[woojoo666]

One argument I saw in a show I recently watched (Ranling of Kings) is that mortality forces us to rely on others to continue our legacy, so we are forced into caring about our community and the people around us. So immortality would lead people to become more closed off. Longetivity is different from immortality of course, but it's still applicable to an extent. Though perhaps it should be up to us to find value in the community, instead of having it forced on us via mortality

[radu_floricica]

I'm absolutely stumped by this kind of arguments. I have to get back to what Eliezer calls "belief in belief" to process this - you can't possibly actually believe that, you just have a belief that you do. Because since there's nothing in this train of thought about us happening by chance to have the exact optimum lifespan right now, the logical conclusion is that we should work on people having shorter lifespans in order to live better, more community-rich lives, at least up to the point where you get diminishing returns.

[robbedpeter]

Every argument for death strikes me as silly. If anything, functional immortality would incentivize people to be better. Your want relationships to be stable and mutually respectful at a minimum. Marriages would be somewhat hard to maintain - if you were in good health, mid 20s body, and expected to live centuries in that state, lifelong commitments achieve that "quantity is sometimes a quality all its own" effect.

We'll need a different scale of maturity, too - an 18 year old adult in a relationship with a 300 year old adult makes the term "adult" ridiculously ineffective in describing anything meaningful.

Age and death and maturity tie in to almost every aspect of life and culture and human experience. We don't have the cultural tools and concepts that allow for immortality to fit. If it's achieved, the world radically changes and we won't know what those changes will be until it happens. It'd be like tasking Edison with predicting how the internet would change life, or cell phones, or asking Julius Caesar to write about how the germ theory of disease might improve the human condition. We're smart enough to predict small parts of it, but there's a whole world of ideas and behaviors that get unleashed by immortality, and a non-trivial percentage of them are probably counterproductive with regards to humanity at large (immortal Putin, anyone?)