I want to die so my biological children can replace me: there is something essentially beautiful about it all. It speaks to life and nature, both which I have a great deal of esteem for.
That said, I don’t mind life extension research but anything that threatens to end all biological life or essentially kill a human to replace it with a shadowy undead digital copy are both not worth it for it.
As another has mentioned, a lot of our fundamental values come from the opportunities and limitations of biology: fundamentally losing that eventually leads to a world without life, love or meaning. As we are holobioants, each change will have substantial downstream loss and likely not to a good end.
As far as I am concerned, immortality comes from reproduction and the vast array of behaviors around it are fundamentally beautiful and worthwhile.
I don’t mind it: but not in a way that wipes out my descendants, which is pretty likely with AGI.
I would much rather die than to have a world without life and love, and as noted before, I think a lot of our mores and values as a species comes from reproduction. Immortality will decrease the value of replacement and thus, those values.
By this reasoning, why is the current lifespan perfect, except by astonishingly unlikely chance? If it’s so good to have death because it makes replacement valuable, maybe reducing lifespan by 10 years would make replacement even more valuable?
what if we could augment reproduction to no longer lose minds, so that when you have kids, they retain your memories in some significant form? I agree with you that current reproduction is special, passing on the informational “soul” of the body, but I want to be able to pass on more of my perspective than just body directly. of course, it would need to still not be setting the main self, not like an adult growing up again, but rather a child who grows into having the full memory of all their ancestors.
But then, perhaps, what if those digital copies you mentioned were instead biological copies, biological backups—a brain and mind stored cryonically, and neurally linkable with telepathy to allow sharing significant parts of your memory, your informational “soul” data, with others? what if you could be immortal but become slower over time, as your older perspective is no longer really fitting into the reality of the descendants, and you can be available should they wish to come learn from your perspective, but ultimately leaving it up to them whether to wake you this year?
If we first assume an improving society that can achieve such things, there are so many gradations between current reproduction and “no more reproduction and everyone’s immortal” to consider...
I don’t think dying is what makes reproduction useful as a strategy, whether we choose to find
it beautiful or not—I think the need to reinitialize brains and bodies in order to learn a new way of being for a new context is what makes it valuable. And right now, in exchange for that ongoing reinitialization and clean-slate of children, we are losing the wisdom of the elders every generation. (not to mention how as people get old, their brains break in a more total way and many of them get more cranky and prejudiced, at least on average. that part can probably be fixed with straightforward healing-the-body healthcare, not drastic life extension stuff, people are nicer when their lives suck less.)
But you do pass on your consciousness in a significant way to your children through education, communication and relationships and there is an entire set of admirable behaviors selected around that.
I generally am less opposed to any biological strategy, though the dissolution of the self into copies would definitely bring up issues. But I do think that anything biological has significant advantages in that ultimate relatedness to being, and moreover in the promotion of life: biology is made up of trillions of individual cells, all arguably agentic, which coordinate marvelously into a holobioant and through which endless deaths and waste all transform into more life through nutrient recycling.
yeah, sounds like we’re mostly on the same page, I’m just excessively optimistic about the possibilities of technology and how much more we could pass on than current education, I do agree that it is a sliver of passing on consciousness, but generally my view is we should be at least able to end forgetting completely, instead turning all forgetting into moving-knowledge-and-selfhood-to-cold-archive. personally I’d prefer for nearly ~all live computation to be ~biological, I want to become a fully general shapeshifter before I pass on my information. I’m pretty sure the tech will be there in the next 40 years, based on the beginnings that michael levin’s research is giving.
(but, also, I’m hoping to live for about 1k to 10k years as a new kind of hyper-efficient deep-space post-carbon “biology” I suspect is possible, so in that respect I am still probably pretty far from your viewpoint! I wanna live in a low gravity superstructure around pluto...)
I want to die so my biological children can replace me: there is something essentially beautiful about it all. It speaks to life and nature, both which I have a great deal of esteem for.
That said, I don’t mind life extension research but anything that threatens to end all biological life or essentially kill a human to replace it with a shadowy undead digital copy are both not worth it for it.
As another has mentioned, a lot of our fundamental values come from the opportunities and limitations of biology: fundamentally losing that eventually leads to a world without life, love or meaning. As we are holobioants, each change will have substantial downstream loss and likely not to a good end.
As far as I am concerned, immortality comes from reproduction and the vast array of behaviors around it are fundamentally beautiful and worthwhile.
Why not go on living alongside your descendants?
I’m with Woody Allen, in preferring immortality to come from not dying.
I don’t mind it: but not in a way that wipes out my descendants, which is pretty likely with AGI.
I would much rather die than to have a world without life and love, and as noted before, I think a lot of our mores and values as a species comes from reproduction. Immortality will decrease the value of replacement and thus, those values.
By this reasoning, why is the current lifespan perfect, except by astonishingly unlikely chance? If it’s so good to have death because it makes replacement valuable, maybe reducing lifespan by 10 years would make replacement even more valuable?
what if we could augment reproduction to no longer lose minds, so that when you have kids, they retain your memories in some significant form? I agree with you that current reproduction is special, passing on the informational “soul” of the body, but I want to be able to pass on more of my perspective than just body directly. of course, it would need to still not be setting the main self, not like an adult growing up again, but rather a child who grows into having the full memory of all their ancestors.
But then, perhaps, what if those digital copies you mentioned were instead biological copies, biological backups—a brain and mind stored cryonically, and neurally linkable with telepathy to allow sharing significant parts of your memory, your informational “soul” data, with others? what if you could be immortal but become slower over time, as your older perspective is no longer really fitting into the reality of the descendants, and you can be available should they wish to come learn from your perspective, but ultimately leaving it up to them whether to wake you this year?
If we first assume an improving society that can achieve such things, there are so many gradations between current reproduction and “no more reproduction and everyone’s immortal” to consider...
I don’t think dying is what makes reproduction useful as a strategy, whether we choose to find it beautiful or not—I think the need to reinitialize brains and bodies in order to learn a new way of being for a new context is what makes it valuable. And right now, in exchange for that ongoing reinitialization and clean-slate of children, we are losing the wisdom of the elders every generation. (not to mention how as people get old, their brains break in a more total way and many of them get more cranky and prejudiced, at least on average. that part can probably be fixed with straightforward healing-the-body healthcare, not drastic life extension stuff, people are nicer when their lives suck less.)
But you do pass on your consciousness in a significant way to your children through education, communication and relationships and there is an entire set of admirable behaviors selected around that.
I generally am less opposed to any biological strategy, though the dissolution of the self into copies would definitely bring up issues. But I do think that anything biological has significant advantages in that ultimate relatedness to being, and moreover in the promotion of life: biology is made up of trillions of individual cells, all arguably agentic, which coordinate marvelously into a holobioant and through which endless deaths and waste all transform into more life through nutrient recycling.
yeah, sounds like we’re mostly on the same page, I’m just excessively optimistic about the possibilities of technology and how much more we could pass on than current education, I do agree that it is a sliver of passing on consciousness, but generally my view is we should be at least able to end forgetting completely, instead turning all forgetting into moving-knowledge-and-selfhood-to-cold-archive. personally I’d prefer for nearly ~all live computation to be ~biological, I want to become a fully general shapeshifter before I pass on my information. I’m pretty sure the tech will be there in the next 40 years, based on the beginnings that michael levin’s research is giving.
(but, also, I’m hoping to live for about 1k to 10k years as a new kind of hyper-efficient deep-space post-carbon “biology” I suspect is possible, so in that respect I am still probably pretty far from your viewpoint! I wanna live in a low gravity superstructure around pluto...)