Transhumanism

[elasto]

I'll admit, it's an argument which requires a bit of imagination. But as someone who has experienced both the good and the bad, I can tell you I really don't want to live forever.

I'm sure this is a genuinely held view but I'd bet a big chunk of money that (a) you are currently young (under 35) and (b) you'll change your tune as you approach the end of your natural life - assuming you are still in good mental and physical health at that time. (Sure, plenty of people in poor physical or mental health would prefer it to end quickly rather than slowly be ground down by entropy, but immortality usually assumes living forever at peak health.)

It's a pretty sad state of affairs for anyone to say 'I've seen all I want to see; experienced all I want to experience; achieved all I want to achieve' imho.

I'd wager another guess in fact: That you don't yet have kids. It's also a pretty sad state of affairs for anyone not to want to see what their kids achieve in life, and, after that, their grand-kids.

Sure, 'forever' is a really long time, and if the choice was only between 'dying at a time not of my choosing after less than 100 years' and 'never being able to die until the universe winds down' it would be a more difficult choice. But if the choice is between 'dying at a time not of my choosing after less than 100 years' and 'dying at a time of my choosing' I would question anyone opting for the former rather than the latter.

[AvatarIII]

Sure, 'forever' is a really long time, and if the choice was only between 'dying at a time not of my choosing after less than 100 years' and 'never being able to die until the universe winds down' it would be a more difficult choice. But if the choice is between 'dying at a time not of my choosing after less than 100 years' and 'dying at a time of my choosing' I would question anyone opting for the former rather than the latter.

totally agree, or even if it came down to it, "living at peak health for a known amount of time in excess of current average life span" would be clearly preferable than the current situation, if for example, we could keep people at peak health (20s-30s equivalent) until 80 for example, without actually extending maximum human lifespan, imagine how much more people could acheive in their life times!

[Pseudonymoniae]

It's a pretty sad state of affairs for anyone to say 'I've seen all I want to see; experienced all I want to experience; achieved all I want to achieve' imho.

You cannot take words that I have said, repackage them through your own personal opinion of what you want me to be saying and then criticize me for my imagined views. This is no more than a straw man which has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I have said.

[Whimsical Eloquence]

Could you perhaps clarify your position then and state clearly what exactly your objections are to a continuation (at an accelerated rate) of the increase in life spans we've been enjoying via technological progress to the point where we enjoy lifespans that make us comparatively immortal unless we chose otherwise?

[gmalivuk]

And it's also always worth pointing out that ending aging doesn't end death. Accidents still happen, and in the US tend to imply a human half-life of about 700 years, iirc. Which means that we'd still expect everyone alive today to be dead within 25,000 years. A long time, to be sure, but not forever.

[TheGrammarBolshevik]

Also, everyone would have a violent, unexpected death, which seems to count for something.

[elasto]

It's a pretty sad state of affairs for anyone to say 'I've seen all I want to see; experienced all I want to experience; achieved all I want to achieve' imho.

You cannot take words that I have said, repackage them through your own personal opinion of what you want me to be saying and then criticize me for my imagined views. This is no more than a straw man which has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I have said.

Just to say, I meant my words literally. I didn't say 'it's a pretty sad state of affairs for you to say...', I said 'it's a sad state of affairs for anyone to say...' - implying that if that was your reasoning for your choice of wishing for not to live any longer than you will, then that would be a sad state of affairs imho. But otherwise making no judgement of your reasoning, since you didn't expound on it.

With hindsight I should probably have phrased it 'it would be a said state of affairs if anyone were to say...' as hopefully that would have been much less open to subtext.

(There's a joke about men and women's interactions that has the man saying 'if something I say can be interpreted in a couple of ways, and one of them is offensive, I meant the other one!' That's the rule I tend to use on the net anyhow when trying to parse the statements of others towards me, and I tend to find it right more often than wrong )

Anyhow, it would be interesting for me at least to hear why you think "But as someone who has experienced both the good and the bad, I can tell you I really don't want to live forever" - unless by 'live forever' you mean 'forced to live forever with no option to bow out'.

[Whimsical Eloquence]

Also, everyone would have a violent, unexpected death, which seems to count for something.

And it's also always worth pointing out that ending aging doesn't end death. Accidents still happen, and in the US tend to imply a human half-life of about 700 years, iirc. Which means that we'd still expect everyone alive today to be dead within 25,000 years. A long time, to be sure, but not forever.

Immortality in the Elven Sense. That someone must not by necessity die - be mortal, as opposed to being immune to death.

[aoeu]

It'll be interesting times if our best means of creating AIs will be scanning human brains and then simulating them. Will we try to treat real and virtual people as equals? Maybe the morally conscious will prefer to use simulated monkey brains.

[nitePhyyre]

(Yes, with 100% efficient space elevators, you could do it with a type 1 civilization. 3500$ energy budget per person (braking not included) at todays energy rates.)

According to Wikipedia, a Launch Loop could bring prices as low as $3/kg. Ignoring the costs of a spacecraft, thats like 200 bucks a person.

On the topic of feasibility, it is not legitimate to simply quote people who have argued solutions to the problems I am proposing. The arguments these people are making are based assumptions which I deny. There is an assumption that we will be able to find/produce/renew the resources required to support a huge growth in the human population. Why is this assumption valid? Dyson Swarm is not an answer.

Energy is probably the biggest issue. So yes, yes it is.

Space is big, yes. But does space have sufficient habitable places which we can reach? No. Do we know that it will when we develop this technology? No.

Sorry, when I meant space I meant something along the lines of an O'Neil Cylinder.

About 1970, near the end of Project Apollo, Gerard K. O'Neill, an experimental physicist, was looking for a topic to tempt his physics students, most of whom were freshmen in Engineering. He hit upon the creative idea of assigning them feasibility calculations for large space habitats. To his surprise, the habitats seemed to be feasible even in very large sizes: cylinders five miles (8 km) in diameter and twenty miles (34 km) long, even if made from ordinary materials such as steel and glass. Also, the students solved problems such as radiation protection from cosmic rays (almost free in the larger sizes), getting naturalistic sun angles, provision of power, realistic pest-free farming and orbital attitude control without reaction motors. O'Neill published an article about these colony proposals in Physics Today in 1974.[citation needed] (See the above illustration of such a colony, a classic "O'Neill Colony"). The article was expanded in his 1976 book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space.

If the futurists are right, we will have life preservation technology in 50 or so years. It would take another while for planet space to run out. This stuff was surprisingly feasible in the 1970s. Now add 100 years. I don't think it is large an assumption to say that if current trends continue, we will have the infrastructure set up to solve the problem when the problem arises.

NASA is already proposing a long term rotating space craft. The first test units are supposed to be in space by 2013.

Your argument about labour seems to be pretty arbitrary and doesn't offer anything close to the specifics required to answer the question that I brought up. Maybe this could be a system which would work, maybe not.

Of course it is arbitrary, I said I was just going to use my personal favorites. If you want a full dissertation on the subject, go out and read one. I am most definitely not qualified to give you one.

Unless you meant the 40 and 20 years being arbitrary. They kind of are, but they are basically the same numbers we use now.

Free-market principles aren't egalitarian now, so why should they be in the future?

If it doesn't bother us now, why will it in the future?

Communism? If we are fighting this philosophy today, what makes you think we will love "techno-communism" when we are immortal?

A big boost to the pricing model is the fact that for most of history we didn't have the processing power to keep track of all transactions, this is no longer true. This is a half-sarcastic answer. The point is really that these are the same problems our society struggles with today.

A particular concern is the equal access to human enhancement technologies across classes and borders.[28] In 2006, a political struggle within the transhumanist movement between the libertarian right and the liberal left resulted in a more centre-leftward positioning of the WTA under its former executive director James Hughes.

Life extension won't bridge political divides. I don't know why you are hung up on egality. I have 3 tvs, 6 computers, a tablet, a 360, a ps3, and a wii. There are many people who can't get any of that. If there is something special about life extension that makes it fundamentally different than any other technology, it i up to you to demonstrate that claim. And the opposite, the idea that trends will continue, is kinda the default 'assumption' that you don't get to just disagree with.

But that aside, supposing this holds up the argument of availability is based upon the arguments listed above (and probably others). Unless you assume that these all go away it will not be possible to allow everyone to use this technology.

huh? Wha...?

Put it this way: if we developed indefinite life extension today, none of your counterarguments to the questions of feasibility would be legitimate. If we develop this technology in ten years, why should this change? More assumptions.

Look, I'll accept that these are complicated and not necessarily unassailable problems. But the primary argument which comes out of these issues is the following: no matter how brilliant or how visionary transhumanist writers might be, they cannot predict the future (yeah, even Ray can't do it). This means that any and all solutions they produce are little more than rhetoric. Now, I suppose the safe position for me would be to remain agnostic on the issue of feasibility. But, given that my gut instinct tends towards skepticism and the proposed solutions from transhumanists are typically based upon technologies we don't have, I'm happy to stand up and say that I don't buy it. Now, I may take you up on looking at some more transhumanist ideas, assuming they are better supported than those I've already read about.

No of course they wouldn't! The entire point of the field of futurism is to track the trends of technology. If we are magically transporting technologies through time, of course things won't turn out that way people are predicting. But again, 'current trends continuing' isn't really an assumption.

You seem to have taken a different tack and gone with the rather simple argument: "A good life is better than death, therefore, life extension is good... qed".

Fixed that for you. This seems to be the same misunderstanding as above. That isn't the argument being made. No one is simply just saying quantity >quality. The argument being made is the FTFY version*. I hope that at least gives us something to talk about.

I'll join you half way on this one: if indefinite life extension allows for people to live longer, better lives; then hey, it's fine with me. I still think it's a big if. Not as big as those if's associated with feasibility, but big enough that I won't accept it on faith (or as an assumption).

I don't think that life extension will let people live longer, better lives. Just longer ones. If their life is good, then it will be just as good if it is longer. If it is a bad life, it will be just as bad for longer. You say that you fear a longer life will dilute its quality. This is the unfounded assumption you make. You are assuming that any life 'added' will be empty, hollow, and worthless. If the life that was being 'added' is of the same quality as a 'natural' life, then the addition cannot be diluting it.

And I hate to sound like a broken record, but if we are going to be assuming things, current trends will continue is the default assumption to make.

[Pseudonymoniae]

Could you perhaps clarify your position then and state clearly what exactly your objections are to a continuation (at an accelerated rate) of the increase in life spans we've been enjoying via technological progress to the point where we enjoy lifespans that make us comparatively immortal unless we chose otherwise?

I do not believe that we ought to develop technologies which allow humans to live indefinitely.

I think that it is a questionable premise to propose that lives will be better as a result of being relatively unending. Imagine that we could create an objective measure of a life's "value," why should this increase as a function of duration? In the most extreme case, why is having a life better than having no life at all?

Assuming it is possible to develop such a technology I think that it will be infeasible to use this technology in an egalitarian society. If we are to offer all individuals the opportunity to use this technology, then we must accept that billions of people might use it. Either these people severely reduce procreation or there will be an enormous population boom. I think that either of these outcomes will be negative, but that the latter would be more likely. In the case of this latter outcome, I have already posted numerous reasons why I believe this situation will be infeasible.

The first point speaks to whether or not this technology would actually be beneficial in a "perfect world". The latter point argues that it is not reasonable to believe that our society would, or even could, put this technology to good use.

Just to say, I meant my words literally. I didn't say 'it's a pretty sad state of affairs for you to say...', I said 'it's a sad state of affairs for anyone to say...'

Why not just admit that you mischaracterized my viewpoint in a moment of impulsiveness, rather than pretend that you meant something other than you did?

If you are using the word "anyone" to literally mean anyone, then there is no reason to preface your comment with suppositions about my life. It's intellectually dishonest to make a clear implication and then pretend that you were ignorant of what your words imply. I suspect we both recognize that the joke you mention is funny specifically because people are so willing to shamelessly pretend that they didn't realize the implications of their words; perhaps, then you meant this as a tacit admission of guilt? I don't know, so I won't put words in your mouth. It really doesn't matter to me so long as we are clear on the fact that I am not this enigmatic and mysterious man named Anyone.

Anyhow, it would be interesting for me at least to hear why you think "But as someone who has experienced both the good and the bad, I can tell you I
really don't want to live forever"

I fear death as much as anyone, I suppose. I don't believe in an afterlife (there might be one, but I suppose my mindset doesn't allow me to accept this without reason), so I admit that it's quite disconcerting to imagine what it would be like to no longer exist (well, it wouldn't be like anything of course! and that is what's so disconcerting). In this sense, I am tempted by any technology which might allow me to escape this fearsome, bizarre, unimaginable and yet ultimately ineluctable state. But the thought of living "forever" (accepting that the probability one survives will decrease with duration, eventually moving towards zero) or even a sufficiently long period of time (say, 500 years) really doesn't appeal to me. To make an analogy: When I'm tired, I go to sleep. When I imagine living several hundred years, it sounds like it would be exhausting.

I suppose what is most troubling is that, at the same time, the idea of cutting life short* is even less appealing: how could I force myself into nothingness? To be honest, I'm not even sure which way I would go; I have an inkling, but I don't pretend that I can predict the future. In a way, I find it oddly comforting to not have a "choice" in this (a feeling of choice, perhaps?... an argument for another day). But that's just me. You're welcome to conduct whatever amateur psychoanalysis you want.

[By the way, I completely missed the irony about using "anyone" when writing about the human fear of death. Looks good on me, I suppose.]
[Edit]
*I have realized this statement is somewhat ambiguous. I support using life-saving treatments such as surgery, anti-biotics, etc, which certainly increase the mean life span. I also support encouraging healthy eating and exercise, and various medicines which undoubtedly act, at least in part, to extend the life spans of individuals. This is certainly a fine line that I am walking. I suppose I conceive of medicine which is intended to improve health/quality of living (which, incidentally also extends lives) as being different from medicine/technology which only extends the duration of life, without directly impacting quality. It is certainly imaginable that we might be able to eliminate the negative impact of aging without extending the life span indefinitely. I'd like to think this counters the argument that "by extending the life span indefinitely, we are improving lives by reducing the negative effects of aging on quality of life". Others might disagree.
[/Edit]

I don't know why you are hung up on egality.

I have already made this point. If technology is not beneficial in a broad sense, then I don't support using it. If a technology simply produces a greater divide between the haves and the have-nots--improving the lives of privileged few but not affecting the lives of the poor--then I think it is superfluous.

You say that you fear a longer life will dilute its quality. This is the unfounded assumption you make. You are assuming that any life 'added' will be empty, hollow, and worthless. If the life that was being 'added' is of the same quality as a 'natural' life, then the addition cannot be diluting it.

You are missing the analogy. If I were to take a flask containing 1L of 100mM NaCl and dilute it tenfold, the total number of moles of NaCl would not change. In this analogy, the number of moles represents the "value" of a life and "duration" represents the volume. Whether my life lasts 10 years or 100 years, the total "value" would not change any more than the number of moles would change if I diluted the concentration of my flask. In this sense, when I say "dilute" I do not mean to imply that the value of a life will decline with duration in an absolute sense.

At some point I may have implied that increased duration could make life worse. If so, you are right, this would be an unfounded assumption, and it would conflict with the principal argument that I am making here (that the value of life is relative and not necessarily affected by duration).

I don't think that life extension will let people live longer, better lives. Just longer ones. If their life is good, then it will be just as good if it is longer. If it is a bad life, it will be just as bad for longer.

So then why is longer better? If all you are increasing is duration then why bother? If duration has no effect on how good my life is, then why should I care? I suspect what you mean to say is that "[living longer lives] x [lives which are just as good per volume of duration] = [better lives overall]".

And I hate to sound like a broken record, but if we are going to be assuming things, current trends will continue is the default assumption to make.

This is not the default assumption. In fact, there is no default assumption. We don't have sufficient data to make one. This is why predictions about the future are meaningless.

[Armanant]

@Pseudonymoniae

I think you seem to be making a bit of an incorrect assumption regarding life extension. As far as I understand the idea, nobody will force you to live forever if you don't want to. As an example, my grandmother passed away relatively recently. I'm not sure of the specifics of the disease, but it was something that could have been treated without too much difficulty. She simply felt that she had done all she had wanted to do, was happy, and it was her time to move on. My mother was definitely sad (grandmother was on her side), but understood. As such, she was allowed to die peacefully from something that was not necessarily lethal in this day and age.

I see something like that as being a common situation, where people feel they are happy with what they've done in life and want to move on, and decide against taking their next Life++ treatment. I certainly see myself doing so when I feel I've achieved and seen all that I want to.

If the thought of living to 500 scares you and is something you definitely don't want, then nobody is forcing you to do that with life extension. If I understand what you are saying correctly, you are afraid of living that long, so nobody else should be allowed to have the choice?

[gmalivuk]

I think that it is a questionable premise to propose that lives will be better as a result of being relatively unending.

That could be. But luckily, no one is holding to that premise. What most of the people in this thread are arguing is that, for those people who *do* see value in continued existence, a choice should be available to continue their existence.

In the most extreme case, why is having a life better than having no life at all?

Dunno, but it appears that you and most everyone else thinks so in spite of not knowing. After all, why do you look before crossing the street, unless you think the bit of extra life you're likely to live as a result is better than getting hit by a car?

Either these people severely reduce procreation or there will be an enormous population boom.

This is already the case, and continuing to reduce mortality will just make it a more immediate problem than it already is. It won't make a problem where none exists.

And it's not like, the second aging is cured (forgetting for the moment that few if any people expect this to be something that happens all at once), there are going to be billions of extra old people walking around all of a sudden. The maximum rate at which life can be extended is one year per year.

When I imagine living several hundred years, it sounds like it would be exhausting.

And, in case it needs to be pointed out once again: no one is proposing that we *force* anyone to live any longer than they want to live.

I find it oddly comforting to not have a "choice" in this

And that's fair. But changes always force new choices on us, whether they're changes you think you'd like to see or not.

I support using life-saving treatments such as surgery, anti-biotics, etc, which certainly increase the mean life span. I also support encouraging healthy eating and exercise, and various medicines which undoubtedly act, at least in part, to extend the life spans of individuals. This is certainly a fine line that I am walking. I suppose I conceive of medicine which is intended to improve health/quality of living (which, incidentally also extends lives) as being different from medicine/technology which only extends the duration of life, without directly impacting quality.

What magic do you expect could do that? The things people are actually talking about are measures to reduce (and perhaps eliminate) the negative effects of aging. Effects which ultimately result in death, but which tend to be increasingly unpleasant up until that moment.

And therefore, in reducing those effects, we would both improve the quality of life for older people *and* extend their lives longer than they would be otherwise.

Whether my life lasts 10 years or 100 years, the total "value" would not change any more than the number of moles would change if I diluted the concentration of my flask.

On what are you basing this rather unusual assumption?

[Steroid]

I do not believe that we ought to develop technologies which allow humans to live indefinitely.

Which is a major reason why I support transhumanism. Part of what we should be going for in transhumanistic advances is to create from ourselves a being that is not subject to counterintuitive diminishing returns such as a downside to immortality.

Too much of human existence is not built for this world, having evolved from needs more suited to the African jungle of thousands of years ago than the modern world of plastic and data. We need to work around Darwinian progress and be more Lamarckian. And we need to attack the problem directly and try to find shortcuts like mind uploading, rather than trying to build a brain that's just a bit better.

I can understand it if someone wants to say that happiness isn't the be-all end-all of existence. I even kind of agree, though I think that there's no particular reason that we need some misery. But you've got to have some gauge to what *is* the point of existence that we should be shooting for, and you ought to want to achieve that point. If you think that complexity of intelligence is the point, then you should support a transhumanistic leap in brain complexity. If you think it's about the most understanding of the world, you should want the major functions of our human efforts to be in learning. Or if you do think that it's all about happiness, then you should take the logical step to support simple stimulation of the pleasure centers of our brains.

What gets my blood boiling is people who propose a gauge that specifically grades failure to achieve itself in full measure as part of the point. That people (or trans-people) should be happy, but not blissful. That we should not die when we want to live, but neither should we live forever. That we should be smarter, but not by having the knowledge uploaded to our brains like in the Matrix. It's self-contradictory and I don't like it.

The other thing that irks me is the idea that it does one person ill if another goes transhuman. OK, you don't want to live forever and know everything. But I do. If I have the opportunity, say by uploading my mind and living entirely on a server somewhere, how do you suffer? I can think of two ways:

1. Without me around as a fellow human, you don't get the benefit of anything I would produce if I stayed human, and you lose the economies of scale that ensue when there is more population.

While this is true, it's never been recognized as a moral wrong done by one person to another. If I don't actually need anything from you, no one says that I'm obligated to engage in even exchanges just to make the scale fit you better.

2. By forcing you to reject the opportunity to upload yourself, you have to suffer through the fact that the intuitive decision to get more for yourself when your own standards say that it's worse to do so. (Pseudonymoniae's statement of being more comfortable without a choice)

Which is just perverse in my opinion. It's the equivalent of saying that you're willing to deny me a choice I would otherwise have the right to make because you don't want to think about it, or consider the possibility that your standards could be wrong. This mentality actually shows up in the more practical debates about the legality of suicide; some people say that even if it might be right sometimes, there's a general wrongness about it, and we need to keep people agreeing with that general wrongness so as not to skew the statistics.

My other big reason for supporting transhumanism is that if we don't transcend this humanity, what's the alternative? It's not good, and it probably involves a lot of death, misery, and pain, probably climaxing in the end of our species. It goes back to our animal nature as I discussed before, and the best analogy I can think of is Windows 98. It had lots of cool applications and shiny graphics, but it was a crash-happy kludge because at the end of the day it was still resting on being backwards compatible with a 16-bit operating system designed for 8086s. It was painful, expensive, and even a little dangerous to those of us who were always used to being able to fix even the major system problems by going into DOS and having near-complete control, but we needed to go to a proper NT-based OS because there were more problems that would be solved by doing so than would be created by losing the backwards compatibility.

[Soralin]

You are missing the analogy. If I were to take a flask containing 1L of 100mM NaCl and dilute it tenfold, the total number of moles of NaCl would not change. In this analogy, the number of moles represents the "value" of a life and "duration" represents the volume. Whether my life lasts 10 years or 100 years, the total "value" would not change any more than the number of moles would change if I diluted the concentration of my flask. In this sense, when I say "dilute" I do not mean to imply that the value of a life will decline with duration in an absolute sense.

At some point I may have implied that increased duration could make life worse. If so, you are right, this would be an unfounded assumption, and it would conflict with the principal argument that I am making here (that the value of life is relative and not necessarily affected by duration).

No, I think you are missing the analogy. If I were to take a flask containing 1L of 100mM NaCl and add another 9L at the same concentration, the total number of moles of NaCl would increase. In this analogy, the number of moles represents the "value" of a life and "duration" represents the volume. Whether my life lasts 10 years or 100 years, the total "value/time" would not change any more than the concentration would change if I added more of the same to my flask.

Say for example, you live to be 100 years old, in one scenario you die, in the other a cure for aging is discovered and you take it. The value of those previous 100 years is the same in both instances. Unless you're proposing that the cure for aging involves time-travel, it can't retroactively affect the value you had for your life in the past, that valuation already happened, it's fixed in time, immutable. So if the future from that point on isn't any worse than the past (and the past was net-positive value), then it's not possible for additional life from that point on to do anything but increase the total value.

[Yakk]

Imagine you believed in a just world. In which everyone got what they deserved. In which the world we are in is, in a sense, the best possible world -- and any improvement must be balanced with a negative consequence somewhere else.

Then, would you want immortality? Of course not: for that good must come with a bad. In fact, any perturbation of the current state will move you away from the best possible world.

Currently, this is my model of Pseudonymoniae. May I ask how your position differs from this one?

[elasto]

I do not believe that we ought to develop technologies which allow humans to live indefinitely.

So where do we draw the line? Every medical advance does this after all. Rather like there is extremely unlikely to be a magic bullet for cancer, there won't be one single technology that allows people to live indefinitely, it will be all advances (vaccinations, antibiotics, transplantations etc) working in unison. So which ones do we hold back on? (To be fair, you address this point later in your edit, and seem to say we shouldn't hold back on any of them. Which means the facility for living for as long as you wish will eventually come about - first for the rich and then later for everyone)

I think that it is a questionable premise to propose that lives will be better as a result of being relatively unending.

Kids and teenagers typically have a sort of 'immortality-complex' whereby they take risks and live life as if it will never end. You think this mindset causes them to enjoy life any less? Part of the 'joie de vivre' of youth is the seemingly infinite possibilities laid out in front of you: You feel like you can do anything and be anyone. If I wanted to change careers now in my late 30s, it would be a major undertaking. I'd be missing out on the 'prime-earning' years of my life as well as mentally being a lot less sharp and with a lot less mental stamina than in my early 20s. If I knew I'd live to be 500 I could change careers virtually on a whim. Life would be all about second-chances - and third-chances and fourth ones.

Some aspects of life may change fairly radically - eg. relationships. There may be less of a misty-eyed view of 'soulmates' and 'one perfect person out there'; but romanticizing slightly less and being slightly more realistic has positive aspects as well as negative ones. And for those that do screw up, make a poor choice, and then stay together for the sake of the children, well, they get a 'proper' second chance too.

If we are to offer all individuals the opportunity to use this technology, then we must accept that billions of people might use it. Either these people severely reduce procreation or there will be an enormous population boom. I think that either of these outcomes will be negative, but that the latter would be more likely. In the case of this latter outcome, I have already posted numerous reasons why I believe this situation will be infeasible.

Sure, there would be huge logistical problems if it were developed tomorrow - but that's not terribly likely since it wont be any one single solution, as I say, it'll be a thousand incremental things.

Just to say, I meant my words literally. I didn't say 'it's a pretty sad state of affairs for you to say...', I said 'it's a sad state of affairs for anyone to say...'

Why not just admit that you mischaracterized my viewpoint in a moment of impulsiveness, rather than pretend that you meant something other than you did?

Because I meant it exactly as I explained I meant it. We are two anonymous people on the net. I will never meet you and you will never meet me. Why on earth would I care about 'pretending' about anything? I care about *me* - that I clearly constructed a sentence in a poor fashion, that's all.

I read my post again and I definitely see how it was confusing. I wrote one paragraph talking to you, then I went into a generalization that may or may not have applied to you (I had no assumption that it did), and then the following paragraph went back to you again. If the generalisation didn't apply to you then clearly my conclusion didn't apply either, and all you needed say was 'I agree, it would be a sad state of affairs for anyone to hold that opinion. Thankfully I don't.' Anyhow, I'm sorry for my lazy choice of verb tense and lack of explanatory caveat and you can either accept my word on that or not, and that's the end of the matter.

I fear death as much as anyone, I suppose. I don't believe in an afterlife (there might be one, but I suppose my mindset doesn't allow me to accept this without reason), so I admit that it's quite disconcerting to imagine what it would be like to no longer exist (well, it wouldn't be like anything of course! and that is what's so disconcerting). In this sense, I am tempted by any technology which might allow me to escape this fearsome, bizarre, unimaginable and yet ultimately ineluctable state. But the thought of living "forever" (accepting that the probability one survives will decrease with duration, eventually moving towards zero) or even a sufficiently long period of time (say, 500 years) really doesn't appeal to me. To make an analogy: When I'm tired, I go to sleep. When I imagine living several hundred years, it sounds like it would be exhausting.

Well, you feel how you feel and noone can argue with that. For me, I'd be very excited to see how the world would be in 500 years. I think of all the amazing technological advances that have happened in the last 20 years and it feels like the most exciting generation to be born into is always the next one. Just simply considering gaming - genuine fully immersive VR is quite possibly only two or three decades away (for the rich - perhaps three or four decades away for the poor) and I could quite easily not live to see it.

I'd love to learn how to draw and paint and play the piano, and all sorts of things that realistically I will never do to any standard that would be satisfying and enjoyable to me. 70 years of life feels just too damn short for my liking. I almost feel like I've been cheated: Only a couple of decades ago I was a child with infinite possibilities and in a couple of decades my life will be more or less coasting to a conclusion.

I don't know why you are hung up on egality.

I have already made this point. If technology is not beneficial in a broad sense, then I don't support using it. If a technology simply produces a greater divide between the haves and the have-nots--improving the lives of privileged few but not affecting the lives of the poor--then I think it is superfluous.

There is always a trickle down effect, though, no matter how weak. Cheap mobile phones are revolutionising Africa two decades after they revolutionised the West. The net is beginning to revolutionise Africa one decade after it revolutionised the West. Many generic medicines are making a huge impact on quality of life in Africa and Asia despite the fact the cutting edge of medical science is and may always be out of reach to the poor.

The good and bad thing about technology is that once something has been invented, it can never be taken away. That's bad when it comes to new and ever more effective ways to kill people, but good when it comes to medicine or mobile phones or whatever else. It's almost impossible for any such technology not to become cheaper and more accessible over time. Sure, the gap between rich and poor will continue to grow, but the poor will advance in absolute terms none-the-less. Someone in the poorest 10% in Britain in 2011 lives a better life than all but the richest 10% in Britain enjoyed in 1911; Perhaps even the top 1%.

Closing the gap between the rich and the poor is pure politics in any case - and the winning or losing of such a political debate is quite independent of whether the gap in question is medicine or education or employment opportunities or anything else.

[Whimsical Eloquence]

Could you perhaps clarify your position then and state clearly what exactly your objections are to a continuation (at an accelerated rate) of the increase in life spans we've been enjoying via technological progress to the point where we enjoy lifespans that make us comparatively immortal unless we chose otherwise?

I do not believe that we ought to develop technologies which allow humans to live indefinitely.

I think that it is a questionable premise to propose that lives will be better as a result of being relatively unending. Imagine that we could create an objective measure of a life's "value," why should this increase as a function of duration? In the most extreme case, why is having a life better than having no life at all?

Would you agree that a life of exactly one second is equal in value to a life of forty years ceteris paribus ? Of course not, the latter is better. An extension upon life, all things being equal in that future life, is more or a less a good thing. The question comes when we propose certain negatives with that extension. But there's no way to objectively weigh those pros and cons up, there's no (even hypothetical) Objective measure. Our lives have value because we live them, as their subjects. If something is about to kill you'll try and stop it won't you? So will everyone. If anything that acts against our own will (not suicide) tries to kill us, we stop it. Everyone, inter-subjectively, recognises some inherent value in life's extension.

Because having a life means possibility. We're rational, self-concious autonomous agents;we've an expectation of future events and desires for those things - that is, agency. Any valuation of life must rate as positively the removal of any restrictions, particularly temporal on that agency. That's ultimately what Transhumanism is - destroying the limitations on that agency via technology. Key to this is mortality. Our agency is limited by time to quite a cruelly small period. Why should it? In making that argument we don't require that life's extension has value in and of itself to all people. We merely have to recognise that fetters on human will is bad and that we should remove them. Should someone desire to die at seventy let them. Should another wish to bear witness to the heat death of the universe, let them. Should another wish to do one of the former with wings - well, by gods, let's get them the bio-engineered wings!

Your objections on grounds of egalitarianism and the like are problems/not problems are present. Unless you can present an argument showing their particular relevance to Transhumanism, then it doesn't work as an objection. Though I would perhaps contend it as an argument for Transhumanism.

[gmalivuk]

Would you agree that a life of exactly one second is equal in value to a life of forty years ceteris paribus ? Of course not, the former is better.

Pretty sure you mean the latter.

[nitePhyyre]

I don't know why you are hung up on egality.

I have already made this point. If technology is not beneficial in a broad sense, then I don't support using it. If a technology simply produces a greater divide between the haves and the have-nots--improving the lives of privileged few but not affecting the lives of the poor--then I think it is superfluous.

So I take it then that you don't drive, that you don't have indoor plumbing, you are unvaccinated, and that you don't use electricity?

Wait, wait, if you don't use technologies that aren't equally in the hands of the world's poor, how are you posting on the internet?

You say that you fear a longer life will dilute its quality. This is the unfounded assumption you make. You are assuming that any life 'added' will be empty, hollow, and worthless. If the life that was being 'added' is of the same quality as a 'natural' life, then the addition cannot be diluting it.

You are missing the analogy. If I were to take a flask containing 1L of 100mM NaCl and dilute it tenfold, the total number of moles of NaCl would not change. In this analogy, the number of moles represents the "value" of a life and "duration" represents the volume. Whether my life lasts 10 years or 100 years, the total "value" would not change any more than the number of moles would change if I diluted the concentration of my flask. In this sense, when I say "dilute" I do not mean to imply that the value of a life will decline with duration in an absolute sense.

As to most of that paragraph, what Soralin said +1.

As to the bold, if it is your contention that the longer you live the more diluted your life becomes, and that this dilution is undesirable (it is in your argument against transhumanism, after all) Why haven't you killed yourself yet? That is, by your logic, the best way to have the highest quality of life. Everyday, your life becomes more and more diluted, more worthless.*

I don't think that life extension will let people live longer, better lives. Just longer ones. If their life is good, then it will be just as good if it is longer. If it is a bad life, it will be just as bad for longer.

So then why is longer better? If all you are increasing is duration then why bother? If duration has no effect on how good my life is, then why should I care? I suspect what you mean to say is that "[living longer lives] x [lives which are just as good per volume of duration] = [better lives overall]".

Let's say in your life you only get to buy one bottle of whiskey. Would you rather that bottle be 1L, or a life time supply?

And I hate to sound like a broken record, but if we are going to be assuming things, current trends will continue is the default assumption to make.

This is not the default assumption. In fact, there is no default assumption. We don't have sufficient data to make one. This is why predictions about the future are meaningless.

You are wrong. Just plain wrong.
Moore's Law

The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper. The paper noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that the trend would continue "for at least ten years". His prediction has proved to be uncannily accurate, in part because the law is now used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.

In 2008 it was noted that for the last 30 years it has been predicted that Moore's law would last at least another decade.

This is just one example where we can come up with trends that help us predict the future. I also remember about this one guy who built a program that when you input the right variables, it could predict elections. I'm very vague on the details at this point.

*Please, don't actually kill yourself.

[jaredsyn1]

Seems to me everyone here is pointing in one direction: improving the human body, in various ways.

We do not need to add electronics to our bodies to make them better. What we really need to do is take care of, and use, what we already have AND strive to fulfill the potential our bodies and mind, already have.

For example, the old saying you are what you eat really is true. Eat better. Exercise your body and your mind. Explore, learn, do more with yourself. True, we may need artificial means to get into the 90 percent of our brain that we do not seem to use, however...if you really want to live longer, healthier and just plain be better, take care of what you already have.

Then when some of these transhuman enhancing inventions come along, you won't be rejected because your body just isn't healthy enough...

[gmalivuk]

the 90 percent of our brain that we do not seem to use

There is no such thing.

[Glass Fractal]

Seems to me everyone here is pointing in one direction: improving the human body, in various ways.

We do not need to add electronics to our bodies to make them better. What we really need to do is take care of, and use, what we already have AND strive to fulfill the potential our bodies and mind, already have.

We don't "need" to improve at all. No amount of healthy living is going to fix congenital heart damage. And I can't think of a reason that we should be limited to the potential of our bodies, we've already built a world based on bypassing those limitations. Charles Atlas couldn't fly, but I can get in a plane. Charles Atlas couldn't lift an I beam 500 feet in the air, but I could use a crane. Transhumanism simply interalizes the sorts of advances we're going to make (and have made) anyway.

[The Mighty Thesaurus]

the 90 percent of our brain that we do not seem to use

There is no such thing.

I think "we" refers to "proponents of this myth".

Then when some of these transhuman enhancing inventions come along, you won't be rejected because your body just isn't healthy enough...

Is there a danger of this happening?

[Robert'); DROP TABLE *;]

Is there a danger of this happening?

I would have thought the opposite, i.e. that people whose bodies are failing would be prioritized for repairs.

[Charlie!]

Then when some of these transhuman enhancing inventions come along, you won't be rejected because your body just isn't healthy enough...

Is there a danger of this happening?

If it was a big surgery and if medical science hadn't advanced much relative to now, it might be deemed too dangerous to do on the really old and sick if there was an unacceptable chance of killing them by operating. That's the only reasonable way I can think of.