[goethes_kind]

I think, most people who want to be immortal are actually motivated by either the fear of death, or the desire to travel far and experience life in the future. But these are distinct motivations.

Immortality itself does not compute. It just does not make sense. You are a product of your time. So if you end up 10000 years in the future, what is going to happen? It wouldn't be good if you were still you, a 2000 millennium person. So lets say you managed to evolve entirely to become a 10000 millennium human (if that's even a thing). Then, you're not really you anymore. There is no discernible continuity. So in effect it's like you died and were reborn multiple times over. "Immortality" only really makes sense over smaller timescales on the order of centuries, at most.

I can tell you, I have relatives who were alive before WWII and although they are alive, they are not part of the present. They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present, but mostly reminiscing the life they used to have in their childhood and early adulthood.

[ben_w]

Ship of Theseus has many variations; one I like is from Terry Pratchett, regarding dwarfs and axes.

“This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”

― Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant

[lc9er]

I love this and Pratchett’s “Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness”. Imagine the cost to the poor if we discovered immortality before we eliminated poverty.

[rbanffy]

That’s a good point. Living forever before we eradicate poverty (and inequality) is a big issue that would, doubtlessly, create a lot of social upheaval.

[DougN7]

Eradicating poverty could be done today, IF we could change everyone’s mindset. In my opinion that is harder to do than immortality. Heck, we could end war with a much smaller change in mindset and we can’t even do that.

[jimbokun]

Eradicating poverty has succeeded many times throughout history. We just raise tha baseline of what’s considered “poor”.

[ben_w]

Not quite today — I'm not even sure if it could be as early as by 2030 even if you eliminated all corruption and just had everyone working to build roads to and utilities in the remote towns and villages most in need of development.

We can certainly do more, don't get me wrong, but I don't think we could change so much for 750 million on a short timescale, even though that's just 10% of the world and we've clearly got the stuff in total.

China is, I think, doing a pretty decent job of getting itself out of poverty, but even they were "only" growing at 10%/year in this process.

[rbanffy]

> could be done today, IF we could change everyone’s mindset.

Oh yes! But capitalism extracts labor from wealth gradients, and extraction is more efficient the higher the gradient. Who’d clean your toilets (or make you coffee, or slaughter your beef) if there is nobody who needs the money to pay for food?

[ben_w]

I think it's more extractive of wealth from information gradients than anything else. If two corporations do roughly the same thing, the staff switch to whichever pays more while the customers switch to whoever charges less or provides a superior product/service.

> Who’d clean your toilets (or make you coffee, or slaughter your beef) if there is nobody who needs the money to pay for food?

If nobody needs money, then surely everyone has a personal service robot? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryten

[r14c]

Me? I already clean my own toilet. My partner sometimes makes me coffee, but I make my own too. I don't eat much beef, but I don't mind slaughtering my own chickens.

Honestly, if I had the time I'd be able to enjoy doing a lot more "menial" labor than I currently do. Living a simple life is nice, but because everything in modern society is tied to competition and the outcomes determine my standard of living, I am forced to constantly level up just to tread water.

[idiotsecant]

>capitalism extracts labor from wealth gradients

This is the sort of thing that sounds very truthy but I don't think that's actually very true. I don't think that this property is particularly unique to capitalism. As long as people have existed society as a system, whatever 'isim' it was labeled with (and even before) has extracted labor from power gradients. It's more simply stated that people tend toward forming more stable and longer lasting social systems (in which more gets done) in the presence of a strong hierarchy.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

You have eliminated it by any meaningful definition of poverty.

[falcolas]

I'm going to be a bit US centric here:

Definitions such as food security? We don't have that. Housing for every person? Nope. How about the ability to ensure our health? Nope. Jobs? Nope. Help when you need it for your mental health? As if.

Poverty is still a scourge on humanity.

[jimbokun]

The fear of insufficient calories to survive is all but eradicated. Obesity is the new marker of poverty.

Agreed on lack of housing, which is largely due to progressive local governments preventing the construction of new housing. Housing is far more plentiful and cheaper in red states.

Agreed on health. Replace the US system wholesale with one of the many more successful models in other countries. Ironically, our existing government run programs are already better in terms of cost and quality than private insurance.

Recent unemployment rates reflect essentially full employment.

So a mixed bag.

[falcolas]

> The fear of insufficient calories to survive is all but eradicated. Obesity is the new marker of poverty.

Tell that to the millions of families in the US who are food insecure TODAY. And calories alone are not enough.

"the USDA found that nearly 7 million households were so financially squeezed last year that they had to skip meals at times because there wasn't enough food to go around. Almost all of these households said they couldn't afford to eat balanced meals." ~NPR

As for employment, that 4.3% unemployment (per MSNBC on 8/3/24) still represents some 13 million people. I'd hesitate to call that "full employment" by any metric. And it doesn't count the other roughly 20% who are not counted in that statistic who are not working (intentionally or not).

[ben_w]

Obesity, and large gold (-ish) chains. Or at least, was so in the UK before I left.

Don't count so much on housing being so easy to fix, much of the rest of the world is also having a hard time with that. (Except China, I think?)

[robertlagrant]

In terms of food security - what does that mean? I hear (unverified) there are places such as Venezuela where the population is starving, which is horrendous, but I haven't heard of this in the US.

[falcolas]

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/26/1208760...

And if you don't trust NPR, feel free to pick another one of dozens of sources under the google search "food insecurity us"

[silver_silver]

>They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present

This is such a limited perspective. I’m in my 20s and don’t bother with any of that either. The continuity is of one’s conscious experience, not identity.

[beezlewax]

As if tiktok was the pinnacle of human existence. It's more or less just marketing trash.

[m_a_g]

> I think, most people who want to be immortal are actually motivated by either the fear of death...

How are you not afraid of death? How is anyone not afraid of death? This baffles me. I mean, I don't spend my days agonizing over the fact that I will die someday, mainly because it has no use. Chronic anxiety won't help me as long as I take the necessary actions. But I'm sure as hell scared shitless of dying overall.

If I were 100 years old and every day was a struggle, sure, I'd want to just get it over with. But I have a really hard time understanding why people won't want to stay 30 years old forever. You, your conscience, the only thing that matters, will cease to exist. If that doesn't strike fear in a person, I don't know what will.

[supertofu]

What is there to be afraid of about death, exactly? If you don't believe in any afterlife or continuation, then there will be no consciousness to perceive the other side of death.

If you do believe in an afterlife or continuation, you'll have spent your life preparing accordingly.

[adrianN]

For me the problem is not death itself, but the steady decline that usually comes before it. Biologically immortal humans would still die eventually, but there wouldn’t be decades of old age before death.

[Auracle]

Because I don’t want to stop existing. I want to be able to see my daughters (and hopefully grandchildren someday) grow up.

Sure, once I’m dead it won’t bother me, but I’m alive right now and it does.

[r14c]

I didn't exist for billions of years before I gained consciousness as a child. I'm sure I won't mind not existing for billions of years after my system expires.

[Panzer04]

Definitely my favourite perspective on death.

[mensetmanusman]

The existence of a mind is a property of this mysterious universe that is obvious yet not described by any physical law.

We know so little what consciousness is at the age of the universe timescale (and possibly the infinite multiverse, which actually guarantees an infinite number of configurations of you), it’s hard to think that death is the obvious end of you-ness.

[jewayne]

I mean, there are plenty of things that are worse than death. I myself have an informal "anti-bucket list" -- things I want to make sure I die without doing / have happen to me. It's a LOOONG list.

Alzheimer's. Paralysis. Elder abuse. Bone cancer. Even identity death. I think anyone who is that terrified of death is doing so from an adolescent "bad things only happen to other people" mindset.

[lainga]

If I see any of those coming around the corner, I have intent to make like Ambrose Bierce: get my affairs in order and then go off into harm's way.

"If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it is a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs."

[jewayne]

I think most people have that thought, but few act on it. And unfortunately, death is not the only harm that can come from harm's way. Stray bullets can find spines and genitals about as easily as they can find hearts.

[Lambdanaut]

Death is just the name we give to the moment when the condensed energy that is moving this system that calls itself a body breaks down into a temporarily simpler state.

At some point I'll get caught up in some whirlpool of energy and find myself crawling out of some uterus again as I have time and time again for all of eternity.

Yippee.

[alonsonic]

So you define yourself as energy? Not your conscience? Because your conscience and sense of self is what most people would describe as gone when you die, and that's where the fear comes from. Energy has no feelings, no conscience, no self...

[Lambdanaut]

> So you define yourself as energy? Not your conscience?

No division.

> Energy has no feelings, no conscience, no self

Where did you get that idea?

[digging]

> Energy has no feelings, no conscience, no self

> Where did you get that idea?

It is not an idea that one needs to have given to them. It is the simple conclusion of known physics. However, the claim that "energy has consciousness" is a non-obvious idea, which can't be derived from the evidence and mathematics we use to describe the universe. It should be supported if you believe it. It would be an important learning about the universe. That, or you're redefining "energy" as "any system that contains energy," (including a human being, which very few would define as "pure energy").

Is there any meaning to this position you're taking? Does it support predictions about the world? Does it change how you think about the world?

[jewayne]

Even if that is true, the actual you is just as assuredly dead.

[Lambdanaut]

"Actual me"?

I'm the sea of energy from which all life and death springs from. We all live and die in it.

[jewayne]

Is that what you signed on your driver's license?

[mensetmanusman]

Bubbling and flickering like a candle in and out of the background consciousness of existence.

[falcolas]

The older I get, the less I want to live forever. I mean, hell, my knees have hurt in some fashion or another since I was 10. It's not gotten better, it's gotten friends. ADHD... I can barely plan for today, let alone make sure I'm not destitute for the next billion years.

Now then, if they could solve (and reverse) all the other things that come with aging (honestly of those things death scares me the least), I would reconsider my stance. But even the thought of living for another 100 years at where I am right now sounds like a pretty miserable existence.

[afthonos]

The good news is that as far as I know, there is no plan to end death that doesn’t also involve ending aging. The bad news is that it might come too late for any of us talking here.

[falcolas]

It's not just aging that's a problem. It's also issues we're born with (mental health, autoimmune disorders, and thousands of others), or issues inflicted upon us (back pain, cancer, etc).

All of these, practically speaking, need to be solved to extend life in a way that's worth experiencing.

[afthonos]

Sure. And practically every one of these issues except for aging and death do have lots of people looking at them, and as someone with an autoimmune disorder that has multiplying available drugs, I can testify that things are getting better.

[falcolas]

We have seen some improvements for some diseases. But so many others, especially any mental health issues, are not seeing much progress from the "drown the brain in these chemicals" method of treatment.

So yeah. I don't want to be a downer, but I'm not seeing what I would call enough movement. And it's slowing down even more (and those chemicals are becoming harder and harder to get sometimes) as pharma and hospitals focus on profit over health.

Even "solved" problems (really, problems which can/could be managed) are becoming issues again thanks to profit seeking. See insulin.

EDIT: So much for not wanting to be a downer.

[imtringued]

The amount of people here that seemingly don't care about quality of life is shocking to me. What's the point of drawing out negative experiences to potentially infinity?

One of the tricks that immortality plays to you, is that no matter how much you screw up, you still have an infinite lifespan remaining to fix everything, including the fuckups of an infinite lifespan (uncountable infinities/cantor's diagonal argument).

For example, let's say your eyesight deteriorates every 100 years and there is a cure that will take 2 years of your salary to fix. Add this up until you spend most of your life maintaining your immortal body.

[robertlagrant]

> The amount of people here that seemingly don't care about quality of life is shocking to me

I haven't seen this on here. Can you cite an example?

[jbstack]

Not everyone is the same. Some people are more open to change and new experiences than others. And ultimately, I'd bet that if your relatives were facing death tomorrow, they'd take a pill today that would avoid it, notwithstanding that they prefer the past to the present. Just because a person doesn't like change doesn't mean they prefer death over change.

[olalonde]

> Not everyone is the same. Some people are more open to change and new experiences than others.

It's also likely that in the future, this trait will be tunable with technology.

[RobotToaster]

In roughly 15 years every cell in your body is replaced, by your logic there's no reason to live past 15, since you're no longer the same person.

[dualogy]

I heard that it varies by cell type from at most 7 years, down to under-24-hours for a few types. But.. that's just my memory from some read many years ago. Curious what the latest official number is.

[anthk]

I'm in my 30's and I don't give a fuck on 'AI', Instagram and Tik Tok.

[agumonkey]

I do think our brain as a somehow fix structure / existential path that would struggle to make sense over multiple centuries[0]. Beside reminiscing times gone, there's also the absurdity of cycles and "forgettance", where stupid things come over and over[1], which is not pleasant.

[0] if you don't just go insane because your memory capacity is reached and you just can't organize new ideas without losing others or causing damage.

[1] that said this might be due to equal demographic waves, but in the case of immortal population, young ones would be less and less large % wise.

[Nursie]

I think most people who don't want to be extend life are actually motivated by extreme fear of death.

A fear so profound that they've reasoned themselves into a corner, that this way we live must be correct and cannot be questioned, because if we start to question whether death is necessary after a 'natural' lifespan, whether research into prolonging life might be possible and might not actually not be a ridiculous endeavour for a few madmen, then that deep dread they cannot speak of may return and consume them.

Beyond that your comment is full of odd assertions - yes, people grow and change, but no, that doesn't imply discontinuity or repeated death.

Your older relatives are living in ageing or aged bodies, including their brains. Their experience of life is not necessarily what we could expect if we were to be able to put off the effects of age indefinitely.

Edit - but I'll take your few centuries over what we have now, as a starting point :)

[m_fayer]

I have those relatives too and I know others in their 60s and 70s who are very much living in this moment. The difference is curiosity and motivation and the humility to recognize that what’s new and alien might just have something to offer you.

I’d bet those relatives you mention weren’t the most curious or open people when they were younger.

[dualogy]

> They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present, but mostly reminiscing the life they used to have in their childhood and early adulthood.

You don't have to be 50+ to fit that description =)

[the_cramer]

Depends on the type of immortality. If we can fight typical aging processes, then a big part of the problem you state would go away. Old brains don't learn and think as fast as young ones do, this has purely to do with ageing and cell/dna defects over time. Old people are not hyped by AI and new tech, because most of them don't understand them and i think this has much to do with the reason stated.

Not to say there is not a possible psychological problem for us when living forever, it just cannot be researched right now because, you know, we tend to die. Let alone the implications.. insurance, prison sentences, housing, population and control of it...

[kochikame]

You could also argue that old people are not hyped by AI and new tech because they have been through so many hype cycles, and seen so much in general, that they know that things come and go, and tech advances, but the really important things in life never change

So not lack of understanding, more that they see through the hype

Pretty cool if you ask me

[arisAlexis]

You are just anthropomorhising a biology / technology problem that could be solvable (death). The fact that you cannot comput it doesn't mean at all that it doesn't compute in general.

[jimbokun]

That’s because AI, Instagram and TikTok have done nothing to improve human life so far and those older people have seen enough to understand that.

Except for the ones on Facebook ranting about politics.

[rikroots]

> I think, most people who want to be immortal are actually motivated by either the fear of death, or the desire to travel far and experience life in the future.

Good points. But I think another key motivation is the simple, banal Fear Of Missing Out. How dare human life on Planet Earth continue without me?

While (of course) I would like to live forever, it is not death I fear. Rather it is the process of dying that upsets me. I'm currently in a position where my mother and siblings seem to be in a race to the grave. My mum (age: 95) still has her mind, but her body has failed her badly over the past 10 years: every movement is an effort and a pain - she no longer leaves the house, though she absolutely refuses to become bed-bound. My brothers have fought, or are fighting, cancer. My sister had her second heart attack earlier this year; she still smokes - perhaps her understanding of things is better than ours? (FWIW, I have not yet discovered the means of my demise).

If extreme extended life includes endless pain and continual loss ... I don't think I'm as strong as my mother. My hope is one day I just forget to wake up, drift into oblivion dreamless. !Cogito, ergo !sum.

> Immortality itself does not compute. It just does not make sense. You are a product of your time.

I wrote a novel[1] about a once-human entity that was born some 6-7,000 years ago, and now exists as a sort of eternal mind parasite. I had to do a lot of thinking about how such entities would think about life, time, and death. As the story developed it turned out that my main character quite enjoyed experiencing life, didn't much worry about time, but in particular was fascinated by how people die - which, as a mind parasite, he could experience almost-first-hand.

[1] - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/book/spintrap-the-lonely-...

[dingnuts]

> There is no discernible continuity.

There's continuity of consciousness which is the only thing that matters. Turn me into a mist, I don't care, as long as I can stay awake.

General anesthesia is the worst thing I've ever experienced.

Nobody wants to live forever in a decaying body. Just let me have my 23 year old body back, just for a few extra centuries. c'mon, universe.

[snickerbockers]

> They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present

If that's actually how you define "partaking in the present" then I truly pity you. There is far more to life than obsessing over the latest silicon valley bullshit machine.

[andrewjl]

"Mein Vermächtniss, wie herrlich weit und breit? Die Zeit ist mein Vermächtniss, mein Acker ist die Zeit.”

[digging]

I find this comment incredibly difficult to read in a way that the book of scientology is, or a bottle of Dr Bronner's soap is. There are many assertions pretending that they logically support each other to build to a conclusion, but there's no logical connection between them at all. I'm going to try to break it down because maybe I'm just completely misreading it?

> You are a product of your time.

Sure. If I were born 600 years ago, I wouldn't be a software engineer. Perfect statement.

> So lets say you managed to evolve entirely to become a 10000 millennium human (if that's even a thing). Then, you're not really you anymore. There is no discernible continuity.

That doesn't follow. It veers wildly off course by making the assumption that I am a static thing, with a binary identity as "me" or "not me". But! I was actually born several decades ago. I was once a small child with no understanding of how software works. How is it that I'm a software engineer now? Growth, and change. Yet I retain my first-person memories of being that ignorant child. Did I steal those memories from another entity? I find that to be a useless definition of change-over-time, so I'd rather say I'm the same person. I feel like you'd agree I'm the same person, but only because the timescale is fewer than 1000 years, but that's a completely arbitrary cutoff. A person isn't defined by an instant in time, a person exists over time. Therefore there's no reason I would cease to be me in 8000 years even though I was still me in 4000 years, or 400 years, or 40 years. What possible mechanism could account for that total loss of identity after an arbitrary time? It may be in year 10024 I have no memory of the year 2024, but I might have memories of the year 9024, and in the year 9024 I might have memories of the year 8024.

> "Immortality" only really makes sense over smaller timescales on the order of centuries, at most.

Why? How many 300-year-olds have you measured this against? How many 3000-year-olds? It seems you've just drawn a line where you feel like drawing one and started telling people the line was a natural feature of the land.

> I can tell you, I have relatives who were alive before WWII and although they are alive, they are not part of the present.

Again this doesn't support your arguments at all. Those relatives are old. Their brains and bodies are weaker every year; we can't expect them to keep up. The idea of biological immortality is not that your body would just continuously age, or else yes you would just be a braindead corpse breathing on a slab for millions of years. Immortality means stopping the process of aging. So the challenges of current old people aren't really relevant to the experience of ageless 10,000-year-olds of the future.