Torchwood cancels Miracle Day).
And all of those, of course, are distinct from the God kind, where you're all-powerful etc.
Fair enough. I personally never got the "different types of immorality" bit; mortal = able to die/will die, immortal = unable to die/will will die was how I've always understood it.
Yeah you definately want to shoot for the God kind or the John Oldman kind (probably the latter since it seems more likely) the other one just sucks and it most likely won't happen anyway since it seems quite unsound scientifically speaking.
Also [spoiler]Jack die in "Gridlock"?[/spoiler]
Quote from: tnu on May 01, 2014, 01:30:24 PM
Yeah you definately want to shoot for the God kind or the John Oldman kind (probably the latter since it seems more likely) the other one just sucks and it most likely won't happen anyway since it seems quite unsound scientifically speaking.
Also [spoiler]Jack die in "Gridlock"?[/spoiler]
The God kind sounds pretty scientifically unsound too.
[spoiler] Maybe. I don't think anyone working on the show now really cares. [/spoiler]
Quote from: tnu on May 01, 2014, 01:30:24 PM
Also [spoiler]Jack die in "Gridlock"?[/spoiler]
[spoiler]That's what they hinted at, and they also said that Jack continued to age, just incredibly slowly (I guess to explain John Barrowman aging). Still, I'd call 5 billion years (plus however much time-travelling he ended up doing) pretty darn close to immortal![/spoiler]
that does raise questions in my mind (I'm throwing these out there precisely so that they can be argued against--I lack sufficient imagination for this):
1-what about kids? if a person is immortal (even assuming such a person can be killed), that means there's little need to replace such persons. that means that even having one child a pair would lead to massive growth in population, even taking into account that many would not marry or have kids. we could in theory sterilize such people, but people are still going to die, and then require replacing. what then? do we unleash the Genophage? :P
2-and of those kids, how can they have a future, if the older people won't just die? we see people who are in their 20's in the field of Geology who can't get a job because baby boomers won't retire and won't drop dead already. do we kick the youth down the curb?
It just means we need to get off-planet. Although being immortal, there are a LOT of resources freed up from the medicine and other things that we won't need anymore.
Quote from: MrBogosity on May 01, 2014, 07:40:05 PM
It just means we need to get off-planet. Although being immortal, there are a LOT of resources freed up from the medicine and other things that we won't need anymore.
Actually I think the opposite would be the reason why we're immortal. We'd still have to make value judgments regarding whether or not we want to live longer. Even if say our consciousnesses were transplant into entirely mechanical bodies (see Ghost in The Shell) they'd still require comparable maintenance.
In regards to children I myself not entirely sure about the incentives TO have them. Closest thing I can think of is that they're merely a status symbol :p