avalanche:ix

tear out my guts and replace them with machines, crack open my skull and upload my brain to the web, tinker with my genetic structure and give me gills, please! yes, i'm a transhumanist.

most of the technologies transhumanists are most excited about are currently in their first steps to maturing. we've now been able to make the blind see again through the cybernetic stimulation of their visual cortex. the first nanocompounds are in prototype stage, genetic engineering is advancing at a rapid pace. for anyone to believe that the goals of transhumanism are unlikely, is to simply shut themselves off from the technological whirlwind going on around them.

much like the theists and the world?


'i'm going to live forever, i'm a transhumanist!'

Adrian Selby

immortality would be awful. I only value my life because I'm going to lose it. If you've read a History of the World in 10 and a half Chapters by Julian Barnes you'd have read the great chapter where a guy wakes up from what he thought was death to an immortal life. Needless to say, the suicide rate there is massive.

Thus, people would have to adapt in massive ways to how we currently conceive of things.

I'm reminded also of Clifford Simak's City, where humans go to Jupiter, transform into Jupiter lifeforms and feel so wonderful they don't bother going back to humans again, changing from being humans to something else.

'We' wouldn't be immortal, 'we' would change into something else that became less and less proximal to us.

Is it a bad thing? Don't know

Primal

I'm DialecticMaterialist from the AN, and as for discouraging inventors, someone has keep his/her sanity around here. Otherwise we may as well just bow down to statues and start praying.

Chip

Hmmm, just suppose for a moment that you or I were immortal. In such a universe we’d probably opt for greater augmented intelligence, information storage and retrieval, ever increasing speed of bringing an ever larger amount of past experiences to bear when considering new situations. Might there come a time when we could not be surprised, our augmented and relatively quick information handling allowing us to predict quite unerringly what would happen in the next moment and the next. Maybe we would become bored. Maybe we’d launch ourselves into a game where we’d start out anew, wipe the slate blank, so to speak, for the sake of the adventure and surprise that learning all over again would entail. Maybe that is exactly what has happened. Maybe we are immortals playing a game with our selves for the sake of feelings and emotions. Come to think of it, I don’t recall ever being dead.

Regards, Chip

Edited for grammar correction.

[ November 07, 2002: Message edited by: Chip ]</p>

Primal

Yes, maybe in a man in a normal house, who thinks he realizes that he is a man in a vat being drained by machines, who thinks he realizes he's a brain in a vat, who thinks he realizes he's an advanced computer who is in reality a ghost computer program.

Such assumptions can go on forever, whatever happened to good Occam?

SecularFuture

Sorry if I haven’t been responding to posts as often. Been busy working on big film, not much time for anything extra.

Before you go to sleep tonight - lie in your bed and imagine that you were dying. Close your eyes and embrace the darkness and silence, and then imagine NEVER being able to awake from that darkness and silence.

I would rather have something forever than nothing forever. And for those who want to discourage Immortalist concepts, please go away. You’re not going to stop us from TRYING to become immortal. You’re not going to stop us from TRYING to prolong our lives.

[ November 08, 2002: Message edited by: SecularFuture ]</p>

Adrian Selby

sec, there's prolonging your life, then there's immortality, I don't think you fully understand the impact of immortality is all i'm saying.

crocodile deathroll

If we could live forever, then how can the brain ultimately fill itself with an infinity amount on information? Or will it just delete superfluous information over time?

crocodile deathroll

Chip, you were in effect dead for 14 billion years then in an instance you were born somewhere on planet Earth. So did that 14 billion year interval of time between the Big Bang and your birth seem like 14 billion years to you? You obviously were not bored at any time
So if you were unconscous for another 14 billion years or one attosecond then either way I do not think it will make one iota of difference to you.

[ November 09, 2002: Message edited by: crocodile deathroll ]</p>

Demosthenes

To perhaps clear up a common misconception, there's indeed a distinction between undefinite life and immortality. Undefinite life's simply life without an end to it, no gradual aging and then finally death at the end. Though you'll still have to worry about accidents. Immortality's never dying, period. No accidents can kill you off, nothing at all. Perhaps the only way to die is by through your own hand.

People often use undefinite life and immortality exchangeably and that doesn't really bother me, afterall, being an immortal sounds better to my ears

It's still heavily debated wither true immortality would be possible at all. The current universe suggests that it's impossible, no matter how long we live, eventally we will arrive at an end. Though it's been argued among the more radical thinkers that if we were to develop the means to craft basement universes we could theorically achieve true immortality.

It's really all just hand waving right now. I'm more interested in practical ways of achieving long, deathless, and vibrant life. The rest can come later when we've had more time to think about them.