/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.3664637]

>tfw humans born today will live forever

[Anonymous No.3664646]

I can imagine nothing worse than living forever. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

[Anonymous No.3664650]

>>3664637
>tfw every "transhumanist" shithead will die and so will their stupid idea, and they'll stop shitposting on /lit/

[Anonymous No.3664654]

Fuck Kurzweil and all those theologians.

[Anonymous No.3664655]

>>3664646
I feel the same, broman.

But still, let's imagine OP is right, the possibility of living forever opens up. Under the current system (capitalism) that means that the wealthy 1% can pay for the monthly very costly procedure to gatorade their cells. We'll have gods as our rulers.

Communism, want me yet?

[Anonymous No.3664666]

>>3664650

[Anonymous No.3664670]

>>3664666
dat graph could be about anything.
"My bovel movement"

this_is_what_they_actually_believe.bmp

[Anonymous No.3664674]

>>3664666
Nearly incomprehensible and unsourced graph?

I'm convinced!

[Anonymous No.3664679]

>>3664670
>>3664674
>ignorant

[Anonymous No.3664690]

>>3664666
Holy shit, once upon a time people didn't live past age 1?

How the fuck did the species survive?

[Anonymous No.3664705]

Fucking great

I can't wait to be ruled by immortal oligarchs

[Anonymous No.3664711]

>>3664666

[Anonymous No.3664716]

>tfw you realize death gives life meaning

[Anonymous No.3664718]

>>3664711
>equates progress with faggotry

stormfag detected

[Anonymous No.3664721]

>>3664716
>yfw you realize a culture of death acceptance manipulates you into pessimism

[Anonymous No.3664723]

>>3664655
But I want you nao ;_;

[Anonymous No.3664727]

>>3664711
This is fun.

[Anonymous No.3664728]

>FM-2030 (October 15, 1930, Brussels – July 8, 2000, New York) was an author, teacher, transhumanist philosopher, futurist and consultant.
>In the mid-1970s F.M. Esfandiary legally changed his name to FM-2030 for two main reasons. Firstly, to reflect the hope and belief that he would live to celebrate his 100th birthday in 2030; secondly, and more importantly, to break free of the widespread practice of naming conventions that he saw as rooted in a collectivist mentality, and existing only as a relic of humankind's tribalistic past.
>(October 15, 1930 – July 8, 2000)
>Transhumanists

mah sides

[Anonymous No.3664729]

>>3664718
>thinking progress exists

stormfag detected

[Anonymous No.3664760]

>>3664637
On the one hand, I hope this is true. Not forever, I suppose, but a few hundred years of healthy living sounds cool.

On the other hand, if dramatically extended lifespans DO become achievable in my life-span, they'll clearly only be for the super-mega-stupidly-rich. So I'll be one of the unfortunates dying centuries early because they're too damn poor. And that doesn't sound cool.

[Anonymous No.3664786]

>>3664760
>On the one hand, I hope this is true.

Worse case scenario, you're forced to go the cryonic route. Rot six feet under or wait for rejuvenation.

>they'll clearly only be for the super-mega-stupidly-rich.

Perhaps in the beginning, but interventions will become increasingly affordable.

[Anonymous No.3664841]

>>3664786
I hope it gets done. Get on with it, science! Solve death already!

[Anonymous No.3664844]

>>3664841

trying. it's pretty hard bro

[Anonymous No.3664845]

Keep in mind that, on a practical level, it's entirely possible that whoever first conceives life-augmenting technology will lack the ability to distribute it worldwide for centuries.

[Anonymous No.3664870]

>>3664844
Fair enough. Feel free to take breaks and have biscuits.

But I want my immortality, dammit.

[Anonymous No.3664876]

>>3664721
its only pessimism if you fear death. If you accept it, its called not being a whining little bitch.

[Anonymous No.3664878]

>>3664870

de Grey (guy in OP pic) says it should be 20-30 years yet, hope you're not too old. Then again de Grey is sort of full of shit, too.

[Anonymous No.3664888]

>>3664870
>>3664878
we need $

here's an interesting interview and be sure to read the debate:

http://80000hours.org/blog/42-living-to-1000-an-interview-with-aubrey-de-grey

[Anonymous No.3664896]

>>3664878
Well, shit. And that estimate's probably optimistic. The best I can hope for is extended middle age, maybe.

>tfw your great-grandchildren will laugh at you for having been mortal

>>3664888
It is weird how people aren't putting all the money in the world into fixing death. There must be a lot of rich people not too keen on the prospect. On the other hand, I guess dealing with cancer is a major part of it.

[Anonymous No.3664906]

>>3664896
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76lIQtE8oDY

http://gf2045.com/

[Anonymous No.3664911]

>>3664896

It's one thing to say "fixing death", but another to actually come up with a concrete proposal for scientific research to do that. You don't get grants by writing "i'm gonna fix death, gibe billions plx hueueh." One of the few counts on which Aubrey de Grey's seven point plan or whatever is of any use is that it reflects the fact that senescence isn't caused by one thing that you can cure, but by many factors all of which need to be addressed by any "immortality treatment". And you need to address them in a way that you can actually make work on humans, which is the real fun bit. There's "immortal" cell lines out there as long as you're okay with masses of cancerous tissue in petri dishes.

[Anonymous No.3664912]

>>3664646
Then you have a very poor imagination

[Anonymous No.3664918]

>>3664911
Yeah, I was being flippant about what's obviously a very complex problem. I just want to kick death in the balls, really.

[Anonymous No.3664920]

>>3664912
Actually he most likely has a very capable imagination. He can most likely imagine a great many horrendous things that could come to pass given enough time.

[Anonymous No.3664922]

>>3664896
You'd be surprised how many people are vehemently opposed to immortality.

[Anonymous No.3664939]

>>3664911
They're experimenting on mice presently. There's some award that exceeds the noble prize award in money for researchers that increase the longevity of mice.

[Anonymous No.3664943]

>>3664922
I know I am.

I mean just imagine if senators never died. A stagnant government. We need new blood to do things like legalize pot, because the old guard ain't going to. Musical preference is heavily influenced by what you listened to in high school, we'd have a massive population of aging bastards just listening to the same damn groups for eternity.

I WANT A WORLD THAT CHANGES!!! I look forward to telling kids that they're no good and the things they value are worthless!!!

Immortality is stagnation, not scientifically, but culturally.

[Anonymous No.3664946]

>>3664716
>tfw it saps all meaning
>in a hundred years or less you might as well have not existed at all

[Anonymous No.3664952]

>>3664943
>I look forward to telling kids that they're no good and the things they value are worthless!!!
Eh, death is a hell of a price to pay for the opportunity to do that. It would be a huge change, no doubt, but seriously, to hell with only having a few decades of healthy living.

[Anonymous No.3664954]

>>3664637
For two thousand years the Christians have believed that life everlasting was just around the corner. That the raising of the dead, and the kingdom of heaven were going to be any fucking day. Two thousand years of lifetimes that people thought "this is it. Judgement day is coming".

I ain't buying it.

[Anonymous No.3664961]

What's so bad about death? Did you complain this much before you were born too?

[Anonymous No.3664971]

If immortality did come about we'd probably just start to death (unless it accounts for that too) since there would not be enough food to go around for a rapidly increasing population.

Thank the skies, because I'm barely making it through my 70-80 year life without killing myself.

[Anonymous No.3664972]

>>3664939

If you mean the Mprize, it's not impressing me much since they've only come up with calorie restriction (sort of works in primates but not really), a special transgenic dwarfism (definitely wouldn't work in humans), and rapamycin (immunosuppressive and generally pretty nasty shit).

[Anonymous No.3664973]

>>3664971
wow starve* to death

[Anonymous No.3664976]

>>3664971

if immortality did come about it'd be in the first world, which isn't likely to start starving any time soon no matter how few of us die.

[Anonymous No.3664977]

>>3664976
>any time soon
Like that has any meaning to an immortal

[Anonymous No.3664981]

>In 2005, 28 scientists working in biogerontology signed a letter to EMBO Reports claiming that de Gray's treatments had never been demonstrated to work and that many of his claims for anti-aging technology were extremely inflated.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1371037/?tool=pmcentrez

Well, nothing to see here folks, move on. Sadly, it is people like De Grey and Kurzweil who get all the public attention because of their extravagant claims. The truth is usually much more complex and difficult than 'hurr we'll be immortal in 30 years"

[Anonymous No.3664985]

>>3664977

It isn't likely to start starving in a thousand years, either. pseudo-Malthusian nonsense is a much less proper grounds for decrying immortality than is >>3664943, even.

[Anonymous No.3664992]

>>3664716
What good is a meaning based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing.

[Anonymous No.3664993]

The complaint or the criticism here is that the human mind has a certain level of ability to handle different sorts of complexity, and if you believe that you could go 100,000 years and not be turned into a repeating tape loop, well, then let’s talk about longer period of time. How about a billion years, or a hundred billion years? At a hundred billion years, you’re out there re-engineering the universe. The age of the universe becomes your chief longevity problem. But there’s still the issue of, what would it be like to be you after that? This raises the point, which actually I’m sure is also on Ray’s mind, that if you’re going to last that long you have to become something greater, and the Singularity is ideally set up to supply that. So the people who are into the intelligence amplification mode of looking at these things, this all fits. And I’m not saying that in a critical and negative way, it does all fit, and it puts you in a situation where you are talking realistically about living very long periods of time, perhaps so long that you have to re-engineer the universe because the universe is not long-lived enough. At the same time, you have to be growing and growing and growing. I mean, intellectually growing.

[Anonymous No.3664994]

Now, if you look at that situation, it ultimately gets you, I think, to a very interesting philosophical point, which really I don’t think was within the horizon of what people normally thought about two or three or four hundred years ago. And that is, if you did grow intellectually, would you be the same person? Well, most of us would argue that we are pretty much the same person as far back as we can remember. You know, we have changes in viewpoint, but what you were when you were five and what you are now, there is certainly a community of self-interest there, and it probably doesn’t bother most people too much. They feel good about what they know now, and they feel sympathetic to what they were then.

[Anonymous No.3664996]

Now, compare yourself to the zygote that became you. It’s a little bit more of an empathetic stretch necessary there. I’m sure that I understand my zygote as well as it ever understood itself, but I bet you that it doesn’t understand me very well. In fact, the amount of it that’s still in me is at a very low level, even in terms of the genes. There’s what’s happened in terms of epigenetic things since that zygote began to grow. Push that further, and the little part of this story that actually is you becomes more and more diluted. So if you really are serious about talking about living forever, not just living for a thousand years or a hundred thousand years, if you’re really serious about that, you come face to face with the same general issues that the Singularity raises, and that is issues of identity and mind.

[Anonymous No.3664997]

>>3664992
only if you are an anxious quivering person. Not everyone is a coward.

[Anonymous No.3665000]

>>3664981

this is what i was talking about here: >>3664911

>If de Grey believes that he has a good strategy to reverse the ageing process, he should devise a detailed plan for testing his ideas, and then, like the rest of us, convince sponsors that his project deserves funding. If he and his colleagues produce scientific evidence that some aspects of ageing can be reversed by a judicious mixture of phenacyldimethylthiazolium chloride, marker-tagged toxins and IL-7, we promise that we will be impressed.

translation: he can talk the talk, but he has not walked any walks lately. Which is not to say that his ideas are all terrible or that anti-aging research goes nowhere, but his "20-30 years" prediction is horse shit and the "problem" of aging (as if there is only one problem here) can't be solved overnight by throwing money at it.

[Anonymous No.3665018]

faggy beard

i bet that nigga dont even lift

[Anonymous No.3665068]

>>3664637
>>tfw humans born today will live forever
not forever. a long, long, long time perhaps. Eventually the sun will go supernova. If we escape that destruction through inter-stellar travel, we'll die when the universe ends.

[Anonymous No.3665092]

>>3664637
I want to believe this, but I have a nagging suspicion we've missed out on it by at least a few generations.

[Anonymous No.3665120]

>>3664981
see the debate enclosed in >>3664888

[Anonymous No.3665123]

>tfw we will have immortal mice long before we have immortal humans

[Anonymous No.3665129]

>>3665123
We should clone humans or kidnap them for experimentation in order to speed up the process.

[Anonymous No.3665134]

>>3665123
I should write something about the immortal mouse. The one that escapes the lab.

[Anonymous No.3665139]

>>3665129
>tfw you are tempted by the eeeeevils of utilitarianism

must... stick... to categorical... imperative...

[Anonymous No.3665135]

>>3665134
Rats of NIMH beat you to it.

[Anonymous No.3665154]

http://thesingularityfilm.com/

what a noble cause

[Anonymous No.3665515]

>>3664646
Life deniers, death pursuaders and otherwordly scum pls go.

[Anonymous No.3665525]

>>3664876
Nice passive agressive turning the other cheek bro. Stay slave mentality.

#futuregang #gohard

[Anonymous No.3665530]

>>3665515
You have comically inverted the meaning of that quote.

[Anonymous No.3665535]

>>3665530
How do you mean?

[Anonymous No.3665542]

>>3665535
Probably in the sense that it isn't le repetition of the same life over and over again but constant novelty. Immortality will lose novelty after a while though probably. It's the closest we will have to eternal recurrence, and being immortal and loving it is the greatest Yea to life.

[Anonymous No.3665544]

>>3665535
Because the whole point of immortality is not to deal with the weight and finality of the limited years we have. The whole point of this being offering eternal recurrence is as a metaphor for the significance of having such limited life, we have only a scant few years on this earth and we must choose what to do with it, in facing the prospect of having these choices replayed again and again it dramatizes their severity. But with an immortal life such a concept would be insignificant, the idea of repeating eternity itself makes no sense after all.

[Anonymous No.3665545]

>tfw brain engineered into constant bliss and immortality
>literally heaven on earth

[Anonymous No.3665547]

>>3665545
I don't believe in heaven.

[Anonymous No.3665548]

>>3665547
"I don't believe in cars." - Some 19th century faget

[Anonymous No.3665551]

>>3665544

So immortality will breed apathy towards ones own actions?

[Anonymous No.3665554]

>>3665548
That makes no sense. They had cars back then.

car (n.)
c.1300, "wheeled vehicle," from Anglo-French carre, Old North French carre, from Vulgar Latin *carra, related to Latin carrum, carrus (plural carra), originally "two-wheeled Celtic war chariot," from Gaulish karros, a Celtic word (cf. Old Irish and Welsh carr "cart, wagon," Breton karr "chariot"), from PIE *krsos, from root *kers- "to run" (see current (adj.)).

"From 16th to 19th c. chiefly poetic, with associations of dignity, solemnity, or splendour ..." [OED]. Used in U.S. of railway carriages by 1826; extension to "automobile" is by 1896. Car bomb first 1972, in reference to Northern Ireland. The Latin word also is the source of Italian and Spanish carro, French char.

[Anonymous No.3665558]

>>3665554
They have heaven now, heathen.

[Anonymous No.3665560]

>>3665558
Read the bible, no they don't, unless Jesus has already made his second coming and no one told me.

[Anonymous No.3665597]

Can we have different future themes in different places, OP? I want full 1950's style Googie retrofuturism in Hawaii or something.

>dat thunderbirds life

[Anonymous No.3665628]

>>3665123
le green mile face

[Anonymous No.3665664]

>HURR DURR YOUR'RE AN LUDDITE BCUZ YOU DONT BELIEBE IN MAGICAL WISHFUL THINKIN
every thread pseudo-science ever

[Anonymous No.3665671]

>>3665664
You are though.

[Anonymous No.3665680]

>>3665671
why don't you just accept jesus, not high-tech enough?

[Anonymous No.3665689]

>wanting to live forever
i mean, i would probably want to live for a couple of hundred, maybe thousand years, but forever? nah

[Anonymous No.3665692]

>>3665680
my sides

[Anonymous No.3666111]

Transhumanism is basically a religion, it's only a few steps away from scientology and raelism (those people who think god is an alien). It has a rapture, its prophets and prophecy, its gods (strong AI) and it's eternal life promise. None of this is based on actual science, but science fiction (seriously, Vernor Vinge came up with it, an SF writer) and pseudo scientific hyperbole. It's based on a mistaken idea of how the brain and mind works (minds are not turing machines) and hyperbolic growth curves (historically, they have generally levelled out when reaching physical limits).

>All atheists and antitheists
>be part of a techno-cult

Enjoy your techno-worship faggots.

[risky cat !EyoS5AWf4c No.3666131]

We need some to write abot distopyan society of homoerotic and sexy :^) tranzhumanitz wanting to die after living 6000 million years and superprogress of science also conquistd spac3 and traveled on time and dimensions but they cant die because they reached infinitez immortality for forever
id writt it but id rather smok weed
fuk of tranzexualists
ill die wehn i want
life abstraction
2 dep 5 H- people XD fuk of maaan

[got myself a name now, throw a(...) No.3666141]

>>3664637
>tfw OP is a fag who doesn´t know anything about anything

[Anonymous No.3666144]

How exactly is it a good thing that people live indefinitely?

I mean, it's not going to happen, but what if we managed to bump the life expectancy to say 200 years?

The problem is bad ideas. Bad ideas are like cancer that gradually take of human minds, and as people age, they become jaded. People need to die for cultural evolution to progress, and for bad ideas to die away with their carriers.

Seriously. Our society is built on learning until the age of 25-30, and after that...nothing. Only in a select few professions like medicine, do you see emphasis put on life-long learning.

But think economists and bureaucrats that received their education in the 60s and 70s, and are now running the world. Utter and total failure to take into account anything we've learned in the past 30-40 years about economics. The only way to get rid of the cancer that infects these minds is to wait them to die. But what if they stayed alive for 50-100 more years? We'd be FUCKED.

[Anonymous No.3666153]

>>3666144
I'm trying to image what could be worse than an immortal elite with ultraconservative views because they have calcified after 500+ years, hanging on to power forever and holding up progress.

Nope nope nope

[risky cat !EyoS5AWf4c No.3666158]

>>3666144
How is it a bad thing to be immortal.
You suffer, well, who cares. You're immortal. You won life.
Here's my consolation to all failed transhumanists.

[Anonymous No.3666180]

Insanity will be the only destiny for the immortals.

[Anonymous No.3666194]

>>3666111
>Transhumanism
is a bunch of loosely connected, parochial cults with their own distinct dogmas, rituals and cult leaders

[Anonymous No.3666201]

>>3666180
what is it, 18th century? there is no such thing as insanity you tool

[Anonymous No.3666204]

Despite popular belief, people that survive infancy do not live much longer now than they did, say, 200 hundred years ago.

[Anonymous No.3666205]

>>3666201
breaking news: cognitive impairment through any means which leads to severely dysfunctional or dangerous behavior is a social construct

[Anonymous No.3666304]

>>3664993
>>3664994
>>3664996
I really don't mind those "issues". I just want to live longer, until I get all the answers of all the questions in existence.

[Anonymous No.3666321]

Eventually all the meat falls off the bone of the chicken wing. We will never become immortal, but we'll have the opportunity to be a very old, crusty/dusty/delirious/mumbling/crumbling gray confused mass of flesh, walking jittery and ready to fall apart at any second if someone as much as pokes them, and then they will disintigrate.

[Anonymous No.3666336]

>some form of immortality is achieved
>even if you somehow ignore resource scarcity and live until the end of time, nothing can avoid the Big Rip

Vanity of vanities.

[Anonymous No.3666341]

>modernists

[Anonymous No.3666369]

As a result, pensions are raised to age 800.

[Anonymous No.3666379]

>>3666336

I feel like the Earth being consumed by the sun is a more proximate difficulty.

[Anonymous No.3666852]

Perhaps there will come a day when I decide I no longer want to live. But that day certainly won't be the day I die naturally. What are the odds of that happening? Why is 80 years the optimal length for life?

So I'll sign up for cryonics and get a shot at living for thousands or millions or billions of years, all for about $50 a month. I'll get to read all the books and play all the video games and meet new people in spaceships and stuff.

On the off chance I decide one day I am bored of life, I can choose to end my life. But *I* be the ender of my life, not some biological nuisance like a disease or stroke.

[Anonymous No.3666862]

Scientists say the first person to live to 150 has already been born. I believe I am that person.

[Anonymous No.3666866]

>>3666852
>Perhaps there will come a day when I decide I no longer want to live. But that day certainly won't be the day I die naturally

Are you sure there are plenty of people out there who have long struggles with disease and are ready for the end to come. There are death with dignity euthanasia movements which strive to bring it on even sooner. How can you be so certain that the day your natural death comes you wouldn't welcome it?

[Anonymous No.3666868]

>>3666862
Scientists say a lot of crazy things. Just because they're scientists doesn't make them necessarily sane or objective.

[Anonymous No.3666869]

>mfw people think they can overcome universal entropy.

Unless Asimov's question does get answered, you won't live forever.

[Anonymous No.3666873]

>>3666862
What a horrible thought.

[Anonymous No.3666881]

When you die, it's the same no matter how long you've lived. You may as well never have been born.

[Anonymous No.3666889]

>>3666304
There are no questions in existence. Everything is skipping along most peacefully. Your mind, however, will never run out of questions unless you stop asking.

[Anonymous No.3666919]

>>3666866
>how can you be so certain

I am arguing in favour of cryonics, anticipating response like "I don't want to live forever."

In light of that, your argument doesn't apply. If in pain, I would be euthanized and have my body frozen, with the hopes I could be revived. If sometime after revival I determine my life is no longer worth living, I would end it.

[Anonymous No.3666942]

>>3666379
No, we'll just take to living in city-sized spaceships.

[Anonymous No.3666995]

>tfw millions now living will never die

[Anonymous No.3666998]

>CoD kiddies will rule the Universe forever

the 360 noscope is the holiest of acts, so sayeth the preacher

[Anonymous No.3667026]

>>3666919
But maybe if you just froze yourself again in another couple hundred years is it would be come worth living again. You'd never be able to decide it wasn't worth living. Its an infinite treadmill.

Second the whole idea of cryonics is terrible, you're completely at people's mercy. They could revive you just to make you into a slave in the salt mines.

[Anonymous No.3667027]

I just want to see the year 3000, live in a space colony, play a hologram vidya. Is that such a bad thing?

[Anonymous No.3667030]

>>3667027
yes. I want to see the year 400 hundred BC and party it up in Athens. It ain't happening.

[Anonymous No.3667040]

>you will never be a space bounty hunter

[Anonymous No.3667049]

>>3667040
A real estate agent?

[Anonymous No.3667065]

>>3667049
I like you

[Anonymous No.3667102]

>>3667040
Never say never.

[Anonymous No.3667104]

>>3667027
I was watching a documentary a few days ago about the future of medicine. It detailed the in vitro organs that can be made in labs from a patients tissue, then went on to synthetic organs -- better than human ones and fully compatible; you can replace almost everything apart from the brain --, then it started talking about the brain and how glial cells can be stimulated with with a wireless source to encourage neural production of dopamine and serotonin; digital drugs, how the microanatomy of dendrites in the grey matter of temporal lobes are compatible with computers... it detailed even more of this wonderful stuff, then said, bluntly, "of course, this wont be available for another 70 years or so.

>mfw born in the wrong generation.

[Anonymous No.3667111]

>>3667104
>mfw forgot mfw

[Anonymous No.3667192]

I have an idea for a short story. It's a satire of certain television shows. The idea is that by offering cheap drop-in pseudo-psychologic evaluations by non-professional psychiatrists (who are not bound to any oath of silence), individuals whose real life traumas would make good television will be selected, paid in full, and subtly threatened by legal action if they don't agree to appearing on stage as live actors perform their traumas in front of both live and t.v. audiences, for the purpose of entertainment.
One idea is to have certain portrayals of involved parties be completely "off" for comedic effect, by making them completely inappropriate for the scenes, maybe even play to exaggerate the excuses the poor victim has constructed in his mind for the actions of these individuals.
What'd you say the odds for seeing this IRL within a hundred years are?

[Anonymous No.3667211]

>>3667192
sounds like a George Saunders story

[Anonymous No.3667222]

>>3667192
I'm bringing this up in this thread to make this point: I'm 24 years old and have lived to see the rise of "reality television" and the aftermath of the normalization of yuppie culture. I don't want to see the future.

[Anonymous No.3667232]

>>3667211
Never heard of, worth looking into?

[Anonymous No.3667267]

stay healthy

[Anonymous No.3667298]

[Anonymous No.3667364]

Something you all might find interesting:
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things all fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is important… No-one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No-one has ever escaped it. And that’s as it should be, because death is very likely the best invention of life. It is life’s change-agent.”

Steve Jobs, commencement address at Stanford University, 2005

Till lately, people discussing death didn’t have to consider the idea of actually abolishing it. Now they do. The ‘new immortalist’ movement campaigns, as it says, to ‘conquer the blight of involuntary death’. It holds that, as one of its leading lights Aubrey de Grey puts it, “humans have a right to live as long as they wish.” And it claims that they will indeed soon be able to do so. At a certain point in time – perhaps sooner than most people think – the increase in the human lifespan will begin to accelerate faster than people age. When the human race achieves this ‘longevity escape velocity’ we will essentially be immortal.

1

[Anonymous No.3667367]

>>3667364

This gospel is being spread rapidly by the Immortality Institute in the United States and to some extent in Britain too. Seeing the way in which lifespan has lately lengthened in Western countries, its prophets argue that this increase both can and must be taken to its logical terminus, when natural dying stops altogether. They say they want to ‘end the scandal of involuntary death’. Except for occasional murders and accidents, we shall all live in perfect health for ever.
Matters of Life & Death

That this is now being seriously put forward surely shows us something of real interest about the way the ideas of life and death are beginning to strike people today. Is this absolute preservation of the self simply the logical conclusion of the kind of individualism that is now in fashion, combined with a devout faith in medical technology which wasn’t present in past ages? Are egos being deified? Anyway, these people now call upon us to ask, in a rather more realistic way than Hume and Epicurus once did, whether this proposed abolition of death is desirable. The immortalists are sure that it is. What are the arguments?

At the scientific level, immortalists bring forward serious reasons for supposing that, physically, this change towards immortality is not unthinkable, although more orthodox scientists oppose the claim with equal fervour. There is actually more room for debate here than one might expect because the causes of aging and death have always been obscure. There is some reason to think that no specially-wired mechanism to produce death and aging exists because it has never been needed. Outside causes of death always cleared away the passing generations. So these questions about physical possibility remain on the table.

2

[Anonymous No.3667368]

>>3667367

If, however, we turn to the moral and political angle, we quickly see some rather grave difficulties. First, of course, there are demographic troubles. Who gets their immortality first? If the rich get it much faster than the poor – which as things stand they would surely be bound to – this would set up a quite new kind of inequality which people might well simply refuse to tolerate.

But suppose that some extraordinary device did manage to synchronise the process, immortalising a whole community at once, what would then happen to the population question? Resources, including space, can’t be stretched indefinitely to accommodate ever-increasing crowds, as even those most optimistic on this subject would have to agree. Very soon, if not at once, it would surely be necessary to stop having children altogether. This is a pretty dramatic change. Is it actually a change for the better? No doubt children are often annoying but people still seem fairly sure that they want to have them. How would life change if they were no longer there? And how would it be if no new people ever arrived in society?

At the other end of life we see equal difficulties if, for instance, we think about pensions. Recent proposals to raise the pensionable age so as to accommodate that very increase in lifespan that immortalists are celebrating have raised cries of outrage. But if nobody aged or died any longer, what would be the proper age for pensions? Would pensions exist any longer? Would there be such a thing as retirement? Newspaper headlines now often ask us such questions as, “Who pays for longevity?” It’s a fair question.

3

[Anonymous No.3667370]

>>3667368

All this is not, of course, just a local question of revising our present arrangements. Old age is, along with childhood, a feature of life’s shape which pervades all human cultures – part of a fixed life-cycle, a crescendo and a diminuendo that frames human efforts everywhere, a cycle which links us to the natural world in which we live. It marks us as a living part of nature, something akin to the rest of the world, rather than supernatural outsiders who have crashed in to conquer it. We have no idea how we would get on without this kind of context. As Tennyson’s Tithonus says in the poem of the same name:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath…
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men,
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?

Though this isn’t an everyday thought it isn’t an eccentric notion either. It resonates very widely. After all, the only thing that makes it possible for any of us to be here now is that our countless ancestors all had the good manners not to live for ever but to die when their time came, after gradually developing for us the way of life that we now enjoy. As we shall see, it seems plausible that this thought is sound biology and plenty of humans have expressed acceptance of it. As Edmund Spencer put it:

Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas,
Peace after war, death after life doth greatly please.

But it is the polar opposite of the temper that inspires the New Immortalists.

4

[Anonymous No.3667378]

>>3667370

Follies and Freezers

This brings us to the social and psychological side of the matter. How does death affect our society and shape what that society means to us? How would a world where normally no-one died be different? This is the aspect of the topic that I find most intriguing, but it scarcely seems to interest immortalists at all. They only touch on these large-scale issues when they are forced to defend themselves against political objections, and even then they clearly don’t think much of them. Thus Robert Ettinger, the high priest of cryonics, explains that he hopes great multitudes will take advantage of the new opportunity to get themselves deep-frozen so as to last until this blessed future arrives. When people object that this sudden influx of thawed-out citizens might produce population-difficulties when they are all revived, Ettinger is not alarmed –

“The frozen population would increase by four billion every thirty years. If it takes 300 years for civilization to reach the immortality level, there would then be some forty billion people to revive and relocate – if we assume, for simplicity, that it all happens at once…. There is ample room on our planet for forty billion people.”

(Quoted by Bryan Appleyard, How To Live Forever Or Die Trying, p.199, emphasis mine)

(Incidentally, the number who have actually been frozen to date is apparently just sixty-seven, but up to a thousand more, including de Grey, are signed up for possible future treatment.)

[Anonymous No.3667385]

>>3667378

De Grey himself usually responds to these wider objections by saying that immortalists will deal with them as and when the particular difficulty arises. He explains that he does not see himself as a general theorist in search of the whole truth but as an engineer whose work is to find solutions to particular practical problems. He thinks this is best done by handling only one practical problem at a time, and he sees the extension of human life as just one such problem. The trouble with this is, of course, that problems don’t always come neatly and separately packed. For instance, population pressure and savage inequality aren’t just possible complications which may arise for immortalists some day in the future. They are rampant evils which already invade us today and which can’t possibly be kept separate from problems about an increased lifespan.

Apart from brief debates like these, immortalists seem only to be interested in the private position of individuals who, today, face the prospect of death and don’t want to accept it. This narrowly personal approach is interestingly different from the wider, political reasoning which led Bernard Shaw to call for a similar lengthening of human life in his play Back to Methuselah. What bothered Shaw was not the distress of the people who had to face death but the general folly of mankind – the confused, destructive arrangements by which humans are constantly wrecking their world. He thought that these follies were simply due to people’s immaturity, to their not living long enough to learn how to manage life responsibly. This belief that merely living longer would cure our childishness may show a certain credulity, a tunnel-vision which perhaps he shares with the immortalists. Like other Utopians, he was better at seeing what was wrong than what to do about it.

6

[Anonymous No.3667389]

>>3667385

But immortalists really aren’t in a position to ignore his wider questions about society as a whole just because they are planning to put the individual predicament of facing death out-of-date altogether. They need to consider what sort of a society individuals will find themselves in if they succeed.
Eternal Hell

So what would it be like for everybody to look forward to an endless death-free future? It is not a new thought that this prospect is actually quite alarming. Long before the New Immortalism arose people had suggested that we need death in order to give a shape to life and that, without that shape, life could become meaningless. Thus in Back to Methuselah Adam and Eve appear when they have just discovered that animals die. At first they are appalled to think that the same thing might happen to them. But then they wonder about the prospect of going on for ever without any possible end and they start to suspect that this would be even worse. Adam cries out that he can’t face “the horror of having to be with myself for ever… I do not like myself. I am tired of myself. And yet I must endure myself, not for a day or many days but for ever. That is a dreadful thought.” Similarly Milan Kundera, in his novel Immortality, remarks, “What is unbearable in life is not being but being oneself.”

7

[Anonymous No.3667393]

>>3667389

Shaw’s Adam and Eve decide to settle instead for a lifetime of three hundred years. As it happens, a woman who has just lived for three hundred years is the central figure in Karel Capek’s play The Makropoulos Affair, which provided the script for Janacek’s opera. This woman, Elina Makropoulos, once took an immortality potion and has come to the point where she will need another dose of it in order to go on. At first she makes desperate efforts to get hold of the recipe. But when she gets it, she gradually decides that, after all, she won’t take it. She really has nothing more to live for. Her successive lives have been good but she has had enough of them and she doesn’t want to repeat them. She no longer cares enough for anybody or anything to find it worthwhile to continue.

Critics have suggested that this must be because of accidental features in her life. But the late Bernard Williams, in a fascinating essay on the story, rejected this. He believed “that the supposed contingencies are not really contingencies, that an endless life would be a meaningless one and that we could have no reason for living eternally a human life. There is no desirable or significant property which life would have more of or have more unqualifiedly if we lasted for ever … [As Aristotle said about Plato’s Form of the Good] ‘nor will it be any more good for being eternal; that which lasts long is no whiter than that which perishes in a day’” (Problems of the Self; pp.89-100)

8

[Anonymous No.3667396]

>>3667393

Williams was surely right to notice here how the value-associations which have always coloured words like immortal and eternal can’t stay with them once we begin to talk literally. Just going on and on without stopping is not what people have always meant by immortality or eternity. Medical immortality is not the religious concept. Richard Dawkins tried to exploit those value-associations when he wrote that “the genes are the immortals”, but genes aren’t divine. There is nothing paradoxical about Williams’s conclusion that, for humans, a life that is eternal in a strictly human sense would be unlivable. It would become too repetitive. The notorious difficulty of spelling out how an endless blissful life would be lived in Heaven shows the force of this obstacle.
La Dolce Morte

Many immortalists recognise that there is indeed a problem about what to do with one’s immortality, or even with one’s extended life. Nick Bostrom, who is an Oxford philosopher, suggests that people’s brains may need to be enlarged so as to cope with maintaining interest in an almost limitlessly extended life, a solution which shows the usual devout faith in technology that pervades this whole project. He adds, however, that not everybody may need this expansion; some people may not mind simply doing the same things repeatedly for ever.

9

[Anonymous No.3667401]

>>3667396

Williams and others sometimes describe this whole difficulty as a form of boredom. Aubrey de Grey briskly replies that the matter can be dealt with educationally. “There will be a greater necessity for education and training… nobody with a good education gets bored, only those people who have never been given the skill to make a lot out of life.” Whatever may be thought of this generalization, de Grey is surely right to ask for a rather less casual, more penetrating name for this trouble than boredom. Boredom can cover all sorts of failure of motivation. Meaninglessness, however, conveys something much more specific. It indicates a particular kind of trouble – the absence of a ruling pattern, a shape, a pervasive rhythm to unite the various elements of life, bringing them together as essential parts of the whole.

In the human case, and in that of other social creatures, this pattern of meaning normally extends far beyond the borders of an individual life. It involves communal enterprises in which others are engaged. And notoriously people who have been living with no clear sense of such a background pattern are often made aware of it by sudden danger of death, whether to themselves or to other people. Part of Elina Makropoulos’s trouble is that, having moved on so many times, she no longer cares much for anybody. This might be partly because she is isolated by her position as a unique immortal among others who die. But perhaps there is also an important point here about human nature – about the inborn emotional constitution that guides us through life. Can that constitution expand its scope indefinitely so as (for instance) to go far beyond great-grandchildren – to take in an indefinite succession of descendants? Or alternatively, if all child-bearing stops and there are no new people, can it go on finding enough to occupy it by interacting with the circle of those who are already here?

9

[Anonymous No.3667406]

>>3667401
Last post should be 10 sorry

Immortalists clearly don’t think that human beings have any fixed, given nature that might block their prescriptions. They see people either, in behaviourist terms, as infinitely malleable, or as being driven always by a single negative motive – the wish not to die. Of course that wish is real. But it is only one strand in human motivation. We see, all the time, how this fear of death keeps being over-ridden by other motives. We have only to think about war, or about sports like hang-gliding and motor-cycling and rock-climbing. That fear is just one part of a whole forest of wishes that are natural to us, wishes which continually jostle together as we try to decide how to live our crowded lives. Immortalists, like other Utopians, focus so exclusively on the one evil that they are trying to root out that they forget to provide for the rest of life.

This complexity of motives is so obvious that I have often been puzzled to see philosophers, from Epicurus on, spilling so much ink in abstract debates about whether death is or is not ‘an evil’. They seem to forget that, where many motives conflict, the question is usually just, which choice is worse? There are a great many things, such as pain and grief, which are bad and frightening in themselves but are essential parts of our existence. Pain and grief are not just necessary means to life’s good things, they are in many ways necessary aspects of life as a whole. The importance of these things accounts for a great deal of our taste in stories, from the deepest tragedies to the most superficial thrillers.

11

[Anonymous No.3667409]

>>3667406

People such as hereditary princes who are carefully shielded from pain and grief certainly don’t end up with better lives than the rest of us. Sympathy and sensibility, discouragement and disappointment expose us to a lot of pain, but we would probably still rather keep them than be vaccinated with a permanent emotional analgesic. And we don’t have to prove separately that apathy is an evil in order to justify this preference.
End Insight

In fact, we are not pure minds or abstract entities. We are mammals, members of a particular primate species, so our natural motives are ones that suit its characteristic way of life. For instance, we hate being totally isolated, we are highly inquisitive, and most of us are strongly disposed to care for our children – a trait which has surely been firmly rooted in our nature by evolutionary pressures. If we were codfish, none of these things would be true. Because the differences between our cultures interest us so much more than what they have in common we often forget this shared heritage and persuade ourselves we that are infinitely adaptable. That is why reformers have so often proposed to get rid of apparently unchangeable features of our lives.

12

[Anonymous No.3667413]

>>3667409

Sometimes, of course, they succeed. For instance, we in Europe have now largely given up slavery, polygamy and capital punishment. So is dying perhaps just one more of these bad habits that we need to be cured of? Immortalists think so, but this path isn’t straightforward. For one thing, we clearly still have a lot of trouble in finding satisfactory substitutes for those vanished institutions, and so do other cultures which try to get rid of them. Slavery, for instance, may not have been so much abolished as exported to other countries, and we all know there are complications about polygamy. The attempt to prohibit alcoholic drinks has been a striking case of a rather more thorough failure.

It’s true that our customs are variable, but they indicate shapes into which our species-specific ways of life do naturally tend to fall. The case of death, however, is in a quite different class from these because dying isn’t just a local custom or even a trait confined to our species. It’s the life-pattern of all complex creatures. The only animals that don’t die as individuals are very simple ones such as amoebas, which reproduce by dividing. In a sense these creatures are indeed death-free. The first, original amoeba is, in a way, still with us. Its examples haven’t changed, and that lack of change is exactly the price that they pay for their immortality.

13

[Anonymous No.3667415]

>>3667413

What made possible the whole rich forest of later speciation, on whose twigs we are now living, was simply the invention of real, final, individual death. This emerged when animals took to the more complicated sexual modes of reproduction which allowed variety and provided for innovation. Each individual creature lived briefly, but the huge range of biological possibilities constantly branched out further. In fact, death was the price of this whole development – the price of real life. It was what made possible that fruitful individuality which we now so much prize. But it is just that kind of individuality that some people now want to freeze and ossify, thus ending the creative process for ever. This desperate attempt to keep the profits of human evolution without paying for them is surely one more case of tunnel vision – of reformers so hypnotized by a single cause that they lose sight of its human context altogether.

Fin.

[Anonymous No.3667439]

>>3667364
>>3667367
>>3667368
>>3667370
>>3667378
>>3667385
>>3667389
>>3667393
>>3667396
>>3667401
>>3667406
>>3667409
>>3667413
>>3667415

T fucking L, D fucking R. As has been noted several times already the point's moot because Aubrey de Grey is a fucking liar and charlatan.

[Anonymous No.3667443]

>>3667222

This isn't a bad point, yeah. It's easy to forget how much and how violently a lot of old people even now hate the world. I hope that, as people become less and less interested in arbitrary codes of morality, you won't get such vicious backlash against the natural development of culture in the future - but maybe that's naive.

[Anonymous No.3667464]

>>3667443
Isn't that vicious backlash a primary reason for said cultural growth? As people get older, larger gaps between generations leads to more "new" things for the elderly to revile and more "old" things for the young to reject. So the young moves further and faster and the old grow more estranged and bitter.

[Anonymous No.3667533]

>>3666862
>Scientists say
No. And you are a retard to think that.

[Anonymous No.3667538]

>>3666919
cryonics is pseudo-science
you are a fool being scammed
but, please, don't let the facts interrupt your vodoo wishful thinking

[Anonymous No.3667544]

you retards don't get that the issue here is not rejecting immortality for whatever reason

the issue is that immortality isn't gonna happen

you are all fucking mental suckers being suckered

don't forget to buy the newest kurzweil book

[Anonymous No.3667558]

>>3667544
>immortality isn't gonna happen?

why?

[Anonymous No.3667576]

>>3667533
I'm pretty sure you could find at least two scientists willing to say that.

[Anonymous No.3668076]

>>3667544
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality
it already exists

[Anonymous No.3668180]

>>3667558
Because cells can only divide a certain amount of times

[Anonymous No.3668197]

>>3664646
I used to think that, but I honestly wouldn't mind living for 100+ years.

Having the option to end it when you wanted would be nice, but tbh I could see myself perfectly sane at 1000 years old. Given of course that we wouldn't all succumb to Alzheimer's.

[Anonymous No.3668221]

>>3668197
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=6LyCC6jjcx8#t=240s

Each subsequent year would become more and more meaningless.

[Anonymous No.3668226]

>>3668180
What about stem cell research?

[Anonymous No.3668232]

>>3668221

New music, literature, film, TV, entertainment etc. is released every year. New technology would develop. I'm sure I could keep myself more than occupied till I was 1000 years old.

Also, I'm assuming by living longer we wouldn't be invalids by say, age 80, and our health wouldn't deteriorate. If so then we would be much more capable of living more fulfilling lives while still relatively old.

[Anonymous No.3668234]

>>3668180
honestly I'm not convinced that's the biggest problem. I'd conjecture that the aging of the brain has more factors than just the hayflick limit.

Even if we could somehow manage to perfectly repair the DNA of our cells, I doubt that would drastically expand lifespan beyond a couple decades.

[Anonymous No.3668244]

>>3665068
>when the universe ends

What happens after that?

[Anonymous No.3668248]

>>3668076
there is no multicellular organism that is demonstrably immortal. Just conjecture.

[Anonymous No.3668251]

>>3668244
no man will ever know, and certainly not you.

[Anonymous No.3668262]

>>3668251
>certainly not me

Why not me?

[Anonymous No.3668265]

>>3668262
because even if immortality which could take men up to the very limits of the universe, until they were at the end of all things. It would not come until long after you sit in the cold dead ground. Billions and billions of years before creation ends, you will scattered atom by atom across distances far too large to even comprehend.

[Anonymous No.3668266]

>>3668265
2spooky4me

[Anonymous No.3668289]

>implying cigarette companies will be going out of business soon.
>implying fast food restaurants will all close up their doors.
>implying heroin, cocaine, et al will stop doing a roaring trade.

People don't want all the life they could have right now. Immortality just won't sell.

[Anonymous No.3668553]

>>3667298
>2040
>life extension

lol nope

[Anonymous No.3668556]

>>3668289

>implying the health problems caused by tobacco and fatty foods aren't solvable by science

[Anonymous No.3668596]

>>3668556
Science already solved them. Its called not partaking of them. People seem largely uninterested.

[Anonymous No.3668635]

>>3666995
>iktfb
best tortoise album by far