[DigitalTerminal]

"(Is it possible the future will become a refuge for the rich, who experience life as a sequence of exquisite events and who might not understand the concept of entropy as relief or escape?)" Can physically and emotionally healthy people actually view death as a relief or escape? This idea seems completely insane to me. As an aside, people who want to die shouldn't/won't be forced to use longevity enhancing therapies to live longer, but I really think some psychological care should be considered for anyone refusing them.

[n4r9]

I don't know about "relief" or "escape" but I'm comfortable with the idea of eventually having "had enough" of life.

Kind of tangential: the human-style characters in Iain M Banks' fantastic and thoughtful Culture series of novels tend to come to this decision after a couple or a few hundred years. Some times they go into deep sleep to be awoken based on some external criteria (for example, when the war that they conduct with another ~~species~~ (edit: society) is proven to be morally justified).

[lmm]

What today's fiction authors write, with no access to life extension technology, doesn't really tell us anything about what the reality would be like.

It's very rare to find a healthy person - even in their '90s or '100s - who actually wants to die. Many more younger people imagine they would want to die at such an age. I suspect the same will be true for 200 or 400 year olds.

[n4r9]

You raise a very good point. I hadn't thought of looking up research on attitudes towards death in actual elderly people.

It's an unusual one because I'm specifically thinking about people who might want to die simply because they've seen and gotten from life all that they want, not people who are fed up with the (present-day) privations of old age. I suspect you're right that only a very small proportion of today's elderly match this

The closest thing I found after a little looking around is a recent initiative in the Netherlands called "Completed Life" - which seeks to extend the option of euthanasia to relatively healthy elderly people who have decided that their life is complete - and some associated research [0][1].

Lastly, on a slightly pedantic note, I think it's valid to invoke fictional worlds in response to someone who says that it's "insane" to feel a certain way.

[0] http://www.elsvanwijngaarden.com/

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027795361...

[Nasrudith]

One account I have heard from nurses in Geritology is the apparent importance of "will to live" - they have witnessed many times death following them psychologically giving up.

There could be some chicken vs egg factor (do they lose the will from health being hopeless or does their health decline with their psychological state influencing immune system, and to what extent?). That or spurious human pattern recognition (superstition) but it is possible that there is some literal survivalship bias.

[torben-friis]

> Can physically and emotionally healthy people actually view death as a relief or escape?

I obviously don't have the experience of living an "overextended" life, but I'd imagine that it would depend at least partially on whether longevity extends to the people around you. Seeing the people you knew and love die is brutal, living that through several generations might get you to a point where you don't want to keep experiencing it anymore.

[magduf]

If life extension is technological, it's pretty hard to imagine how it wouldn't extend to the people around you. Technologies almost always get much, much cheaper and available to the masses after an initial period.

In such a scenario, you're going to see some people you knew and love die, but usually because of things like accidents, not old age, so it'll be entirely random, unlike now where elderly people have to watch all their friends die off around them, something they didn't experience that much in their younger years.

[Amygaz]

The kind of biotechnology we are talking about will be more like a cocktail of drugs and gene therapies. The price of entry will be in the millions, and maintenance in the tens of thousands per year. It will take many generations to be affordable to the masses

[magduf]

Oh please. Dentistry involves extremely personalized care, with crowns custom-made for every patient (these days by automated machines) and work done by highly-paid specialists on an individual basis, yet the masses are generally able to afford it. Once stuff gets out of the patent phase (20 years), it's going to become very cheap with tons of competition.

[thom]

Shame we don't have Camus around to address the problem, tbh.

[PavlovsCat]

> Can physically and emotionally healthy people actually view death as a relief or escape?

I think before that should have come the question whether a person who is only invested in their own life, and not interested in the tapestry or river of life, for lack of a better word, could be considered emotionally healthy?

Yes, I want to see and experience life, my own and that of others, but I'd rather die at some point, and know other life will exist, than live forever and squat on it. We can't be forever young, that is, some things will never be new to us again. Yeah, life is still fun, but not as fun as it could be for someone else. To me, that matters.

from https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/bitstream/123456789/20935/...

> Arendt argues that human action is contained within the notion of plurality as the most basic condition of human life, which in turn rests on her concept of 'natality'. In an almost poetical way she writes in this same essay how the world is constantly being refilled by strangers, outsiders and newcomers who act and react in an unforeseeable manner, in ways that cannot be calculated or predicated by those already familiar and stationed there, who will eventually leave and be replaced by others. The very fact that we come into the world through natural birth shows that the world is continuously being transformed and renewed through birth. Thus, 'natality' highlights this emphasis on the capacity of new beginnings with each and every birth.

I'd say natality more than makes up for mortality, while immortality removes natality, and doesn't even begin to cover the loss.

I'd rather there is something beautiful I miss out on, than something mediocre I get to experience, doubly so if it's made mediocre by my insisting on experiencing everything that goes on. And on top of that, there is the mediocrity of the lens through which we experience things, our own mediocrity, that also should not be increased lightly. New life makes life, the universe and everything better, it just happens to not extend my own life to infinity. But I can't have it both ways, not in an intellectualy and morally honest way, they way I see it. If everybody was truly immortal, as we are now, and for the reasons we want it, everybody will start to suck super badly real quick, and they'll suck too much to even notice it. The majestic and ever fresh river of life would turn into a petty, stinky puddle. Or I could wish for immortality myself, and mortality for everyone else -- but what would that make me, and what about friendship and love?

[riffraff]

you are positing that an extended amortal life is at the expense of someone elses' birth.

But why should it be?

If we're talking SF, we might as well agree on a method to handle that, e.g. force people to go off-planet at some age and make room for new people. The universe is big enough.

(I meant to write a novella on this for a long time :)

[PavlovsCat]

> you are positing that an extended amortal life is at the expense of someone elses' birth.

> But why should it be?

That's the default, considering we live on a finite planet with finite resources, and even without immortality on the expensive of others is already quite the thing. I'd say the burden is on showing how that could change, not to mention why it absolutely must and will change... rather than just assuming it.

> we're talking SF

I'm "just" talking immortality, that I take for granted in this context, not additional things. At the least, those additional things can't just go one way, just because assuming immortality is assuming something hitherto impossible, doesn't warrant assuming other impossible things, while dismissing other possibilities, both possible and hitherto impossible, just because they'd spoil the parade.

Why would some live at the expense of others, or prevent others being born? Well, having "eternity" to lose, one must not let anything unpredictable happen, one certainly must not let anyone have the ability to harm oneself. The universe is too big to let anyone just get away and potentially hatch unpredictability. That is certainly a way to look at it, and it only takes a few with enough power to have that outlook for my dystopia to occur -- while your utopia would require nobody with power going that route, everybody always agreeing on "playing nice".

We can't even agree on a way so people don't starve and die for lack of water, we can't exactly agree to not ruin the planet, potentially leading to catastrophic shifts in rather short timespans, we already live at the expense of those who might be born after us -- but we're going to handle immortality well, if only we had it? We're greedy and murderous about shitty trivialities, about trinkets -- but we'll play nice when it comes to something like living forever? Seems unlikely, certainly not a given.

The possiblity of immortality combined with the fact of ongoing concentration of wealth and power, plus automation, might lead to a rapid depopulation of the planet indeed, but not by moving anyone anywhere. Why keep people around that are nothing but a potential threat, that serve no use, that are not even an exploitable resource, because they take up more space and resources than means of production requiring no workers that are orders of magnitude more powerful, and after some point plain unnecessary either way? After people "have everything", not by being content and loving life and the world, but by owning it personally, what they still need is for nothing else to be able to rise up.

(I also meant to write a short story once, about a little girl who skipped the weekly dose of the government mandated antidote for the biological weapon terrorists supposedly unleashed, say, 150 years ago, because she wonders if it's even true that not taking it is lethal, since nobody she knows ever failed to take it even once. She manages to hide the pain and the skin discolorations that appear after a few days, finally staying up all night the last night gritting her teeth before the day the next weekly dose is given out, sneaking into the bathroom early to wash off her sweat, before her mother wakes her. It was supposed to begin with her vowing to never do that again, then starting to ask questions about the past, but I never got beyond that.)

[chr1]

Immortality + no other technology improvement is not a realistic assumption, that's why you get to a non-realistic result of "people have to die eventually" from it.

The immortality is not a thing you take and then have to kill others to not allow them to take it from you.

The only way to not die is to have a huge society that invents new treatments, discovers new physics, builds machines to prevent death from random comets, from earth's magnetic field running out, or sun exploding. The mere 7 billion we have now is not enough for any of this.

[Guillaume86]

Nicely put. It is also my intuition that immortality would ultimately be very unhealthy for our species and environment. I tend to think about it in terms of morals and beliefs stagnation, or the death of new ideas but I like your argument.

[PavlovsCat]

When I was 9, I cried all night because I realized that one day, we might meet aliens and go to other galaxies and whatnot, and I would just be dust in the ground by then. The thought of thousands, millions of years of events and me just having been a blip, felt crushing. And there are many people I miss, and many people who died before I was born I would have loved to get to know; that I "made peace" with that doesn't mean it doesn't make me sad. It is sad, it's sad that people die, even after a long life. It's sad for friendships to end. But that I'm sad doesn't mean I'm not also happy and grateful, and prefer to be content with being a single finite thread in a much bigger tapestry of life, rather than just going on forever, kinda defacing that tapestry.

I mean, that's the binary "immortality" option. I'm not against medicine, or people living longer. But if someone genuinely wants to live forever forever, I really would question how much they thought it through.

[antepodius]

It's not a binary immortality decision, luckily. It's just not comitting suicide (or dying in a car crash) every day. Most people will do that, given the choice.

[qwsxyh]

I consider anyone who doesn't want to die in this current word psychologically unsound.

Once again, downvoted for holding a Controversial Opinion that the hive mind doesn't like.

[rfrey]

More likely downvoted for a sweeping, conversation ending dismissal of anyone who disagrees with you, without bothering to add any substance.

There are plenty of comments in this thread that agree with you, that are doing fine. It’s not your argument, which to be honest is not particularly unpopular or unconventional.

[chr1]

Could you please elaborate why do you consider us psychologically unsound. Have you watched any talks by Aubrey de Grey?

[qwsxyh]

Because living in a world where you live to work for the next 30 years until climate change kills us all is not a good prospect.

[chr1]

First of all "kills us all" is highly exaggerated and what happens largely depends on what we do in this years.

But even assuming the kills us all part is correct, dying now is worse prospect than dying in 30 years so i don't see how that can be an argument for psychological unsoundness.

> Once again, downvoted for holding a Controversial Opinion that the hive mind doesn't like.

I did not downvote you, but i don't think you were downvoted for holding a "Controversial Opinion", unfortunately many people hold opinion similar to yours, you were downvoted because calling some people crazy without giving any explanation why you do it.

[qwsxyh]

The parent comment did the same. I don't see it downvoted.

[chr1]

It's not the same, writing style matters in getting your message to the reader, the style of your comment looked hostile, and not motivation nor the logic of your argument were discernible from it.