it seems to me that getting rid of death BEFORE we eliminate all the other major problems facing humanity is going to make those problems much worse. Death is an enemy that should be vanquished, but it’s not an enemy I’m prepared to destroy until I’m satisfied that we’ll be able to handle the consequences.
I think perhaps you don’t realize what “getting rid of death” means. Humanity grew up in the shadow of death, and lives every day in the shadow of death. The whole world population of 1880, and every earlier year, is completely dead. Getting rid of death means that the end never comes, for anyone, beyond a certain point in time. Rejuvenation doesn’t get rid of death, it just means you’re still young when you do finally die. Cryonics, uploading, and copying don’t get rid of death—in fact copying multiplies death—if you live on through your copies, that means you will die many times. And physics says there will be a last time, even in that scenario.
Also, you don’t realize the enormity of the mass psychological inertia here. There is no popular will to “get rid of death”. If you make that your goal, you will find yourself in a desert, bereft of support and understanding. Humans can be classified into those who don’t yet understand the idea of death, those who are resigned to it, and those who believe in a metaphysical safety net. The people who see death as something which the human race could choose to abolish by an appropriate effort are a microscopic minority. Since the first cryonic suspension, over a billion people died, and less than a thousand were frozen; that tells you how small a minority.
The next tipping point will come when there’s popular interest in rejuvenation, that is, in getting rid of “ageing”. That is a far more doable thing, than getting rid of death per se, and it has an obvious appeal for anyone who is, in fact, ageing. Again, it’s only strange minorities who want to take a one-way liquid-nitrogen ticket to an unknown future, or who think of getting their brains scanned so they can live on in cyberspace. But simply staying young would appeal to a lot of people—I won’t say everybody, or even a majority, because apparently you can’t underestimate the human will to find its existing situation satisfactory and not in need of change.
But returning to your desire to solve “all the other major problems facing humanity” first… I am going to criticize this attitude as radically out of touch with reality in multiple ways. If it helps, I had similar thoughts once. I didn’t want to do the “other major problems” first, but I wanted to do them at the same time.
So, let’s see what’s wrong with this picture. First: what makes you think that you get a say on any of this—either the course of world events, or the rate at which the human race tries to overcome its biological limitations? Are you in a position, of influence, wealth, knowledge, ability, to make a difference to anything much outside your own life? Or are you just an atom of will slowly realizing that it was born into a universe completely at odds with the sort of reality it would like to be inhabiting, an atom of will which is able to express this preference verbally, but which is not able to act on it in any way?
That is the harshest thing that needs saying. Most people who start young with big dreams more or less completely abandon them, because it’s hard to make them actually happen. A few people persist at the price of everything else, perhaps without even realizing that this is what they are doing, or understanding why life seems to be so difficult; I’d place my younger self in this category. It would be an extremely rare and fortunate person who neither compromises their ideals nor suffers because of this. The world around you is waiting for you to abandon any idea of immortality or a better world, in order to focus on more achievable things like making money and having a relationship, and it is set up to support this sort of activity, not the other sort.
Next, let’s consider what’s implied by solving those “other major problems”. By the sound of it, here you mostly mean “unsustainability”—overpopulation, maybe resources running out—though you could also have in mind poverty, war, and who knows what else.
Just to be realistic, let’s remember that these problems have been around for the whole of human history. Saying that before you get rid of X (in this case, death), you want to get rid of Y first, where Y is at least half a dozen things that have existed forever despite the intention of numerous of your predecessors to get rid of them—that sounds like a formula for never getting around to dealing with X.
Also, the human race does not inhabit one single rational polity run by philosopher-kings. It consists of about 200 sovereign states whose governments are already always in crisis management mode, because they’re dealing with insurgencies, culture wars, the exigencies of the global market, and so on. Here’s a tip: do you want to know how fanatical movements get created, the sort that wage wars, demonize opponents, and so on? One way they get created is that someone decides to solve all the world’s problems at once, and that becomes such an overwhelmingly positive outcome that people become desperately willing to do anything in order to make it possible. The world is so far beyond the control of any individual atom of will, or even any political coalition of them, that those who insist on having an impact at the highest levels of the historical process generally have to adopt the most extreme available measures.
Another problem is that technological development is not going to wait for you to try to achieve a perhaps impossible planetary “equilibrium” in which distressing things are no longer happening in any corner of the world. The flip side of this is that peak oil, new diseases, and terrorists with WMDs are not going to stop a singularity from happening. Despite what the myths of planetary Internet mind-union say, the world does not stand together or fall together, and it especially does not advance together. The world could be having a major eco-economic crisis, but any sufficiently advanced country can at any time pull a North Korea, put up a wall, and retire from the globalization game without sacrificing its technological culture. Two-thirds of the world could go Mad Max, and the progress of the final third would still be far more than enough to drag us all into the AI/nanotech zone. So if you do choose to maintain an interest in ultra-high-tech post-human possibilities, get used to doing this even while the slums on the other side of town are on fire, metaphorically speaking. You can always choose to be a firefighter instead, but that really does mean you will no longer be very important in solving those more futuristic problems.
I had some other things to say but this is already more than enough.
I think just about everything in the above comment is predicated on a grossly incorrect reading of the original post. So far as I can tell:
Raemon was using “getting rid of death” not to mean “magically ensuring that no one ever dies at all, even on account of the end / heat-death of the universe” but “eliminating, or very nearly eliminating, death through old age and disease”, and nothing s/he said requires the former meaning.
Raemon was not claiming to have any substantial ability to influence whether or not the human race abolishes death, or when, nor to play a big role in solving all those other problems. (And: discussing whether something would be a good or a bad thing doesn’t in the least imply any claim to be able to influence it.)
Raemon was not claiming to have a politically feasible way of solving any of those problems. In particular, s/he was not claiming that the world is a single rational polity run by philosopher-kings, s/he was not proposing to form a fanatical extremist movement, etc., etc., etc. (And: discussing whether something would be a good or a bad thing doesn’t in the least imply any claim that there’s an easy way to bring it about.)
Thank you. Both for understanding what I was talking about (more accurately, what I wasn’t), and for making the effort to use gender neutral wording. (As it happens I am male, but it’s something I care about which happens to be on my mind right now).
I totally understand why death is a big deal. I’m not saying we should wait to fix it. I understand emphasizing that because it’s not something that generally gets press. But there’s a lot of other issues out there that need fixing as well, and not everyone is the sort of person who has the skillset/interest in fixing the death issue directly. My target audience was internet bloggers, whom I thought were disproportionately talking about one issue. Not government officials.
Mostly, though, I honestly just wanted to know what the counterarguments to overpopulation were, and they have been explained to my satisfaction.
I think perhaps you don’t realize what “getting rid of death” means. Humanity grew up in the shadow of death, and lives every day in the shadow of death. The whole world population of 1880, and every earlier year, is completely dead. Getting rid of death means that the end never comes, for anyone, beyond a certain point in time. Rejuvenation doesn’t get rid of death, it just means you’re still young when you do finally die. Cryonics, uploading, and copying don’t get rid of death—in fact copying multiplies death—if you live on through your copies, that means you will die many times. And physics says there will be a last time, even in that scenario.
Also, you don’t realize the enormity of the mass psychological inertia here. There is no popular will to “get rid of death”. If you make that your goal, you will find yourself in a desert, bereft of support and understanding. Humans can be classified into those who don’t yet understand the idea of death, those who are resigned to it, and those who believe in a metaphysical safety net. The people who see death as something which the human race could choose to abolish by an appropriate effort are a microscopic minority. Since the first cryonic suspension, over a billion people died, and less than a thousand were frozen; that tells you how small a minority.
The next tipping point will come when there’s popular interest in rejuvenation, that is, in getting rid of “ageing”. That is a far more doable thing, than getting rid of death per se, and it has an obvious appeal for anyone who is, in fact, ageing. Again, it’s only strange minorities who want to take a one-way liquid-nitrogen ticket to an unknown future, or who think of getting their brains scanned so they can live on in cyberspace. But simply staying young would appeal to a lot of people—I won’t say everybody, or even a majority, because apparently you can’t underestimate the human will to find its existing situation satisfactory and not in need of change.
But returning to your desire to solve “all the other major problems facing humanity” first… I am going to criticize this attitude as radically out of touch with reality in multiple ways. If it helps, I had similar thoughts once. I didn’t want to do the “other major problems” first, but I wanted to do them at the same time.
So, let’s see what’s wrong with this picture. First: what makes you think that you get a say on any of this—either the course of world events, or the rate at which the human race tries to overcome its biological limitations? Are you in a position, of influence, wealth, knowledge, ability, to make a difference to anything much outside your own life? Or are you just an atom of will slowly realizing that it was born into a universe completely at odds with the sort of reality it would like to be inhabiting, an atom of will which is able to express this preference verbally, but which is not able to act on it in any way?
That is the harshest thing that needs saying. Most people who start young with big dreams more or less completely abandon them, because it’s hard to make them actually happen. A few people persist at the price of everything else, perhaps without even realizing that this is what they are doing, or understanding why life seems to be so difficult; I’d place my younger self in this category. It would be an extremely rare and fortunate person who neither compromises their ideals nor suffers because of this. The world around you is waiting for you to abandon any idea of immortality or a better world, in order to focus on more achievable things like making money and having a relationship, and it is set up to support this sort of activity, not the other sort.
Next, let’s consider what’s implied by solving those “other major problems”. By the sound of it, here you mostly mean “unsustainability”—overpopulation, maybe resources running out—though you could also have in mind poverty, war, and who knows what else.
Just to be realistic, let’s remember that these problems have been around for the whole of human history. Saying that before you get rid of X (in this case, death), you want to get rid of Y first, where Y is at least half a dozen things that have existed forever despite the intention of numerous of your predecessors to get rid of them—that sounds like a formula for never getting around to dealing with X.
Also, the human race does not inhabit one single rational polity run by philosopher-kings. It consists of about 200 sovereign states whose governments are already always in crisis management mode, because they’re dealing with insurgencies, culture wars, the exigencies of the global market, and so on. Here’s a tip: do you want to know how fanatical movements get created, the sort that wage wars, demonize opponents, and so on? One way they get created is that someone decides to solve all the world’s problems at once, and that becomes such an overwhelmingly positive outcome that people become desperately willing to do anything in order to make it possible. The world is so far beyond the control of any individual atom of will, or even any political coalition of them, that those who insist on having an impact at the highest levels of the historical process generally have to adopt the most extreme available measures.
Another problem is that technological development is not going to wait for you to try to achieve a perhaps impossible planetary “equilibrium” in which distressing things are no longer happening in any corner of the world. The flip side of this is that peak oil, new diseases, and terrorists with WMDs are not going to stop a singularity from happening. Despite what the myths of planetary Internet mind-union say, the world does not stand together or fall together, and it especially does not advance together. The world could be having a major eco-economic crisis, but any sufficiently advanced country can at any time pull a North Korea, put up a wall, and retire from the globalization game without sacrificing its technological culture. Two-thirds of the world could go Mad Max, and the progress of the final third would still be far more than enough to drag us all into the AI/nanotech zone. So if you do choose to maintain an interest in ultra-high-tech post-human possibilities, get used to doing this even while the slums on the other side of town are on fire, metaphorically speaking. You can always choose to be a firefighter instead, but that really does mean you will no longer be very important in solving those more futuristic problems.
I had some other things to say but this is already more than enough.
I think just about everything in the above comment is predicated on a grossly incorrect reading of the original post. So far as I can tell:
Raemon was using “getting rid of death” not to mean “magically ensuring that no one ever dies at all, even on account of the end / heat-death of the universe” but “eliminating, or very nearly eliminating, death through old age and disease”, and nothing s/he said requires the former meaning.
Raemon was not claiming to have any substantial ability to influence whether or not the human race abolishes death, or when, nor to play a big role in solving all those other problems. (And: discussing whether something would be a good or a bad thing doesn’t in the least imply any claim to be able to influence it.)
Raemon was not claiming to have a politically feasible way of solving any of those problems. In particular, s/he was not claiming that the world is a single rational polity run by philosopher-kings, s/he was not proposing to form a fanatical extremist movement, etc., etc., etc. (And: discussing whether something would be a good or a bad thing doesn’t in the least imply any claim that there’s an easy way to bring it about.)
Thank you. Both for understanding what I was talking about (more accurately, what I wasn’t), and for making the effort to use gender neutral wording. (As it happens I am male, but it’s something I care about which happens to be on my mind right now).
I totally understand why death is a big deal. I’m not saying we should wait to fix it. I understand emphasizing that because it’s not something that generally gets press. But there’s a lot of other issues out there that need fixing as well, and not everyone is the sort of person who has the skillset/interest in fixing the death issue directly. My target audience was internet bloggers, whom I thought were disproportionately talking about one issue. Not government officials.
Mostly, though, I honestly just wanted to know what the counterarguments to overpopulation were, and they have been explained to my satisfaction.