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Immortality. That would be great. There would still be death...murder and what not.

 

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Economically, it would be better if we would live to say 50 or 60

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I want to live to whatever age I want to live to. And 80 years seems rather way too short for me. I have many plans, interstellar travel, new civilization, mathematical analysis, science exploration, fun with girls on the side, and lots upon lots of important stuff.

 

That would be sad because by the time you really want to die you life will suck.

 

the premise here buddy is that I will never want to die, because I am always occupied. Its one of those rhetorical statements/questions...Like when you were a lil tiny baby Enmos were you ever asked what would you do if you have a million dollars? well don't answer the question, noone cares. What is important here is what you chose to would be a profession you would choose to follow. Same here...all this bananza business to live forever is to be kept occupied always.

 

The thing is when you finally run out of things to do you still won't want to die.. You'll get miserable and more miserable until finally your life sucks so badly you'll want to kill yourself

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I have trouble understanding why anyone would choose to die. And why anyone would choose to place a limit on how long they would want to live.

There are only two states - existence or non-existence. If you choose non-existence there is no way back, you can no longer change your mind. Why would anyone choose that?

And 80 years, 150, 500, what the heck! At the beginning of the 20th century average life expectancy was around 44 and the concept of retirement didn't exist. Why not choose an arbitrary 50? Well no because we can now see that 80 is achievable. And over the next few decades or so we are likely to see 120 as achievable etc.

Imminst sponsored the writing of a book titled Live Long Enough to Live Forever, at least I think that was the title or at least the point. The observation is that science and especially medical science is finding ways to enable us to live longer and with each new breakthrough we are pushing the average lifespan further out. But those of us now who are perhaps in their 50s like me are at a point where there is a race between the pace of aging decline and the rate at which medical science can keep me going. The idea is that I must fight hard to stay healthy as long as possible so that medical science can just stay ahead of that aging curve to the point where it is finally cured. I remain hopeful.

And I don't see that man will stop evolving because he is immortal. It is more that his evolution will speed up and be self directed rather than left to the whim of random mutations. I'm quite sure I would want brain implants and every possible enhancement to enable me to take on ever increasing challenges that the universe would present or what I might choose to explore or try.

The universe is vast and even if I live for a trillion years I would only have a chance to see a fraction of it. I'm just very curious to see how much I will achieve in such a time.

If you choose death you lose all your options - I just don't get that choice.

 

For the future; for evolution; for new ideas, concepts and societies.

In a million years I'd be an obsolete life form, a museum curiousity. My ideas about right and just would be archaic and would hamper the social evolution. Like Kali I better free the world from me, when my natural time comes, so it can evolve, change, improve.

 

dragon,

Huh?

 

avatar,

If you were to time jump a million years into the future then sure you would be a relic. But why oh why assume that you would not be able to undergo constant and frequent changes and upgrades. Even genetic engineering now is showing great promise for many potential biological enhancements and then of course my favorite of mind uploading that gives no end in sight for progress.

What is a natural time for you to go? To die because of the aging disease we haven't cured yet?

 

You are talking only about biological development, I am talking also about social, philosophical, artistic development.
Besides, could a single celled organism in the primodial Earth be so genetically upgraded and changed to make it into a human and for it to still retain some remains of that personality?

What if the first generation of life on Earth wouldn't have died?
The old thing has to die, for a new one to be born.

Time and time again we look on the natural world for scientific inspiration, if there wouldn't have been any birds, would we have mastered flight? Maybe yes, mayb no.

My point is that we may be too limited to imagine or to do the development that nature can do on its own.

Please don't take this personally, because I don't mean it like that, but there are reasons why I find religious people funny because they think that human is the pinnacle of life, made into an image of god,
there are similar reasons, why I find people seeking to become immortal alike, because they can't imagine that they could be an obstacle for yet higher life forms of becoming, having the arrogance to think that they can make an image of god* from themselves.

* I mean that just as a concept, not a literal daddy in the sky.

Or maybe it's people thinking like me that have to die off, so people like you can create an immortal humankind. And maybe, just maybe in the end it would have been a mistake.

 

I'm interested in the mind upload idea (from a philosophical, not realistic perspective). I'm picturing you getting the essence of your mind read and then your behavior patterns get written on a permanent electronic analog.

But, like... what then? What about your body? As I see it, you're making some form of electronic duplicate of yourself, but you'd still be around, in your body, as usual. Is this what you mean?

 

Exhumed,

Yes, essentially there would be two of you, and the issue of what to do with your bio version is a matter of much debate.

For the moment though the brain scanning process needed to achieve the resolution required is destructive. The best mechanism is to thinly slice the brain into thousands of very thin slices and scan each one while building a 3D image. You'll be dead of course.

Other scanners that need to penetrate deep into the brain would need so much energy to achieve the resolution that the radiation would fry your brain. Again you are dead.

But assuming technology can scan and not kill then yes you are correct - what to do with your bio self?

I think that once enough checks have been completed to ensure the upload was accurate then I'd choose to dispose of my bio body. An alternative might be to put it in some form of cryogenic state to save it in case of later if an error was found in the upload and a reference to the original was needed.

Ideally though once an upload process had completed there should be a smooth transition where the bio body is destroyed and the new electronic/mechanical version takes over.

Now there is a further complication relating to identity. Your brain patterns would now be in a digital form and easily copied, you'd want to keep back-ups in any case, but instant cloning now becomes really easy. There might be practical limitations on this assuming you want to exist in some form of android shell - I would imagine the cost of such precise mechanisms plus the huge processing power and portable energy sources would be extremely high. Being able to afford multiple copies might not be feasible for most. But if you did have multiple copies of yourself how would you assign identities and what about property ownership etc, etc.?

But another alternate to android shells would be to simply have your image run as a process inside a super computing virtual world and exist in that form. I could see that would be attractive for many but I think I’d prefer to have that android shell and be free to explore the universe in a more traditional way.

 

Immortality = Infinite boredom unless accompanied by health and mental acuity.

 

I believe that the concept of the word “I” will change if mind uploading becomes a reality. I can imagine a world where the word “we” would be used more frequently. People that are interested in things like Transhumanism, immortality, and the so-called singularity spend a lot of time speculating about what the future will be like, but I don’t think there is any way for us to really comprehend what it would be like to exist as an enhanced human. We can imagine what it would like to have genetically enhanced bodies and cybernetic implants, but things can get very confusing once you add things like advanced artificial intelligence and mind uploading to the mix. That is when people start asking questions like, should self-aware A.I or digital copies of people be entitled to the same rights that biological humans have? I think it is too early for anyone to answer these questions correctly because a futuristic society with all of this advanced technology would be very different from the world that we are living in. Most Sci-Fi television shows and movies do a poor job of showing what the future would be like with advanced technology. They do a good job of displaying the futuristic technology, but the characters (A.I, aliens, and humans) are usually thinking and acting like present day humans. I can imagine a futuristic race of humans that is similar to the Borg on Star Trek, but without all of the evil robot stuff. I explained it in the link below.

http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?p=1232775#post1232775

 

In that case, I call it suicide.

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The transition is what I'm curious about. It seems to me that you are just getting copied, not becoming immortal. You'll have a very grateful, immortal copy, but you're dead.

Though this depends on opinion. Is being alive any different than having a continuous new copy in place? :scratchin: I get uncomfortable entertaining that idea

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In that case, the upload would be like becoming immortal, IMO. Otherwise no.

I'm interested in the implications it has on how to look at being alive.

Another thing I wonder about... If we accept this upload as immortal, then it applies immortality in other ways, which already exist. Like the common one of having children continue on (ignoring the fact that children are often substantially different for now), or similar people in the future having your essence of character.

If we are really just our behavior patterns than we already have immortality I think...

 

Avatar,

The longer I live the more I learn about such different things. In a very short lifetime of say 100 years most people are only able to absorb one profession or one area of expertise before they become too decrepit to absorb anything new. With an open ended lifespan with perfect health there are no limits to what one could absorb, adapt, imagine and create. I really don’t see you have a valid point here. The biological changes and upgrades come as a result of a desire to stay current and to adapt and be able to accomplish new things and create new ideas.

I don’t understand what point you were trying to make here.

And has to start all over again learning all the mistakes the previous generation made, again and again. If the first generation didn’t die then it could have progressed much further basing new achievements on past learnt experiences and knowledge.

It always seems to me so sad that so many great people reach pinnacles of achievement and have so much potential to do so much more and then old age catches and kills them before they can progress. I see no value in people constantly dying to be replaced by others who have to start from square one again.

Random positive natural mutations that survive occur over millions of years, whereas intelligent directed changes would occur in decades, or at least centuries. These are huge orders of magnitude. I don’t see you have a point in trying to assert an advantage of very long term slow random changes over something being driven by intelligent rational fast based needs.

I have no such illusions or aspirations and I have no interest of what might be superior to me. My only interest is my own long term personal survival. If my lack of death blocks the development of something superior then good since I have no interest in their survival over mine.

A mistake for who? I have no interest in what might occur if I die, I wouldn’t be around to know about it.

 

SAM,

Implied.