when people argue immortality bad from the assumption that its magical indestructible immortality it always feels disingenuous, because its literally impossible. any form of immortality thats achievable in reality will be the live forever but can still die variety, so there will always be the threat/promise of death by some means, however difficult. it bothers me because its used as an argument against seeking biological immortality in real life, like theres some cosmic purpose to us dieing after such a short life and actually living much longer than we do would suck, and people should be happy they get old and wrinkly and die. it wouldn’t suck it would be awesome because we’d live to see other planets, other stars, fucking aliens. I could go on but yeah, immortality good, impossible hypothetical infinite torture irrelevant.
the issue is that “immortality” is impossible and not the same as life extension. Immortality would only work as a magic thing. Or maybe brain upload thing.
Otherwise the best is just medical life extension. Which is a very different topic.
This feels more like a nitpicking semantic argument than anything to me. You’re just using a different definition of immortality. I just mean being able to live effectively forever without dieing of being old, which is absolutely possible.
I want to live today, I wanted to live yesterday and I imagine the most likely state for tomorrow is “I still want to live”. And I’ve absolutely had times, quite recently too, where my state was “maybe I don’t have the drive to live anymore” but I always came out living and being okay with that. And I keep on preferring it to the very final alternative.
Opt-Out immortality is quite good! Opt-Out immortality and eternal youth is better.
The horror of eternal, unavoidable immortality is imho mostly just projection of the absolutely eternal and (likely) unavoidable horror of death. Absolutes are scary. But as long as I have the option to check out, you might find me enjoying living forever in eternity.
when people argue immortality bad from the assumption that its magical indestructible immortality it always feels disingenuous, because its literally impossible. any form of immortality thats achievable in reality will be the live forever but can still die variety, so there will always be the threat/promise of death by some means, however difficult. it bothers me because its used as an argument against seeking biological immortality in real life, like theres some cosmic purpose to us dieing after such a short life and actually living much longer than we do would suck, and people should be happy they get old and wrinkly and die. it wouldn’t suck it would be awesome because we’d live to see other planets, other stars, fucking aliens. I could go on but yeah, immortality good, impossible hypothetical infinite torture irrelevant.
the issue is that “immortality” is impossible and not the same as life extension. Immortality would only work as a magic thing. Or maybe brain upload thing.
Otherwise the best is just medical life extension. Which is a very different topic.
This feels more like a nitpicking semantic argument than anything to me. You’re just using a different definition of immortality. I just mean being able to live effectively forever without dieing of being old, which is absolutely possible.
honestly, this is 100% nitpicking semantics.
As a biologist, that biological immortality is also nearly impossible so far. like warp drive. My PhD thesis was on aging and senescence.
Preach!
I want to live today, I wanted to live yesterday and I imagine the most likely state for tomorrow is “I still want to live”. And I’ve absolutely had times, quite recently too, where my state was “maybe I don’t have the drive to live anymore” but I always came out living and being okay with that. And I keep on preferring it to the very final alternative.
Opt-Out immortality is quite good! Opt-Out immortality and eternal youth is better.
The horror of eternal, unavoidable immortality is imho mostly just projection of the absolutely eternal and (likely) unavoidable horror of death. Absolutes are scary. But as long as I have the option to check out, you might find me enjoying living forever in eternity.