If you could live forever with a healthy body and mind, and could get away with it environmentally, would you want to?
I don’t know about forever, but I’d be up for it for at least a few hundred years. How about you?
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As long as it was still possible to “opt out” (i.e. commit suicide), I would totally be game for immortality.
I second that.
Thirded.
fourth’d
Fifth that. But still kind of a bummer, you could die from an accident any day.
Variation: you are impervious to harm, but still capable of “willing” yourself to death, or have some other exceedingly rare and easily avoidable mortality condition.
Like insane reflex’s?
If the only way I could die is by committing suicide then I’m game. But if I would still be able to die from accident, then I don’t want to, I’d become a giant pussy, always afraid of dying.
I’d go for I’d have to commit suicide twice with the second time between 1 and 4 months after the first… make sure I didn’t just do something stupid!
If immortality means you would be impervious to harm, then you could hold your breath forever; you could pull your heart out and play catch with it. If you were immortal, your life would have no more meaning, purpose or value than existence itself.
If you were immortal, your life would have no more meaning, purpose or value than existence itself.
How does that follow?
Well, since we’re talking about impossibilities anyway, suppose you had a magic wallet with an unlimited amount of money inside. That means you could pay a thousand or even a million dollars for a candy bar without a second thought. Why? Because for you, money no longer has any value. The same goes for life. If you really think about it you’ll see that every moment you live is, in reality, a question of life or death. You’ll also see that everything you hold valuable either sustains or enhances your life. Why? Because your life is of limited endurance. If you were immortal, there would be no reason to value anything. Like it or not, the eventuality of death is what gives life its value.
So you’re saying you wouldn’t want a magic wallet with unlimited money inside of it?
If you say so…
No, I didn’t say so but since you’ve mentioned it you’re right, I wouldn’t want a magic wallet because I wouldn’t want to live in a universe that admits of magic.
Oh, no fun. If the universe had magic, that would be at the very least interesting, if not flat out entertaining.
But let’s just say that you had a wallet that could construct with perfect accuracy duplicates of currency (some technological advance made it possible). You wouldn’t want to possess it?
Sure, if everyone else had one as well. Now wouldn’t THAT be fun?
Well, unlike life and air, money does respond directly to supply. If everyone had an infinite money machine, money would become useless.
Money is a shared delusion that we all subscribe to. If everyone didn’t place value in that wad of printed paper you have in your pocket what would it be? A wad of printed paper! Money is nothing, without the shared delusion we all believe in. It reminds me of the story of the guy who’s lottery check flew away from him onto a busy street full of traffic. He freaked out and got killed running after it. Now, what was he running after? A piece of paper with some ink on it, or a million dollars?
Money is no more a delusion than a ‘promise’ or a ‘contract’.
A social contract is NO WAY a delusion; it is the result of an evolutionarily acquired trait.
Now hand over all of your cash, should you be so foolish to believe the drivel that you have spouted.
I tend to think a better word than delusion would be “convention” or perhaps “covenance”. I agree that social devices are not delusory insofar that they have real effects, and probably are rooted in our social animal instincts to some extent.
However, VidLord is quite correct insofar as money is at best a referent for value, and itself under most circumstances is not valuable but for what is imputed to it. Since that value exists *only* in human minds, it is in a sense a delusion. The treachery of images, and all that.
Either way, it is no call to be nasty, as you seem fond of being.
Bullshit.
What gives life its meaning are the experiences in it.
If you want to apply economics to the value of life:
1. Don’t.
2. Ignoring #1, then consider that life is not a good with an infinitely elastic demand curve because unlike most goods (which have imputed value only), life has inextricable intrinsic value (its utility function is never zero). So, even if the supply is practically infinite, the demand never drops below a hard floor somewhere above zero. Much like, say, breathable air.
But, you might say, what accounts for suicide? Well, it is possible for extrinsic conditions to force the realizable utility of life at or below zero. But absent external conditions, it is on balance better to be alive than not alive. This is, if for no other reason, because of the inequality of flow between the two states: it is relatively more difficult to go from being not alive to being alive, than from being alive to being not alive, hence there is a metaphysical scarcity value imputed to life.
To me, this is not an answer, it is obfuscation. I don’t understand it at all.
Let me attempt to explain while trying to avoid technical terms.
First contention: Life has intrinsic value.
Argument: There are two states that a person can be in, alive, or not alive. These states are mutually exclusive (i.e. it is impossible to be both alive and not alive at the same time). It is not difficult to make a person that is alive to be not alive. It is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to make a person who is not alive to be alive. If you possess something (like life) that is easy to lose and difficult to gain, that fact alone makes possession of it valuable (in an economic sense).
Second contention: Things with intrinsic value remain valuable even when there is an infinite supply of them. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Necessities tend to act this way; food , air, and so forth, goods that have a demand (people are willing to pay more than zero for them) even if there is an infinite supply.
I brought up suicide to anticipate a counterargument, which is that clearly some people hold their actual life to have negative value. The point there is that while life may have an intrinsic value due to it being easier to be dead than to be alive, that intrinsic value is finite, and can be swamped by extrinsic factors (things that happen to a particular life that cause its owner to believe it has, on balance, less value than zero; things like chronic pain, emotional devastation, and so forth).
Life makes possible all positive and negative experiences. If a person is dead (so far as we know) they experience nothing, and so death can never have greater than zero value itself. Life, on the other hand, so long as it is possessed, makes possible other values. So long as the sum of all likely future actions have a positive value (or even so long as the person who has the life believes it is likely that the future holds in total more good than bad) it is rational for him or her to continue valuing their life.
Since we as human beings come up with many strategies to maximize our happiness, if we could avoid all the bad stuff associated with fear or desperate avoidance of death (which, to be frank, is a heckuva lot of our total “bad stuff”), it is reasonable to think that the good would easily outweigh the bad over a long enough time line.
Thanks for your consideration.
“First contention: Life has intrinsic value.”
I don’t think life itself, that is, the phenomenon of life, has any more intrinsic value or meaning than that of gravity or tectonic activity. I do, however, see life as the only possible condition under which values can exist. The basic values of an individual living organism are those things that enable it to continue surviving. The reason they are valuable is because they are not guaranteed; the organism can fail to gain the values required for it to survive. Doesn’t this clearly indicate that what gives rise to values is the fact that the organism’s life is conditional and finite?
Now, if the organism were immortal (I’m working here from the premise that immortality includes invulnerability) its life would be unconditional and infinite. Therefore, it would require no values whatsoever. Of course we humans like to fantasize about having wonderful, exciting experiences forever but even Heaven, that “shining city on the hill,” would, after a millennium or so, begin to lose its luster. And just think, you’d still have eternity to go.
“Second contention: Things with intrinsic value remain valuable even when there is an infinite supply of them. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Necessities tend to act this way; food , air, and so forth, goods that have a demand (people are willing to pay more than zero for them) even if there is an infinite supply.”
I’m not sure about this. Although food and air may have intrinsic value, they are by no means in infinite supply. Moreover, they are valuable only because us mortals need them to stay alive. Immortals would have no need of these things and would, therefore consider them worthless.
“if the organism were immortal” basically means you would be like an Angel of Devil. My brother recently told me that Angels are extremely fast but still bound by our physical laws. Preternatural he called it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preternatural
He really didn’t like it when I told him over the phone:
Some examples of preternatural creatures in fiction include fairies, werewolves, vampires, zombies, and the Chupacabra.
Now, if the organism were immortal (I’m working here from the premise that immortality includes invulnerability) its life would be unconditional and infinite. Therefore, it would require no values whatsoever.
I don’t think that follows. If I were rendered immortal and invulnerable tomorrow, the length of my life would be guaranteed to be infinite, but almost nothing else about my existence would be “infinite”. I’d still be 5’10″, with finite strength and speed, and I wouldn’t necessarily know anything more than I do today. In fact, I can’t think of a conceivable way in which such a being could truly transcend many of the barriers to growth that are built in to the human body (the brain is only so big and has a physical upper bound for connections, and so forth) without becoming something significantly more distinct from what we understand to be human.
Just because you’re immortal and impervious doesn’t also mean you won’t be forgetful. In fact, one of the more tolerable ways in which a being could exist for an infinite period of time is if each of its memories can only be recalled for a finite period. Absent any direct modifications to the person’s brain, this is likely to be the status quo for an immortal being of the sort we’ve been discussing.
Although food and air may have intrinsic value, they are by no means in infinite supply. Moreover, they are valuable only because us mortals need them to stay alive. Immortals would have no need of these things and would, therefore consider them worthless.
It’s not that they are an infinite supply, it’s that if there were to be an infinite supply, they still would retain a value larger than zero.
If the immortal person obeys the laws of thermodynamics, he or she would still need an energy source in order to take actions of any sort. So, food would likely still be a necessity; you just couldn’t starve to death. Beyond that, the subjective experience of eating food (the aesthetic qualities: taste, texture, and so forth) are nearly universally valued, and I see no reason why that might change for an immortal being.
It’s really a very good explanation, not obfuscatory at all. If you’d like to understand it, you’d only have to read a bit of economic theory. That is, if you are indeed willing to understand it, rather than just dismiss it nonsense because you don’t understand it currently.
This is the same problem with most creationists, not to rag on you. They pose some question easily answered by a slightly higher level discussion, but then refuse to admit those explanations to the debate because it’s over their heads.
Very good. I’ll concede for the sake of argument that Elemenope’s comment is correct, but tell me this. If you presented my comment as is (whether right or wrong) to a mathematician and he whipped out his chalk and scribbled equations all over the board as an answer, wouldn’t you feel he was being a bit obfuscatory? Or would you go ahead and take a course in math before reading his answer? Both you and Elemenope might take a lesson from people like Dawkins. He writes for his peers but he also writes for laypersons. I think that’s because he wants people like myself to be able to grasp his ideas.
“mathematician and he whipped out his chalk and scribbled equations all over the board as an answer, wouldn’t you feel he was being a bit obfuscatory?”
No. Obfuscatory implies an intent to confuse. Just because you couldn’t grasp the concept he was explaining doesn’t mean he was deliberately trying to confuse you.
Sunny Day-
I know what the word means. That’s exactly why I used it in response to LMNOP’s comment. I felt he/she was trying to bully me with esoteric jargon. When I complained, he simplified the comment and I acknowledged his consideration for doing so. I find your concern for my vocabulary quite amusing, especially since you referred to one of my comments as “bullshit.”
Mmmm…maybe I should look that up.
Bullshit: “A persuasive mode characterized primarily by a disregard for and/or disinterest in the truth value of statements”
Harry Frankfurt wrote a book about it. :-)
Look out Amazon, here I come!
Not sure I agree life has an “inextricable intrinsic value.” I would actually argue life has no objective value, and any value it has is relative, subjective, and imposed (or “imputed,” in this case). My life doesn’t have value because I am living it, but because of what I do with it. This harks back to the idea of a person who lives life always high on drugs. But not only is this person high, the drug is so strong that it experiences nothing but happiness. Perfect, ignorant bliss, all the time, for its entire life. It does not work, it is not even aware of the concept. It has no freedom or control over its own life whatsoever, but it doesn’t want it either, because it is perfectly happy and ignorant.
Most people agree there is no value in such a life. This doesn’t necessarily mean there is no value in an immortal life, but it does imply there is no intrinsic value to life itself. In fact, I would argue that even placing value in freedom is already admitting we have the ability to impose value onto our own lives through our actions, rather than the value merely being there objectively. If the latter were the case, maybe slavery would be a good option.
Michael – we impose the value. It is not there objectively. Anything your human mind deems “value” in reality, is nothing. It’s scary I know. Our solar system will evaporate in time – all so called “value” will too.
That’s exactly what I was saying, that value to life is not intrinsic. If there is no intrinsic value to life, then Elemenope’s whole premise for valuing an immortal life is flawed.
Here’s a question, then: If all valuations are subjective, does that also apply to the ability to make valuations? Is the ability to make the judgment “all values are subjective” inherently valuable, or not?
Actually, no, I do not think our ability to make judgments is intrinsically valuable, but that does not follow from life itself not having intrinsic value. Life could not have value, and other things still could.
However, the reason I don’t think our ability to judge is itself valuable is that we do not gain anything by having the ABILITY to make judgments, we gain by actually MAKING them. If anything, their value is only a virtual value, a value in the opportunity to create real value. When we actually DO make such judgments, they may be valuable if they improve the world in some way.
Michael: “if they improve the world in some way” is entirely human judgement. What if you knew for a fact that the entire world would be destroyed by a massive comet in 10 years. Where does that leave “value”? We are confined to the small sphere of “life” that our little brains allow for. If you look at the tsunami that killed 200,000 people you clearly see that we are but ants – creeping about on a little ball of dirt and water – victims of the order of the universe just like every other creature. We are not special. We live in a vast sea so immense our tiny brains cannot even comprehend 1 trillionth of it. For most of the humans on this little ball of dirt we call earth – life is a curse of suffering and pain. The fact you are reading this on a computer shows that you are lucky, extremely lucky to have been born where and to whom you were born. Most are not so lucky.
VidLord, I agree that humans do not occupy a special place in the universe. For this very reason, there is no reason their life should have some objective, absolute value different from anything else. To disagree with us is to assign us a special place.
It is of course POSSIBLE to uphold simultaneously that humans are not special and that there is an objective value to life, but I find this view at least aesthetically displeasing. How, for example, can you ever justify eating meat with this worldview? How can you have pets? How can you have abortions? I know that many philosophers end up concluding on these points that you cannot. But I see the world differently. Life isn’t special because of the way it self-replicates or because it is sentient, it is special because of what it does. And in that respect, humans ARE special, among those organisms which we know.
The person high on drugs constantly is still experiencing pleasure. The dead person is experiencing nothing. I think there is an objective value difference between experiencing and not experiencing.
I do not think so. A dying man is experiencing pain. A dead man is experiencing nothing. But if you ask the dying man, you might find he doesn’t think his experience is objectively valuable.
So it is with happiness. We experience happiness because it is an evolved survival trait, not because it is objectively valuable. There are people who do not experience happiness, but their lives can still have value if they make them valuable.
There are also many paradoxes you can run into, here. Suppose you are trying to decide whether or not you want to have a child. If there is an objective value to life, the best decision is ALWAYS to have the child. This clearly is problematic.
There is also the question of what “objective value” even MEANS. In every other situation, all values are relative. We know the value of something only by how it can be useful to us, or what other valuable items we can trade it for. This laptop is valuable relative to money I could sell it for, or productivity I could get out of it, but in the absence of buyers and the absence of useful activities I can do on it, the laptop loses all its value. There is no absolute value to my laptop. In the same sense, there is no absolute value to life. When a person is experiencing emotions, improving others’ lives or the world in some way, or even attempting something important, there is value to her life. When she does none of these things, but merely lies in bed all day, perpetually unconscious, a la Terry Schiavo, there is no longer any value to her life.
Note that this does NOT mean that it is easy or even possible to judge people’s value relative to each other. This would require an absolute set of standards that does not exist. It also does not mean that I can accurately judge the values of other peoples’ lives, unless they are entirely unconscious or otherwise not sentient, because their value comes from their own mind to which nobody else has access. But when they have no mind at all to impose this value, there is no value whatsoever, and only then can I definitively say: your life has no more value.
Well, I think the main problem comes from the fact that there is a generally distributed phenomenon, life, that we can talk about, but its individual instantiations have high variability. I’m arguing only that life qua life is itself inherently valuable, which must be factored in when an individual decides the actual value of the specific life they possess.
I don’t like the idea of trying to judge the value of a specific life. In my opinion, nobody is qualified to judge somebody’s life except that person himself. Of course, we DO value people’s lives all the time, but that does not mean we should.
This follows neatly from the postulate that my life only has value that I impose on it. Therefore, only I can really determine its value, since only I know the contents of my own mind. This is true whether or not I used rational processes to come to this conclusion.
In terms of “life qua life” (or perhaps a better term, “life per se”) having intrinsic value, I will ask you a question: To whom does this life have value? If the value is only to the person himself, then the very same phenomenon could be explained by the assumption that this value really comes from the person, not from the intrinsic value of life. If it is valuable to other people, then we are granting others ownership of his life. This is problematic, because it treats life from a communal rather than individualistic perspective, which makes life only valuable as an asset to the community and again, means that life doesn’t really have “intrinsic” value, since it becomes worthless at the point where it cannot help out others.
I don’t like the idea of trying to judge the value of a specific life. In my opinion, nobody is qualified to judge somebody’s life except that person himself. Of course, we DO value people’s lives all the time, but that does not mean we should.
Hence my original caveat using economic tools to discuss human life.
i.e. Don’t.
But it’s fun nonetheless to use a tool-set and see if it has any applicability in unfamiliar surroundings.
I think we might be talking past each other a little bit, because I intended the term “value” to mean what it tends to mean in economic contexts, not the general principle of normativity, since the original post was about distinguishing the behavior of life as a “good” as reacting differently to supply than money or widgets.
————
I tend to think that a life can gain value from many sources, the vast majority of which are extrinsic (what happens to the person, what the person does, etc.). My main point was that in any valuation of any given life, one is not starting from zero, since the fact of life itself has an intrinsic value. There seems to be a qualitative difference between talking about the value of an inanimate object (that is, transactionally, or at best aesthetically) and the value of a life, or even the value of life as a general quality. Most of the arguments pursuant to that point really just devolve to first principles and axioms; I doubt any argument would avail to persuade. I’m a moral realist (and not really an existentialist), and so I believe in objective values as well as objective facts (i.e. Hume was wrong about the fact-value distinction), and so that’s the place I’m coming from with this.
Well, I think the main problem comes from the fact that there is a generally distributed phenomenon, life, that we can talk about, but its individual instantiations have high variability. I’m arguing only that life qua life is itself inherently valuable, which must be factored in when an individual decides the actual value of the specific life they possess. [no reply option for LMNOP’s comment further down]
If life qua life is inherently valuable, then existence must be inherently valuable as well since without it life could not exist. Life is a natural process just as surely as is geology or climatology (in fact, life is very often described as the result of geological and climatological processes). To my way of thinking, something of value is a thing that serves a purpose or achieves an end and must be acquired and maintained through the actions of a living being. Can you think of any value that is not? Only individual, living beings can have values; the process of life can have no value in and of itself.
Well said, Clyde. I agree on all accounts, and that is essentially what I was trying to say.
well said Clyde however I love sex. I would value immensely being able to have sex for hundreds or thousands of years. Wouldn’t you? It may sound crude but as Sunny Day said “What gives life its meaning are the experiences in it.” I totally agree with. I’m not just saying that because my girlfriend is the hottest thing on planet earth either (which she is) ;)
Now if I’m immortal and I lose my two arms and legs in a car accident – well then I would probably head to a church and beg God to give me my limbs back….cause that would really suck.
Or you could do something useful and get some robot parts and make some limbs.
that’s what i’ve always wondered. I think living forever would be great, I say so, and then somebody always says that life would become meaningless.
Living is the best and most eagerly protected good available to people. If having more makes it worth less, then we should all just kill ourselves now…
immortal does not mean the same as invulnerable.
“If you were immortal, your life would have no more meaning, purpose or value than existence itself”
You mean it has? Any idea about what that meaning or purpose could be?
Yet all I desire is existence. Eternal existence.
I would opt for for probably at least a thousand years if not more.
At the end of your thousand, you’d want a thousand more.
I’d rather like to live awhile if I were healthy mentally and physically. Oh, and financially, too! But forever? Hell no. Would anyone in their right mind really want to continue to exist trillions of years from now?
mmm..christians? A lot of religions out there? Hey, they invented heaven on that purpose!
oops,and me too :-)
I’ll opt for several million years. I’d like to be around for the next tectonic super continent.
I’d hang around long enough to watch religion die the shameful death it so richly deserves. Then, I’d have a huge blowout party and wax my nipples with red candl…..umm….sorry, got carried away there.
My boyfriend wrote an article on his blog on this very topic! Here’s the link: http://www.synchronium.net/2008/11/18/living-forever-is-it-really-worth-it/
Definitely. If it’s a question of existing and experiencing things forever or just doing it for a short time, then never existing and experiencing things again, I’d have to go with the first option.
Death is an essential part of human society, not just human existence. Wouldn’t ideas have a lot more trouble evolving if their supporters could stick around for a couple millennia promoting them? Cultural shifts usually happen when the supporters of an old viewpoint die out. Would we really want 1000-year-old Dawkinses, if it meant methusalic evangelicals? How about George Bush Jr. running again for office in 3000AD?
Didn’t help with Christianity, Islam, or Monarchy…
Actually monarchy has evolved an awful lot. In Britain, for example, we are a constitutional monarchy, but the reigning monarch has very little power. She is the titular head of the armed forces provided she doesn’t do something as stupid as try to give an actual order to anybody, and she could in theory disband the government (again, a power which she’d lose if she tried to use it in any but the most dire of needs) which ironically affords us protection from tyranny.
Just because something is unavoidable it does not follow that it is essential, though it would be easy to confuse the first for the second. I would argue simply that we lack the ability to know in what ways society and human nature would change given immortality, since none of us have come close to experiencing the condition, nor do we have much of an ability to extrapolate from our current conditions given the qualitative differences.
Oh the irony of this thread! :)
I suppose from a Christian POV it would be ironic. But then, I get confused when they cry at funerals.
As an aside, I wonder how many disciples the monotheistic religions would lose if people could achieve eternal life outside of heaven. It is, after all, the major selling point of those religions.
We might find that believers who claim they look forward to the afterlife would be just as willing to extend their life indefinitely as non-believers, given the choice. It seems to be the case so far with existing life-prolonging treatments.
Naw, they’d just start saying how its not a “true” afterlife and Gawd will punish them eventually.
They might say something like that. But would they actually be willing to refuse eternal life (or just a very long extension of life) when they near the end of their lives? I sincerely doubt it.
And the appeal of, say, Christianity would diminish accordingly when the afterlife offers less of a reward. After all, you’d have to be very sure in your faith to forfeit almost certain eternal life on earth in return for a supposed eternal life in heaven.
What, it’s ironic that people would like to live longer? Wouldn’t we all? Religionists deal with this longing by devising fables about living on in some Beyond for which there is no real evidence at all. Is it ironic that more rational people might approach it in a scientific way that’s far likelier to pay off?
Death serves one purpose, keeping DNA up to date with our surroundings. But if you could be like m
McCloud that would be bad ass.
I don’t think that I would want to live forever.
Forever? No way. I don’t even want to live past 60.
Remind me to ask you again at 59.
:)
If there are still icebergs in 20 years when I’m 60, I’m pushing off on one and letting nature take its course.
I get bored really easily, and I doubt I would have enough patience to spend lifetimes figuring out how to avoid boredom. But I suppose that if accidental death and suicide were still options I would be ok with it.
I don’t play piano, but say i wanted to. I could take 30, 50, 70 years
You know how good I’d be? I’d be amazing. I could read everything ever written, watch everything ever filmed, look at every piece of art ever created.
Then I could learn how to create them, one medium at a time, even things I have utterly no talent in.
I could play every video game ever created, and then learn how to make them.
Heck, at some point, keeping abreast off technological advances would probably be a full time job.
I don’t think I’d get bored.
I’m with you here. There’s just way too much to learn and do — to master each one would take one of our lifetimes.
I like my life. I’m never bored. I would like to live forever, but only if those I love can too.
you’ll find new people to love
But he has a point, are we speaking about “me” living forever or all humanity living forever?
I’d definitely like to live forever (with the opt out). And I’d want to whether or not those that I love live forever too. It’d be fun to have a whole new life every 70 years or so. It’d be rich with experiences and new love.
Immortality would be boring. I would be happy with just living to 100 with the body and mind I currently possess.
Hypothetical philosophical armchair question: If you are immortal, how can you say you are living? Wouldn’t that just be existing? I do not think those terms are interchangeable.
Cyberdraco: You would never really be immortal – what if you fly up in a space rocket and it explodes? Not exactly immortal now. Or if you don’t like your immortal life you jump off the tallest building….splat. We’re talking humans here…not devils and angels (who cannot be wounded or die and are extremely fast…and invisible). What would be cool is if everyone lived to be say age 35, then stopped ageing completely and didn’t die unless they chose to or went up in that space rocket.
There’s no reason to want to die as far as I’m concerned, unless living is excruciatingly physically painful or one’s mind is itself essentially dead—incapable of all or nearly all human reasoning altogether.
There are so many things to do, people to know, things to create. I don’t think if I’d lived the last 3,000 years of human history I’d be any less fascinated to wonder about the future than I am now having only been around the last 31 years of them and knowing the basic facts about the previous ones. The story never stops taking interesting twists and turns.
Nope, I want to live forever. On the upside, being dead is truly no experience at all anyway so there won’t be any grief at inevitably having this desire thwarted and having to die.
Okay, so if part of the value of life is, as I think it is, contributing to the well-being of others what would be some of our other motivations? Hang around? Live a gratuitously consumerist life? How many stages would we have – I don’t want the teenage years to be longer. And I am pretty tired at 45 of dealing with stupid conservatives….what about housing? You could have many, many careers and learn endlessly – THAT would be cool; and eating without getting fat…
what if only one person on the earth was immortal? I wonder how long before that person would be crowned GOD and ruler of all…. (now that might be fun)
Some people are working on it:
http://www.ted.com/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html
Although he is a bit of a loon.
I have been immoral since youth. I don’t know how much longer I can continue.
Intentional spelling error?
Hee, hee…yup. Just testing. You win the Grand Prize!
Yeah I think I would like to be immortal. I want to see what the next 1000 years holds for humanity, and what the next few million years has in store for our planet. What I wonder is the capacity of the human mind to remember. Think of it like a hard drive, how much data can I store before it’s full? Would I have to go through and delete certain memories to make room for more? hmmm…
“You see,” [Sherlock Holmes] explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”
I’d love to live forever, or atleast a few thousand years or so.
This question is the reason vampires were created. They’re no happier than we are (at least the ones I love: Louis and Lestat), and after dozens of centuries, they STILL have no idea why any of us are here. Vampires are the fictional manifestation of the human desire to live forever. They have the option of immolation by simply walking the doggie in the daylight, of course, but they never would have been dreamed up if there wasn’t an underlying human desire for immortality.
As for me, nah. I’m in the middle of a good run, and I won’t be terrified when it’s about to end. This question is a lot like the one you asked recently about whether we’d take an organ from a murderer. This question, like that one, is moot.
And watch my little sister, my brother, my children, and my partner die? To watch my nieces, great nieces, grandchildren, nephews – to watch them all die? No thank you. I’d rather my life just ran its course.
Kayla – time heals wounds. After a thousand years or so you may not recall much about your brother. What you’re saying is you’d prefer to die to avoid emotional pain. You could pop a variety of pills today to minimize that. That said I think what’s implied is if you can do it, everyone else can too. That would create a whole host of problems regarding space and resources however. We would absolutely have to develop faster than light travel. Right now it would take 30,000 years to get to our nearest star (and all the energy on the planet earth) with our current technology!
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/technology/warp/warpstat.html
Above link I love the question: “How can an object travel faster than that which links its atoms?”
My idea is to figure out some way to have a colonizing space craft stay stationary while the galaxy rotates other solar systems towards the craft. The galaxy rotates at 100,000 miles per second. Even at that rate it would lifetimes for the next star to come into exploration view. But I do envision creative ways of “waiting” in stationary spots for the mechanics of the universe to bring us other planets. That, I believe will be the future – not super fast space ships.
A life without any of those people is not a life worth living. I don’t care how many centuries of shiny bobbles and new ways of brutalizing eachother the human species could come up with – if I’m experiencing it alone, I’d rather be dead.
You can’t fall in love twice?
And then when that love dies, find another? Then another? Then another? I’d rather just go with my time and hope it’s spaced close enough to my partner’s death so neither of us suffer too greatly without the other.
Yup. Love is great and gives meaning to life, but I don’t think romanticizing it does it any favors. An Australian comedian (whose name at the moment escapes me) had a great routine about how if he didn’t happen to love the person he loved now, he would more than likely have loved someone entirely different and never known the difference.
“Love is great and gives meaning to life, but I don’t think romanticizing it does it any favors.”
Yup. I couldn’t agree more. The romantic bullsh*t that one reads in books or watches on movies is completely illusory. Love is hard work and involves accepting that one’s loved one is imperfect and probably will hurt/disappoint you from time to time (not in an abusive way, but just by virtue of being a fallible human being). There is no such thing as “the one” and we are not “halves” waiting to find our perfect “whole”. We are whole already. We are capable of loving many people for many reasons. And we are capable of falling out of love as we grow and change over the years. I think that is why the divorce rate is so high, not because people are increasingly morally weak in modern times, but because we have more freedom and self awareness to recognize when to fold, and there is less stigma about it. Finally, one of the worst romantic notions that is pervasive in our culture is the idea that one cannot be happy without one’s soul mate. Bullsh*t I say. I can be perfectly happy doing a variety of things for a variety of reasons. If my only reason for being happy is a guy, then I would call that a massive failure of imagination on my part.
Just my $0.02.
LRA, word.
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Oh, and the comedian was Tim Minchin.
LOL! Finally, something we agree on! :P
So if an accident wiped them all out, you’d kill yourself?
If your self-worth is found only through your loved ones, you may want to talk to a professional about it.
I wouldn’t mind a few hundred years perhaps
Life has surely started going faster (past me) since turning 50 a while back. But health and income would have to be part of it
Who wants eternal life?
Too boring, I want to shapeshift from time to time, like becoming a rock or a bird or a phone record to be sent to another galaxy… stuff like that.
I think if one was to live forever life would lose a immense amount of meaning.
“I’d like to live forever, but barring that, a few hundred years would be nice.”
i’m surprised no one else has said that, it’s from a popular source.
Only if I got to control my age as well. None of this starting anew life every 20 years crap. I could go from 19-30 for all eternity. Think of the clubs, the parties, the drugs and of course the sex with hot people for eternity.
Yes.
As long as I could be equipped with a light saber….
Cracked.com once had an article about super powers and how science spoils the fun. The last one in the article is Immortality.
http://www.cracked.com/article_17185_7-awesome-super-powers-ruined-by-science.html
I don’t want to quote the whole thing, but the first problem was enough to make me change my mind:
Okay, after the first, say, few hundred years, everything’s still fine and well. You’ve seen a few generations of people live and die, and had this happen to your family. Oh well, they were likely douches you could live without anyway at some points. Companionship is companionship, or so you think.
Not so fast: You know how when you were younger (by human terms, a child), an hour seemed like forever to you? As people grow, their brain starts to perceive time differently. An hour feels like less time. Now extend that logic to a year, or a decade, or a century. This means that eventually, you will be completely unable to form relationships with human beings because their lives and deaths will flash past you like a tape on fast-forward.
Would I want to live forever?
Perhaps if I were able to choose my companions. But being stuck with yammering religious fanatics of any stripe could indeed turn that eternity into an unimaginable hell.
I imagine it’d be kind of boring. If I could have my g/f with me aswell, then maybe – but would I want to watch everybody I care about die one by one? Really?
ok,, think about that sentence twice, but don’t tell her. Do you really want to be stuck with your g/f for all the eternity? Along our short lives we change our friends, you keep very few of them for a long time and even then, your relationships change and evolveFamily relationships are different, but parents don’t want their childs “forever” at home; you have a fight with your brother or with your cousin and you don’t see him for years, people get divorced…
Oh, sorry, I forgot that your love is everlasting :-p
If there is no suffering, yes, I’d want to live forever. Isn’t that what heaven’s for, though?
You atheists are missing out. Oh well, you will live forever anyway-in hell!
In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.
Lol! Atheists don’t miss out on an afterlife, theists miss out on their ONLY life because they’ve been conned into thinking they’ll get an even better one afterwards! This is it, PKW, your one and only life. Waste it on your knees praying to a false God if you want to, but personally I’m going to make the most of mine!
Custador, this is a common misconception. This “eternal Life” is not merely an afterlife but a certain kind & quality of life in the here and now. We exchange, lose our lives for a higher Life from which we live in the here and now. This is why JC said “if you seek to save your own (psuche, greek meaning inherited, soul) life you will lose it, but if you lose it for my sake’s you will find it. The kingdom is a paradox, it makes no sense to our natural, reason loving minds. It requires that we trust the Father who, in return gives us His life (that life of eternal kind & quality) from which to live by.
So holding on to “your” life is a high compromise indeed, though it “appears” (judge not by appearances as JC said because they’re not trustworthy) to be the prudent thing to do, to safeguard it. Ahh…but how can you trust someOne you’ve never seen? He’s asking a lot you say? No, not really, He only asks from us in return what He gave, His all, His very life. Where is the wisdom in this foolishness eh? Hmm….if you only knew.
From a contradiction, everything follows.
Can I borrow that sentence?
You sure can. I did. It’s one common way to describe the paradox of entailment (otherwise known as the principle of explosion, or the paradox of material implication) in English.
If the contradiction leads to the truth…then it’s well worth the following
Ya know, usually we use “contradiction” and “truth” as word with definite meanings. You can’t just pick them and throw them in the middle of an assertion and expect that the rest of the society will understand your point
You’re missing the point, John. Contradictions lead *everywhere*. You may trip and fall on some true statements in the morass, but they are not effective engines for seeking and identifying truth.
No, I understood where you were going Elemeno, just saying I wil follow where the truth leads, contradiction or not.
“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”
the bible says there are animals in heaven, including sheep and horses. I absolutely love any opportunity to point this out :)
I have a few questions about this. Could you pass the ability to live in good health to others? Think about how people around you would react when they notice you haven’t changed in 50 years. If you are able to pass it on then you would be flooded with people wanting the extended life. If you can’t pass it on, how would people around you react?
Plastic surgeon and run!
Absolutely not, (my personal idea of hell….) and definitely not now. Our future from this point on is not going to be enjoyable for anyone….
That’s pretty pessimistic.
I have to agree that a bleak period in human history is innevitable at this point. The facts are simple, really: If we don’t control our population ourselves, Mother Nature is going to step right in and do it for us sooner or later. Either way, it’s going to be pretty grim.
Nah. Malthus was wrong.
Maybe in the next hundred years or so, we can start sending people to Mars to ease the population burden? But I do think as the population increases, resources will become more and more scarce and suffering will increase overall, especially for the powerless, the poor, the unskilled, and/or the uneducated. Of course, my biggest concern is that we are ruining the environment with our overpopulation problems. If that happens, it could disrupt societies all over the world, and the thought of that scares me.
The annual world population growth rate has been plummeting for forty years straight. If current trends continue, the world population will top out at just shy of nine billion (at about 2040), and then start falling.
The main mechanism is the increase of prosperity; as average individual income goes up, fecundity goes down.
Really? Where can I find that study?
The data is here.
In handy-dandy chart form here.
And to avoid the link limit, if you wiki “malthusian catastrophe”, just above the chart I linked to above is the projections chart. The middle trendline is if current trends continue.
I’m sorry, I misspoke. The lower trendline is for current trends continuing. More likely is a moderate slowing of the rate crash, yielding the middle line; I also misread the graph, it was just over nine billion at about 2075 followed by a steady decline.
Thanks. So I looked it over and perhaps the picture isn’t as bleak as it would seem. However, there is still some unmet need for contraception in certain parts of the world (ie Africa) and I wonder is the trend will continue in a way as to allow a negative growth rate as some point. That is to say, if we top out around 9-10 billion, is that really a sustainable number, given the poverty and suffering we have today (in part because of unjust distribution of goods, I understand)? As it is, there are millions worldwide who live in unimaginable poverty, and I worry as to what can be done about it.
There are two (diametrically opposed) schools of thought when it comes to development in the third world.
The first is that due to the vast wealth and goods discrepancy between the developed and developing world, the developed world should increase aid to the developing world in the form of grants, loans, and direct aid (food, medicine). The argument here is that what is lacking for development is infrastructure, and so supporting necessities and providing funds for infrastructure (schools, roads, and phone lines) will allow the developing countries to join the world market and become more prosperous.
The second, opposing, view is that foreign aid has systematically (if unintentionally) prolonged and made more severe the conditions in the developing world and all but guaranteed their continued dependency and lack of development. The argument here is that aid causes severe depression (in the form of depressed goods prices) which insures that no local industries and agriculture can become profitable. They suggest the alternative in the form of microloans and other similar mechanisms to stimulate local production and economic activity, in lieu of aid.
There are economists (both from the developed and developing words) well-represented on both sides of this argument.
Yes, I know we’ve talked about that before. But my question was really about environmental sustainability rather then economic stability. Any ideas on that?
Well, as far as resources go, the only limiting factor is really energy production. That is, we’re nowhere near world peak food production (and we produce enough right now to more than feed the world; the problem there is entirely economics and practical distribution), and raw materials can be mined and then when exhausted be recycled. Since agriculture, resource recovery, and production are all energy intensive, the primary environmental impact is going to come from what choices are made as far as energy sources and consumption. Those choices, in turn, are going to nearly entirely be dictated by economics in the developing world.
Yes, I’m all for the development of cheap alternative energies (which I realize will take some time). So if economists are divided on financial support, can they come together to help developing nations get cheap energy (via wind, solar or geothermal means?)
So if economists are divided on financial support, can they come together to help developing nations get cheap energy (via wind, solar or geothermal means?)
I honestly don’t know.
I call it realistic but, hey thats just me, I just appreciate life day by day =)
Offred: “Our future from this point on is not going to be enjoyable for anyone….”
That’s been said again and again for centuries. In medieval times the apocolypse was just around the corner. My parents were positive that their grand children would probably be living their lives in underground holes after the nuclear winter lol.
The key for living longer is going to be growing one’s own organs for transplantation. The simple act of breathing damages the lungs – they wear out just like anything else.
Now, replacing the brain: that’s the real trick.
I don’t think it can really be done without losing the mind that is associated with it at some point. That is, I think that the mind and brain are inseparable, so I would opt for regeneration over replacement. If we can switch back on neural stem cells and have them repair damage, then that might work, but putting foreign parts into a brain (like silicon chips) would seemingly make one less and less human as the parts replaced the organic matter over time, IMO.
I think it might be possible to slowly ratchet a mind from one substrate to another, if we could figure out a way to isolate the cognitive subsystems and reliably shunt their inputs and outputs to the new substrate (brain, computer, or whatever) one at a time.
good point. I can imagine a bunch of 200+ year olds all running around with Alzheimer’s. What fun would that be? Seems to be an insurmountable problem – the brain WILL wear out. Kinda like the faster than light travel problem – once you start going faster than light that which makes up YOU deteriorates. Even if you put your brain on another medium it really isn’t YOU.
Sure, why not? At least this way I could make sure that there would be at least one left that would remember history and not just hear of it from books, movies, or television.
Wouldn’t the immortal be just as forgetful? Just as prone to distort memory with perspective?
Only if there’s the possibility to kill yourself when you get bored. Not being able to die, ever, sounds nightmarish to me.
Sure, living a couple of thousand years would be nice. But forever isn’t a thousand years, or a million years, or a billion. Even a quadrillion years later forever would be no closer to ending. You’d outlive Earth. You would do everything there is to do an infinite number of times. There’d have to come a point when you get tired of everything, right? But you just couldn’t die.
The idea of heaven doesn’t appeal to me at all for this reason.
Your brain has X cells. Even if they recover and do not die you still have a maximum of X.
Given a memory per cell of Y you will not be able to “remember” all that you ever do in an eternal life.
Hence sooner or later you will forget.
The good thing: It wont ever get boring ;-)
I’m not sure about forever, but long enough to find out about the mistery of the universe, from scientific point of view. I mean I’m glad I wasnt born in the dark ages or on the time where earth was flat, there’s so much things I’d like to learn and my lifetime might not be long enough to find out what I’d like to find out
Hell yeah, provided I can end it myself if I so choose!
Sounds appealing, but I’ll get extremely bored with life after a couple decades. Death is bliss. Wouldn’t want to miss that:)
Only if I also had never-ending wealth. Oh yeah and superpowers, too.
I would like to live for a long time if in good health, or at least no worse than I am now (I’m disabled and chronically sick), there are so many wonderful things out there I would love to learn more about, but not forever – how would you find out what happens next?
I’d settle for 5000 years. After that I want a fresh start, I want to choose birthplace, parents, DNA etc..
Will it happen? Unlikely..