Since you seem to want to have people attempt to comment as advocates for death, and generate possible counter arguments to provoke new angles of thought, I accept your challenge and will try to come up with a plausible sounding argument for death and a self contained counter argument that you can consider.
Our finite universe simply cannot continue our exponential growth rates for a million years. For trillions of years thereafter, possibilities will be known and fixed, and for each person rather limited.
The article goes into it’s own details, but the general point is: Exponential growth eventually ends unless we simply have infinite space/resources. Hanson has several examples and he has run a variety of numbers.
So clearly, we simply have our immortal population producing new immortal babies at a constant rate, Unless we first gain such unlikely powers as generating new universes filled with such useful things as empty space and atoms out of thin air.
I’m willing to accept immortality as physically possible out to billions of years, but it seems stagnant. Let’s call this “Immortal Steady Population.”
And I’m willing to accept a 1% of the population forming new babies for billions of years, without immortality. Let’s call this “Death, with Babies.”
But I’m not willing to accept BOTH as physically possible. We run into Hanson’s exponential limits far before we reach billions of years. We can have, at best, “Immortal Steady Population” or “Death, but Babies.” But we can’t have “Immortals with Immortal Babies.” at least, not for any substantial amount of time, without infinite resources.
Our very existence revolves around spreading our genes and making new babies. I can’t accept not having that.
Therefore, to fulfill our life’s purpose as baby makers, we must allow ourselves to die at some point. Without death, life has no purpose.
Ending Death’s advocate.
Starting possible counter argument. I’ll call it “The Fusion Argument”:
Imagine if two immortals could fuse together in the future. You would take two unique individuals, and have them combine together into a single individual, who only needed one person’s worth of resources, and was still immortal. You then combine their genetic material, and make a fresh immortal baby, without the accompanying memories. So I and a fusion partner could accept being only “half people” by fusing into one being to diminish our resource use, and as a single “parent entity” we can have a new baby. The overall population doesn’t change, but no one individual actually dies. Instead, the “death” if it even makes sense to call it that anymore, is shared between the two people who want the new baby, who are forced to become one person to make up for what would otherwise be an untenable resource demand.
Also you could rearrange this further:
3 parents form 2 people and 1 new baby? That’s fine as well.
3 parents form 1 existing person and 2 new babies? If that’s what they want.
Two people fuse into one, but have the baby also take genetic material from a third person who is not personally diminished? Needless to say, there are a lot of possible combinations here.
Ending possible counter argument.
So given the choices I mentioned:
1: “Immortals with Immortal Babies.” (Impractical for long periods of time as per Hanson, without infinite resources)
2: “Immortal Steady Population” (No new Babies! Doesn’t appeal to people who feel the need to make new life.)
3: “Death, but Babies” (A standard argument for the way things are, but doesn’t allow for immortality.)
4: “The Fusion Argument” (A demonstration that there are other ways of handling things like death and new life.)
The Fusion Argument sounds like a pretty good. I gain all the benefits of immortality to begin with.
And if I want, I CAN have babies to make new life, and if I can find someone else to help and we can work out an appropriate division of our diminished cognitive/biological resources.
There might even be further possible states, although none immediately come to mind.
Do you find the argument and counter argument as presented interesting?
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.
This seems to fit a different context than the sort of argument being made by Linster. The primary objection to Linster is not a disagreement on what is possible but a disagreement on what is good, moral or just. Your argument is an argument primarily about possibility based on the physical constraints of our universe. I don’t think many people here will disagree with your assessment.
If for example it turned out that we could bend space and violate conservation of energy using some advanced technology to make the limitations you point out obsolete Linster’s argument seems to be that immortality would still be a very bad thing.
Since you seem to want to have people attempt to comment as advocates for death, and generate possible counter arguments to provoke new angles of thought, I accept your challenge and will try to come up with a plausible sounding argument for death and a self contained counter argument that you can consider.
Beginning Death’s advocate:
I’ll start off with a quote from Hanson: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/10/limits-of-imagination.html
The article goes into it’s own details, but the general point is: Exponential growth eventually ends unless we simply have infinite space/resources. Hanson has several examples and he has run a variety of numbers.
So clearly, we simply have our immortal population producing new immortal babies at a constant rate, Unless we first gain such unlikely powers as generating new universes filled with such useful things as empty space and atoms out of thin air.
I’m willing to accept immortality as physically possible out to billions of years, but it seems stagnant. Let’s call this “Immortal Steady Population.” And I’m willing to accept a 1% of the population forming new babies for billions of years, without immortality. Let’s call this “Death, with Babies.”
But I’m not willing to accept BOTH as physically possible. We run into Hanson’s exponential limits far before we reach billions of years. We can have, at best, “Immortal Steady Population” or “Death, but Babies.” But we can’t have “Immortals with Immortal Babies.” at least, not for any substantial amount of time, without infinite resources.
Our very existence revolves around spreading our genes and making new babies. I can’t accept not having that.
Therefore, to fulfill our life’s purpose as baby makers, we must allow ourselves to die at some point. Without death, life has no purpose.
Ending Death’s advocate.
Starting possible counter argument. I’ll call it “The Fusion Argument”:
Imagine if two immortals could fuse together in the future. You would take two unique individuals, and have them combine together into a single individual, who only needed one person’s worth of resources, and was still immortal. You then combine their genetic material, and make a fresh immortal baby, without the accompanying memories. So I and a fusion partner could accept being only “half people” by fusing into one being to diminish our resource use, and as a single “parent entity” we can have a new baby. The overall population doesn’t change, but no one individual actually dies. Instead, the “death” if it even makes sense to call it that anymore, is shared between the two people who want the new baby, who are forced to become one person to make up for what would otherwise be an untenable resource demand.
Also you could rearrange this further: 3 parents form 2 people and 1 new baby? That’s fine as well. 3 parents form 1 existing person and 2 new babies? If that’s what they want. Two people fuse into one, but have the baby also take genetic material from a third person who is not personally diminished? Needless to say, there are a lot of possible combinations here.
Ending possible counter argument.
So given the choices I mentioned:
1: “Immortals with Immortal Babies.” (Impractical for long periods of time as per Hanson, without infinite resources)
2: “Immortal Steady Population” (No new Babies! Doesn’t appeal to people who feel the need to make new life.)
3: “Death, but Babies” (A standard argument for the way things are, but doesn’t allow for immortality.)
4: “The Fusion Argument” (A demonstration that there are other ways of handling things like death and new life.)
The Fusion Argument sounds like a pretty good. I gain all the benefits of immortality to begin with.
And if I want, I CAN have babies to make new life, and if I can find someone else to help and we can work out an appropriate division of our diminished cognitive/biological resources.
There might even be further possible states, although none immediately come to mind.
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”.
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.
This seems to fit a different context than the sort of argument being made by Linster. The primary objection to Linster is not a disagreement on what is possible but a disagreement on what is good, moral or just. Your argument is an argument primarily about possibility based on the physical constraints of our universe. I don’t think many people here will disagree with your assessment.
If for example it turned out that we could bend space and violate conservation of energy using some advanced technology to make the limitations you point out obsolete Linster’s argument seems to be that immortality would still be a very bad thing.