I think you are overestimating how many people would choose immortality. If one were wealthy with a steady stream of unlimited income, I can see why it would be appealing. If one were a blue collar working man that had been at the construction site every day for 40 years and has just enough saved to retire comfortably at 67 and live until they are 80-85, what then? Go back to work for another 40 years just work your guts out and take another 20 year break? To live forever would mean you need not just the how but the means. Very few people have this capability.
Your thoughts on immortality.
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I think you are overestimating how many people would choose immortality. If one were wealthy with a steady stream of unlimited income, I can see why it would be appealing. If one were a blue collar working man that had been at the construction site every day for 40 years and has just enough saved to retire comfortably at 67 and live until they are 80-85, what then? Go back to work for another 40 years just work your guts out and take another 20 year break? To live forever would mean you need not just the how but the means. Very few people have this capability.
Good response. But there are so many things I find wrong with your post. In my scenario, I asked you to imagine familiar possibilities because we do not actually know what life will be like a 100 years from now (or however long it'd take to achieve it). In reality, life would be very different. For one, why would you ever stop working? You would be a man of 90, but you'd feel like a youth in his 20s (physically). You're telling me that I'm underestimating the number of people who would choose to extend their perfectly healthy existence because they would not want to continue working? I don't think so. People retire now because they become old, tired, and sickly. They would like to enjoy the decade or two they got left.
Another, even more important point; you're assuming scarcity based lifestyles are the only ones possible. Not so. There may come a time where the notion of money and resource exchange becomes obsolete. Imagine this:
1. A cheap and ubiquitous source of energy. Futuristic fusion reactors are one possibility. But other options may be possible in the far future. Harvesting anti-matter from the radiation belt, for example. Maybe even Casimir Effect and other kinds of zero-point energy harvesters. Another option would be massive solar sails orbiting the sun and transmitting captures energy as coherent light. I can think of a thousand possibilities that do not violate understood laws of physics.
2. A fully automated and extensive recycling system that wastes very little. Additionally, we would have vastly more resources available through advanced mining/extracting/collecting techniques, and exploitation of extra-terrestrial resources (asteroids, gas giants, rocky planets, etc).
3. Cheap and sophisticated personal fabricators. Have you heard of 3d printers? They are devices you can buy for a few thousand dollars. You download models from the internet, and the printer will create it for you, one microscopic layer at a time. They were conceived only a couple of decades ago, and they have already dropped in price a few dozen times over, and become more and more useful. They are still very limited (very few material choices, limited colors, limited circuitry capabilities, kind of slow, and others). In time - regardless of whether immortality becomes feasible- such fabricators will be able to create a vast array of objects, from food to cars to computers, and all you'd need is the raw materials.
I can go on and on, but my point is, people will find a way to live productively. Our current paradigms are not the only possible ones.
The question is, who is willing to work for a 1000 years just so that they have youth and health? 1000 years is a hell of a long time. In fact, I'd argue it's near the definition of hell and what Satan would offer for your soul.
You can do whatever you like. I already explained this. When death is not in the way, your option expand exponentially. You want to study nuclear physics? Go for it. Want to give being a musician a try? Why not! You're never too old for anything. You can travel. You can live in a virtual world for a while. You can do many things that society now rejects (join gladiators league!). You can do things we haven't even conceived of. You don't have to work a job you hate just to make ends meat for 1000 years.
RobDMB
Well-Known Member
Personally I think that you are assuming too many positives to coincide as if they are inevitable. Don't underestimate the level of selfishness and exploitation that us humans are capable of. What makes you think that your version of immortality would ever be shared with the masses? Perhaps I am just being skeptical and negative, but I hardly think that the things you are assuming will happen are as inevitable as you believe them to be. I am with Scat on the definition of hell theory. I am a person that "works to live", not "lives to work". No matter how much things become automated you still need some labor force, it may be small, but it would still be undesirable. Do you want to be the guy that pushes a button in a factory repeatedly for eternity? People want to be rich and live forever to lead leisurely, pleasure filled lives, not work. At least that is my point of view. Sorry if it's a bit incoherent.
No no no. My question is, if you are presented with a world where immortality is the norm, and its major negative consequences were managed, how would you feel about it? What would you do? How would you change?
Many of the answers were skeptical of the possibility, so I was attempting to introduce a possible path to such a scenario.
None of what I said is inevitable. It is simply possible and achievable. For all I know, a genetically engineered virus will escape from a lab and turn everyone into a zombie sometime next year. A well protected camp will be created in Salt Lake, and it will be governed by TheSilencer. I will beg him for admittance, and he will let me in just so he'd show all those who mocked him where science got them. I will spend the rest of my very short life vilified and abused, before I am bit by a zombie in an expedition to gather food. TheSilencer pulls the trigger himself.
Damn, dude .. wow.
Dude! You do not have to beg. Just show up with a tinfoil hat on and he will think you are one of his "own" and you will be admitted with a parade and banquet.
The Thriller
Well-Known Member
The Thriller
Well-Known Member
Another movie which touches on this is Highlander. It would suck to be immortal! And to have guys chasing you around trying to cut your head off...
D
Deleted member 848
Guest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdvBfI5Ee04
MAYBE I JUST WANNA FLY
I WANNA LIVE I DONT WANNA DIE
MAYBE I JUST WANNA BREATH
MAYBE I JUST DONT BELIEVE
MAYBE YOURE THE SAME AS ME
WE SEE THINGS THEYLL NEVER SEE
YOU AND I ARE GONNA LIVE FOREVER
MAYBE I JUST WANNA FLY
I WANNA LIVE I DONT WANNA DIE
MAYBE I JUST WANNA BREATH
MAYBE I JUST DONT BELIEVE
MAYBE YOURE THE SAME AS ME
WE SEE THINGS THEYLL NEVER SEE
YOU AND I ARE GONNA LIVE FOREVER
leftyjace
Well-Known Member
I haven't read up, but I'm going to respond directly to this.
This is dependent upon the individual's perspective on the purpose of life. Some feel their purpose is to live their life in such a way that they aren't forgotten. And others feel their purpose in life is to live it. Paralysis would affect the former, but not the latter.
If only I was the only one immortal. I can't bear seeing same people around me forever.
Immortality can change everything. In this capitalist system, I don't think that immortality would be cheap. Only the rich could be immortal and working class would become slaves. We would need another Martin Luther King. Countries would change into kingdoms there would be kings that reigned for hundreds of years maybe only to replaced by someone else with more power.
Immortality can change everything. In this capitalist system, I don't think that immortality would be cheap. Only the rich could be immortal and working class would become slaves. We would need another Martin Luther King. Countries would change into kingdoms there would be kings that reigned for hundreds of years maybe only to replaced by someone else with more power.
AtheistPreacher
Well-Known Member
Oh boy. I have a lot of thoughts here. Death has always been an interest of mine from a philosophical perspective.
First of all, I find this hard to believe. I don't keep up with biotech at all, but there have been lots of times where we've thought we'd been in a certain place technologically within X amount of time, and it hasn't happened. Weather prediction is one such area where we thought we'd continue to get more and more accurate inexorably -- right until chaos theory taught us that such things are virtually impossible to predict. In any case, I'd be very surprised if we didn't hit a wall at some point on life extension techniques where they simply can't get us any further. I don't really have much backup for this opinion, but then again the mechanics are the least interesting aspect of it for me.
I think it's interesting that you want to bracket off the larger social ramifications, since they're quite interdependent with the individual ramifications. Actually, I think immortality is a bad idea in both cases, and for much the same reasons. But you're right to point out that the wider ramifications of immortality would be catastrophic... the world is overpopulated already just for starters, not to mention that death has always been one of the primary mechanisms (if not THE primary mechanism) for social change. Older people become more rigid in their thinking, and if the old guard never died off and vacated their positions of authority and power, it'd be a lot harder to disseminate new ideas.
First of all, I think a lot of people like the idea of immortality because as a species we generally want to live longer than the average person lives. And on our deathbed, we can always wish for a few more years. But when infinity stretches out before you, then it starts to become a different question.
The classic article written on this topic was written in 1973 by the philosopher Bernard Williams and titled "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality." I recommend it highly, as it's by far the most cited text on this subject (I can send a PDF copy to anyone who PMs me for it). And in fact, he poses much the same scenario as you do. He talks of a fictional character from a play (I forget which play) who is a 40-year-old woman with access to an elixir that will keep her alive indefinitely as long as she continues to drink it. After 300 years, she voluntarily stops.
Williams' basic argument is that all people develop a certain character, along with certain likes and dislikes, certain dispositions, etc, and that at a certain point, any person will have experienced all that a person of that character and disposition will wish to experience. They will be deeply, existentially bored -- not a boredom which still looks to tomorrow for alleviation, but a boredom which knows that there is simply nothing else anywhere that he or she wants to do. I have to say that I agree with Williams on this point. Sure, there will always be new people to meet, new injustices to fight, new basketball games to watch, new books to read. But seriously, how long could you go on doing the things you enjoyed until you had simply done them to death? A thousand years? Maybe. A million? Um... no.
I really think that religion can be seen as an attempt to answer the fact that everyone dies. The fact is that -- on the surface at least -- nothing you do will ultimately matter, because eventually you'll die and become nothing, and then even everyone who you directly affected will die. So why even bother living? No one really knows quite what to do with that question. But a lot of religions have tried.
And in fact, when religions are viewed from the perspective of trying to answer our questions about death, I think that's where Christianity and Islam stand out as particularly lame. They seem to sidestep the issue rather than address it by simply saying that we continue on living in some other realm. Besides stretching creduality (as an aside, odd that only humans get to live forever, right?), this view has all sorts of negative implications. First and foremost, it belittles our existence here on earth, which then becomes little more than a pre-game, or a test. It makes us undervalue physical bodies in deference to our supposed "spiritual/incorporeal" sides. It gives us license to continue exploiting the earth as we have been. And in the end, it's all so VERY ego-centric. Why the hell is any person so important that he or she must live on FOREVER? Hate to burst you bubble, but there have been billions and billions of people before you, and there will be more billions after you. No one's so special that they should live on for eternity. I'm sure the new generation will do quite well without us.
In any case, setting aside some of the more selfish reasons, I tend to think people believe in afterlife either because they'd like to imagine their loved ones going on in some way, or because they simply can't wrap their head around a world that doesn't have them in it (or both).
To be fair, really no one can imagine his or her own non-existence -- the best we can do is either imagine the world in the case where our physical self is absent, or just imagine black nothingness. But in both cases we are still conscious of thinking about blackness, or thinking about our absence. The existential truth of death from any finite perspective is not just of the self dying, but of THE UNIVERSE ending. When we die that is the END, and there is NOTHING. That's not something that anybody's mind can grasp, but just because we can't grasp it doesn't mean that we get to live on somehow.
And as for lost loved ones (and ourselves), Epicurus' statement from more than 2000 years ago still holds water: "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not." In other words, death is simply non-existence, and so it seems hard to construe it as bad for the dead person, because the dead person no longer exists to care that he or she is dead. And while the living may mourn them, death is not ultimately such a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy living, but I don't see myself as so important that I need to believe that I go on forever. Lots of other will come after me, some better and some worse -- and I don't need to be hanging out in a peanut gallery up in the clouds while these others go about living. The work of others and whatever small legacy I leave behind to help (or hinder) them should be more than enough.
One more observation. Questions about death are tied up very closely with questions of personal identity, so much so that we might call them one and the same question. When we die, what is it that actually dies?
Of course, there are at least two different kinds of self. There is first the active, reflective ego-self or subjective self, and second is the objective (or perhaps "objectifiable") historical self. So what does it mean to say that "I am AtheistPreacher"? On the usual reading, both the proper name "AtheistPreacher" and the personal pronoun "I" -- at least when AtheistPreacher is speaking it -- rigidly denote the same person. Yet as Mark Johnston points out in his book Surviving Death, I can imagine being someone else, like FDR, and then being killed in an event that wiped out all of human life, so that AtheistPreacher never existed. As Johnston summarizes it: "While knowing that I am Johnston, I can, without semantic incoherence and without ignoring the structure of the fact that I am Johnston, imagine myself [the ego-self] existing without Johnston [the historical person] existing."
What exactly does this idea tell us? Precisely that the subjective self is empty of content. Which historical person it happens to be does not matter to the ego-self -- by itself it's like a picture frame in want of a photograph to fill it. It is simply, as Johnston puts it, quoting Wittgenstein's Tractatus, "the limit of the world, not a thing in it."
Unless I misunderstand, this is a rather Buddhistic reading of the self. But in any case I find it a compelling one. And the take-home message is, once again, that our subjective selves aren't even really worth saving. There are billions of subjective selves out there, and while there may be small differences in sense organs that will then make us perceive the world differently, the vast portion of our differences arise from our social and historical context, the historical details of our lives. It is our historical and objective selves that actually matter in the wider context. But of course, we need not worry about saving them, because the fact is that we all leave legacies behind, and the next generation will take what is good about us -- those actions and ideas which help to enrich the world -- while they will leave our self-centered actions and ideas buried with our corpses. That sort of objective immortality is a fact, even if subjective immortality is a misguided pipedream.
I may eventually respond to some of the other points in this thread, but for now I think I've written enough. Fascinating question, though.
First of all, I find this hard to believe. I don't keep up with biotech at all, but there have been lots of times where we've thought we'd been in a certain place technologically within X amount of time, and it hasn't happened. Weather prediction is one such area where we thought we'd continue to get more and more accurate inexorably -- right until chaos theory taught us that such things are virtually impossible to predict. In any case, I'd be very surprised if we didn't hit a wall at some point on life extension techniques where they simply can't get us any further. I don't really have much backup for this opinion, but then again the mechanics are the least interesting aspect of it for me.
I think it's interesting that you want to bracket off the larger social ramifications, since they're quite interdependent with the individual ramifications. Actually, I think immortality is a bad idea in both cases, and for much the same reasons. But you're right to point out that the wider ramifications of immortality would be catastrophic... the world is overpopulated already just for starters, not to mention that death has always been one of the primary mechanisms (if not THE primary mechanism) for social change. Older people become more rigid in their thinking, and if the old guard never died off and vacated their positions of authority and power, it'd be a lot harder to disseminate new ideas.
First of all, I think a lot of people like the idea of immortality because as a species we generally want to live longer than the average person lives. And on our deathbed, we can always wish for a few more years. But when infinity stretches out before you, then it starts to become a different question.
The classic article written on this topic was written in 1973 by the philosopher Bernard Williams and titled "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality." I recommend it highly, as it's by far the most cited text on this subject (I can send a PDF copy to anyone who PMs me for it). And in fact, he poses much the same scenario as you do. He talks of a fictional character from a play (I forget which play) who is a 40-year-old woman with access to an elixir that will keep her alive indefinitely as long as she continues to drink it. After 300 years, she voluntarily stops.
Williams' basic argument is that all people develop a certain character, along with certain likes and dislikes, certain dispositions, etc, and that at a certain point, any person will have experienced all that a person of that character and disposition will wish to experience. They will be deeply, existentially bored -- not a boredom which still looks to tomorrow for alleviation, but a boredom which knows that there is simply nothing else anywhere that he or she wants to do. I have to say that I agree with Williams on this point. Sure, there will always be new people to meet, new injustices to fight, new basketball games to watch, new books to read. But seriously, how long could you go on doing the things you enjoyed until you had simply done them to death? A thousand years? Maybe. A million? Um... no.
I really think that religion can be seen as an attempt to answer the fact that everyone dies. The fact is that -- on the surface at least -- nothing you do will ultimately matter, because eventually you'll die and become nothing, and then even everyone who you directly affected will die. So why even bother living? No one really knows quite what to do with that question. But a lot of religions have tried.
And in fact, when religions are viewed from the perspective of trying to answer our questions about death, I think that's where Christianity and Islam stand out as particularly lame. They seem to sidestep the issue rather than address it by simply saying that we continue on living in some other realm. Besides stretching creduality (as an aside, odd that only humans get to live forever, right?), this view has all sorts of negative implications. First and foremost, it belittles our existence here on earth, which then becomes little more than a pre-game, or a test. It makes us undervalue physical bodies in deference to our supposed "spiritual/incorporeal" sides. It gives us license to continue exploiting the earth as we have been. And in the end, it's all so VERY ego-centric. Why the hell is any person so important that he or she must live on FOREVER? Hate to burst you bubble, but there have been billions and billions of people before you, and there will be more billions after you. No one's so special that they should live on for eternity. I'm sure the new generation will do quite well without us.
In any case, setting aside some of the more selfish reasons, I tend to think people believe in afterlife either because they'd like to imagine their loved ones going on in some way, or because they simply can't wrap their head around a world that doesn't have them in it (or both).
To be fair, really no one can imagine his or her own non-existence -- the best we can do is either imagine the world in the case where our physical self is absent, or just imagine black nothingness. But in both cases we are still conscious of thinking about blackness, or thinking about our absence. The existential truth of death from any finite perspective is not just of the self dying, but of THE UNIVERSE ending. When we die that is the END, and there is NOTHING. That's not something that anybody's mind can grasp, but just because we can't grasp it doesn't mean that we get to live on somehow.
And as for lost loved ones (and ourselves), Epicurus' statement from more than 2000 years ago still holds water: "Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not." In other words, death is simply non-existence, and so it seems hard to construe it as bad for the dead person, because the dead person no longer exists to care that he or she is dead. And while the living may mourn them, death is not ultimately such a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, I very much enjoy living, but I don't see myself as so important that I need to believe that I go on forever. Lots of other will come after me, some better and some worse -- and I don't need to be hanging out in a peanut gallery up in the clouds while these others go about living. The work of others and whatever small legacy I leave behind to help (or hinder) them should be more than enough.
One more observation. Questions about death are tied up very closely with questions of personal identity, so much so that we might call them one and the same question. When we die, what is it that actually dies?
Of course, there are at least two different kinds of self. There is first the active, reflective ego-self or subjective self, and second is the objective (or perhaps "objectifiable") historical self. So what does it mean to say that "I am AtheistPreacher"? On the usual reading, both the proper name "AtheistPreacher" and the personal pronoun "I" -- at least when AtheistPreacher is speaking it -- rigidly denote the same person. Yet as Mark Johnston points out in his book Surviving Death, I can imagine being someone else, like FDR, and then being killed in an event that wiped out all of human life, so that AtheistPreacher never existed. As Johnston summarizes it: "While knowing that I am Johnston, I can, without semantic incoherence and without ignoring the structure of the fact that I am Johnston, imagine myself [the ego-self] existing without Johnston [the historical person] existing."
What exactly does this idea tell us? Precisely that the subjective self is empty of content. Which historical person it happens to be does not matter to the ego-self -- by itself it's like a picture frame in want of a photograph to fill it. It is simply, as Johnston puts it, quoting Wittgenstein's Tractatus, "the limit of the world, not a thing in it."
Unless I misunderstand, this is a rather Buddhistic reading of the self. But in any case I find it a compelling one. And the take-home message is, once again, that our subjective selves aren't even really worth saving. There are billions of subjective selves out there, and while there may be small differences in sense organs that will then make us perceive the world differently, the vast portion of our differences arise from our social and historical context, the historical details of our lives. It is our historical and objective selves that actually matter in the wider context. But of course, we need not worry about saving them, because the fact is that we all leave legacies behind, and the next generation will take what is good about us -- those actions and ideas which help to enrich the world -- while they will leave our self-centered actions and ideas buried with our corpses. That sort of objective immortality is a fact, even if subjective immortality is a misguided pipedream.
I may eventually respond to some of the other points in this thread, but for now I think I've written enough. Fascinating question, though.
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The Thriller
Well-Known Member
Huh? I think there would be significant resistance from secular institutions as well. They're already crying about dwindling natural resources, overpopulation, starvation, climate change, etc. Imagine if the avg lifespan were just 50 years more?
Gross. Which leads to the other issue, how would the affect the QUALITY of life? Why would you want to work 90+ years at your boring job before you could retire? Why would you want to life 100+ years with diabetes or other issues? Would you feel comfortable driving on the same street as a 150 year old woman??? That's a recipe for disaster.
Don't any of you have at least a curiosity about "the other side?" If death is the end and there isn't any afterlife, then what kind of awesome relaxing sleep would you finally get to enjoy? If there is an afterlife, how cool will it be to finally see it? Meet god? See your dead loved ones and friends? Maybe finally figure out some of the mysteries of the universe?
I've seen plenty contemplating the 'other side' on here. Scat, for one, me to a lesser degree .. and a couple others as well.
The Thriller
Well-Known Member
That's good. I know I have a lot of curiosity about "the other side."
My comment was more directed to those who seem to want to live forever.
Live... Here... Forever???
I love life and there's a lot of stuff I want to get done. But not gonna lie, wanting to pass this test, get it over with, and obtain a better life is one of my primary motives.
John 16:33
"33 These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world."
I think this is an important distinction. Believers in God/afterlife are less inclined to want to live forever than a non-believer, I imagine.
The question I posed earlier in the thread was, essentially, if we were somehow forced to live forever .. how many would abandon religion?
The Thriller
Well-Known Member
I don't think many people would.
religion covers many others issues, honesty, hope, service, charity, etc.
Just look at the last LDS Gen. Conference. Very few talks were given, do x and y so you can inherit/gain z.
Most of the talks referred to doing x and y so you can have the spirit with you, feel good about yourself, and become an instrument in God's hands.
I'm guessing a lot of other religions are like that too. Not limited to Christianity either. Most religions seem to have some form of the "Golden Rule" which isn't tied at all to the afterlife but is tied into how one acts toward their fellow man will be how their fellow man acts to them.
If anything, religious/moral teachings would increase since in order to live together for a longer period of time/forever we'd have to figure out how to get along (or be killed).
As a Christian, I tend to agree .. except I feel the majority of believers would eventually fall away because of no need of afterlife. Impossible to know, though, unless this little fantasy were to become a reality.