Who wants to live forever?

This is a split off from a discussion in the science thread about space exploration. This topic seemed very interesting but not at all related so I split it off. I put it here because I thought it might get less science related and more philosophical.

Rickie wrote:

our advances in medicine and science will make personal immortality accessible

I hope your right.

there is ample evidence that our capabilities are getting closer and closer every few years,

I believe your right and maybe faster than we believe possible now.

the question is eventually going to be "who gets it, at what price, and who doesnt?"

Personally I don't want us to get to a point where we can live forever. 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.

Thoughts?

P.S. I might have cut part of Rickie's response off. Sorry Rickie.

I'd would consider it an option. If it gave me the opportunity to: learn, grow mentally, morally and spiritually, and help improve our human condition I think I'd take a shot at it.


Go this is what you cut...no offence taken

When we can I pray our wisdom on how to answer the question grows at a greater pace than our ability to make it happen.

Wisdom more evolved than technology being the key for me.

I have no interest in living to 150 or whatever science/medicine would like us to.

First reason, this planet gets enough of our crap already, we don't need to make the situation worse and increase the strain we put on it.

Second reason, for me lengthening life so much devalues it... why bother making something of yourself, or cherishing the time you have with your family and friends, if you know you 'have the time'?

Last reason (that I can think of right now).. who's to say that this extra life will be worth living? We may live longer, but there's no guarantee that extra life will be comfortable to live.

A few years back I used to think that I would do anything to be able to live forever. The idea of death, of having limited time, was all utterly terrifying to me and I simply could not understand those people who say "Why would anyone want to live forever?"

Now, I've come around to the way of thinking that life would be meaningless if it was eternal. The short time that we have makes every moment precious. And death is arguably one of the most fundamental and important experiences of life...from a Jedi point of view if you don't die, you're missing out on...well, everything really.

"And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life."
"Death, yet the Force."

I'll still admit to finding the idea of death a little scary, but the idea of not dying is also now equally scary.

I think human minds could handle it if human bodies could. We'd just keep on going and you'd have much greater opportunity to learn more lessons, make more mistakes and experience new things. Which might be an important point about 'new' things... how much memory can our brains hold!? If we get so much we might forget the old stuff meaning we just eventually cycle through the same types of things so we can experience them as 'new'!!!

As I guess we'd notice the loss of older memories a lot more if we lived for hundreds of years - unless there is some massive storage capacity which we just need to work out how to unlock. Important fragments of memories for example could serve as a scaffold for how our 'imagination' might fill in the blanks (like the road material, wind direction, etc), and if we could learn what they were we might be able to have more, more accurate memories longer. It might even be how it works now for all I know.

I'd do it if it was on offer, as it's easy enough to get out of it if I changed my mind.... just because it would be something new :pinch:

But seriously, technology will mitigate the loss of memory to a large extent. Even me now thinking back about my past my memories are informed by photographs I have. Those pics give me important reminders which help me remember other details.

At the end of the day our mind has a relationship with our body, and our body has a relationship with the world - its how you manage those things in the now which matters.

death is arguably one of the most fundamental and important experiences of life

Maybe but I'm in no hurry to find out. :laugh:

What i belive is that when we die, we live on.
We never actually die, we are vibrations, our bodies are just shells. And i belive that we live on, forever.
However if we keep our memories after we pass on is something i've always been intrested in.
From what i have read, the only documented people who could keep their memories after dying was the nacaals, or the ascended masters. Their existence are stated in the emerald tablets of thoth i belive.. Their existance haven't been proven yet though

I feel like, at this point in my life, the only reason that I would want to live forever (or at least a really, really long time) is to see all the cool stuff that will happen later. Like what if we do encounter aliens in a few hundred years? Achieve fusion to a degree which can actually provide clean, limitless energy? Interstellar travel? One of Mars's moons is supposed to eventually break up and spiral into it and give Mars a ring like Saturn. That's supposed to happen in a few million years. I'd like to see that. Have the time to travel to every country and learn all the world's martial arts. Stuff like that.

But, as I said before, I don't think it's worth it.

For me, the jury is out. I think I understand why death is necessary. But, I also feel like oblivion is a lot to take in.

time goes fast

youth goes fast

life is pretty awesome if you can really live it

i dont believe that death makes life valuable any more than i believe that a car that doesnt work makes cars that do work more valuable - it is life that makes life valuable, imo

i also dont believe in any after life - it may be that there is one, but my understanding is that the human psyche exists as a condition of being a biological organism - take away the biology, and if there is anything left (and thats a very big "IF") it is not at all what we know ourselves to be now

i think its probably like blowing out a candles flame: where does the flame go?

nowhere - it just doesnt exist anymore

maybe theres some cosmic unity which is sublimely better than any other possible state of being

but i rather enjoy this adventure, and i know i dont have time enough to do half of the things i would like, and maybe i would get tired of it eventually, but id like to have the option of going on until i do get tired of it, and if that sublime cosmic unity exists, it will still be there for me when im ready

however, i do not much like the idea of an elite class being allowed immortality while the poor are denied it - the kind of tyranny that an intelligent cadre of wealthy, immortal beings could achieve in a few hundred years is pretty frightening if you spend some time really thinking of it

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: