[soneca]

I'm way out of my league here, but what if aging is just the way to evolve and adapt. If there were no natural deaths, beings with the same genes would be around forever, with no possibility for its species to adapt to a new environment.

Any reproduction would be just creating more competition for resources if one expect to live forever. So there would be no deaths, but also no births, no mutations.

If there was no death we still would be just - what is the first life form to age? protofishes? populating the oceans until the salinity (?) changes and we were all dead.

[TylerJay]

Hey, sorry for the delay on this. That's not quite how natural selection works, but it's a very common line of thinking. When making an evolutionary argument, you can't make "top down" arguments. You have to look at it from a "bottom up" perspective.

Lets analyze the scenario where individuals don't die by aging. So we have some members of the species from generation 1 who grow up, then reproduce. In generation 2, there are some that have mutations that make them more suitable for the environment and some that make them less suitable. The less suitable ones are outcompeted and don't survive, the normal ones mostly group up to survive, and the ones with beneficial mutations outcompete all the others, leading to the deaths of some of the ones with the "original" genes, and procreate. This then happens again and again with beneficial mutations and they eventually becoming ubiquitous in the population.

There's just no way that an individual member of the species with a mutation that gives it a definite lifespan has a fitness advantage over the others, all else being equal. What's more likely is that immortality is not necessary to pass on genes, so it simply never developed because it would involve many complex systems, the individual components of which would not have conferred enough of a fitness advantage on their own to become universal in a population. And since the natural environment is harsh and predatorial, most animals don't die of old age anyway, which again limits the usefulness of an unlimited potential lifespan.

[drcomputer]

Yea, coming from the background assumption of "everything comes from the same thing", it seems more interesting to me that we have consciousness to experience, rather than the curiosity that we age and die. Age and death are phenomena we observe of ourselves, a thing that is constantly changing yet fundamentally the same thing.

It's a philosophical quirk, but it really depends on your existential and universal (philosophies / beliefs / religions). Things you must assume, basically, in order to make meaning from what is otherwise, pure logic (structural arrangement) and pure state (instances of that structure).

The idea that aging and death are undesirable is a complex phenomena to begin with. A rock does not care that the water slowly washes it away to shape it into a new form, yet humans have very discerning opinions on the matter across all phenomena they observe. Every explanation humanity manufactures seems to have some bias.

[Umn55]

>it seems more interesting to me that we have consciousness to experience,

Everything that is alive has some level of "consciousness" aka some ability to sense, detect, and adapt to it's environment. The idea that consciousness is "special" and "unqiue" is the big lie. If knowledge is unified, then that means the same is true for the universe, since what we call "knowledge" is in fact the universes structure directly. Like your hand, your car, etc. What we call "knowledge" is our representations (symbolic languages like math, english, etc). We confuse our symbols with reality.

It's not that knowledge is "provisional" (aka the structure of the universe is the truth, hence not provisional), it's that our current abstract representations of it is.