I wonder what happens if I follow this to what I viscerally feel to be a supervillain: Death itself.
Maybe Death is like Gaddafi. It is very bad, but gives a semblance of order, and removing that might not make living in its former domain any better immediately. It is hard to even make a guess at the probability of this, given that we don’t know what defeating Death would mean or even look like, but we can try to build scenarios and select among post-villain worlds before its removal, in the same way that we and the Libyans would wish had been done in the Gaddafi case.
Do we want to retain Death as an option? Or should immortality, once accepted, be compulsory? Fictional immortalities tend to not be absolute: if you wanted to kill yourself, you could still jump into a black hole or something. But suppose those aren’t possible, and a more modest type of durability can be rounded up into immortality by some cognitive modifications that create extreme aversion to bodily harm. Even if those didn’t necessarily come with durability, people in love could still blackmail each other into accepting such modifications, and spend billions of years living a life that isn’t actually a choice, sort of like in Friendship is Optimal.
Then there are the innumerable ways immortality could be worse than death—many of these have already been explored in fiction. Maybe you permanently lose 1% of your capacity for reason and happiness every 50 years, and unlike Death that isn’t fixable—or whatever.
But even if both of these were averted and immortality was otherwise perfect for the immortal individual, it might still be a bad thing for humanity or life. If it is not available to everyone—because it is too expensive, classified as Top Secret military technology or only works on people with certain inalienable features like particular chromosomes or a Wizard Gene—that gives a whole new level to societal inequality. Death used to be the great equalizer—remove it and the rich (or Wizard Gene holders or whatever) become so dissimilar from mortals as to be practically a seperate species. And the only comparative advantage mortals retain is the ability to do suicide attacks. That kind of scenario can go wrong in all sorts of ways. It can still be a net gain for a select group of individuals—like getting rid of Gaddafi was a net gain for the people in his prisons—while a net loss for a larger number of other individuals.
You could construct even weirder scenarios, where immortalizing one individual removes one distant and probably lifeless galaxy, but I find it too hard to suspend my disbelief about such scenarios for them to help me think.
So how would removing Death lead to a certainly improved universe? I think that at a minimum, it’d have to be available to every human, retain Death as an option and not have side-effects that could ever escalate into fates worse than Death. That’s a much, much taller order than “just invent uploading and declare victory” and might be a hopeless endeavor even if uploading is possible.
After going through these imaginations with something I viscerally feel to be a villain, I can kind of understand the impulse to just remove Gaddafi and hope for the best, rather than plan (and take responsibility) for what happens after.
I wonder what happens if I follow this to what I viscerally feel to be a supervillain: Death itself.
Maybe Death is like Gaddafi. It is very bad, but gives a semblance of order, and removing that might not make living in its former domain any better immediately. It is hard to even make a guess at the probability of this, given that we don’t know what defeating Death would mean or even look like, but we can try to build scenarios and select among post-villain worlds before its removal, in the same way that we and the Libyans would wish had been done in the Gaddafi case.
Do we want to retain Death as an option? Or should immortality, once accepted, be compulsory? Fictional immortalities tend to not be absolute: if you wanted to kill yourself, you could still jump into a black hole or something. But suppose those aren’t possible, and a more modest type of durability can be rounded up into immortality by some cognitive modifications that create extreme aversion to bodily harm. Even if those didn’t necessarily come with durability, people in love could still blackmail each other into accepting such modifications, and spend billions of years living a life that isn’t actually a choice, sort of like in Friendship is Optimal.
Then there are the innumerable ways immortality could be worse than death—many of these have already been explored in fiction. Maybe you permanently lose 1% of your capacity for reason and happiness every 50 years, and unlike Death that isn’t fixable—or whatever.
But even if both of these were averted and immortality was otherwise perfect for the immortal individual, it might still be a bad thing for humanity or life. If it is not available to everyone—because it is too expensive, classified as Top Secret military technology or only works on people with certain inalienable features like particular chromosomes or a Wizard Gene—that gives a whole new level to societal inequality. Death used to be the great equalizer—remove it and the rich (or Wizard Gene holders or whatever) become so dissimilar from mortals as to be practically a seperate species. And the only comparative advantage mortals retain is the ability to do suicide attacks. That kind of scenario can go wrong in all sorts of ways. It can still be a net gain for a select group of individuals—like getting rid of Gaddafi was a net gain for the people in his prisons—while a net loss for a larger number of other individuals.
You could construct even weirder scenarios, where immortalizing one individual removes one distant and probably lifeless galaxy, but I find it too hard to suspend my disbelief about such scenarios for them to help me think.
So how would removing Death lead to a certainly improved universe? I think that at a minimum, it’d have to be available to every human, retain Death as an option and not have side-effects that could ever escalate into fates worse than Death. That’s a much, much taller order than “just invent uploading and declare victory” and might be a hopeless endeavor even if uploading is possible.
After going through these imaginations with something I viscerally feel to be a villain, I can kind of understand the impulse to just remove Gaddafi and hope for the best, rather than plan (and take responsibility) for what happens after.