Not signed in (Sign In)
Categories
Welcome, Guest
Want to take part in these discussions? Sign in if you have an account, or apply for one belowVanilla 1.1.4 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
-
I figure that a site aiming to take on all the really big stuff like this ought to have a resident immoralist so here I am. Now first of all, immortalist is a long way from immortal, but as with all things, it must first begin in the mind.
Why would I want to live indefinitely? Why not? Unless you are suicidal or wracked by some horrible pain, chances are you would turn down the opportunity to die and not see tomorrow. I have taken this simple logic and expanded it out to every tomorrow. Basically while I remain open-minded enough to acknowledge that there may be a set of circumstances that would cause me to not wish to continue to live, I cannot imagine what they would be. Until further notice I am alive and wish to remain so. That is not to say that I fear death, but rather that I love life.
But lets get down to the nuts and bolts of how this is actually done. Obviously no one any of us have run into has lived forever. Many people from way back to Gilgamesh have sought immortality to no avail. However I believe we passed a critical point in history when Robert C. W. Ettinger wrote "The Prospect of Immortality" in 1962. He laid out the idea of freezing people right after death in liquid nitrogen to preserve them until the point that medical science could restore the damage that had caused them to die as well as the damage of being frozen. Techniques have since improved at preserving the cryonically suspended and many brains are vitrified which is a technology that has been used to preserve organs while awaiting transplant.
Of course the ultimate proof of concept: the reanimation of a suspended individual is still a way off. However physicists have not been able to raise any reasons that it might not work.
There is much more to immortalism than just cryonics. Caloric Restriction with Optimal Nutrition (CRON) is the only known way to extend lifespan currently, but Aubrey de Grey has proposed Strategies for Negligible Engineered Senescence (SENS) which aims to obviate the effects of aging in humans. Some people think these developments could come about fast enough that even baby-boomers could take advantage of them.
The Methuselah Mouse Prize was created to allow people to contribute to a prize that will be awarded to scientists who develop methods to radically extend the lifespan of mice. It is hoped that it will achieve results similar to the Ansari X-Prize or the DARPA Grand Challenge which both pushed the limits and spurred greater investment in their persepective fields.
The Immortality Institute is an organization that is made up of those seeking to transcend the pathetically short lifes we have inherited and perhaps live forever. Being able to slow and eventually reverse aging is not enough alone to enable one to live forever. Eventually it will become advantageous to make backup copies of one's self that could alleviate the effects of being obliterated. Only once a person can be entirely distroyed and then recreated from off-site backups would I personally consider them to be "immortal".
A great book covering a possible future where many of these events take place is James Halperin's The First Immortal which can be downloaded for free or purchased on Amazon.
For more reading check out Alcor which is one of two currently operational cryonics institutes. -
I've got Mu to say about Cryogenics...
You really believe that consciousness is concrete enough to be extended indefinitely? Forget the body aspect for a moment (one of a multitude of gaps in the immortalist's theory) what is it that you are trying to extend exactly? The memories you hold? The sense of self so easily dismissable as an illusion?
I'd hate to live in a world populated by 1000 year olds. Just imagine how utterly inadequate you would feel until at least your 100th birthday... the resentment between young and old would be too much to bear. Teenage angst lasting decades!
Immortalism is just another form of religious appeal. Why not concentrate your actual self into the inevitable 70 odd years you are likely to have, save the dreaming until after you reach this point? -
To be fair, the sense of self is not so easily dismissable as an illusion. First, if it is an illusion, it is extremely convincing. Second, while the sense of self is what it is, one could parse it as still being a sense of self, and not an illusion.
I grant you your point about 1000 year olds. (Lousy 1000 year olds!) However, if immortalism is a form of religion, so to is "I'm Not Really Hereism". The religion with the central mystery: if I'm not really here, how can I enjoy my 70 off years I have? -
I have some more responses, but first, please outline what exactly it is you hope to be immortal... Start from the basics
(I hope I didn't offend your position. Devil's Advocate and all that...) -
My guess is that we are already immortal (and all immoral). We just need to change bodies occasionally. Consciousness, being non-local, can only partially intrude into what we experience as the spacetime continuum.....Let me ask, who would choose to live one day forever? Being an immortal (I hope) I would happily escape into an interesting and difficult life, temporarily giving up my memories so as to better savour the bittersweet delusion .
-
That would be a delusional I'd share ... To live a thousand lifetimes, each distinct, and then to have all the experiences and memories from each of them to coalesce in one final embodiment.... Once again, religion.
I honestly find it impossible to perceive 'me' as an immortal. What would this entail? -
I'm not comfortable with such a broad definition of 'religion'. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=religion&searchmode=none Pretty hazy category..I dont really know what the word means. I prefer 'metaphysics' for purely trivial reasons. If you can do ontology, why not ontography?
-
Woops...this might entail no more than being exactly who what and when you are right NOW.
-
Indeed that whole area is hazy, I should just say 'metaphysical nonsense' but religion has an ooomph to it that delivers more weight. Transhumanism exhibits many religious attributes. From your link:
religion..... "bond between humans and gods." Another possible origin is religiens "careful," opposite of negligens. Meaning "particular system of faith" is recorded from c.1300.
In transhumanism Man becomes God, or at least technology does. 'A particular system of faith' based on the mystical, all encompassing power of technology.
I hope that's a little clearer, although I concede that true clarity is nigh impossible to acheive. -
Is puss alive, or is puss dead? Neither, puss is in a superposition of states. What collapses the state vector? What chooses the future? ...Observation, interaction, attention, intention, how do you lable the act of creation? That link presents a peculiar, solipsistic take on the consequences of quantum wierdness.
-
If our consciousness persists in a rigid form, than an eternity of sunrises (or at least, an unending string of mornings until the sun goes nova) is not very appetizing.
But if the form endures but alters into new manifestations as the centuries accrue...that might be intriguing.
Even so, I can't shake a belief death is the price we pay for the hope of progress. -
I suppose I must be kind to everyone, but I truly find these perspectives that see death as both inevitable and
the right thing
as near unbelievable. Perhaps it is because I both have a scientific mind given to wonder and seek to learn and I come from a very religious background that took this life to be merely a blip compared to a coming wonderful eternity. While I currently love my life and would rate my current happiness level at 9.5/10, I don't see that I would want to die even if this level dropped to 2/10 as long as there was a chance at it improving once again.
As to what it is I seek to keep around forever, it is the thing that lets me know I am here now. In other words, when you go to sleep or are sedated, is it the same person who awakens afterwards? Of course it is. Even though we don't understand the mechanism of consciousness doesn't mean that we should consider it to be a worthless illusion. I understand that it is an emergent construct of an enormous configuration of finely ordered matter called the brain. However when the time is right, I will have no problem leaving the meatware behind for an upgrade made of some superior substrate as long asI wake up in the new form.
As to irascible 1000 year olds kicking around and wielding all the social clout, that may or may not be an issue. Yes people today tend to be stubborn and resistant to change. However immortalists as a rule do not fit this generalization. Many of us are scientists who relentlessly pursue new discoveries. Benjamin Franklin was an early immortalist. Imagine if he had continued to live to the present day. Do you think the world would find him intolerable? -
I don't devalue consciousness to the level of non-existence - quite the contrary - I just feel that it is reflected upon far too readily as something utterly tangible. This is dangerous.
Your self is far from just a sense of 'you' which re-emerges every morning. 'You' are a bundle of cells intricately woven together, connected to a central nervous system which itself is governed by hormonal and chemical reactions happening at levels approaching thousands of instances a second.
What is emotion? It is the reaction your body supervenes from the interaction with its environment. The elevated sensations of laughter, of love, of hate, of fear, of awe - these are integral to your sense of self, they had a hand in building you into a person from baby onwards. A reactive apparatus manifested by interplay with its environment. The portion of 'you' which decides to pick up the pencil, which remembers they exist each morning, which transposes a causal sense of persistence on itself over time is but a tiny part of the whole entity of 'youness'.
If a way were discovered to suspend your body in its current state for eternity what effect would this have on your hormonal balance over time? If, as some immortalists would have it, you intend to cast off your 'irrelevant' body and transport your conscious experience beyond the shell it has come to perceive as separate from itself, what then is left behind?
Would the hormones and chemicals be simulated in the computer download of your 'self'? Would the robotic outer shell be programmed to feel lousy on monday mornings? To boost your immune system when you fell in digital love? To simulate the increase of simulated blood flow to its simulated muscles when simulated danger was perceived in simulation? These reactions are not arbitrary, they have immediate effects on the way your brain works, and thus your consciousness, and thus the memories stored and the 'you' which emerges at the end.
How do you expect the infinite complexity of biology to survive immortalisation? The constant necessity of drugs, simulated reactions and technological mediums just to push that tiny sliver of selfhood past its natural capacity would leave little time left for 'being eternally happy'. Life is a cycle, and long may it stay that way.
Humans have got to remember they are just as natural as the farm animals. If the pigs got together and annouced they were seeking a technological path to spiritual immortality one might think they had missed the point somewhat. Utopian daydreams should receive the same response. -
"How do you expect the infinite complexity of biology to survive immortalisation? The constant necessity of drugs, simulated reactions and technological mediums just to push that tiny sliver of selfhood past its natural capacity would leave little time left for 'being eternally happy'. Life is a cycle, and long may it stay that way."
====================
Just so.
Stanislav Lem, in GOLEM XIV (a work which has been coming up a lot recently in discourse...at least for me) has his fictional, sentient computer declare its cognitive apparatus to be different in just about every way from that of its human creators.
Whereas humans have real experiences of lying on grass, GOLEM can only create a simulacrum of that experience.
At first glance, this may seem like a trivial difference (after all, our experiences of the world are mediated by eyes, ears, nose, minds - our own sensory complex which seems analogous to the machine's array for gathering sensations and synthesizing perception).
But GOLEM goes on to make a more fundamental point: human consciousness evolved in reaction to the demands of the world our ancestors found themselves in - it is tailored for that world and, of necessity, limited by it. GOLEM, by contrast, is an intelligence evolved under wholly different conditions and possesses, because of this difference, an entirely alien perceptual tool set and way of understanding the world.
The immortals would, after time, no longer be the selves that originally longed to persist forever. The you that wanted to see a billion days and more would be lost in time. Some other entity would be in its place with the memories of the original creature – perhaps – but none of its concerns; the superstructure supporting the original consciousness is gone.
Thus the project would be a failure even if technically it was a success. -
idoru345 said:
The immortals would, after time, no longer be the selves that originally longed to persist forever. The you that wanted to see a billion days and more would be lost in time. Some other entity would be in its place with the memories of the original creature – perhaps – but none of its concerns; the superstructure supporting the original consciousness is gone.
Thus the project would be a failure even if technically it was a success.
Do you think I would care? No way! I want to be far more than the current protein, DNA, and lipid creature that needs to constantly worry about keeping a supply of oxygen, water, and calories coming in. The wonder of life is in the journey. If the future me is 1000x different than what I can currently imagine, that would be wonderful. Now I realize from what you guys are saying that to you it would be just as well if you were to die sometime in the next 50 years and then the ultimate being that you could have become was created de novo in 2963. However that is not necessarily true. By allowing yourself to perish, something from the past is inarguably lost. Even if it would someday make up only a tiny fraction of the entity it would become, it is still gone. And I suspect that will be viewed as a tragedy as significant as the loss of all others who have come before. -
I have to admit that thoughts of still being around 1000 years from now are pretty exciting. I have often thought too about cryogenics, but I don't think I'd wish to keep being 're-born' in this way, rather I'd like them to wake me up a few hundred years from now and let me have a few days experiencing the weirdness of the new world around me. After this I'd get put back to sleep, or end myself once and for all. I'm happy with the thought of 70 odd years of life. From where I am sitting right now that seems like the perfect length of time to perfect being human. Any more is kind of unrealistic.
I agree with your broadenings of the concept of 'entity' too - so often is the case that humans see themselves as the end of some long progression. In cosmic terms we are less than zero. It is the lineage of life which is awe inspiring to me, and not simply mankind sat on its imaginary pinnacle... I just started a new discussion extending this idea somewhat:- Panspermia: Seeds of Change
[Throughout this conversation I have resisted the urge to talk about Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker and Last and First Men. But I can resist no more. If you want to get the closest idea of an evolving, conscious universe there are no better guides...] -
0bvious said:
I have to admit that thoughts of still being around 1000 years from now are pretty exciting.
I'll let that comment speak for itself.I'm happy with the thought of 70 odd years of life. From where I am sitting right now that seems like the perfect length of time to perfect being human.
Although I highly doubt that if you were 72 years old and a technology was developed that for 90% of your life savings would make you biologically 30 again you would choose to turn it down, I remember reading a column in the paper once written by a cattleman where he said that he was sure that vegetarians would certainly sneak a hamburger if they were at a barbecue where none of their friends or acquaintences were and his smugness infuriated me as a vegetarian who has yet to eat a hamburger and probably never will. -
But burgers are so tasty...
So what steps have you undertaken to become 'immortal'?
Reminds me of the first chapter of 'Life, the Universe and Everything' by Douglas Adams:Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was --indeed, is — one of the Universe's very small number of immortal beings.
Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying.
Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some light jazz on the ship's stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it hadn't been for Sunday afternoons, he really could have done.
To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody.
In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2.55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everyone in it in particular.
This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing which would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this.
He would insult the Universe.
That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in alphabetical order.
When people protested to him, as they sometimes had done, that the plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a steely look and say, "A man can dream can't he?"
And so he started out. He equipped a spaceship that was built to last with the computer capable of handling all the data processing involved in keeping track of the entire population of the known Universe and working out the horrifically complicated routes involved.
His ship fled through the inner orbits of the Sol star system, preparing to slingshot round the sun and fling itself out into interstellar space.
"Computer," he said.
"Here," yipped the computer.
"Where next?"
"Computing that."
Wowbagger gazed for a moment at the fantastic jewellery of the night, the billions of tiny diamond worlds that dusted the infinite darkness with light. Every one, every single one, was on his itinerary. Most of them he would be going to millions of times over.
He imagined for a moment his itinerary connecting up all the dots in the sky like a child's numbered dots puzzle. He hoped that from some vantage point in the Universe it might be seen to spell a very, very rude word.
The computer beeped tunelessly to indicate that it had finished its calculations.
"Folfanga," it said. It beeped.
"Fourth world of the Folfanga system," it continued. It beeped again.
"Estimated journey time, three weeks," it continued further. It beeped again.
"There to meet with a small slug," it beeped, "of the genus A-Rth-Urp-Hil-Ipdenu."
"I believe," it added, after a slight pause during which it beeped, "that you had decided to call it a brainless prat."
Wowbagger grunted. He watched the majesty of creation outside his window for a moment or two.
"I think I'll take a nap," he said, and then added, "what network areas are we going to be passing through in the next few hours?"
The computer beeped.
"Cosmovid, Thinkpix and Home Brain Box," it said, and beeped.
"Any movies I haven't seen thirty thousand times already?"
"No."
"Uh."
"There's Angst in Space. You've only seen that thirty-three thousand five hundred and seventeen times."
"Wake me for the second reel."
The computer beeped.
"Sleep well," it said.
The ship fled on through the night. -
You can't go wrong with the hitchhiker's guide.
So what steps have you undertaken to become 'immortal'?
Currently I carefully control what and how much I eat, I obviously don't smoke, I try to stay active and fit, I'm looking at getting signed up for a cryonics policy soon, and I'm pursuing higher education. I'm sure there's more but that's what comes to mind right now. -
-
CommentAuthoralexanderj
- CommentTimeMay 11th 2006
I fear, as the only thing, to die:
Stupid stupid bodily mind -
-
The universe - having bore you from infancy as a multi-cellular, replicating mass in the womb of a hormonally imbalanced ape-like creature - has only minimal use for your brain.
If reality as a whole was imbued with some kind of cosmic mind which could pick and choose at will the attributes the creatures it encompassed would own, I hazard a guess that we'd all just be walking penises, vaginas with the occasional, intricately balanced, matronic womb guiding our sexual frustrations.
DNA, genes and change is what it's all about. Perhaps in time this will become digital-cells, computer encoded DNA and equally malleable change.
Embodied 'human' means very little to the future of the cosmos. -
I know I'm a latecomer here, but please forgive me.
So, Scorb has said:
"As to what it is I seek to keep around forever, it is the thing that lets me know I am here now." (Apr 17)
So it's not metaphysics that's being discussed after all, Mr What?: rather, epistemology. Scorb wants a change in his belief set: he never wants to think that he's going to die. Why do I get the feeling he's got that already?
As for the adamant implication that we should all feel that way, well, suddenly 'religion' seems like the right word after all, and with all of the most negative conotations it has sometimes carried on this site (No Offenc, Mr Danieru).
And you say you're from a background of faith, Scorb? Shocking. -
Is it me or are the implied models of time in this immortalist business all linear?Does an immortalist imagine that there is some form of continuity to the self? Some of this has been covered above, I know (or do I)...Maya, mortality is an illusion just like in those televidiomatic games you young people so enjoy.
-
And while I think of it, I dont know I'm going to die, I infer that I will die, or in other words, I have faith that I will die. The question becomes 'what is death?'..As we travel towards the center all categories blend, like the four (or five) fundamental forces, religion and science demonstrate complimentarity.dont forget that the Abrahamic faiths are only part of the picture, I gave that lot up when I realised how few self styled christians know what that jesus fella said, let alone practiced the bloody teachings.
-
I've always liked the endurant concept of time (In this philosophical concept the identity of the object, or individual, is maintained at ALL moments in its entirety. This is opposed to the perdurantist who claims that every object is composed of a seeming infinity of temporal parts, each part being distinct and therefore identical only with itself.)
Interestingly enough, it is at the borders where time and consciousness meet that endurantism breaks down. Once again our self-serving sense of self throws a metaphysical spanner in the workings of reality. I still fail to understand exactly what is expected to persist into immortality:
"As to what it is I seek to keep around forever, it is the thing that lets me know I am here now."
Would this 'thing that lets me know' have to 'know' indefinitely? That is, could I freeze your brain and simply wake it up for a split second every 10,000 years? The universe might appear to fly by at this level of immortality, but at least your 'self' would be more or less the same one which got frozen in the first place.
I remember a thought experiment in my philosophy of mind lectures which posited two universes. One of these universes ceased to exist for 1 minute outof every 2 and then would miraculously re-appear unharmed. The other universe persisted permanently. If you were to talk to a creature from each universe about their persisting lives neither would be able to tell you whether it was their universe or the other which existed only half the time. Their is much evidence to show that the human consciousness performs similar feats of time dilation at every moment in your life. Our perceptions are like the flicker on a TV screen or the incessant hum of a strip light. For us to exist at all parts of our lives with equal concentration would require an infinite consciousness, a never ending perception. What we actually have is a brain which fills in the blanks between perceptual nano-moments to create a concrete stream of time. With drugs I feel like I have disrupted this flow somewhat, and everyone has gone through a terror in their life or woken up from a lucid dream which stretched time off to a focal point of perceived infinity.
Perhaps here, in the flicker on and off of our minds, we can find the beginning and end of time, and if we could manipulate this perceptual illusion surely then we could create a sense of immortality in an enduring universe!?
Is it the sense of time which the immortalist intends to extend? Not a particularly concrete entity. Religious nuts and psychedelic drug users have been peddling these kinds of immortality since long before time had even been named... -
ooh, i'm comin for ya, D..........
1 to 28 of 28