The survey is quite simplistic. 19% said “I want to live forever”, while 42% said “I want to live longer than a normal lifespan, but not forever”. The problem is in the ambiguity. What does ‘forever’ mean? A million years? Until the heat death of the universe?
And what is ‘longer than a normal lifespan’? Ten years longer? A million years longer?
My guess is that most people who chose the second option want to live until they’re 100 or something, and that is in fact “longer than the average lifespan” which is 79 in US.
This is confirmed by the age effect. The proportion of people who want to live forever drops from 24% to 13% from the youngest to the oldest age group. And the proportion of people who want the normal lifespan increases from 19% to 29%. But the proportion of people who want to live longer than a normal lifespan stays unchanged.
So if there is an age effect that makes anti-deathism attractive to the young but not to the old (here is a first-person account of the phenomenon) the fact that it doesn’t show in the “longer than a normal lifespan” category suggests that the people in this bucket (who are the majority) are not anti-deathists. They just want to live one or two decades more than the average, and this preference stays constant throughout the life course.
Hence, I suspect that at most, only the 19% who said “I want to live forever” qualify as anti-deathists. Although some anti-deathists may have been lost to the second category because they were put off by the fact that it’s impossible to literally live forever.
However, “I want to live forever” does not automatically translate in: “I would support scientific research into fighting death.” It might be an idle statement that you don’t intend to act upon, like when my dad says “I want a Ferrari”. And what about religions or magical systems who promise immortality?
It’s hard to disentangle all this from a single question. But I would argue that the proportion of genuine anti-deathists is probably lower than 19%. While the proportion of deathists is at least 60%.
That linked account seems to assume that people who want to live forever expect to “get old” along the way, in the same way they do now, and I don’t think that’s accurate. I wouldn’t want to live even for centuries, let alone forever, in a 90 year old’s body, in world where most of the people I know and love are gone forever. But many of those same 90 year olds will gladly profess to believe, or at least hope, to be reunited with loved ones in death and remain with them forever. But if you offer me the chance to stay in a 25 or 30 year old’s body/level of health, and everyone else I love would get the same, I’d at least like the chance to see what it’s like and (Ian Banks’ Culture-style) get to choose my lifespan, not all at once but each and every day, based on how well it works out. I have no idea if I would actually want to live for TREE(3) years, but I’d much rather have the choice, and not have to make it within the next 50 years.
it’s impossible to literally live forever.
Are you sure? That seems like a question of physics, and the accessible energy reserves and computational capacity of our light cone (the latter of which may be infinite even if the former is not).
Any survey of this type runs into, not just the nuances of the questions and how they’re asked, but how little most people have really thought about the question, or what the different answers would actually imply.
I agree with you, though I don’t think the linked account expects an “eternal old age”; what made you think that? As I see it, it’s actually an argument about the inner experience of humans and how the author thinks we wouldn’t be happy with a very long lifespan. I don’t agree with the author, but I linked the post as anecdotal evidence that some people who are no longer young may reject the idea of a very long lifespan because of a general feeling of life-weariness (to what extent this feeling is connected to the biological phenomenon of aging is to be ascertained).
Are you sure? That seems like a question of physics, and the accessible energy reserves and computational capacity of our light cone (the latter of which may be infinite even if the former is not).
How would computational capacity be infinite in the presence of finite energy?
You’re right, nothing explicitly stated anything about old age, but the study itself has “burials” right up in the headline. IDK if respondents knew those questions were coming when they answered the “lifespan” question, but if they did, I doubt most people automatically assume an increased lifespan meant they’d start being younger than they currently were. That’s all conjecture on my part, but I think it’s similarly plausible as psychological life-weariness as an explanation.
How would computational capacity be infinite in the presence of finite energy?
As I understand it, the theoretical limits on energy efficiency of irreversible computing are a function of ambient temperature (because they involve dumping heat/entropy into the environment). That means if the future universe keeps getting colder as it expands, the amount of computing you can do with a fixed supply of stored energy goes up without bound, as long as you use it slowly enough. That’s basically Dyson’s Eternal Intelligence, though I don’t think anyone knows what the computing architecture would look like. Things like the Omega Point spacetime in a collapsing universe seem more speculative to me but still might be possible.
According to this survey, only 23% of Americans don’t want to live longer than a normal lifespan. They can’t really be holding the rest of you down.
The survey is quite simplistic. 19% said “I want to live forever”, while 42% said “I want to live longer than a normal lifespan, but not forever”. The problem is in the ambiguity. What does ‘forever’ mean? A million years? Until the heat death of the universe?
And what is ‘longer than a normal lifespan’? Ten years longer? A million years longer?
My guess is that most people who chose the second option want to live until they’re 100 or something, and that is in fact “longer than the average lifespan” which is 79 in US.
This is confirmed by the age effect. The proportion of people who want to live forever drops from 24% to 13% from the youngest to the oldest age group. And the proportion of people who want the normal lifespan increases from 19% to 29%. But the proportion of people who want to live longer than a normal lifespan stays unchanged.
So if there is an age effect that makes anti-deathism attractive to the young but not to the old (here is a first-person account of the phenomenon) the fact that it doesn’t show in the “longer than a normal lifespan” category suggests that the people in this bucket (who are the majority) are not anti-deathists. They just want to live one or two decades more than the average, and this preference stays constant throughout the life course.
Hence, I suspect that at most, only the 19% who said “I want to live forever” qualify as anti-deathists. Although some anti-deathists may have been lost to the second category because they were put off by the fact that it’s impossible to literally live forever.
However, “I want to live forever” does not automatically translate in: “I would support scientific research into fighting death.” It might be an idle statement that you don’t intend to act upon, like when my dad says “I want a Ferrari”. And what about religions or magical systems who promise immortality?
It’s hard to disentangle all this from a single question. But I would argue that the proportion of genuine anti-deathists is probably lower than 19%. While the proportion of deathists is at least 60%.
That linked account seems to assume that people who want to live forever expect to “get old” along the way, in the same way they do now, and I don’t think that’s accurate. I wouldn’t want to live even for centuries, let alone forever, in a 90 year old’s body, in world where most of the people I know and love are gone forever. But many of those same 90 year olds will gladly profess to believe, or at least hope, to be reunited with loved ones in death and remain with them forever. But if you offer me the chance to stay in a 25 or 30 year old’s body/level of health, and everyone else I love would get the same, I’d at least like the chance to see what it’s like and (Ian Banks’ Culture-style) get to choose my lifespan, not all at once but each and every day, based on how well it works out. I have no idea if I would actually want to live for TREE(3) years, but I’d much rather have the choice, and not have to make it within the next 50 years.
Are you sure? That seems like a question of physics, and the accessible energy reserves and computational capacity of our light cone (the latter of which may be infinite even if the former is not).
Any survey of this type runs into, not just the nuances of the questions and how they’re asked, but how little most people have really thought about the question, or what the different answers would actually imply.
I agree with you, though I don’t think the linked account expects an “eternal old age”; what made you think that? As I see it, it’s actually an argument about the inner experience of humans and how the author thinks we wouldn’t be happy with a very long lifespan. I don’t agree with the author, but I linked the post as anecdotal evidence that some people who are no longer young may reject the idea of a very long lifespan because of a general feeling of life-weariness (to what extent this feeling is connected to the biological phenomenon of aging is to be ascertained).
How would computational capacity be infinite in the presence of finite energy?
You’re right, nothing explicitly stated anything about old age, but the study itself has “burials” right up in the headline. IDK if respondents knew those questions were coming when they answered the “lifespan” question, but if they did, I doubt most people automatically assume an increased lifespan meant they’d start being younger than they currently were. That’s all conjecture on my part, but I think it’s similarly plausible as psychological life-weariness as an explanation.
As I understand it, the theoretical limits on energy efficiency of irreversible computing are a function of ambient temperature (because they involve dumping heat/entropy into the environment). That means if the future universe keeps getting colder as it expands, the amount of computing you can do with a fixed supply of stored energy goes up without bound, as long as you use it slowly enough. That’s basically Dyson’s Eternal Intelligence, though I don’t think anyone knows what the computing architecture would look like. Things like the Omega Point spacetime in a collapsing universe seem more speculative to me but still might be possible.