If you could, would you live forever?

Not to mention, if humans subsist for several millennia, they will probably keep evolving, while you won't. You'll be a neanderthal living amongst hairless white monkeys with huge brains or something.

It's not a matter of "i will probably grow bored of everything" it's inevitable, you will curse your existence. Humans are not physically nor psychologically designed to be immortal. Death is a necessity for any living creature, if it weren't, why would we be here instead of Adam and Eve/Captain Caveman and Son or whatever? The world needs to keep moving forward.

Credit, who said anything about giving everyone equal everything? We're discussing immortality, not communism. :P

But I was talking about what my organization would do if I was CEO or something. Communism = not gonna happen. We were supposed to solve societal issues, right? So if we solve world hunger, we would have to first give a lot of the money used to buy things we want for the food that poor people need. Also, the father in the story is part of the organization. And Saskamanka would be what I would rename myself to if I become immortal

You need money to solve world hunger. And when your "Want" purchases are limited, you're going to steal.

Also, I agree with Ed, don't you notice that immortality is only shown in stories and movies? Humans aren't designed to live longer than we have to. Our psyche would break down.

Here's a video that talks briefly about human perception of time and lifespan. Doesn't really answer any questions, but I find it gives some good things to think about.

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I seem to recall watching a youtube clip talking about the maximum storage size of the human mind, and it's fallibility, but I don't remember where to find it or what it really said. [/irony]

I've noticed a lot of talk about immortality being a helping factor in solving societal issues. I'm not sure how this helps?

Like, if you suddenly knew you had millennia to live, would that really empower you to cause greater change than you could right now? Would you honestly be more motivated to use your time productively? Or would the time you have become even less valuable to you? And is your lack of immortality really the key reason that you aren't trying to create wide-scale change now?

@Coldblooded: YES. THAT STUFF ABOUT 2000 YEAR OLD JERKS. One of the reasons why it would be a bad idea for immortals to try to govern.

Like, if you suddenly knew you had millennia to live, would that really empower you to cause greater change than you could right now? Would you honestly be more motivated to use your time productively? Or would the time you have become even less valuable to you? And is your lack of immortality really the key reason that you aren't trying to create wide-scale change now?

Good point!
I don't think it's necessarily about an increase of productivity per unit of time though, seeing as you have so much more time that even a decrease of unit productivity per time would yield much greater results. Suppose you live your life productively already, the concept of gaining immortality will only seem that much more potent and full of possibility. Plus there would be extra motivation with the whole 'wow I might actually get to live to see my dreams come true in this lifetime?'

So, is this immortal life and immortal youth? If not, then what's the point past ~150-200 years? You're so degraded by then that you cannot do anything. If so, then how do you explain this to everyone? You'll be a specimen, and again, what sort of life is that?

So, is this immortal life and immortal youth? If not, then what's the point past ~150-200 years? You're so degraded by then that you cannot do anything. If so, then how do you explain this to everyone? You'll be a specimen, and again, what sort of life is that?

Uhh... I guess we just assumed we wouldn't degrade?

But that brings up another form of immortality.

I would say No to this one because I don't want to look like Herb who is practically immortalized senile old man in Family Guy. Yeah, it would be nice to keep my looks and be able to DO STUFF. And the experrimental life wouldn't be that great. Sure, they would test nuclear bombs on me, which sounds nice, but it would be pretty boring since I might watch a soap after a long day.

And I hate soaps

"...If people were hit on the heads with truncheons once a month, and no one could do anything about it, pretty soon there'd be all sorts of philosophers ... who found all sorts of amazing benefits to being hit on the head with a truncheon once a month. Like, it makes you tougher, or it makes you happier on the days when you're not getting hit with a truncheon. But if you went up to someone who wasn't getting hit, and you asked them if they wanted to start, in exchange for those amazing benefits, they'd say no. And if you didn't have to die, if you came from somewhere that no one had ever even heard of death, and I suggested to you that it would be an amazing wonderful great idea for people to get wrinkled and old and eventually cease to exist, why, you'd have me hauled right off to a lunatic asylum! So why would anyone possibly think any thought so silly as that death is a good thing?"

-Harry Potter, kind of.

The idea that death is a part of life, that it somehow gives meaning to our accomplishments... it strikes me as the most egregious case of sour grapes in all of human philosophy. I haven't done any dying yet, and I still feel happiness and satisfaction when I accomplish tasks and create things. I certainly don't see how ceasing to exist would somehow increase my satisfaction with anything.

Death is kind of like a 0x multiplier to your total utility. You can certainly imagine horrible futures where your immortality has awful consequences, such that 0*x > x, but those consequences aren't an innate problem with life itself. Your achievements are forgotten? Write them down! Your friends and family are getting old and disappearing? Make them immortal, too! Your memory is getting too full and your perception of time is inexplicably distorted? See a neurosurgeon, or something! We have this cool thing called "all of human knowledge and power" that we can use to work on solutions to the problems that might arise for immortal people.

The universe has an annoying little quirk in the form of the second law of thermodynamics. Assuming we don't find a way past it, the universe might eventually reach thermal equilibrium, making the continuation of life impossible. The heat death of the universe would suck a lot- and if humanity were to be wiped out by it, or something else before that deadline, I might be like "dang, I wish I could die now, because the most interesting things in the universe are dead and there's literally nothing left for me to do", but that seems super unlikely because humans have done a pretty good job of not being exterminated over the past 300,000 years.

Entropy's a bitch, but we might as well fight her tooth and nail for as long as we can. If/when the universe decides I absolutely need to die, I don't plan to fall asleep and welcome it as closure. I'll go to the grave cursing Death's name and kicking myself for my failure to kill him first.

haha that was a rant wasn't it; what am i doing up at 4:30 in the morning

*high-fives Benedict*

I still don't get why everyone is SO SURE that eternal life would mean eternal boredom. I mean, maybe, yeah! I haven't tried it, I don't know - but neither do you! Is it inconceivable that you'd keep changing, keep finding new things to do or see or whatever?

Here's a question for all those people who think immortality would be tedious - how long until that happens? How many years WOULD you live, if you had to pick a number right now?

I have wonderings about what all you'll end up nostalgic about

Benedict, that quote is awesome. I shall treasure it forever. It beautifully expresses my own feelings about those kinds of statements people so often and so casually make. I don't understand the reasoning when people talk about how they'd rather die if x or y applies to their life. Boredom is surely better than not existing. Plus, I'm pretty sure there can't be eternal boredom, since our memory isn't infallible, so old forgotten things to rediscover the joys of will always be abundant!

I got too many things to say here and too little time to actually say it.
But you can count on me to write a constructive post to this thread.

For now, simply "yes". The how and why will be posted later, since I need some time to prepare this post.

I got too many things to say here and too little time to actually say it.

I think this quote explained why mortality sucks quite neatly already.

The history of life has been trying to not die for the longest time. To see a way to not die ever and not taking that opportunity is tremendously disrespectful to everything that's ever lived. You're not accomplishing your hardwired goal to self-perpetuate, and a glitch in the system THAT bad would make me think that perhaps this whole "life" thing was just a grand, but failed, experiment and that we should either scrap it or start over. And then I'd become a supervillain.

Spoilered for length and to prevent an absurd amount of page-stretching.

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SpoilerLiving forever seems cool. It is, that's why we want it, but it probably won't live up to our expectations because seriously, SERIOUSLY.
We expect WAY too much. We expect to have no more diseases, to stay eternally the same (whether we are looking at age, fertility, looks, general body shape does not matter), to remember everything, to be above pain.
Sorry to shatter your dreams, but becoming immortal is not becoming a god.

However.
To be able to stay alive our major body functions must remain intact.
Therefore our heart, digestion system, lungs, liver, kidneys, brain, etc. must always remain in reasonable shape.
This means, that we need not include eternal youth in our prerequisites for accepting eternal life, because our body will never be able to grow older than about 200 years at the very most.

Provided we are clearly-minded most of the time and write things down before we forget them, demention is not a HUGE issue either.
And when we are working on things, we have infinite time to complete them, which is great. No deadline, no stress.

OK, it might be boring you say. I could not disagree more. If our brain happens to age to about 200 we won't remember much. Everything will cause joy, because everytime it's the first time. Or maybe the second time. This can be illustrated by real-life examples from my experience:
I read a lot of books. I usually end up re-reading a large number of them because I like them and I am out of things to read. Everytime I reread a book I notice new things that I either did not notice before or forgot. Some books I have not read in a long time, and I remember almost nothing.
I can say, "yes, I did read it", but I could as well not have read it.

There will always be new inventions. We will never be done.
There's always new tech to look forward to, and everything will bring new joy or grief to your life.
Joy in itself is great, and can be increased by supporting the cause. Grief is not so great but will keep you motivated for fighting the cause, and it is a source of hope, which can be an even better feeling than joy.

You say people living forever might be locked away in a lab or nuthouse.
Yup, that's inevitable. AS LONG AS YOU SHOUT IT OUT.
If you live your life like a normal person, switching identity and relocating yourself, faking your death, whatever, it will go unnoticed a lot of the time.
If it does not go unnoticed, well, it can hardly go noticed EVERY time you try it, and you got loads of it. This also will be a source of adventure and energy.

Then there are our dreams.
Like mentioned above, immortality does not answer to our dreams.
However, immortality gives us the time to work on them, and eventually, if it's not COMPLETELY unrealistic, we will make them come true.

Oh, and entropy. There's that.
If the complete universe dies and runs out of energy, there will still be you.
Since you are truly immortal, not even the finished processes of entropy and all the leaked away energy will be able to kill you. Since you must stay alive, there's always energy in you, so entropic processes will not ever fully finish.
You tapping from an unlimited amount of energy (at a certain rate, not superhuman) is NEEDED to stay alive in such a situation, so solely with your time and strength, you will inevitably (infinite time, remember) find a solution to bring energy back to the universe and have it be reborn. Maybe through two particles, exactly the ones you need, colliding? No one can tell.
Of course, it'd get cold after a while, but there's this new universe to work for. And once you do finish recreating the universe, can you not consider yourself a god?

If all this is not worth the grief and pain, I might as well be dead now, because it's called LIFE. Joy, hope, energy and andventure don't come for free.
You gotta WORK for them, and immortality buys you the time for that. Maybe too much time, time that you cannot actually spend, but there will always be things to live for.

And there's the arument that we would become cavemen in a world filled with hyper-intelligent creatures.
Sorry, not going to happen. In our current state, we are either stagnant or devolving. We keep the weak alive, and this is great, but it will not help us in the long run, because weak genes will be spread amongst humanity as an entirety, because people with those genes will not die (like in nature).
For a healthy evolving race, the weak must die. That's not happening here, so unless humanity finds a way to discourage the "weaker" to reproduce, WE will be the more intelligent people after, say, five thousand years.

"Life won't have a meaning".
If life doesn't have a meaning without death, life does not have a meaning at all. This is because most people do their things without thinking of death continuously. They might as well be immortal for all they care at that moment they decide to do things.
And who says you have to be dead to have your life have meaning? There are things like "virtual deaths". One of my friends died a "virtual death" to me a while ago, since he was moving out of town. At the very moment I last saw him before he moved, he died for me. I see him enough times now, but at that very moment, he died. If that is not death, I do not know what IS, and if his life didn't get any meaning right then, no ones lives ever will get any meaning.
There are many ways to die a "virtual death". And all of them feel the same as a normal death, at that very moment you need to say goodbye. The only difference between death and "virtual death" is the feeling of hope that comes with the latter. The lack of hope is not required when giving lives a meaning.

And also the example of the "2000 year old jerks" does not apply here. Want to know why? Because if they behave like that, they did not live forever, no. They've been transported to this time without having a chance to do, see, or understand anything that happened in the meantime. If you were to follow most developments in society properly, you would be able to adjust. If we're talking about time-travel, yes, this applies. If we're talking about immortality it doesn't.

God this post is so long.
How did I even find the time?

For a healthy evolving race, the weak must die. That's not happening here, so unless humanity finds a way to discourage the "weaker" to reproduce, WE will be the more intelligent people after, say, five thousand years.

That argument really doesn't hold water based on IQ scores of the past several years (IQ is a flawed metric, but the fact that scores are going up certainly implies that things aren't being entirely fucked). Not to mention that morality and knowledge is ever-evolving and the 200-year-old brain you just mentioned will be a lot more resistant to change and gaining new information. Eventually your knowledge and opinions are going to be outdated simply by virtue of the fact that you can't keep up.

As for the "follow most developments in society and adjust" thing, most people who are eighty, let alone two hundred, are kind of shitty at that. I do think a fair portion of this community is liberal and open-minded but I feel like it's a lot more complex than you make it out to be.

Also that argument's kind of eugenics-y and creepy.

(It is total sour-grapes bullshit that death is the only way for life to have meaning though)

Again, spoilered for page-stretchiness.

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That argument really doesn't hold water based on IQ scores of the past several years (IQ is a flawed metric, but the fact that scores are going up certainly implies that things aren't being entirely fucked). Not to mention that morality and knowledge is ever-evolving and the 200-year-old brain you just mentioned will be a lot more resistant to change and gaining new information. Eventually your knowledge and opinions are going to be outdated simply by virtue of the fact that you can't keep up.

As for the "follow most developments in society and adjust" thing, most people who are eighty, let alone two hundred, are kind of shitty at that. I do think a fair portion of this community is liberal and open-minded but I feel like it's a lot more complex than you make it out to be.

Also that argument's kind of eugenics-y and creepy.

Today we live on the most free Earth of all time. A free and liberal environment require a free and liberal mindset. Everyone is capable of that if they try hard enough. I feel like you are stereotyping older people as incapable of having this mindset, rather than, what I believe, that they simply choose not to.

By accepting immortality, one should also accept that things move on and that one should adjust. People are very well capable of adjusting: My grandma is 75 and she works with computers the way anyone else does.

The IQ gains. Heheh. I'm actually not that surprised.
Education today focuses on increasing intellectualism, and we are working together to also bring this to 3rd world countries. Education as it was focused on preparing children for reality, and work rather than being intelligent, and there was a lot of difference and apartheid back then.
I'm not saying I'm not glad that IQ displays a global avarage increase, I'm simply saying it is misleading.

Although I must say that educating people in an intellectual way also has them expect they get intellectual jobs. Currently there are too few people working in less-intellectual jobs, so the actual development is questionable.

About the eugenics. Yeah, I'm a supporter of the idea in the way I explained it. You can find it creepy if you want, but this also means that I myself should be discouraged to reproduce. I have certain weaker genes that caused me to have autism and possibly gluten intolerance.
If there were a large global group of people who also supported the idea, I would go ahead and don't have children, but just doing it myself without any supporters doesn't make much of a point.

Also notice how I use "discourage" rather than "disallow". Disallowing is bound to be rebelled upon and takes away free decision, which I am a supporter of. Discouraging people is bound to give some result, and raises global awareness, while it still respects everyone's opinions and free choice on the matter.

Also, eugenics is a far more humane solution to this problem than simply killing off all the people who are in any way weaker or less intelligent, which would have happened in nature.

XD Immortal 2create saga. That was indeed a long post!

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SpoilerRegarding the matter of reproduction, I'm of the rare opinion that everyone should stop reproducing until all of the orphans are adopted.
The Earth has enough humans, and not enough parents for the children already here. I don't understand how a couple can be like: Oh hey there's a whole ton of babies that don't have parents in this town that are going to grow up in shitty conditions and probably have shitty lives and never feel loved and feel so alone, but yeah let's just ignore that whole thing and make a new baby!
I can never actually say that to any parents though ofcourse ahahaha /oh gob I hope I haven't offended any parents here

As for hard, brainless work that is so in demand for more laborers: I would rather not society depend on that, and that people that would work in horrible conditions for low pay and die early because of some mining-related disease or whatever would instead run into the wild and live off hunting and a vegetable garden. I don't think that kind of massive system of suffering should be an accepted part of humanity, and we should fight it with everything we have. Hopefully automate/robotize things as much as possible on that end. We're making good progress on that in some places.

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Regarding the matter of reproduction, I'm of the rare opinion that everyone should stop reproducing until all of the orphans are adopted.
The Earth has enough humans, and not enough parents for the children already here. I don't understand how a couple can be like: Oh hey there's a whole ton of babies that don't have parents in this town that are going to grow up in shitty conditions and probably have shitty lives and never feel loved and feel so alone, but yeah let's just ignore that whole thing and make a new baby!

I have to say I agree with you here. It would not be a bad idea at all.

As for hard, brainless work that is so in demand for more laborers: I would rather not society depend on that, and that people that would work in horrible conditions for low pay and die early because of some mining-related disease or whatever would instead run into the wild and live off hunting and a vegetable garden. I don't think that kind of massive system of suffering should be an accepted part of humanity, and we should fight it with everything we have. Hopefully automate/robotize things as much as possible on that end. We're making good progress on that in some places.

As a matter of fact society does depend on it. Not that it is necessarily brainless, underpaid and unsafe. Those things are being worked on, although I would like to see they are being worked on harder.
But don't tell be being a carpenter or plasterer is brainless.
Then there are some things that simply need human control.
Some things are hard or dangerous when there is no human controlling it.
Something else to think about: some people like low-educated jobs. Why it is wrong to let them have those jobs? If they enjoy working as a baker, a telephone sanitizer, etc.
As for the underpaid portion, we should internationally make sure companies cannot hire workers from other countries cheaper than a lowest legal price in the country they are going to work in. Something like that. This is not really worked on and I would like to see that change.

Benedict forgot to mention Harry's argument for infinite boredom as long as we're quoting Methods of Rationality.

"What would you do with eternity, Harry?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."

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SpoilerWhile only a few chapters deal with immortality, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a great read and I highly encourage everyone who thinks Harry Potter as a scientist is an awesome idea to give it a read. It's pretty long though.

Concerning the heat death of the universe: I have no doubt in my mind that if humanity achieved immortality that we'd find a way to prevent, circumvent, or escape our universe's destruction. Humans are resilient and ingenious little bastards and we're already finding ways to distort and bend physical reality to our whim. Given infinite time, 100 monkeys will write Shakespeare and 100 humans will defeat entropy.

Do we need to evolve further, if we are already the dominant species on the planet? There is nothing inherently unhealthy about not evolving, and more evolution does not equate to "smarter people" !

Evolution is purely about survival and we already do that, and much better than basically anything else considering we have healthcare and as a result of our evolution have invented the exact things that you say are preventing our evolution. Many winning evolutionary strategies care very little at all for the organism's well-being or quality of life past that they have kids and "more smartness" is also very far from the only route it takes.
Creatures like ants, seals and slugs haven't "failed" evolution because they are less intelligent and control smaller areas of land than we do, arguably you could say that most insects are actually more successful as they vastly outnumber the species of mammals.

I think this really stems from a misunderstanding of how the evolution of species works to be honest.
It is not a function by which every organism is striving to be supreme masters of the universe, it is merely the natural effect of competing organisms trying to fit better into the situation in which they were placed, and out-breed their opponents. If we've "stopped" evolving (as if we've really been aware of it over a sufficient timescale to tell) then it is because we've finished. Traditional "natural selection" (there's actually nothing natural about just picking people who can't have kids) can't help us any more, because if it could then it would already be happening.

Given then that this would have to be a human-driven project rather than one based on our environment (meaning it isn't even evolution in a traditional sense) who arbitrates what are and aren't desirable human characteristics?
I can't think I'd really trust anyone at all to do that.

Who says we're not done evolving? And who's to say other animals have failed to evolve? They could be evolving in your living room as we speak

Evolution takes millions of years: Who's to say chickens aren't going to evolve into BIGGER chickens within a few million years (granted we don't kill them all off first...)

And humans... well if we were done evolving then there really would be no point to reproduction. We would already be "perfect" (we are not, at all) and would have the exact number of humans on the planet.

Because seriously, our body would have an internal mechanism telling us how many people the Earth can actually handle.

EDIT: Assuming bigger is an evolutionary trait. Just an example. Maybe it isn't good but the gist of it is that chickens want to get better, no?

That... Is not even close to an accurate representation of how evolution works. Like, at all.

As in, I've heard anti-evolution activists who get the concept better than that.

There's no goal to evolution. There's no One Perfect Organism that some sort of quasi-theurgical nature entity set as some kind of finish line for evolution. All evolution is is the inheritance of traits that make an organism more suitable to reproduce in its environment.

Humans can be said to be in a low- or no-evolution state because there are few heritable traits that significantly impact the rate and success of human survivability and reproduction given that our society has implemented a number of safeguards to prevent "less fit" members of the species from dying off prematurely. "Not evolving at all" is not particularly accurate because genetic drift and certain heritable diseases are still factors (not too many kids with cystic fibrosis reproduce, for instance), but for the most part they have little effect on our mating selection. The species is always changing, but it will never be perfect, because perfect is a meaningless word in this context.

I will rip you a new one later, Credit, when I'm not tired but: as a corollary to slorange changes in a species' genetic makeup from one generation to the next are dictated by the most successful individuals of /that/ species in /that/ particular environment in /that/ particular point in time. Those goalposts are constantly shifting because the environment and what is most successful in it will be constantly changing

The argument that "humans stopped evolving" has its merits if you consider the human environment is largely human-engineered, but nope that's also changing over time

dang this is an instersting topic wowhahh

Right okay so it's like prsonally, no, i wouldn't want to be like immortal and shit, even with like eternal youth or whatever, but it's only fro mthe perspective of the me who never has her shit together and already is doing shit with her life so what the shit am i gonna do with an eternal life i mean c'mon.

But if I were an actually competant human being and shit, i might actually say yes. 'cause look, yeh, there might be some mental issues. but i doubt they'd last all of forever. Like you're sad 'cause everybody keeps dying around you and you can't make friends and shit? The thing is, the human mind is pretting dang resiliant, like most human beings are able to get over many tragedies in a few months or so, which includes death of a dear one. It doesn't mean that peeps don't care, it just means that people have this ability to move on, generally. I mean c'mon, if we ddn't have this ability i mean what the shit would happen we'd all wallow in our tears because life is pretty goddamn shitty.

As for boredom, that thing kinda baffles me 'cause look, there is like a shitton of things we've yet to discover and let's not even get into freaking epxlploration of space how can you get freaking bored when there's so muc hfor humans to do? "But I'm not a sciency person" right okay that's legitimate but listen to this

so like what do you think would happen if you gave like a 12th century peasant an iPod, their monds would be totally blown, right? I mean shit it's like magic to them but y'know, it's just that our tech changed and evolved and advanced or whatever verb you wanna use. Now think about what sorta shit the future will make i mean c'mon aren't you freaking curious? well you can't see it UNLESS YOU GOT ETERNAL LIFE, YO. check it. manybe things will be so freaking amazing that we can't even concevive of them right now ic'ause it's so frekaing amazing. I DON'T KNOW! even if you aint a scientist, you'd still be able to see what those scientist types'll make and shit. I'd want eternal life(/youth/biological healthiness/whatever the shit) just to see that alone, see what happens next and what shit we come up with and also maybe aliens. HELL, EVEN MOVIES. OR VIDEO GAMES. I hate feeling like i'm missing outta fun shit WHAT IF I DIE BEFORE THE ULTIMATE VIDEO GAME COMS OUT??!?!

i'm reallytired.