Greg Linster on the beauty of death

Jonathan_Graehl

Without death we cannot truly have life. As such, what a travesty of life it would be to achieve a machine-like immortality!

Gray writes the following chilling lines: “If you understand that in wanting to live for ever you are trying to preserve a lifeless image of yourself, you may not want to be resurrected or to survive in a post-mortem paradise. What could be more deadly than being unable to die?” (my emphasis)

via.

Sounds like sour grapes. I'd heard of people holding such sentiments; this is the first time I've actually seen them expressed myself.

Without death we cannot truly have life. As such, what a travesty of life it would be to achieve a machine-like immortality!

Gray writes the following chilling lines: “If you understand that in wanting to live for ever you are trying to preserve a lifeless image of yourself, you may not want to be resurrected or to survive in a post-mortem paradise. What could be more deadly than being unable to die?” (my emphasis)

via.

Sounds like sour grapes. I'd heard of people holding such sentiments; this is the first time I've actually seen them expressed myself.

Do you find the argument and counter argument as presented interesting?

I really do. I was very fairly convinced by Death's Advocate, but then the counter argument blew it out of the water. Fusing to form babies sounds like a fun thing to look forward to, and mediates the problem of everyone who wants to being able to create a completely new consciousness without exponential growth.

Generalizing, I imagine that any 'resource-type' problem could be solved with some ingenuity. That's not the problem I anticipated however.

The problem that I anticipate is one of goals and values. If we should be immortal -- truly invincible, for example through a medium that is indestructible or as information that is easily stored and copied and thus disposable -- then what goals could we have? I wonder then if there would be anything to do?

Most of our current goals regard self-preservation or self-continuation in one way or another. I suppose another set of goals regards aesthetics, creating and observing art or something like that. Still, this activates associations in my brain with building towers to nowhere and wireheading.

I'm concerned that this 'argument' is just nihilism popping its head out where it spots an opprtunity, due to the extreme 'far-ness' of the idea of immortality, but nevertheless, I think this is closer to what Gray was driving at with his claim that "immortality is lifeless".

If we should be immortal -- truly invincible, for example through a medium that is indestructible or as information that is easily stored and copied and thus disposable -- then what goals could we have? I wonder then if there would be anything to do?

From HP:MoR, Chapter 39, Pretending to be Wise, Pt. 1:

"I have lived a hundred and ten years," the old wizard said quietly (taking his beard out of the bowl, and jiggling it to shake out the color). "I have seen and done a great many things, too many of which I wish I had never seen or done.

... (read more)

5Nornagest15y

If we self-consciously value the futile pursuit of self-continuation over actual self-continuation, it seems to me that something's gone seriously wrong somewhere. I also think that some serious inferential distance problems show up for almost everyone when they start thinking about perfect immortality, ones that tend to be wrongly generalized to various imperfect forms of life extension. But that's less immediately relevant.

7Desrtopa15y

Personally, I can't think of a single goal of mine that is strictly contingent on my dying at any point in the future.