Or there’s several ways to look at a creature that is largely immortal. I’m thinking of two specifically: One is so hearty that they can hardly suffer damage or death no matter what. The other is generally long-lived, but largely because they are careful (I think Eliezer talked about this somewhere, but I can’t find it) that they would be terrified of crossing a street or driving a car because even a 1 in 100 million chance of death is too dangerous (but they would expect to get a royal flush several times over the course of their lives, they live that long).
I like the idea for wanting/liking being the same thing. You could play off of that theme with stuff like:
creatures who have conscious control over their reward circuitry
creatures whose neural reward pathways grow with age, so they experience rewards more deeply the older they get
creatures whose pathways for liking are transmitted to others, so the more creatures that like something, the deeper the pleasure
creatures whose desires can be traded
That’s about all I could come up with in the past ~20 minutes. Hope they help.
The nearly immortal and very careful species is a trope that shows up in some science fiction stories. See for example the Puppeteers in Niven’s Ringworld. Note also that there’s some empirical evidence for this on a small scale. Countries which have longer lifespans generally have more risk averse populations. There’s an argument that dueling went out of style in many cultures about the same time that the likelyhood to die from a lot of diseases went down as well. I don’t know if the data really reflects that claim though.
I’ll give it a few shots...
Based off of something I once saw about octopuses, how about a creature with no sense continuity of self? Or no sense of self at all, even?
Or there’s several ways to look at a creature that is largely immortal. I’m thinking of two specifically: One is so hearty that they can hardly suffer damage or death no matter what. The other is generally long-lived, but largely because they are careful (I think Eliezer talked about this somewhere, but I can’t find it) that they would be terrified of crossing a street or driving a car because even a 1 in 100 million chance of death is too dangerous (but they would expect to get a royal flush several times over the course of their lives, they live that long).
I like the idea for wanting/liking being the same thing. You could play off of that theme with stuff like:
creatures who have conscious control over their reward circuitry
creatures whose neural reward pathways grow with age, so they experience rewards more deeply the older they get
creatures whose pathways for liking are transmitted to others, so the more creatures that like something, the deeper the pleasure
creatures whose desires can be traded
That’s about all I could come up with in the past ~20 minutes. Hope they help.
The nearly immortal and very careful species is a trope that shows up in some science fiction stories. See for example the Puppeteers in Niven’s Ringworld. Note also that there’s some empirical evidence for this on a small scale. Countries which have longer lifespans generally have more risk averse populations. There’s an argument that dueling went out of style in many cultures about the same time that the likelyhood to die from a lot of diseases went down as well. I don’t know if the data really reflects that claim though.