I can only speak for myself, but I think most of us are defining “immortality” as “living for at least a million years” rather than Greg Egan’s “Not, dying after a very long time; just not dying, ever.”
Now I certainly have no moral objection to the latter state of affairs. As I sometimes like to tell people, “I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers.”
But flippant remarks aside, I’m not sure how I feel about real immortality, if such a thing should be physically permissible. Do I want to live longer than a billion years, live longer than a trillion years, live longer than a googolplex years, live longer than Graham’s Number, live so long it has to be expressed in Conway chained arrow notation, live longer than Busy_Beaver(100)?
Note that I say “live longer than Graham’s Number”, not “live longer than Graham’s Number years/seconds/millennia”, because these are all essentially the same number. Living for this amount of time does not just require the ability to circumvent thermodynamics, it requires the ability to build custom universes with custom laws of physics. And the vast majority of integers are very much larger than that, or even Busy_Beaver(100). Perhaps this is possible. Perhaps not.
The emotional connection that I feel to my future self who’s lived for Graham’s Number is pretty much nil, on its own. But my self of tomorrow, with whom I identify very strongly, will be just a tiny bit closer. As I fulfill or abandon old goals, I will adopt new ones. The connection may be vicarious, but it is there.
And I certainly see a very great difference between humanity continuing forever, versus humanity continuing to Graham’s Number and then halting; a difference very much worth dying for. (It follows that my discount rate is 1.)
So, as I usually tell people:
“Do I want to live forever? I don’t know. Ask me again in a million years. Maybe then I’ll have decided how I feel about immortality. I am a short-term thinker; I take my life one eon at a time.”
I can only speak for myself, but I think most of us are defining “immortality” as “living for at least a million years” rather than Greg Egan’s “Not, dying after a very long time; just not dying, ever.”
Now I certainly have no moral objection to the latter state of affairs. As I sometimes like to tell people, “I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers.”
But flippant remarks aside, I’m not sure how I feel about real immortality, if such a thing should be physically permissible. Do I want to live longer than a billion years, live longer than a trillion years, live longer than a googolplex years, live longer than Graham’s Number, live so long it has to be expressed in Conway chained arrow notation, live longer than Busy_Beaver(100)?
Note that I say “live longer than Graham’s Number”, not “live longer than Graham’s Number years/seconds/millennia”, because these are all essentially the same number. Living for this amount of time does not just require the ability to circumvent thermodynamics, it requires the ability to build custom universes with custom laws of physics. And the vast majority of integers are very much larger than that, or even Busy_Beaver(100). Perhaps this is possible. Perhaps not.
The emotional connection that I feel to my future self who’s lived for Graham’s Number is pretty much nil, on its own. But my self of tomorrow, with whom I identify very strongly, will be just a tiny bit closer. As I fulfill or abandon old goals, I will adopt new ones. The connection may be vicarious, but it is there.
And I certainly see a very great difference between humanity continuing forever, versus humanity continuing to Graham’s Number and then halting; a difference very much worth dying for. (It follows that my discount rate is 1.)
So, as I usually tell people:
“Do I want to live forever? I don’t know. Ask me again in a million years. Maybe then I’ll have decided how I feel about immortality. I am a short-term thinker; I take my life one eon at a time.”
You can’t use “humanity” and “Graham’s Number” in the same sentence.