[mrandish]

> it can’t prevent deaths from accidents or foul play

Cory Doctorow's wonderful sci-fi book "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" explored exactly this in interesting ways. In the book people in the future can live essentially forever by transferring their consciousness into new bodies. They can also back up the contents of their consciousness, something most people do nightly but certainly before doing some dangerous extreme sport. Doing dangerous things without backing yourself up is considered tantamount to suicide since you lose all the memories and personal growth, essentially the person you became since your last backup.

People do get bored and will sometimes choose to "deadhead" for hundreds of years at a time, which is putting yourself into stasis and skipping those centuries. The book is full of provocative ideas about how practical immortality might actually work on a personal and societal level.

[skissane]

Life extension to make people live several times longer? Seems plausible we’ll get there eventually, simply by extrapolating current trends in science and biotechnology, and observing what is possible in other species.

Mind uploading? That’s a whole other level of sci-fi. It isn’t extrapolating what we already have, it is waving your hand and declaring “as far as we know it isn’t physically impossible so why wouldn’t we get there eventually?”

Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are?

[ileonichwiesz]

> Plus it raises all these difficult questions about the philosophy of mind and theory of personal identity - is the backup actually you? Or do you die, and you are survived by someone else who isn’t you but thinks they are?

You don’t need sci-fi mind backups for that. How certain are you that when you go to sleep tonight, the person who wakes up tomorrow will be „actually you”? How certain are you that all your memories were lived by „actually you”?

The answer, I suppose, is that we don’t know what „actually you” even means, how consciousness works, or why you’ve even got a (seemingly) continuous internal experience.

[bgbntty2]

I think there's no "you", just an illusion that there's this uninterrupted "you"-ness from birth to death. It's a very useful illusion for the most part.

I view life (in the philosophical sense; consciousness) as the stream of subjective experiences (qualia) that arise out of life (in the biological sense; neurons and such). Right now my life consists of a collection of sustained interest in this discussion, a little hunger, the qualia of seeing the screen and the realization that I'm sitting a bit uncomfortably. In a few moments "I" will be a collection of other ephemeral qualia.

There's no "real" continuation between one experience and then next, just like there's no real continuation between my past "self" and my future "self", but they're both extremely useful illusions. I'll eat to subside that hunger that was registered a moment ago or change my position to get comfortable. I'll be responsible for "my" previous actions, as well. I'll basically be able to function as a temporally continuous being.

On the topic of immortality, I'd like to be virtually immortal so I can pursue my goals indefinitely. If I stop having goals or feel like I've had enough, I could always kill myself. My goals arise from my ethics, my biological needs and probably many other things. Why would I be OK with biology and death preventing me from achieving my goals at some arbitrary age?

So for me "immortality" is both being able to continue the illusions of self indefinitely (which I admit, feels good intrinsically), and being to continue the pursuit of my goals indefinitely. The goals seem to actually have more "real" continuity than "I" do.

The most troubling thing with immortality is the biological imperative to live that makes suicide so hard. But I think after a few centuries many people will reach that point. It's not a bad thing, it's just a personal choice.

[vidarh]

We can't even tell for certain the we have existence in time beyond just this moment - our only source of that is a memory of time passing, which we can't validate.

[nradov]

What trends are those? So far there has been zero progress on increasing maximum human lifespan.

[skissane]

We know other species have different maximum lifespans-some shorter, some longer. Obviously this is determined by genetics-as our knowledge of that subject continues to improve, why wouldn’t we eventually work out how to alter it?

We can already change the maximum lifespan of some other species. Why shouldn’t we expect to gradually be able to do it for more species? And then what makes humans special that we couldn’t eventually do the same for humans?

[nradov]

You're making a huge leap there based on zero scientific evidence. No one has ever demonstrated maximum lifespan extension for mammals living in the wild. Experiments have been limited to animals living in nice safe, sterile cages. There's no free lunch in genetics and modifications that increase maximum lifespan are likely to result in other undesirable changes. Like suppression of immune response can be helpful but that comes with a huge obvious downside if you're ever exposed to random pathogens. Outside of some very limited genetic defects it's usually impossible to alter a single trait in isolation.

[skissane]

No one has ever done it is not in itself evidence it can’t be done, only that it is hard.

And my point was-no matter how hard human life extension is, mind uploading is many orders of magnitude harder. The first, it seems likely in principle that we could achieve it if only we knew the right genetic changes to make-now, you may be right that in a thousand years we still won’t work out in practice exactly what they are-but human life extension has a certain kind of theoretical in principle feasibility which could well coexist with practical infeasibility; mind uploading lacks even that level of theoretical in principle feasibility.

[leethargo]

And we know how reliable normies are with the backup of their personal data...