Do you find the argument and counter argument as presented interesting?
I really do. I was very fairly convinced by Death’s Advocate, but then the counter argument blew it out of the water. Fusing to form babies sounds like a fun thing to look forward to, and mediates the problem of everyone who wants to being able to create a completely new consciousness without exponential growth.
Generalizing, I imagine that any ‘resource-type’ problem could be solved with some ingenuity. That’s not the problem I anticipated however.
The problem that I anticipate is one of goals and values. If we should be immortal—truly invincible, for example through a medium that is indestructible or as information that is easily stored and copied and thus disposable—then what goals could we have? I wonder then if there would be anything to do?
Most of our current goals regard self-preservation or self-continuation in one way or another. I suppose another set of goals regards aesthetics, creating and observing art or something like that. Still, this activates associations in my brain with building towers to nowhere and wireheading.
I’m concerned that this ‘argument’ is just nihilism popping its head out where it spots an opprtunity, due to the extreme ‘far-ness’ of the idea of immortality, but nevertheless, I think this is closer to what Gray was driving at with his claim that “immortality is lifeless”.
If we should be immortal—truly invincible, for example through a medium that is indestructible or as information that is easily stored and copied and thus disposable—then what goals could we have? I wonder then if there would be anything to do?
From HP:MoR, Chapter 39, Pretending to be Wise, Pt. 1:
“I have lived a hundred and ten years,” the old wizard said quietly (taking his beard out of the bowl, and jiggling it to shake out the color). “I have seen and done a great many things, too many of which I wish I had never seen or done. And yet I do not regret being alive, for watching my students grow is a joy that has not begun to wear on me. But I would not wish to live so long that it does! What would you do with eternity, Harry?”
Harry took a deep breath. “Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild’s tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild’s hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we’ve explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I’m a lot more hopeful now that I’ve discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines.”
The problem that I anticipate is one of goals and values. If we should be immortal—truly invincible, for example through a medium that is indestructible or as information that is easily stored and copied and thus disposable—then what goals could we have? I wonder then if there would be anything to do?
Personally, I can’t think of a single goal of mine that is strictly contingent on my dying at any point in the future.
I suspect that this sort of approach may come from imagining “immortality” as a story that you’re reading—where’s the suspense, the conflict, if there’s no real danger? But if you instead imagine it as being your life, except it goes on for a longer time, the question becomes—do you actually enjoy being confronted with mortal danger?
Or, put another way: I’d lay odds that most people would have more fun playing Dungeons and Dragons than Russian Roulette.
If we should be immortal—truly invincible, for example through a medium that is indestructible or as information that is easily stored and copied and thus disposable—then what goals could we have? [,,,] Most of our current goals regard self-preservation or self-continuation in one way or another.
If we self-consciously value the futile pursuit of self-continuation over actual self-continuation, it seems to me that something’s gone seriously wrong somewhere.
I also think that some serious inferential distance problems show up for almost everyone when they start thinking about perfect immortality, ones that tend to be wrongly generalized to various imperfect forms of life extension. But that’s less immediately relevant.
If we self-consciously value the futile pursuit of self-continuation over actual self-continuation, it seems to me that something’s gone seriously wrong somewhere.
Just because that would be a ridiculous way to be, doesn’t mean it isn’t that way. (We weren’t designed afterall.) Suppose underlying every one of our goals is the terminal goal to continue forever. (It seems reasonable that this could be the purpose of most of our goals, since that would be the goals of evolution.) Then it makes sense that we might report ‘shrug’ in response to the question, ‘what goals would you have if you were already in a state of living forever’?
It would be necessary to just observe what the case is, regarding our goal structure. It seems that some people (Gray, and myself to some extent) anticipate that life would be meaningless. I think this might be a minority view, but still perhaps in the tens of percents?
I also allow that it is one thing to anticipate what our goals would be verses what they actually would be. I anticipated I wouldn’t have any goals if I stopped believing in God, but then I still did.
Just because that would be a ridiculous way to be, doesn’t mean it isn’t that way. (We weren’t designed afterall.)
That lack of design is precisely what makes me skeptical of the idea that the pursuit of self-continuation can be generalized that far. When I look at people’s goals, I see a lot of second- or third-degree correlates of self-continuation, but outside the immediate threat of death they don’t seem to be psychologically linked to continued life in any deep or particularly consistent way. Compared to frameworks like status signaling or reproductive fitness, in fact, self-preservation strikes me as a conspicuously weak base for generalized human goal structure.
All of which is more or less what I’d expect. We are adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers. Even if self-continuation was a proper terminal value, it wouldn’t be very likely that whatever component of our minds handles goal structure would actually implement that in terms of expected life years (if it did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation); in the face of perfect immortality we’re more likely to be left with many disconnected sub-values pointing towards survival-correlates which very likely could still be pursued. Contemporary people still happily pursue goals which were rendered thoroughly suboptimal upon leaving the EEA, after all; why should this be different?
And on top of all that, I suspect the entire question’s largely irrelevant; since individual self-preservation is only loosely coupled to genetic, memetic, or societal fitness, I’d be very surprised if it turned out to be a coherent top-level goal in many people. The selection pressures all point in other directions.
Yeah, I do agree with you. I would probably continue to care about all the same things if I were to live forever, such as getting along with my coworkers and eating yummy food. I might have time to seek training in a different profession, but I would still be working, and I certainly don’t eat now just to keep alive.
I’ll locate this sympathetic feeling I have with Gray as just another version of the nihilistic, angsty tendencies some of us wrestle with.
I think it would be nice to hear in more detail exactly what Gray meant...
However, empirically, I don’t think this is the case. Since we are so messy, we probably don’t have a feature to make desires for sex, power, companionship, exercise, etc. vanish when we attain immortality. We will probably just go on desiring those things, perhaps in somewhat different ways.
I really do. I was very fairly convinced by Death’s Advocate, but then the counter argument blew it out of the water. Fusing to form babies sounds like a fun thing to look forward to, and mediates the problem of everyone who wants to being able to create a completely new consciousness without exponential growth.
Generalizing, I imagine that any ‘resource-type’ problem could be solved with some ingenuity. That’s not the problem I anticipated however.
The problem that I anticipate is one of goals and values. If we should be immortal—truly invincible, for example through a medium that is indestructible or as information that is easily stored and copied and thus disposable—then what goals could we have? I wonder then if there would be anything to do?
Most of our current goals regard self-preservation or self-continuation in one way or another. I suppose another set of goals regards aesthetics, creating and observing art or something like that. Still, this activates associations in my brain with building towers to nowhere and wireheading.
I’m concerned that this ‘argument’ is just nihilism popping its head out where it spots an opprtunity, due to the extreme ‘far-ness’ of the idea of immortality, but nevertheless, I think this is closer to what Gray was driving at with his claim that “immortality is lifeless”.
From HP:MoR, Chapter 39, Pretending to be Wise, Pt. 1:
Personally, I can’t think of a single goal of mine that is strictly contingent on my dying at any point in the future.
I guess I meant more long-term goals.
What would be the purpose of having and controlling resources if you were already going to live forever?
I suspect that this sort of approach may come from imagining “immortality” as a story that you’re reading—where’s the suspense, the conflict, if there’s no real danger? But if you instead imagine it as being your life, except it goes on for a longer time, the question becomes—do you actually enjoy being confronted with mortal danger?
Or, put another way: I’d lay odds that most people would have more fun playing Dungeons and Dragons than Russian Roulette.
Improving your quality of life?
Having and controlling resources isn’t a terminal goal for me, and I suspect that anyone who treats it as one has lost track of what they really want.
“Die awesomely”—but it’s a rather low priority goal...
I decided a long time ago that it would be much cooler to repeatedly fake my death until all reports that I’ve died are regarded as implausible.
If we self-consciously value the futile pursuit of self-continuation over actual self-continuation, it seems to me that something’s gone seriously wrong somewhere.
I also think that some serious inferential distance problems show up for almost everyone when they start thinking about perfect immortality, ones that tend to be wrongly generalized to various imperfect forms of life extension. But that’s less immediately relevant.
Just because that would be a ridiculous way to be, doesn’t mean it isn’t that way. (We weren’t designed afterall.) Suppose underlying every one of our goals is the terminal goal to continue forever. (It seems reasonable that this could be the purpose of most of our goals, since that would be the goals of evolution.) Then it makes sense that we might report ‘shrug’ in response to the question, ‘what goals would you have if you were already in a state of living forever’?
It would be necessary to just observe what the case is, regarding our goal structure. It seems that some people (Gray, and myself to some extent) anticipate that life would be meaningless. I think this might be a minority view, but still perhaps in the tens of percents?
I also allow that it is one thing to anticipate what our goals would be verses what they actually would be. I anticipated I wouldn’t have any goals if I stopped believing in God, but then I still did.
That lack of design is precisely what makes me skeptical of the idea that the pursuit of self-continuation can be generalized that far. When I look at people’s goals, I see a lot of second- or third-degree correlates of self-continuation, but outside the immediate threat of death they don’t seem to be psychologically linked to continued life in any deep or particularly consistent way. Compared to frameworks like status signaling or reproductive fitness, in fact, self-preservation strikes me as a conspicuously weak base for generalized human goal structure.
All of which is more or less what I’d expect. We are adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers. Even if self-continuation was a proper terminal value, it wouldn’t be very likely that whatever component of our minds handles goal structure would actually implement that in terms of expected life years (if it did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation); in the face of perfect immortality we’re more likely to be left with many disconnected sub-values pointing towards survival-correlates which very likely could still be pursued. Contemporary people still happily pursue goals which were rendered thoroughly suboptimal upon leaving the EEA, after all; why should this be different?
And on top of all that, I suspect the entire question’s largely irrelevant; since individual self-preservation is only loosely coupled to genetic, memetic, or societal fitness, I’d be very surprised if it turned out to be a coherent top-level goal in many people. The selection pressures all point in other directions.
Yeah, I do agree with you. I would probably continue to care about all the same things if I were to live forever, such as getting along with my coworkers and eating yummy food. I might have time to seek training in a different profession, but I would still be working, and I certainly don’t eat now just to keep alive.
I’ll locate this sympathetic feeling I have with Gray as just another version of the nihilistic, angsty tendencies some of us wrestle with.
I think it would be nice to hear in more detail exactly what Gray meant...
Insofar as evolution can be said to have goals, continuation of the individual is definitely not one of them.
Grouchy response retracted..
However, empirically, I don’t think this is the case. Since we are so messy, we probably don’t have a feature to make desires for sex, power, companionship, exercise, etc. vanish when we attain immortality. We will probably just go on desiring those things, perhaps in somewhat different ways.