I genuinely think death will be conquered, for all practical purposes, within this century. In our vast 300 thousand year history, we are likely in the last century of mortal humans, and in the last millennium of biological ones.
Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death, and wonder why we didn't try harder, earlier.
Why isn't the longevity problem our #1 tax expense? Because the culture believes the problem is insurmountable, inevitable, and not worth solving. Our parents try to hide their grief and dread at the inevitability, telling us it's okay, but the tears at a funeral disagree.
As an aside, I would pay vast sums of money (millions of dollars) to live my final days at an old folks' home that was capable of monitoring my health on a frequent basis, catching things early, and integrated SOTA cryonics facilities to maximize my chance of revival in case LEV doesn't become a possibility in my lifetime.
I'm not too confident that mortality will be cured this century. Even if we cure some of the big targets (dementia, muscle wasting and cancer come to mind) there will inevitably be a long tail of problems.
If it were just that, I might still be hopeful, but the latency on aging cure experiments is inevitably going to be quite long, and that won't change without massive advances in biological simulations.
If life feels empty to you, I'm sorry to hear that. I hope it gets better soon. I feel the opposite - there is so much to do, and so little time. I am also happy and content just... existing.
I don't think a social problem (that will be solved in time, and is already solved in some countries) is a reason to prevent this from happening.
Social problems can be fixed, death is final. If euthanasia doesn't become legal before, it certainly will be after.
I think they meant eternal life much more in the “I have no mouth, and I must scream” sense.
Much has been said and written about the cruelty of immortality, since the myth of Sisyphus and probably before.
“The Mortal Immortal” is a story about prolonging lifespan but not healthspan, and also not emotional fulfilment in life — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mortal_Immortal. There are also TV shows (“Altered Carbon”, “Black Mirror” USS Callister and other episodes, “Twilight Zone”) and video games (“Nobody Wants to Die”) about it.
What your parent comment speaks about (the vanity of endless life) is particularly explored in Bernard Williams’s “The Makropulos Affair”. Endless life could mean no regard for quality of life and endless trivial pursuits.
Yes, I've read/watched most of those and I believe they are just entertainment. I can perfectly envision people living happy, long lives. These books and shows have manufactured conflict for drama.
With our current lifespan I already see lots of people intentionally killing themselves with alcohol or drugs or food. I cannot imagine most people would be happy with eternity.
I know most people aren't happy with how long they live now. The idea is that you'd get to choose how long you want to live instead of having it forced on you.
To be honest, I've never gotten that. The creative output I can manage in a mere 80ish years has never felt sufficient to me. I would love to have the lifespan to be able to take on tasks like selectively breeding Bunya pines, or painting gigapixel collages.
If you can cure aging, death itself becomes an engineering problem. Curing aging gives you the time you need to figure out gradual replacement, uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes in orbit or beyond, etc.
Then you have cured death for all practical purposes. You will still be vulnerable to certain cosmic catastrophes (which you can plan around) and the heat death itself, but I would still call that "cured."
Edit reply because of HN rate limit: Transfers are possible, copies aren't our only option. Consider replacing one neuron at the time with an uplink to a virtual neuron in the cloud. An implant (at the cellular scale) reflects communication back to your physical neurons - they don't even notice it disappeared.
Wait for your thoughts to normalize, rinse, repeat. This is gradual replacement. You'd do it with more than one neuron (a cluster of neurons) realistically.
I have a very strong metaphysical prior against consciousness uploads being possible, but I hope to live in a universe structured in the right way to make me wrong.
It's not the difference in substrate that makes me doubt it's possible (I'm a very strong believer in panpsychism), but I doubt the transfer could ever be "continuous" in a way that my monkey brain was satisfied with.
The continuity flaw is a reasonable concern; I have it as well. (I don't want a copy of me to live on; I want to live on, myself.)
However, I do think it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible. It's harder than the alternative, but theoretically possible.
I've come to believe that the copy will seriously believe it's me, similar to a virtual machine being halted and moved to different hardware, how would "I" know I'm not me? My copy will have my memories, if it's an exact copy it'll have the same ways of thinking, maybe after the transfer it'll remember "Ah, I have a date tonight with my wife, geez I remember this morning she drank all the juice except for a sip, and then put it back in the fridge, that always makes me irrationally angry.".
Sometimes we even feel "out of body", even in our own consciousness, so why would it be so different when we are copied?
One easy way to tell the difference: if you do the full upload non-destructively, such that there's a full uploaded copy that thinks it's you, and your full original biological self, would the latter then happily get disintegrated? (There are people who say yes to that question, which genuinely baffles me.)
The thing I'm talking about, of attempting to build a "move" operation that isn't "copy then delete", is exactly what I meant when I said it seems harder but possible to solve.
Both the copy and the original wouldn't like to be destroyed, would they, it's like volunteering to end one's consciousness.
What if there's hardware to wirelessly combine the minds, and you can experience what your clone^W other-self experiences. A bit like having someone be in e.g. Iceland and facetime you a low quality sight and sounds experience of Iceland... would you then say "Ok, I don't mind having one of my input devices go offline".
> it's entirely possible to solve, if we're already at the point where uploads are possible
The fundamental gating discoveries are all around the nature of consciousness. Is it emergent? Is it empirically detectable? Is it quantum magic? We have inklings around this. But our understanding of it hasn't fundamentally changed since, arguably, Descartes.
Even with the one-neuron-at-a-time thought experiment, I'm not sure if we are ever going to know for sure if we got uploads right — even in principle.
While a sufficiently detailed copy should be conscious, we don't know what "sufficiently detailed" is — and we can't just do this by external behaviour, because (1) People are still arguing both sides of the P-zombie thought experiment; and (2) LLMs regularly fooling people into thinking they're discoursing with a human, even though I think most people think LLMs aren't conscious.
There's something like 40 different definitions of "consciousness"; some are easy to test for, some are provably impossible, but I don't know if even one of them is actually what we want.
I remember my dreams, but was I really conscious, or was it an unconscious experience whose memory was available to my conscious mind when I woke? It's conceivable that I am fully conscious right now, that an upload of my brain would change and grow and report conscious throughout, that you could then download it into a new brain in a new body and that new mind would also report having remembered conscious experiences while uploaded — all without the upload having ever experienced anything that would match the hard-to-describe thing we often try to grasp at with the word "consciousness".
We have altered states of consciousness. People can have conversations and drive cars while sleepwalking. Am I only truly conscious while actively engaging in self-reflection, or all the time? Is my consciousness like your consciousness? Did my mother loose hers at some point during the course of her Alzheimer's, or did she keep it until the very end? When a Buddhist trains themselves to let go, do they lose theirs?
Before you were born you didn’t have the thing you call a consciousness. But now you do.
I think continuity is a red herring, realistically our whole idea of consciousness is probably off base. It might not even be a real thing, for example my pet cat doesn’t care if he has a consciousness or not because he never invented a word for it.
Perhaps I do. Perhaps it's only there when I pay attention to it, and my brain smooths over the gaps like I know it does with saccades and blind spots (both literal and metaphorical). And even if it is there all the time, is it like yours?
I agree, likely the first immortal person has already been born. Perhaps even large swaths of the population are already effectively immortal, but they just don't know it yet.
Sadly, my main fear is that immortality will only be available to the extremely rich and powerful. Generally historical progress is made when the old guard die, be it in science with the leaders clamoring to old theories, dictatorships falling when their leader does, companies setting a new course when their founder/CEO retires.
I shudder at the thought of living in a world where everyone still dies like before, except an entrenched immortal powerful elite.
I feel like you and the parent need to give a better operational definition of what you mean by "practical purposes." The ultimate destiny of every bit of matter out there is to become part of a black hole, evaporate to Hawking radiation, then succumb to the expansion of space gradually putting every discrete particle outside of the future light cone of all others.
This should take unfathomably long epochs of time well beyond the current age of the universe, but it will still inevitably happen. This is even putting aside possibilities like proton decay and false vacuum collapse.
Don't get me wrong. Given the choice between a 100 year lifespan and a quadrillion year lifespan, my first instinct is to take the quadrillion year lifespan, but even then, it seems like you're incurring the very real risk that you'll eventually remain "alive" but in complete isolation with no matter to interact with that isn't part of your body, waiting for thousands of times longer then the Milky Way will exist for the attraction of a supermassive black hole to finally pull you in and end it. Given whatever sort of brain you might have has to have a finite storage capacity for information, you also open up the possibility that you'll spend the last few trillion years of your life with no memories except that complete isolation and experience of utter nothingness.
These are all sci-fi scenarios and there is no way to know for sure what will actually happen or what it will be like, but we do know for sure that a functionally immortal being would not just be living a normal life doing things animals typically enjoy doing, but forever. There are plenty of possible fates worse than death.
I feel like the situation you describe is fairly unrealistic because you'd definitely use simulations to pass time. And I don't see any reason why you'd be the only immortal being left, either.
All medical technology is maybe "available", but if you google "person dies from not being able to afford insulin", we can see that availability is only half the equation. It has to be affordable, too.
Never going to happen. We don't have the technology, we're not going to get the technology, and nobody benefits by having wealthy people around forever. Your body parts will eventually wear out regardless of what you try to do to mitigate the situation, and everybody will get terminal cancer sooner or later regardless of anything else. And even if THAT doesn't get you, an accident eventually will. Doesn't matter if it's a car wreck, a plane crash, someone coughing on you at the wrong moment, or you sneezing and bursting a blood vessel in your head.
The big assumption in this counterargument is that we stay biological forever. I see biological "immortality" (anti-aging) as a temporary stopgap while we develop gradual replacement and migrate to a synthetic/digital consciousness, hosted on nodes distributed throughout Earth orbit or beyond for fault tolerance and availability.
I'd be shocked if this didn't happen in the next thousand years.
Needing air/water everywhere we go is incredibly limiting as well.
You won't "migrate", it will just be a copy of you. Your conscious perspective will not transfer to the copy of you. You will still be bound to the original, even if a simulacrum of your mind is created.
You can "migrate" with a technique such as gradual replacement, which in a simplified form replaces one physical neuron at a time with an uplink to a virtual neuron, and waits for your thoughts to equalize. Realistically you'd do clusters of neurons.
And how do you plan to deal with the latency of connecting the neurons of your brain to a remote virtual uplink? The speed of light limits the size of a virtual brain that is able to function in the same manner as a biological one. The truth is our understanding of consciousness and its neurological foundation is nowhere close to the level that would allow us to recreate it artificially. We don't even know how it works normally. It will not happen in your lifetime and you are going to die like the rest of us, and very likely this will not change even in the next thousand years.
And then when the hormones are also gone, you won't be you. You won't even be a copy. You'll be a husk pretending to be a person long after the actual person is long gone. You'll be a talking wikipedia article with no ability to anything but regurgitate some of what you already knew, and the vast majority of these things will be of no consequence or use to anyone. We will never need immortality badly enough to spend the kind of resources to come close to achieving it.
Smallpox was not meant to be cured anyway, but we did, and we're better for it. One of the defining qualities of humanity is the ability to better ourselves and overcome challenges.
We've wrecked our habitat and keep most of humanity in some form or other of slavery, and there are exactly zero credible social movements aiming for another course. Why would we want to watch this deterioration and tyranny go on for centuries more?
As for 'non-biological' humans, I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory. You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments. The digital lacks identity, which is the source of security issues in the computerised society. There is no difference between 1011011001 and 1011011001 regardless of source, it can be a biometry reader sending an encoding of your thumb print or another computer hooked into a network sending the same bytes.
If we for the sake of argument ignored the problems with the transfer, then you still propose a deeply restricted existence, a machine prison, where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source feeding digital signals into your machine. At best it is a simulacra of a dream you can't wake from. You'd be absolutely cut off from any possibility of freedom and immediate engagement with the universe.
Now, I do understand that many people enjoy living almost their entire adult lives mediated through digitally transmitted images and sounds, but at least they still have the option to look away and out of their own bodies and into the remnants of the world that birthed our and many other species. Removing that option entirely and replacing it with the most intimate and absolute form of imprisonment we have yet been able to imagine does not seem at all attractive to me.
Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible.
If you get to watch them follow through on this, how do you expect to keep some semblance of sanity? Are you hoping to be able to ignore it, sitting on a server in a bunker being fed a constant soap opera of fiction and simulated conversations, humming away at some 200 watts or so?
> You are an analog being, you view the world as analog projections onto a mammal cortex. That is fundamentally, ontologically very different from digitally virtual environments.
No it's not. If you accept "mind is brain" (i.e. consciousness is a phenomena within known or knowable laws of physics), a digital virtual environment that simulates the laws of physics (to arbitrarily good precision) could have brains (and therefore minds) running inside it that are indistinguishable (to arbitrarily good precision) from the real thing. [1] [2]
> currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though they are well beyond what is the common age of retirement in vast parts of the world. If allowed they will for sure continue this refusal and they signal clearly that they are going to kill and maim a lot of people just to try and stay in power now. Locking borders against climate refugees, taking resources from things like education and art and medicine and pushing it into war industry, inventing new insidious forms of surveillance and control to try and make sure dissent becomes impossible.
I'd sure as hell rather be alive now than in the 1800's, or the 1700's, or the 1600's. Or the Middle Ages, or classical antiquity, or ancient times, or pre-history. Life sucks for billions of people compared to Western standards but life's also better for billions of people than it's ever been before. Humanity's mostly made forward progress over the long arc of time, and I'm skeptical of claims that such progress is doomed to permanently halt anytime soon.
[1] I could replace "to arbitrarily good precision" with a proper mathematical formulation. But the technical details of the epsilons and deltas don't affect the thrust of the philosophical argument. I'm happy to leave a more precise epsilon-delta phrasing of my idea as an exercise to the reader(s).
[2] Of course the equivalence goes both ways; I hardly need to explain to HN that it's possible to build digital computers in our analog universe!
> I'm assuming you believe in some soul that could be transfered from your body to a computer? If so, that's clearly into deeply religious territory.
Actually, I would say the opposite is deeply religious territory. Nothing fundamentally restricts this unless you think the analog nature of a neuron is a pre-requisite to consciousness, and no synthetic/digital consciousness could ever exist. But you have no reason to believe this. Such a belief is almost religious.
> where there is no way for you to discern whether your experience actually comes from your sensors or some other source
This is life today as well. How do you know you aren't part of some Matrix-style biological mind prison? You don't. It's pointless even trying to wonder.
> Regarding "longevity", currently billions are suffering under the rule of a few generations that refuse to let go of power even though
Social problems can be fixed. Death is final. Tyrants existing is not a reason to promote the death of billions of innocents. If Putin lived for another 1000 years, I certainly wouldn't kill myself. You will experience more net social progress being immortal, though it may be slower, than dying after a short 80 years.
I mean, you've given me an abused Russell's teapot in an attempt to mirror my position, just like a Jehovah's witness or charismatic christian would. At the very least you should hypothesise that you could anchor an argument in quarks and then pick a conceptual level of matter at which you believe you have enough control to be able to fully simulate human corporeality.
If you could it'd be very, very slow, because your machine needs to embed more than the representation of the system you aim to simulate. Among other things to correct for the different complexity, similar to how you need to juggle ten extra decimals or rounding rules just to be able to compute 0.3 * 3 in the browser console.
I know that I'm not in a Matrix style prison because I've experienced pharmacologically induced dissociation and other disruptions of the nervous system. If my brain was a tube floater hooked up to whatever machine you're fantasising about, then I'd have noticed, just like I notice that I'm dreaming if I for some reason turn lucid when sleeping. You could, of course, spend so much time being introverted and deep in your own fantasies, e.g. by stimulating your brain with screens, that you lose the ability to discern between real and virtual settings. Some might claim that this is an ideal and spend their lives practicing such techniques in cloistered, monastic environments.
I did not "promote the death of billions of innocents". I claimed that watching the current trajectory play out isn't obviously attractive, to refute the opposite position, that it should be the "#1" priority of contemporary state administrations. But if you want an argument for death, sure, I'll give you one, because it's trivial. Death is part of the human condition, it is fundamental to who we are and always has been.
If you take it away, then we are no longer human and lose our connection with human history and recorded experience. Is it better to be a human than to be a machine? I'd say yes, because machines cannot have liberty and freedom, they're dead already.
The assumption that there will be "social progress" under conditions where people no longer die would need a very strong set of arguments for me to accept it. Currently, that we are born and die exerts a pressure on our rulers and injects volatility into our societies. If they instead could just say 'alright, we'll make things better, just wait a millenium', then they would. They are already very good at erasing dissent and the memory of previous dissenters, to a large extent by substituting for it with false ideas, or 'false consciousness'.
The assumption that "social progress" is inevitable has a religious background, it has its immediate roots in Enlightenment deism, i.e. christian protestantism, which were inherited by liberalists and early marxists. This position has suffered a lot since then, mostly because of modern takes on science, but also the global effects of mass extinction, disruption of the atmosphere and so on, which is quite tangible evidence against this view.
Whether eighty years is long or short from your perspective is up to you. Perception of time is highly elastic and especially under dissociative states you can feel like you've experienced centuries pass by. This is routinely exploited in televised media.
Future generations will wonder at our coping mechanisms for something so tragic and horrifying as death, and wonder why we didn't try harder, earlier.
Why isn't the longevity problem our #1 tax expense? Because the culture believes the problem is insurmountable, inevitable, and not worth solving. Our parents try to hide their grief and dread at the inevitability, telling us it's okay, but the tears at a funeral disagree.
As an aside, I would pay vast sums of money (millions of dollars) to live my final days at an old folks' home that was capable of monitoring my health on a frequent basis, catching things early, and integrated SOTA cryonics facilities to maximize my chance of revival in case LEV doesn't become a possibility in my lifetime.