but on the other hand, how would we feed all those people? What if the world’s resources run out? As a transhumanist, I believe that we can use science to prevent things like death, but nature wasn’t designed to support a population like that.
If we enter an era where we’re able to put a stop to the aging process, we’ll mostly also be in a massively more affluent time, where concerns about resources running out etc would be much less relevant.
Are there other ways of extending life? What if we were able to prevent death, but not ageing? So we were able to control mortality, but not time? Your point is well taken, though. To add to my question-is there a way to recover the “essence” of a person after death? So when we learn how to stop it, we can resurrect people?
The scenario you’re painting is intuitively plausible, which goes mostly to show why intuition is sometimes a poor guide. Any attempt to defeat death must necessarily make people healthier and keep them young.
Which is not to say it’s impossible, but it’d almost have to be deliberate...
There is almost certainly no way to bring back most people who have died. With the destruction of their brains, the information that makes up their memory is probably nowhere we can retrieve it. Maybe for example something different is happening in a worm’s digestive system because it ate through a memory that was one way instead of another. But that’s shortly after the brain is eaten by the worm (and other stuff). You’d have to capture the worm and take it apart impossibly delicately to even have a chance of getting the information back. You’d have to have enough information about the prior state of the worm and its surroundings to know how the insides of the worm would be different depending on the state of the memory before it being eaten. The things you would have to know to track down each bit of information explode outward as more things happen to the worm and its surroundings, etc. I’m pretty sure this is something not even a superintelligence could do.
It might be possible to bring back a little bit of someone who has been dead short enough that they still have lots living friends, acquaintances, and detailed records of things related to their thoughts. Though there should be lots of little hidden internal details that can’t be inferred from their external behavior, which couldn’t be reconstructed.
There’s also cryonics, though it can’t help most people who are already dead and probably won’t be able to help most people who have yet to die.
Plus, to be clear, the chance that cryonics works is (as far as I can tell) low.
It’s not a pascal’s wager—the number is low, but not that low, maybe 1-20% - and even if it isn’t good enough for that, it’d still probably help an AI that’s trying to “bring back a little bit” of a person, so it’s definitely worthwhile. Just not a sure thing.
If we enter an era where we’re able to put a stop to the aging process, we’ll mostly also be in a massively more affluent time, where concerns about resources running out etc would be much less relevant.
Are there other ways of extending life? What if we were able to prevent death, but not ageing? So we were able to control mortality, but not time? Your point is well taken, though. To add to my question-is there a way to recover the “essence” of a person after death? So when we learn how to stop it, we can resurrect people?
“Preventing death but not ageing” is not carving reality at its joints, when the main cause of death is ageing.
The scenario you’re painting is intuitively plausible, which goes mostly to show why intuition is sometimes a poor guide. Any attempt to defeat death must necessarily make people healthier and keep them young.
Which is not to say it’s impossible, but it’d almost have to be deliberate...
We arguably already do that too much.
There is almost certainly no way to bring back most people who have died. With the destruction of their brains, the information that makes up their memory is probably nowhere we can retrieve it. Maybe for example something different is happening in a worm’s digestive system because it ate through a memory that was one way instead of another. But that’s shortly after the brain is eaten by the worm (and other stuff). You’d have to capture the worm and take it apart impossibly delicately to even have a chance of getting the information back. You’d have to have enough information about the prior state of the worm and its surroundings to know how the insides of the worm would be different depending on the state of the memory before it being eaten. The things you would have to know to track down each bit of information explode outward as more things happen to the worm and its surroundings, etc. I’m pretty sure this is something not even a superintelligence could do.
It might be possible to bring back a little bit of someone who has been dead short enough that they still have lots living friends, acquaintances, and detailed records of things related to their thoughts. Though there should be lots of little hidden internal details that can’t be inferred from their external behavior, which couldn’t be reconstructed.
There’s also cryonics, though it can’t help most people who are already dead and probably won’t be able to help most people who have yet to die.
Plus, to be clear, the chance that cryonics works is (as far as I can tell) low.
It’s not a pascal’s wager—the number is low, but not that low, maybe 1-20% - and even if it isn’t good enough for that, it’d still probably help an AI that’s trying to “bring back a little bit” of a person, so it’s definitely worthwhile. Just not a sure thing.