| 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. |