Death Sucks Thursday, Sep 7 2006
transhumanism 2:45 pm
From the immortality lens on Squidoo…
Top 10 Immortality Quotes
- I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. — Woody Allen
- That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die. — H.P. Lovecraft, The Nameless City
- He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt. — Joseph Heller
- Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. — George Bernard Shaw
- Do not go gently into that good night. Old age should burn and rage at the close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. — Dylan Thomas
- Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it. — William Somerset Maugham
- We loose vitality, creativity, flexibility, energy, even personal health as we age. This is not a feature, this is a bug. — Eliezer Yudkowsky
- The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes. — Frank Lloyd Wright
- Speak for yourself, sir. I plan to live forever. — Riker, Star Trek: Generations
- Here’s what happens when you die – you sit in a box and get eaten by worms. I guarantee you that when you die, nothing cool happens. — Howard Stern
Top 10 Frequently Asked Questions About Immortality
- What about overpopulation?
Stay mortal and have kids, or be immortal and childfree. Your choice. - What about boredom?
Only boring people get bored. You’re one of those boring people, are you? Boredom is a lame excuse (see AskANinja.com, Question 25). - What if I don’t want to live forever?
Hey, no problem. You can kill yourself anytime you want. - What about God’s plan?
Sorry, there is no god. And even if there is, his plan sucks. - What about nature and being natural?
Trying to overcome nature IS natural to humans. - What if it doesn’t work, or something goes wrong?
Well, then you die, like you would have died anyway. Nothing to lose by trying. - What about losing our creativity and memories and stuff?
Yeah, like you lost your creativity and memories when you were growing up and lost your childhood. Even if that happens, it’s still better than being dead. - What if we don’t want to take risks anymore and just play it safe all the time?
Still better than being dead. - What about the poor people who can’t afford the cure?
Yes, let’s forget it because we all can’t have it instantly. Like clean water and antibiotics. - We all die eventually (heat death, blah blah), so why bother?
You might die tomorrow, so why bother living today? Try answer number 3.
God cannot be proven so if there is a god, we don’t know and if there isn’t a god, we don’t know. We simply don’t know because god is unknowable. You cannot prove or disprove god.
However, reasons for immortality is vaild:
Let assume that when we die, we don’t exist anymore. Totally sucks.
Let assume that when we die, we still exist in soul form and can interact with the other dead people. Cool and awesome.
But we really don’t know because nobody come back from the dead. So immortality is a good idea, because we don’t know what happen and we don’t want to be annihated forever if that is the case with death. Beside we can’t prove if a soul exist.
We can’t prove that God and the soul don’t exist, but we can assign them the probability they deserve – a smidgin above zero. The possibility that we are all being stalked by pink elephants that can change shape and disappear when we turn around deserves a higher probability assignment than God.
If we can explain the world entirely without reference to God, then it’s safe to assume that there is none. The probability that humans made up the whole idea to satisfy their personal and philosophical needs is MUCH, MUCH greater than the probability that God actually exists.
Maybe we should limit the population of the Earth to for example 10 billion or so, and when people die of accidents a child-ticket lottery is made among anyone who wishes to have children. And the chance of getting the right to a child increases for any person as the number of years since the last birth has happened.
nah…The overpopluation won’t be a problem once all the countries in the world got rich enough.
By that time, we probably will be able to take care of the world popluation or have the technology to extend Earth’s ability to support the popluation. (Underwater cities anyone?)
Hah, the earth could support at least a trillion. There is just sooooo much empty space and underground space, it’s insane. With uploading and VR, you could support a quadrillion or more, right here on this planet.
And don’t forget about terraforming both Venus & Mars. And the asteroid belt alone contains enough material for at least 100 (or is it more on the order of 1000?) Earths. Finite still, yes; but plenty of room–for the foreseeable future–for plenty of (trans)humans, and the occasional brand-new little nipper. Plus one probable social-institutional path that’ll be explored will be communal (“affinity group”) parenting (already conjectured by both Esfandiary & Harrington) wherein the parenting/nurturing urge or “instinct” can be satisfied w/o one’s having to have one’s own kids in the traditional, narrow sense. The urge to individually procreate may well drop-off precipitously. With communal parenting and robot nannies, such (de novo) kids as do happen to arise can be well-taken-care-of.
terraforming Mars… okay maybe, but Venus??? If we sent humans to the surface of venus we’d surely have no problem with population as they’d all die upon arrival.
Children complain about feeling bored a lot. Does that mean they’ve lived long enough, and would better to die?
“With uploading and VR, you could support a quadrillion or more, right here on this planet.”
That strikes me as the groundwork for arguing that the future of sentience in our universe points toward inner rather than outer space. Why bother colonizing Venus if you can do it virtually, without risk?
I forsee that the entire human race will eventually live in a computer the size of a basketball, with plenty of room for superintelligence and any amount of virtual real estate we want.
Re Terraforming Venus: Yeah, it’s doable. Obviously the first thing to do is completely revamp the atmosphere. But that is, in principle doable. Since Carl Sagan popularized this, though, there’s been speculation that Venus is much too seismically volatile–planet-wide–for terraforming to be practical. So, on the one hand, could we terraform the atmosphere?–in principle, yes. Is Venus not easily (if at all) terraformable, though, due to intense, planet-wide seismic activity? Still an open question…
All of (Post)Humanity living inside a basketball-sized ball of computronium? Yeah, maybe…I’d sure like to stick around and find out!
Oh, and hey, Michael…your last comment about all of (post)Humanity in a basketball-size computer dovetails perfectly with some of John Smart’s conjectures–that we are, indeed, involved in a “MEST” compression of super-exponentially intense proportion(s), and that “innerspace” may indeed be every bit as much (if not more) the ultimate frontier as is (or may be) outer space… see Smart’s stuff at singularitywatch.com
Yes I’ve read John Smart’s stuff lol. Just hope he can get a book out before the Singularity hits.
Terraform Venus? Puh-leeze. We’ll Venusform ourselves.
“The possibility that we are all being stalked by pink elephants that can change shape and disappear when we turn around deserves a higher probability assignment than God.”
That would depend on what you define as god. Are you only using the Abrahamic definition of God?
If you define it as a creator of the universe that you live in, the simulation argument strongly threatens that argument with a ‘sysadmin’ of a Creator. Have you read the Nick Bostrom essay?
It should be pointed out the number of religious positions this would support is (virtually) infinite and that there is no specific major religious position that would benefit singularly from this probability.
I had this page as a tab open in Firefox for a few days before I got around to replying, and crap, I didn’t refresh before replying so I didn’t see a few of the latest until after I submited my comment.
“I forsee that the entire human race will eventually live in a computer the size of a basketball, with plenty of room for superintelligence and any amount of virtual real estate we want.”
Take on your own argument Michael, I’ll leave you to it :D
Michael said: “Yes I’ve read John Smart’s stuff lol. Just hope he can get a book out before the Singularity hits.”
I heartily concur. If I’m not mistaken, he’s actually got a trilogy “in the works…” It would indeed be nice if he could get at least vol. 1 out before the Singularity (chuckle). His website’s pretty good, though; well worth a perusal for anyone who hasn’t done so.
Michael said: “Terraform Venus? Puh-leeze. We’ll Venusform ourselves.”
Yeah, with diamondoid and computronium substrate, one could thrive (or at least survive) in a 900-degree, dense, hi-pressure, sulfuric-acid soup of an atmosphere. But, hey—call me old-fashioned—but I’d just as soon terraform Venus (if cost-effective & feasible). But, one way or the other, it’ll be party-time on Venus before century’s end (and, indeed, quite possibly by or before this century’s mid-point!)
Ontologically, though, *pace* Moravec & Bostrom, this does, in a way, presuppose that we happen to occupy first-order, or “primal” reality (that, whimsically-speaking, our cosmos happens to be the first turtle, in Bertrand Russell’s “turtles, turtles, turtles…all the way down…” anecdote). In terms of observer selection effects and reasonableness (as a hypothesis), Nick (Bostrom) would, of course, say (quite correctly, as far as it goes…) that this is not the most reasonable hypotheses. True. Plus, of course, the whole ontology of causality has to be (albeit subtley) rethought & recast (Nick and a few others will probably lead the charge on this…) So, do we happen to (curiously, from a Bostromian perspective) occupy a (the?) basement reality, (meta)ontologically-speaking? Or are we already just in one the “simulations, simulations, simulations…all the way down…”? Good question… Oh, well I look forward to tripping on Venus, one way or the other…or perhaps on Olympus Mons, instead. Yeah, that sounds nice…see ya…
Even with biological immortality, lifespans will have a limit of about a couple thousand years. (Based upon the probability of getting into a life terminating accident.)
There may be an end to growing old, but not Death by stupidity!
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