Well, please feel free to explain with absolute clarity and necessity; perhaps you’ll do so in that great philosophy book. I regret that, at least for me, you haven’t at all managed to do so yet. I can see that, e.g., writing a good philosophy book might seem more valuable to you if you only have one shot at it (though, er, it seems to me that it’s not unheard of for philosophers to write more than one good book in their lives), but I can’t imagine how you can think that’s not outweighed by being able to write more and better books. And if your expected productive lifespan were a thousand years, there would still be challenges big enough that you’d only get one shot at them. They’d just be bigger, harder challenges.
In other words, you’d get more done, you’d get better things done, you’d have better just-one-shot challenges to meet (perhaps: not “kiss the girl I loved the most” but “find someone I can live with happily for a thousand years”; not “write a really good philosophy book” but “definitively solve such-and-such a very deep philosophical problem”—though I bet these aren’t imaginative enough); what’s the downside, here?
Perhaps you think actual immortality would be worse somehow; I think that’s a more defensible proposition. But you actually claimed not merely “infinitely extended lives might turn out to be worse” but “even as they are, our lives are quite likely too long”. Stockholm syndrome, sorry.
Well, please feel free to explain with absolute clarity and necessity; perhaps you’ll do so in that great philosophy book. I regret that, at least for me, you haven’t at all managed to do so yet. I can see that, e.g., writing a good philosophy book might seem more valuable to you if you only have one shot at it (though, er, it seems to me that it’s not unheard of for philosophers to write more than one good book in their lives), but I can’t imagine how you can think that’s not outweighed by being able to write more and better books. And if your expected productive lifespan were a thousand years, there would still be challenges big enough that you’d only get one shot at them. They’d just be bigger, harder challenges.
In other words, you’d get more done, you’d get better things done, you’d have better just-one-shot challenges to meet (perhaps: not “kiss the girl I loved the most” but “find someone I can live with happily for a thousand years”; not “write a really good philosophy book” but “definitively solve such-and-such a very deep philosophical problem”—though I bet these aren’t imaginative enough); what’s the downside, here?
Perhaps you think actual immortality would be worse somehow; I think that’s a more defensible proposition. But you actually claimed not merely “infinitely extended lives might turn out to be worse” but “even as they are, our lives are quite likely too long”. Stockholm syndrome, sorry.