Which partially worked, but only partially, because he admitted we would appreciate existing poetry as much, if not more, than we do now, but he still claimed that we wouldn’t be able to write it anymore, and I didn’t find anything as simple/strong to answer to that.
Possible counter-example: Even as really well designed transhuman entities, we will eventually start “forgetting” our past experiences, given light-speed limits and some other physical upper bounds on practical storage densities and retrieval rates. At the very least, it would take long enough to retrieve enough detail about ourselves far enough in the past that it would be more like looking up someone else’s life on Wikipedia than actually remembering the past. With clever indexing and compression, as well as advanced storage hardware, this might take many millions of years or longer, but it will still eventually happen as long as we continue having new experiences.
Therefore, if your friend insists that we must have something to mourn in order to create and appreciate poetry, consider the unavoidable slow loss of our past selves.
Therefore, if your friend insists that we must have something to mourn in order to create and appreciate poetry, consider the unavoidable slow loss of our past selves.
This happens to me now. I have more than once noticed and mourned gaps in my memory, where a day of bliss interrupted by some silly bit of emotional drama is retained only as a memory of a ruined day.
And on a more professional level, I routinely notice the annoying difficulty of recalling how a “past self” as little as one day old would think about a problem (when I’ve effectively deleted that self due to a recent mind hack).
(It’s not that I personally care about how the deleted self thought or felt, it’s just that I’m usually trying to write accounts of the before-and-after of my mindhacks, and it’s bloody difficult to write the “before” part, after, because I just don’t think the same way any more.)
True. But I wasn’t arguing over “absolute immortality” (that’s even quite fuzzy for me, “eternity” is not something I can apprehend, and I’m not sure it’s really possible, with the Second Law of Thermodynamics), but more about a “moderate” amount of trans-humanism, with no more old age, but occasional accidents, so people living in average like a few millions of years. But you said hold true for “absolute immortality” if it’s possible.
so people living in average like a few millions of years.
“Curing aging” isn’t enough on its own to get a million year lifespan; an 18-year old male in the United States has about a 1 in 1000 chance of dying before reaching his 19th birthday*, which would imply an average lifespan of about 1,000 years.Of course, by the time we do cure aging, we’ll probably have solved a lot of other problems, too...
Possible counter-example: Even as really well designed transhuman entities, we will eventually start “forgetting” our past experiences, given light-speed limits and some other physical upper bounds on practical storage densities and retrieval rates. At the very least, it would take long enough to retrieve enough detail about ourselves far enough in the past that it would be more like looking up someone else’s life on Wikipedia than actually remembering the past. With clever indexing and compression, as well as advanced storage hardware, this might take many millions of years or longer, but it will still eventually happen as long as we continue having new experiences.
Therefore, if your friend insists that we must have something to mourn in order to create and appreciate poetry, consider the unavoidable slow loss of our past selves.
This happens to me now. I have more than once noticed and mourned gaps in my memory, where a day of bliss interrupted by some silly bit of emotional drama is retained only as a memory of a ruined day.
And on a more professional level, I routinely notice the annoying difficulty of recalling how a “past self” as little as one day old would think about a problem (when I’ve effectively deleted that self due to a recent mind hack).
(It’s not that I personally care about how the deleted self thought or felt, it’s just that I’m usually trying to write accounts of the before-and-after of my mindhacks, and it’s bloody difficult to write the “before” part, after, because I just don’t think the same way any more.)
True. But I wasn’t arguing over “absolute immortality” (that’s even quite fuzzy for me, “eternity” is not something I can apprehend, and I’m not sure it’s really possible, with the Second Law of Thermodynamics), but more about a “moderate” amount of trans-humanism, with no more old age, but occasional accidents, so people living in average like a few millions of years. But you said hold true for “absolute immortality” if it’s possible.
“Curing aging” isn’t enough on its own to get a million year lifespan; an 18-year old male in the United States has about a 1 in 1000 chance of dying before reaching his 19th birthday*, which would imply an average lifespan of about 1,000 years.Of course, by the time we do cure aging, we’ll probably have solved a lot of other problems, too...
Yep, or perhaps for immortality that lasts “merely” a few hundred billion years.