get yourself uploaded to a computer, so you can stay alive indefinitely. I think it’d be horrible to give up food, sex, exercise, and the rest of our bodily experience, even if we posit that you can still somehow retain your visual qualia.
I will be nice rather than mean, and explain why this is wrong.
We already have artificial deices that help the blind see. We can take the signals from an amputee's brain and use them to move an artificial limb. We understand how the ear works - there are different nerves for different frequencies. Artificial taste would be pretty trivial, but isn't as good without artificial smell, which seems the hardest of all the senses. To assume that a brain simulated on a computer in 100 years won't be able to hear, touch, taste, or smell is incredibly naive about the workings of the human body and the progress that's being made right now.
Not to mention that all of your parts that can be cut off without making you stop being you, like eyes or limbs, might already best be viewed as squishy prosthetics instead of fundamental parts of your true being. Ari Heljakka has written about this stuff, unfortunately in Finnish. I wonder if his Model Zero book has something about it.
One futuristic approach to the problem: get yourself uploaded to a computer, so you can stay alive indefinitely. I think it’d be horrible to give up food, sex, exercise, and the rest of our bodily experience, even if we posit that you can still somehow retain your visual qualia.
Weird that he assumes you could keep "visual qualia" but not the other senses/experiences.
I think it’d be horrible to give up food, sex, exercise, and the rest of our bodily experience
Then don't. Does it not count if it's virtual? Even if you're dead set on a physical body, why do you care whether the brain that's controlling it is made of meat or silicon?
Perhaps you could hibernate for fifty years at a time
Why would you do that? That's fifty years that you're not living. If you do that after each year, you'll only live a fiftieth as long. Also, there's the problem if everyone does that: https://xkcd.com/989/
My personal opinion is that problems like these will be solved in a very mundane and brutal way. Future people will be much closer to "fitness maximizer" concept than homo sapiens is, and ideas like humanism will be abandoned. Physical immortality does not mean living forever if leading causes of death are war, murder and capital punishment.
Meeehhhhh. Ok, I'm going to slightly dissent and note that we're on our way to creating a second rise of fascism at the moment in much of the Western world. That is, even though our economies and societies are easily capable of keeping everyone alive, on a collective level we're currently choosing to force large numbers of people into Survival Mode, which frankly is an even greater mindkiller than blue-green politics. Get large numbers of people into Survival Mode and they start making really stupid decisions, like marching down the streets of the capital yelling "Jews out!" and demanding a strengthening of the military... in an EU member-state with barely any Jews in it.
Did I just refer to France or Greece? Both.
On the other hand, I don't think population trends really allow for militarization and total war anymore, and the rise of Asia means that someone's around to smack Europe and America when they get too stupid.
So we could be looking at some waves of terrorist violence if public policy remains terminally obstinate about forcing people into their brain's mind-killed survival mode no matter the material facts, but probably not another Great War.
As a model, look at expat communities in e.g. China, where people who are willing living in a strange environment get the relief of sitting down and relaxing with people who have a shared cultural background. If the cryonics thing works out, I wouldn't be surprised if Alcor clients became a very tight-knit social group in the far future.
The last line in the article is my favorite:
"Evolution, we could say, has found a simpler solution yet: reproduction. You get new people with the genetic heritage of the species, but neotenous and adaptable to the current environment."
It is ironic to me that death, as a part of the mechanism of natural selection, has brought about creatures who seek to invent methods to eliminate it.
Death, after reproduction, works as a part of a process to advance a given species' levels of fitness.
It is ironic to me that death, as a part of the mechanism of natural selection, has brought about creatures who seek to invent methods to eliminate it.
The irony is that DNA and its associated machinery, as close as it is to a Turing Machine, did not become sentient and avoid the concept of individual death. The universe would make much more sense if we were DNA-based computers that cared about our genes because they were literally our own thoughts and memories and internal experience.
Or perhaps DNA did became sentient and decided to embark on a grand AGI project that resulted in Unfriendly multi-cellular life...
Death, long lives, uploading
Mark Rosenfelder (aka zompist, of language construction kit fame) writes about the advantages and drawbacks of mortality and its alternatives, in fiction and real life. Rosenfelder, as an author, clearly takes Fun Theory very seriously. After discussing the mental and physical decline that age usually entail, he assumes that the most difficult to surmount of these problems will be the loss of mental flexibility and tolerance of novelty. He then uses this obstacle to offer interesting fun-theoretic arguments against uploading and cryonics:
And how he addressed the issue in his own far-future conworld: