Death makes space for new life, and new strategies. It's a key part of the evolutionary process, and thus of life itself. Yet another sign of the desperate egocentrism of a generation alienated from what it means to live.
Evolution is an awful optimization process. It's only effective in real life because it's had literally billions of years to work. Intelligently-guided directed optimization is vastly superior and we should prefer it whenever possible, if only for reasons of practicality and efficiency. For example, look at the development of flight: biological evolution took probably a few billion years to evolve things like pteranodons and archaeopteryx; we landed on the moon in about seventy years.
Evolution is amazing, sure. It's also evil, bad, and wrong, even without getting into ethical issues. Don't do it.
Funnily enough I was just thinking today about how a living organism is in some ways essentially a brute force attempt at finding the solution to persistence.
I'm not sure you understand much about the evolutionary process, or life.
Trying to cheat death entirely isn't some perversion of evolution, its the pinnacle of it. It's the purest expression of the desire for self-preservation, which was hardwired into us by evolution, that there is.
If you don't like human beings trying not to die, then don't blame them for being "egocentric", blame evolution for making them that way.
>Yet another sign of the desperate egocentrism of a generation alienated from what it means to live.
I disagree. Fear of death is a cultural constant that almost every religious/spiritual movement in history has tried to assuage, either through the promise of an eternal afterlife or a belief in some pan-consciousness that we are all part of (i.e. eternal life).
I do not really understand this perspective. Could you help me figure out where you're coming from?
My current model for comments like this would suggest it would be made by one of two categories of individuals:
1) An innocent. A person who has not yet personally been touched by death, and who has not already put some thought into it. The full weight of death isn't real yet.
2) Someone who has at the very least brushed by the darker side side of things- maybe their parents, maybe friends, maybe their own disease, maybe depression... and they came out the other side with an attempt at a coping mechanism. Some form of spirituality, philosophy, or maybe just hardened nihilism, that let them look away, or 'accept' it.
But the above is too general to really provide any insight. And to be clear, I am not upset at people like the above- I can understand how it happens, even if I strongly disagree with the results.
I just have a very hard time squaring the above... approaches... with the special, horrible kind of sound someone makes when they are weakly screaming for their life and they are terrified that no one will be able to help them. I can't unhear that. And I can't help but try to listen for all those other people in the same position, thousands of times a day.
My own perspective is simple: death doesn't have any special meaning, and it causes absurd levels of suffering. Any uses it has are so inefficient and unethical that any attempt by a human to emulate them would (rightfully) be considered comically evil. We can do better- unlike raw evolution, we have brains.
Aren't you doing the same mistake now?
"Egocentrism" which you see in the core of these attempts to prolong life - that's just a "new strategy". It has has obviously survived in humans through the billions of years of evolution (because we see it living in us now). Right now it has lead us to pursue this technology. We shall see how it goes. Maybe these efforts will prove futile, and other humans will evolve which will not have such egocentrism. Or maybe this new strategy will win and all of you (royally speaking) who think that it's bad will simply die off, because you couldn't keep up with the new evolutionary trends didn't believe that we should use tech to prolong life.
In either way, pursuing such goals is EXACTLY what it means to live. It's the process of the evolution itself. We are not alienated from it, on the contrary we are in the very heart of it and we get to experience it first-hand.
Alienation from life is more like non-accepting a certain aspect of it which is obviously happening. An aspect like people researching into biology to cheat death. So isn't that what your comment is?
Evolution is amazing, sure. It's also evil, bad, and wrong, even without getting into ethical issues. Don't do it.
(speaking of ethical issues: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/)