Immortality seems to me like a meaningless concept, because the only hypothetical event that could define it (the end of time) would also deny it.
A more useful concept is actuarial life expectancy. To make that middling long, we need to defeat aging. That’s all but certain, and I don’t expect it to seriously alter humanity. To make it really long, we need to defeat such civilization-ending mischances as a local supernova. That means uploading and backups at minimum. To make it indefinite, we need a way to laugh in the face of entropy and duck away from string-theory universe collisions. No such a creature would be recognizably human.
This is neither an argument for or against, but it is an argument against such trite ideas as “ask me in a million years”. You won’t be you. There will be historical continuity, but almost no similarity.
I suppose that ties in to a Buddhist way of looking at time. The self is in the moment. You aren’t the same you from one instant to the next. Given that, what does dying mean? From one perspective, you’ve been doing nothing but dying since your remotest ancestor congealed out of loose nucleotides.
Immortality seems to me like a meaningless concept, because the only hypothetical event that could define it (the end of time) would also deny it.
A more useful concept is actuarial life expectancy. To make that middling long, we need to defeat aging. That’s all but certain, and I don’t expect it to seriously alter humanity. To make it really long, we need to defeat such civilization-ending mischances as a local supernova. That means uploading and backups at minimum. To make it indefinite, we need a way to laugh in the face of entropy and duck away from string-theory universe collisions. No such a creature would be recognizably human.
This is neither an argument for or against, but it is an argument against such trite ideas as “ask me in a million years”. You won’t be you. There will be historical continuity, but almost no similarity.
I suppose that ties in to a Buddhist way of looking at time. The self is in the moment. You aren’t the same you from one instant to the next. Given that, what does dying mean? From one perspective, you’ve been doing nothing but dying since your remotest ancestor congealed out of loose nucleotides.