RE: If you could, would you live forever?
04-04-2013, 09:21 AM
Spoilered for length and to prevent an absurd amount of page-stretching.
God this post is so long.
How did I even find the time?
SpoilerShow
Living 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.
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.
How did I even find the time?