[zaroth]

I couldn't agree more that our humanity places truly absurd limits on our existence. You get, if you're lucky 30-40 years of solid productivity after 20-30 years of training. Maybe enough time to create one or two solid accomplishments before your capacity for thought, and soon enough your capacity for life is extinguished.

Also consider the economic argument. On the one hand, the level of investment experts make in becoming so is squandered by death. And yet, this also levels the playing field for newborns, since you don't have to compete against the guy with 8,000 years of experience.

I think human intelligence hits an asymptote due to mortality. There's only so deep an individual can go, and a limit on how much you can replace depth with breadth.

We enter and exit this world as babes. 100 years is in many ways a pathetic excuse for an existence. Obviously extending that would have to focus on quality not quantity, and has supremely disruptive economic effects (on par with strong AI) but I do not doubt there are great leaps we will take toward this end over the next 500 years.

One nice side-effect of a millennial-scale existence would hopefully be a more macro and less cyclical approach to "current affairs".

[pron]

But why do you think productivity is any less absurd than non-productivity? And why is intelligence relevant to absurdity? Is a butterfly's life any more absurd than a human's?

Humans and humanity don't have goals. The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct. And it is certainly not our goal to be creative, productive, efficient. We make up goals for ourselves to give subjective meaning to our lives, and that can be plenty. The hard part of anyone's life is to find the existence that gives their life meaning in their eyes. You think extending our lifespan or making society more efficient are worthy goals? So dedicate your life to those goals. But make sure that's really meaningful to you, because, frankly, the universe doesn't give a damn.

[zaroth]

Not everyone is an explorer, creator, inventor, artist, etc. Not everyone takes life as an opportunity to push some boundary further than anyone before. Pull on some thread and see where it all leads...

But I think for those of us who are, mortality seems like an awful joke, and a terrible waste. We just get started and then it's all cut short.

[marincounty]

I will never forget a lottery winner statement. She won a huge amount of money in the lotttery. She went out to dinner with her family to celebrate. The next morning her husband woke up in complete liver failure. Both were MD's and her final statement at the end of the interview was "Life is truly random." I think about that quote too often.

[nickthemagicman]

Yep but there's statistics that are pretty reliable.

[pron]

There's perfectly reliable statistics for a fair coin toss. Doesn't make it any less random.

[philwelch]

Depending on how much the husband had to drink at dinner, it might not be so random after all.

[lloeki]

> The universe

As far as we know currently, the future looks particularly grim†: on the longest time scale imaginable, the very fabric of the universe is being thinned out of existence. The absurd thing here is trying to make sense out of what definitely hasn't, as all information within this universe will ultimately be destroyed.

Whatever, I choose to enjoy the ride.

† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

[neuronic]

I wouldn't take this understanding of the physical universe for granted. I think we lack both insight and perspective to make sure-fire statements about things happening to the universe billions of years from now.

[eli_gottlieb]

>The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct.

So what? I fail to understand how this supposedly renders our lives more or less meaningful.

[neuronic]

Meaning is like a whole bunch of other things very relative, so I agree with your point.

But I understand OP as well. Some other potential entity only a dozen light years away might not care much about our human art, love, war or suffering. Maybe the interest in alien life is unique to us because we are social in nature. We don't know other civilization's cultures. Maybe they know where we are but actively choose to ignore us. We can't even deal with or comprehend cultures a few hundred miles away from us. It makes no sense to try and preemptively comprehend the intent of the rest of the universe.

But for us as humans, our lives are usually maximally meaningful often to the point where it's egocentric and selfish. I am sure you can think of a few people who deserve to die rather than you. After all the selection of ostracized or hated people is very large. However, in the grand scheme of things you can only claim to look at local optima and we walk through history like a greedy algorithm.

Only when the full scale of events are known, when humanity's history becomes static either by ending or stagnating, we are truly able to make conclusions whether events in our time are good or bad. And even then it doesn't mean that it actually matters.

[pron]

It makes the meaning of "meaning" self-referential. Usually, when we say that something has meaning, we mean it is significant to something external to it. If the most external thing at all does not consider our existence significant, then "meaning" becomes entirely subjective: something is defined to have meaning if we convince ourselves it does. Some may think that's not much. Others think that if that's as far as we can go, then that is everything.

[eli_gottlieb]

Nothing can be infinitely recursive, every chain of reference must bottom out somewhere. So why not in us?

[pron]

I am not sure I understand what it is you're saying, but sure, for many people something is meaningful if it is significant to other people, or even themselves. Others find that less satisfying, requiring a more absolute meaning.

[sireat]

If (universe==indifferent) meaning=null;

Anecdotally speaking most people get through their day to day tasks thinking that somehow it all matters in the end.

If nothing really matters, and best you can do is be your own little streetlight(to paraphase Kubrick) you are faced with the problem on what to choose as your meaning.

Pick anything, it will do. That is scary.

[eli_gottlieb]

> If (universe==indifferent) meaning=null;

Why?

[sireat]

Because that implies man is free to make up their own meaning.

No natural law, no nothing -> pure chaos

Put it another way, indifferent universe strongly points to us being a complete accident, our qualia so cherished by us just an absurd joke.

So meaning being null means there is no ultimate answer not even 42.

[eli_gottlieb]

I still don't see why meaning is null in the case that the universe isn't a conscious agent. Meanings are aspects of us, not of the Universal Consciousness or whatever.

[nosuchthing]

You seem anthropomorphize "The Universe", as some God-human like creature?

Structure (and the immense variety), life, mutations, and the known universe that exist rather than infinite disorder and an entropic void seems more than just "indifferent".

[mynameisvlad]

I don't see the OP trying to anthromorphize it at all. It's merely looking at the universe as it is. If you or I, or hell, even the entire human race, suddenly ceased to exist, it wouldn't be felt even outside our planet. Mars' orbit wouldn't change, a nearby star wouldn't suddenly go supernova, etc. We are such an incredibly small part of the universe that we don't really affect anything outside our planet.

[marquis]

> levels the playing field for newborns

We see the effects of longer, more productive lives already in youth unemployment and property prices. It may not be until the post-boomer generation that we adjust to this. Perhaps there is a historical period where a generation has lived far longer than the few preceding it, from which we can get an idea how society managed?

[sliverstorm]

The historical problem is too many children surviving childhood. The oldest son gets the farm, the youngest gets nothing.

The solutions have been things like:

- subdivide the property (not sustainable)

- The younger son goes to the military, or the frontier, or...

- The younger son courts a daughter in a family with no sons

[mjevans]

There are only three possible outcomes.

- Increase the death rate (war, disease, etc)

- Establish an equilibrium and plan for a given number of living beings, preventing the formation of new ones until there are free resources. (Attempting to defy this will lead to the previous or next outcome.)

- Expand in to new areas to provide more SPACE!

[bryanlarsen]

It's a historical problem, it's already been solved in developing countries. Nothing drastic, just dropping the birth rate below 2.1.

[baddox]

Is giving more inheritance to the oldest child still a thing?

[pcmonk]

> I think human intelligence hits an asymptote due to mortality. There's only so deep an individual can go, and a limit on how much you can replace depth with breadth.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "human intelligence", but in general we get deeper not by stretching vertically, but by moving vertically, if you follow the metaphor. Many software engineers today don't even have a passing familiarity with the deeper levels of the stack they're programming on, and that's all new stuff in the last ~50 years.

[zaroth]

Very good point! To the extent that we can build on abstractions and black boxes we stand on the shoulders of giants. BTW, perhaps s/human intelligence/science & technology.

Does this really work about as well (e.g. leaky abstractions but better than nothing) in all disciplines? Learning math is a pretty much a 'climb the ladder' experience. You don't have to literally discover it all for yourself, but you do still have to learn it. I assume e.g. biology is similar; there are absolutely abstractions upon abstractions, but it takes a tremendous amount of work to level up to the point where you are making breakthroughs.

Certainly low hanging fruit abounds, but our individual capacity for learning seems fairly limited in the great scale of things, and has not advanced much in the past few centuries. As a species, we either gain an order-of-magnitude increase in our ability to learn/retain knowledge, or the computer does it all for us. Not sure how much I like the potential adverse side-effects of the 2nd case.

Evolution of science / technology is typically drawn on an exponential scale and we're staring up the side of a cliff ahead of us. There are a lot of marvels in the world we have built, but most of them to someone with 15 years of training in the relevant field are not black boxes or magic. I just imagine climbing much further up the cliff and you start to get to that point.

E.g. I was watching a video of how the Toyota Prius eCVT works last night. I know fuck-all about CVTs, but I have a passing familiarity with planetary gears, and could follow the 15 minute explanation / walkthrough and learned enough to distinguish eCVT from magic. In 100-500 years I would be surprised if the underlying technology of our personal transportation devices would be remotely so 'accessible'.

Isn't it only a matter of time before computers are designing and replicating devices that are sufficiently beyond our capability to understand how they even operate? Or synthetic compounds created by computer algorithms that cure disease but we have literally no idea the mechanism of action? Maybe in a very few problem domains today this is already the case.

[tempestn]

Great thoughts (in this and your other comments here). I have to think that for better or worse, even if human lifespans are drastically increased, it is inevitable that we will reasonably quickly reach the point where computers essentially know more than we do. 500 years might give us time to climb a much higher ladder of knowledge, but computers don't have to climb it at all; they will all have access to all the knowledge, effectively immediately. Also, a computer will have access to extreme depth and breadth of knowledge, which would be impossible for a human, and which could lead to all kinds of cross-discipline breakthroughs.

Of course there's also the middle ground option, where the clear distinction between human and computer becomes blurred, and eventually meaningless.

[tempestn]

On the other hand, there are physical limits to computing power. Computers will always be able to solve simple problems faster, but I suppose it isn't a given that they will be able to solve complicated problems better, than humans. (This other article on the homepage got me thinking about this more: http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html)

[sarreph]

I often think about how humans manage to build upon previous knowledge, and how much more difficult it gets to add another abstract layer, but the point* you just made about computers designing increasingly complex paradigms really got me thinking/scared!

* > Isn't it only a matter of time before computers are designing and replicating devices that are sufficiently beyond our capability to understand how they even operate? Or synthetic compounds created by computer algorithms that cure disease but we have literally no idea the mechanism of action? Maybe in a very few problem domains today this is already the case.

[will_work4tears]

Your comment really inspires me take another read of the I, Pencil short story[0].

[0] - http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl1.html

[guard-of-terra]

I think technology will be easier, not harder.

In 150 years your car will be made from carbon only and will have tiny simple motors in its wheels. Plus some magic energy source.

[zaroth]

Cars? Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads! ;-)

[guard-of-terra]

Even worse, you have around 15 years to find a soulmate, create a family and have all your babies. Men more, women maybe even less.

And you are also supposed to both have a career and find your place in the world meantime.

[_random_]

"...30-40 years of solid productivity..."

Even less, many people choose family.

Also if longevity is achieved there will be plenty of disruption on the way, since there is no "magic pill", but rather a lot of breakthroughs combined.

[jqm]

The thoughts and actions you have are largely a product of your culture, your position in space-time.

Maybe think in classes instead of individual cases. 100 years is nothing. Wheels within wheels. And larger wheels are turning.