The same thought process applies to not necessarily living forever. It’s not interesting to have the same individuals to continue indefinitely—it’s more diverse and interesting to have many varied individuals rising and falling. There are better things to do with resources than continually maintain everyone who is ever born. Of course, some of the more emotional parts of me don’t give two shits about resource constraints and say “fuck no, I don’t want myself or anyone else to die!” but until you get infinite resources, I don’t see how that’s feasible.
This does an awesome job of putting into words a thought I’ve had for a long time, and one of the big reasons I have trouble getting emotionally worked up about the idea of dying. Although it’s not necessarily true that an individual living forever would be less interesting–the more time you have to learn and integrate skills, the m ore you can do and imagine, especially because assuming we’ve solved aging also kinda suggets we’ve solved things like Altzeimer’s and brain plasticity and stuff. Then again, when I imagine “immortal human”, I think my brain comes up with someone like Eliezer being brilliant and original and getting more so with practice, as opposed to Average Joe bored in the same career for 1000 years. The latter might be closer to the truth.
From my perspective, it’s not intelligence that’s the problem so much as morality, culture, and implicit attitudes.
Even if we could freeze a human at peak cognitive capacity (20-30 years?) we wouldn’t get the plasticity of a newborn child. I don’t think that sexism, racism, homophobia, etc… just melt away with the accumulation of skills and experience. It’s true that people get more socially liberal as they get older, but it’s also true that they don’t get more socially liberal as quickly as the rest of society. And the “isms” I named are only the most salient examples, there are many subtler implicit attitudes which will be much harder to name and shed. Remember that most of the current world population has the cultural attitudes of 1950′s America or worse.
Of course, I might be thinking too small. We might be able to upgrade ourselves to retain both the flexibility of a new mind and the efficiency of an adult one.
I don’t know how much hope I have for my own, individual life though. It will probably cost a lot to maintain it, and I doubt the entire planet will achieve acceptable enough standard of living that I’d be comfortable spending vast amounts on myself (assuming i can even afford it). It’s something I’ve still got to think about.
Of course, societal attitudes can become more conservative as well as more liberal. You seem to be assuming that the overall direction is towards greater liberality, but it’s not obvious to me that that’s the case (e.g. the Arab world going from the center of learning during the Islamic Golden Age to the fundamentalist states that many of them are today, various claims that I’ve heard about different fundamentalist and conservative movements only getting really powerful as a backlash to the liberal atmosphere of the sixties, some of my friends’ observations about today’s children’s programming having more conservative gender roles than the equivalent programs in the seventies-eighties IIRC, the rise of nationalistic and racist movements in many European countries during the last decade or two, etc.). My null hypothesis would be that liberal and conservative periods go back and forth, with only a weak trend towards liberality which may yet reverse.
This does an awesome job of putting into words a thought I’ve had for a long time, and one of the big reasons I have trouble getting emotionally worked up about the idea of dying. Although it’s not necessarily true that an individual living forever would be less interesting–the more time you have to learn and integrate skills, the m ore you can do and imagine, especially because assuming we’ve solved aging also kinda suggets we’ve solved things like Altzeimer’s and brain plasticity and stuff. Then again, when I imagine “immortal human”, I think my brain comes up with someone like Eliezer being brilliant and original and getting more so with practice, as opposed to Average Joe bored in the same career for 1000 years. The latter might be closer to the truth.
From my perspective, it’s not intelligence that’s the problem so much as morality, culture, and implicit attitudes.
Even if we could freeze a human at peak cognitive capacity (20-30 years?) we wouldn’t get the plasticity of a newborn child. I don’t think that sexism, racism, homophobia, etc… just melt away with the accumulation of skills and experience. It’s true that people get more socially liberal as they get older, but it’s also true that they don’t get more socially liberal as quickly as the rest of society. And the “isms” I named are only the most salient examples, there are many subtler implicit attitudes which will be much harder to name and shed. Remember that most of the current world population has the cultural attitudes of 1950′s America or worse.
Of course, I might be thinking too small. We might be able to upgrade ourselves to retain both the flexibility of a new mind and the efficiency of an adult one.
I don’t know how much hope I have for my own, individual life though. It will probably cost a lot to maintain it, and I doubt the entire planet will achieve acceptable enough standard of living that I’d be comfortable spending vast amounts on myself (assuming i can even afford it). It’s something I’ve still got to think about.
Of course, societal attitudes can become more conservative as well as more liberal. You seem to be assuming that the overall direction is towards greater liberality, but it’s not obvious to me that that’s the case (e.g. the Arab world going from the center of learning during the Islamic Golden Age to the fundamentalist states that many of them are today, various claims that I’ve heard about different fundamentalist and conservative movements only getting really powerful as a backlash to the liberal atmosphere of the sixties, some of my friends’ observations about today’s children’s programming having more conservative gender roles than the equivalent programs in the seventies-eighties IIRC, the rise of nationalistic and racist movements in many European countries during the last decade or two, etc.). My null hypothesis would be that liberal and conservative periods go back and forth, with only a weak trend towards liberality which may yet reverse.