Who wants to live forever?

Goken wrote: ...able to transfer our consciousness into machines, ...None of these options appeal to me.

whats wrong with transferring our consciousness into machines? better, stronger, faster, infiinitely adaptable, etc etc. why not?

It's easy to turn down immortality when it's not available to you. In all honesty, if I'm on my deathbed about to croak and someone offers me a pill that can ensure my survival indefinitely I sure in hell ain't turning it down...

See this is what I'd do probably. But clone my mind just before death, rather then transfer it.

While there is no way of knowing if the machine me would really be me... like the question was the me that woke up this morning the same me that went to sleep. If I was going to die I might as well try it to find out. I'd try and get the best of both worlds, both die and yet live on. So if there is a spiritual domain beyond death, the flesh me moves on like normal.

If the transfer doesn't work then I'm dead like normal, but if it does work then I'd still be alive in the machine yet also have experienced death in the body. The only thing missing then is the machine me's experience of death. This could go on ad infinitum I suppose. Machine Adder wants to experience death so it clones its mind just before dying, but the issue would remain of that living machine version of mind not having experienced death. The only reason to clone machine me again though is if integral to some sort of science of death, such that the conditions of dying are specific to some nature of study... otherwise the machine mind that wanted to die would not bother doing the transfer. Though I reckon a machine version of my mind would realize it might just be better to run a version of itself which doesn't choose to die, and since it can clone itself if it wants to experience death it could just clone a copy of itself to go ahead and do that at anytime. But would that one really be me... its become a conditioned me.
:S
Anyway, there might have to be laws about how many 'minds' a person can have. Only one allowed unless the person is in the final phases of a terminal condition sort of thing. It mightn't matter where the mind was, but just how many there were.

Desolous wrote:

Goken wrote: ...able to transfer our consciousness into machines, ...None of these options appeal to me.

whats wrong with transferring our consciousness into machines? better, stronger, faster, infiinitely adaptable, etc etc. why not?

my first thought to this was "because theres no more sex!"

my next thought was - well my next thought really was "im not having a lot of it these days anyway

but the next thought after that was "if we didnt have the bodies we have now, we wouldnt want sex in the same way that we want it now"

which then begs the question "what WOULD we want?"

a lot of the things that we value are predicated on the bodies we have

everything probably

afaik, all of our motivational systems begin with our human bodies - even the more abstract things we value like "love" or "freedom" are important to us as a condition or result of our biological nature

without our bodies, theres no telling what we would be

but, by definition, it wouldnt be human

it wouldnt DESIRE in the same way that a human desires, or conceptualize in the same way a human conceptualizes

i suppose it would desire SOMETHING, but, what would that be?

from Time Magazine

http://healthland.time.com/2013/12/19/reversing-aging-not-as-crazy-as-you-think/

"Reversing Aging: Not as Crazy as You Think

Harvard researchers find a new compound that can make old cells young again

....In an experiment in mice, the team found that giving older mice a chemical called NAD for just one week made 2-year-old-mice tissue resemble that of 6-month-old mice (in human years, that would be akin to a 60-year-old’s cells becoming more like those belonging to a 20-year-old)."

I'd like to live, not forever, but for a looong time. Yoda was able to gather a lot of knowledge, wisdom and experience. If there was a way to live for a long time, healthy enough to fight with lightsabers (jk), and with a lucid mind, I don't see why dying soon.

Whats the point in living even a day, if nothing continues after your death?

Kohadre wrote: Whats the point in living even a day, if nothing continues after your death?

Anything is more then nothing, if nothing continues after death. It would just mean you get the one shot at life.

The thing is no-one knows what the future holds. Change is always happening. It's just difficult to see because it does not happen uniformly in space - but it would seem to be increasing in rate through time.

While the 1985 version of me perhaps imagined some things would be possible in 2015 which are not, it did not expect some of the things which are. The tricky part was that it wasn't until I was about 34 that I actually noticed how much stuff changes. When I was in my early 20's everything seemed like it had stayed the same for the last 10 years. I reckon that sensation has something to do with the neural pruning process winding down maybe.

I believe that there will come a time when science can not explain a few more things, will not be possible to transfer your consciousness to machines, because its soul can not be transferred, the Force does not translate into data, so die. Without saying that living forever is a problem, people go crazy.

Zenchi wrote: It's easy to turn down immortality when it's not available to you. In all honesty, if I'm on my deathbed about to croak and someone offers me a pill that can ensure my survival indefinitely I sure in hell ain't turning it down...

I hope the Dr isn't the devil? :ohmy: :evil:

Kohadre wrote: Whats the point in living even a day, if nothing continues after your death?

may be one of the most important questions of our era

my reflex answer is: "that depends on what youre doing with your life"

Once you move past the need for a "point" and realize life isn't literary, then I think it becomes really easy. I'm not there myself. That's just my hypothesis.

I thought this was a thread about a Queen song, so I didn't really come prepared with an answer to the question.

Goken wrote: Every path that I see that leads there isn't really what I'd call living. Either we live longer but with constant health problems, are able to transfer our consciousness into machines, or are able to live longer at the expense of the lives of others. None of these options appeal to me.

Perhaps herein lies the problem. Now, I agree that enduring for centuries on miserable bones and ever fading sanity is undesirable. I also find that prolonging our own lives at the expense of other ones has some rather ugly ethical implications if it isn't one in itself. Both of these produce strictly unnecessary suffering to either oneself or somebody else. Pending further specifications, is not in principle true of transfering ourselves into machines that can run a consciousness. You did not specifically exclude that by the time we could do this, the machines in question would be bodies no less suitable to host us than our current ones are.
However, while I do understand that these are the only three options you deem plausible, I doubt we have established that these are indeed the only three. What if medicine advanced to where it could in some way restore our physical bodies to the prime state we had at, say, our late twenties, and that would be done by an enzyme injection synthesized from a personal DNA sample gathered from stem cells we give for that specific purpose? What if prolonging lives wouldn't cost anybody else's life expectancy nor would mean living on to observe our own bodies decompose nor living in a body that is fundamentally foreign? And if you object to that, is it not more accurate to say that said objection stems from some place other than the mere undesirability of the options?

It does for me, if you wish to know. My mortality is what gives my life urgency. It is by scarcity that time is precious. Would I like to live, say, another half century longer and in good health? Maybe. If I find something to invest that time into, then maybe. A prospect of proper immortality however is utterly unappealing to me...

You could just be like Dracula, crushing your enemies and seeing them tremble before you.

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steamboat28 wrote: I thought this was a thread about a Queen song, so I didn't really come prepared with an answer to the question.

I very much did that on purpose. Not really a huge fan of that song but I do love "The Highlander" (the movie for which the song was written, along with "Princes of the Universe" although that might not have been until the TV show. Hard to remember).

If a human is presented with the option to escape death, and become immortal forever. He will accept it.
If he must so kill for it, human programming is to survive, it is our instinct and it has always been.
Not all humans will react the same way, and some may not accept it, but in most cases a human will accept the offer. That is simply how we are, i belive that we should refrain from instinct, as instinct is very impulsive and it could lead us to a quick death.
But as i said above, a human want to survive, the individual want to keep existing, it is in our nature.
So yes, many humans want to live forever

I'm interested in living as long as nature, augmented by medical support to overcome emergencies, allows. My understanding is that under ideal conditions, this is a maximum of a bit over a century.

My perception though is that Earthly life is just one segment of what is available to each of us as an eternal soul-being. I believe there are other places for us to go, other things for us to experience, and I don't want to give that up for the limited range of options which exist for most of us while living in the material universe.

So - no, I don't want a body that is a perpetual-motion machine.

Desolous wrote:

Goken wrote: ...able to transfer our consciousness into machines, ...None of these options appeal to me.

whats wrong with transferring our consciousness into machines? better, stronger, faster, infiinitely adaptable, etc etc. why not?

because it isn't possible and never will be. Even if we are able to use whole brain emulation to emulate your brain and if that simulation is conscious (I personally find this doubtful and frankly i have yet to see a viable test of consciousness ) at best it will be a copy of you. You will still die with your body and will either find out that there is an existence after this or just cease to exist.

I definitely want to live forever. Life is so rich of experiences, I need immortality to explore better ways to overcome mortal limitations.