> What kind of monster are you that you don't think thats a laudable goal?
I think there are many compelling ethical and philosophical arguments one can make against wanting everyone to live forever.
We shouldn't confuse live extension with living forever. Oddly enough, David Attenborough is in the news today for suggesting population control is a huge and growing problem[1]. You could argue that research into extending human life when we are looking at significant problems with population overcrowding and competition for resources in the near future is putting the horse before the cart.
I am not sure which side of the fence I fall on. Medical research can allow people with previously incurable conditions to live full lives. This is a laudable goal. But that's not what you said - you're talking about living forever. Is that so laudable? I would certainly not call someone who thought that was a truly awful idea 'a monster'. Indeed, there's lots of speculative fiction based around how awful it would actually be to live forever (or even a very long time).
Admittedly, you do have to laugh at the sheer irony. Research into life-extension is taking place in advanced countries that can't even maintain their current population levels without net immigration.
And also, at the same time, cannot be bothered to raise labor wages.
Right, the inconsistency is: the First World goes tsk tsk at the Third World for its overpopulation and poverty; meanwhile, it critically relies on the Third World to breed a neverending supply of cheap immigrant labor to exploit.
I never became confident that my worldview had matured into adulthood until I lost my fear of death. And not only that, someday will welcome it (and all the agonizing pain it may likely entail) as the ultimate justification for everything that came before and that will occur after.
Actually, I have no fucking clue what kind of mindset wants to live forever. Reminded of the beautiful (book) scene in Ender's Game where Wiggin ponders the death of the buggers, and the essential union of death and rebirth.
My favorite response to this view comes from Greg Egan's short story "Border Guards": The tragedians were wrong. They had everything upside-down. Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round. All of its gravitas, all of its significance, was stolen from the things it ended. But the value of life always lay entirely in itself — not in its loss, not in its fragility.
Frankly, I think it's awful when people die. People are so interesting and irreplaceable and wonderful; I don't necessarily think it's an improvement for them to just fall over dead one day and be gone.
Please note that this is a relatively orthodox opinion: Even the Christian church has always felt that death and oblivion were rather horrible, and it thought that humans should live forever, albeit after a bit of debugging so they'd stop being quite so awful to each other. They approved of death only because it was the price of admission to immortality.
> Actually, I have no fucking clue what kind of mindset wants to live forever.
The kind of mindset capable of performing induction over the positive integers. For me, today was a good day. I want to live until tomorrow, at least, and I want tomorrow to be at least as good.
Therefore, I want to live forever, or at least as long as reasonably possible.
Your straw man doesn't work. In a trivial sense, we are machines. There's nothing magic between quantum mechanics and a fully functional brain. Our soul is material, made up of neurons and other cells.
Just like a man-made machine, we are physical processes. We're just much better at self reference than the machines we build.
You've contradicted the statement that you made elsewhere - that it's the arrangement of atoms that matters. There's nothing magical about the processes, but the specific state matters.
The boundaries are not arbitrary, to the extent we can factor the configuration space. For instance, we can draw a rather sharp limit between me, and the keyboard I'm typing with.
The recognition of involuntary death as a terrible tragedy does not require the slightest fear of it.
I am also not afraid of illiteracy or racism though I also consider them terrible. If your ability to not fear death requires that you trivialize it, to pretend its something wholesome, then I regard that with the same kind of mild contempt that I hold for people justify their bigotry by convincing themselves that people of other creeds are inferior and so its /natural/ to discriminate against them.
I hardly think that a fictional child's excuses for committing genocide, themselves constituting a bit of an Author Tract by a writer with well known outspoken religious views on the proper nature of human interactions, is really much of a contribution here.
The suggested vague possibility of living forever doesn't force it on anyone, I wouldn't agree with that either. I think you should be free to stop existing on your own schedule.
With involuntary death removed, I think and hope that instead people would "die" a different way— by becoming different people over time, ending a chapter in their lives and adopting a new one, being reborn without ever dying, and hopefully conserving most of the best about themselves in the process.
