On the meaning of life and the long-term merits of technologic improvement

[Trading]

My post was made under a scientific perspective. From this perspective, death is our final destination. Freezing ourselves only delays it (but if it increases our life, while we wait for a cure for our problem, go for it).

I didn't write that waiting for our turn is fair or necessarily always enjoyable.

But in this case, it's better to be on a long line than to be our turn next. Death is the proof that delaying the inevitable might be a sound decision.

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[The Sceptical Chymist]

I wanna add some,
Just think about future. If you don't hold place in people's hearts and minds; you will be completely forgotten in 300 years. Even everyone remembers you will be dead. So actually, life race in many ways is meaningless because we die physically also die when we don't get remembered.
Technology plays good role in second stage, uploading people into pcs. So there may be no real death.

Yes, and I like to pretend the things I do have meaning.  If I didn't have my little illusions and delusions, I would have committed suicide years ago.  I do despair for the future generations though.  I see technology bringing about a lot of really shitty things.

[bitsmichel]

My post was made under a scientific perspective. From this perspective, death is our final destination. Frozen ourselves only delays it (but if it increases our life, while we wait for a cure for our problem, go for it).

We should reconsider what we mean by ourselves and conscience. Death our final destination? We have to be open minded.
Let me give you some science fiction ideas to become immortal:

replacing our hardware.
We have some early technology: pacemaker, fake legs. If we completely replace all of our our hardware, we would live for 100s of years or perhaps even longer.

fixing our hardware.
The vary traditional method. In the event of sickness use pills etc. Can we stretch life this way to infinity?

time travel
Live your life from young to old. Everytime you get old travel back in time to being young.

brain transplant
transfer the brain into new body. Humans would have a new body every 50-100 years.

components
We divide our conscience (brian) into components. We implement these components into a new living human being. In practice there are cases known of human beings losing part of themselves due to brain damage (left/right disconnection and others). What if we could simply take components and put them in any human being? This also implies you can become a mix with your wife or friend. That is to say, to become one.

recreating ourselves.
In the event we die, we print ourselves exactly as we were.  Yes, I do mean a 3d printer that prints human beings. This means an exact copy of our body. This also implies that you could be alive in several bodies, all across the world or space. Different versions of yourself could be alive at the same time (Young, adult).

reincarnation
We download our conscience (brain, about 2.5 petabytes of data and additional structure / system). By uploading you can then literally be reborn as any animal, machine or space system. Download and upload could be simultaneously, so any type of traffic would be obsolete (Trains, cars, planes etc).

The later two have severe consequences. Here are some thoughts:

• You could meet yourself and shake hands.
• You can see yourself die and go on with your life
• You can be at zero or more places at the same time
• You can be anywhere in the world within a split second
• You could be half of you if merged with another brain
• You could be a bird on monday, a dolphin on tuesday and a giraffe on wednesday.
• You could be everything that lives in different shapes

These are truly fantasies but as a scientist you should remain open minded. But why be immortal when everyone else goes to heaven  

[Trading]

I'm convincing that, if we don't screw up, our descendents will live hundred of years, probably thousands of years, thanks to new technology, including on aging.

The idea that our bodies are like machines that will necessarily slowly decay is wrong. We are programmed to get old and die, to leave resources to the young. That is the most efficient way for a species to survive on a world with scarce resources. But they are working not only on stopping but even reversing aging (see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1221052.msg13000982#msg13000982).

But, sorry for being negative, death will wait for all our descendents patiently, a million or a billion years if necessary. Soon or later, something will go wrong to each and everyone of them. Death will be their final destination also, even with several of your SF solutions.

I wouldn't count on a heaven waiting for us. Deep down, even religious people normally don't count on it.

One of the most astonishing things is the importance religious people give to all the details, material resources and honors they have in this life and how scare they usually are of dying. Even suicidal bombers hesitate or give up some times.

For a real believer, this life of, say, 100 years, should be irrelevant compared with the next immortal one. That all of them (more or less, at least in some moments) are ready to sin against others and god, risking their immortality, seems completely absurd. Unless, deep down, they feel this is really the only life they will get.

[Trading]

Small update in the OP.

[Trading]

"Without the threat of death, there's no reason to live... at all."    — Marilyn Manson

The quote has some merit. One of its points is that we need bad things in life to give value to the good. If one does only what one wants, one gets bored. Beside, the conscience of the shortness of life is a serious motivation to do things now and not tomorrow.

However, death will be always with us. Humans might only be able to postpone it for very long.

[Trading]

"Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back."    — Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD), roman emperor.

Stating the obvious, being death just a state, mostly caused by the weakness of the human body (a real treason against the conscience), doesn't make any kind of sense interactions with it. It doesn't have any kind of conscience. But if it were possible any meaningful interaction, except in the case of suicide, smiling to it would be like kissing Judas. It would be smiling to an odious being, that imposes it self on ourselves and on our love ones.

Laughing or mocking our tragic destiny is a much better reaction:

"Life is a sexually transmitted, fatal disease" (this one is brilliant, thanks Neil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gaiman)

"Health /n./ The slowest possible rate at which one can die." (don't know the author, but it's excellent).

"They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days."    — Garrison Keillor.

"The first thing you should do when you get up is read the obituaries. You never know when you'll see a name that will just make your day."    — Ed Salisbury.

"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."  Jack Handey

I hate funerals and would not attend my own if it could be avoided ~ Robert T. Morris

"I swear on my dead relatives — and even on the ones who are not feeling too good." Jacopo in The Count of Monte Cristo (2002), probably the author is Jay Wolpert

"Everybody knows that the great russian poet Maiakovski commited suicide. What is not so well known is that his last words were: 'Comrads, don't shoot'..."    — Fred Botten.

"I told you I was sick." — Tombstone of Spike Milligan (1918—2002), British actor.

"That's All Folks !"    — Epitaph of Mel Blanc, The Man of a Thousand Voices.

Die, my dear doctor! That's the last thing I shall do! ~ Lord Palmerston

"Life sucks, but Death swallows!"

"Half of all adults in the United States say they have considered registering as an organ donor, although only some have purchased a motorcycle to show that they're really serious about it."

The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets.
 from Will Rogers

"Support the American Kidney Foundation. Don't wear your motorcycle helmet."

"I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers."    — Emo Phillips or Will Shriner?

"100 000 lemmings can't be wrong." [animals famous for throwing themselves to death from precipices fowling hordes of thousands]

"Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?"

"After a year in therapy, my psychiatrist said to me: 'Maybe life isn't for everyone'."    — Larry Brown.

"The last thing we'll hear is some scientist saying 'It works!'"    — Jon Stewart about how the world will end.

The annoying thing about being an atheist is that you'll never have the satifaction of saying to believers, ‘I told you so.' Mark Steel

[adverbelly]

I wanna add some,
Just think about future. If you don't hold place in people's hearts and minds; you will be completely forgotten in 300 years. Even everyone remembers you will be dead. So actually, life race in many ways is meaningless because we die physically also die when we don't get remembered.
Technology plays good role in second stage, uploading people into pcs. So there may be no real death.

Somehow, you are right but Tech will make you to be remembered after you died in both sides.. perfect and bad sides of you... seconds one is the worst i guess

[Trading]

More quotes on meaning and death:


A dead atheist is someone who is all dressed up with no place to go. ~ James Duffecy


A friend of mine stopped smoking, drinking, overeating, and chasing women --all at the same time. It was a lovely funeral.


"Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened."   — Terry Pratchett.

"Want to know what happens after death ? Go look at some dead things."    — Dave Enyeart.

"Your worst day when you're alive is better than your best day when you're dead."

"One thinks one's something unique and wonderful at the center of the universe, when in fact one's just a slight interruption in the ongoing march of entropy."    — Aldous Huxley

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is, or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy."    — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

[Daniel91]

Very interesting topic.
In my opinion, in seeking the meaning of life we should not rely on changeable human values but we should rely on God's absolute and unchanging values.
Human thinking is constantly changing, during day, month, year, life, 100 years, 1000 years etc.
Can we create stable and happy society if our values are not stable and we are in conflicts all the time?
Meaning of life we can find only in God, our Creator.
Technology should serve and help man, their creator.

[Trading]

Contrary to Camus, who says the first question one has to ask is if life deserves to be lived, I think the first question is if there is anything else than the present life (an after life, a god, etc), because the answer to it will affect the answer to Camus's question, as well as all issues about meaning.

For a believer, life has already his determined meaning, usually to be a test for an afterlife.

What believers don't answer is what is the meaning of the afterlife. Are people really happy forever on "heaven" or do they ask for the meaning of their afterlife, bored to death, without even the last resource of terminating their own immortal life?

[Trading]

Reposting this on this thread, to concentrate here my posts on death and meaning:

Since there can't be any immortality, and death is our destiny, unfortunately, the issue of the effect of immortality on the value of time can't be really tested. Clearly, being able to live thousand of years would lower the value of our time. But I surely wouldn't mind to have time to be able to real waste it.

In the end, the only positive way to part from this life would be if we were completely bored with it. Think about it: life is like a relationship, the only happy way to end it is if we were tired of it. If we still love it, death will always be a tragedy.

Beside, being able to make our own decision to end life is also a positive thing. Death wouldn't be imposed by nature, but would be our own decision. One of the major problems of death is that is imposed on us against our will.

Of course, parting this life because one is bored with it wouldn't be exactly a happy moment. But it might be less unhappy than to parting it when we are still in love with life.

I'm not making an apology of suicide. In our current conditions, where life is a blink of an eye of awareness, in between two eternities of being nothing (before being alive and after being dead), suicide seems absurd. Even if life was a pain (not literally; if it was really a pain, euthanasia would make completely sense), why rush things?, we'll be dead "soon". But if we could live thousands of years, suicide could make more sense.

[Trading]

Most human beings live their life ignoring or denying death, like if living forever was their destiny. Some even real believe that something will happen that will allow them to escape death (let's forget about religious people). It's part of the terror of death management mentioned on the OP.

Camus had a different opinion on the cause, but also wrote: "I come at last to death and to the attitude we have toward it. On this point everything has been said and it is only proper to avoid pathos. Yet one will never be sufficiently surprised that everyone lives as if no one “knew.”" ("The Myth of Sisyphus").

Underlying this instinctive reaction is the idea that thinking about death will make us die not one time, but a million times. Every time someone contemplates his death, is like if he were dying again and again. Under this perspective, death can be much more oppressive from an intellectual point of view than physically.

Anyone that already faced certain death (for instance, an accident in which you really thought you were going to die) probably remember feeling fear, but mostly a simple sad resignation. That's nothing as harsh as the frequent conscience of the inevitability of death.

Even faced with the most terrible news ("you have 3 months to live") human capacity to adapt and accept what is inevitable is remarkable. Face it: what has no remedy is necessarily and automatically remediated as is, liked or not.

Dying is no big deal, but thinking about its inevitability can be, because of its coercive nature and feelings of unmeaningfulness.

Thus, the old quote saying the philosopher is unhappier than the simple farmer that lives each day caring not for anything more than his family.

Of course, no philosopher would change place with him. It seems there are people which prefer to die mentally a million times than live in oblivious.

[Trading]

The so-called theory of A Universe from nothing.

The main creationist argument is based on the point that since the universe is made of "physical stuff" (notion that comprehends not only particles, radiation and energy, but also their space-time structure of support) this stuff had to have an origin. God had to be it.

The theory that the Universe emerged from "nothing" was defended by Lawrence Krauss on his 2013 book A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing (you can watch here a presentation from him that is worthy watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwzbU0bGOdc).

Krauss argues that the difference between "nothing" and the everything we can watch now (planets, stars, galaxies, etc.) is much more thin than it was thought and that "physical stuff" can emerge from "nothing" because, inter alia, the quarks (particles that compose subatomic particles like protons and neutrons) almost have no mass and earn mass by the way they interact with other particles. Since nothing is unstable, soon or later, nothing will convert itself in something.

That means we are made of particles without almost mass composed mostly of nothing ("empty"/free space), as are all the rest of the "physical stuff".

But, as have been pointed out (David Albert, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html), the "nothing" from which the stuff emerges isn't really nothing, because it's made of quantum fields able to create virtual particles (particles and antiparticles that destroy each others in fractions of a second) and real particles.

On this aspect, and on some others about Philosophy, the reply from Krauss was a disaster (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/ "Well, yeah, I mean, look I was being provocative, as I tend to do every now and then in order to get people's attention"; see also http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.fr/2012/04/lawrence-krauss-another-physicist-with.html).

So, this theory still forces us to ask from where the quantum fields came and why they obey to some specific laws.

On the Laws, the criticism seems unwarranted. The real philosophic problem of the physical laws is the fine tuning character of some of them. A slight change in some variables and stars and galaxies would never form. This precision makes some wonder if it wasn't planned.

By asserting (like others have done) that there might exist a Multiverse (or a Universe with billions of inaccessible parts that follow different laws) with many other Universes that follow different laws, Krauss eliminates the fine tuning problem. We simple emerged on a random universe with laws that allowed for this to happen.

Claiming that even the Multiverse would have some basic laws that would be the base to the other specific physical laws of each Universe (again, David Albert) doesn't bring back the same problem, since those basic laws are not fine tuned to humans. They are compatible with billions of different Universes. They can just be a random reality.
 
But about the quantum fields, as the origin of "physical stuff", believers still can claim it was god that made them. So, the problem is far from solved.

The issue has been discussed on many places over the Internet and elsewhere:
https://philocosmology.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/an-explanation-from-nothing/
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/04/28/a-universe-from-nothing/

But, of course, ignorance is no reason to say it was god. Our ancestors made this god claim in mistake thousand of times about simple things, like thunders and lightning.

Another interesting claim (from a meaning perspective) made by Krauss is that the Universe is flat, will keep expanding forever and will die slowly. The dying claim seems to have empirical confirmation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1221052.msg13036508#msg13036508)

The way "nothing" can be converted to "everything" makes one wonder if, if the universe becomes "nothing" again, the process can be repeated and everything started again.

Also leaves open the question if, since this entropic process happens in different moments on each universe of the Multiverse, it might be possible to "cross" to another universe with identical or compatible laws in order to escape from the end of ours.

Well, humankind probably won't be here to see it anyway. We'll fade away long before that.

Or, perhaps, we won't. Meaning is made also of these hopeless hopes.

[Trading]

I posted here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1432165 a text about the issue of our identity as a specific pattern (DNA) of organization of atoms and if a replacement of our cells with an exact artificial copy would affect this identity.

[Trading]

The quest for "immortality" I write about on the OP is called by some authors as "symbolic immortality". The main creator of the concept was Robert Lifton, The Broken Connection - On Death and the Continuity of Life (1983).

One day, I will update the OP with quotes of this study and several others that elaborated on it.

[Trading]

The text was updated with some details and quotes.

[Trading]

Since many of us live under the immortality delusion (death only happens to others), let me ruin your day once more and make you think again about death.

As Freud wrote "It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators. Hence ... at bottom no one believes in his own death, or ... that in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality "
(Sigmund Freud-Reflections on war and death (1915), Part II - Our Attitude Towards Death: https://archive.org/details/reflectionsonwar35875gut )

Death is just a return to our natural state, our only real "home", where we already spent an eternity, before being born: nothingness.

It's life that is extraordinary, not death/nothingness, which is a normal state.

As Freud on the same quoted book said in great terms: "Everyone owes nature a death and must expect to pay the debt".

But the idea of being forced to be again nothing for another eternity, after experiencing this fabulous life, is something so catastrophic, that one can't avoid a well known, but still pathetic (because pointless), overwhelming sentiment of imminent and irreversible loss.

Imagine what future generations would think about us if it were found a mean to avoid aging and our usual mortal diseases and people normally lived thousands of years.

They probably would say that we were people who lived their life like shooting stars, burning intensively and illuminating everything around for just an instant.

People, who faced with the most certain looming destiny, kept going unremittingly.

Who were able to leave their pre-historic caves, imagine and create deliberately the most beautiful, intelligent and admirable things known on the Universe and even create means to leave this planet and conquer the stars despite the conscience of their pending fate.

There is something glorious on being able to do all of this despite the conscience that our life is little more than a blink of an eye between two eternities of nothingness.

It's like the last and pointless charge of a doomed battalion.

Probably, this destiny was in many cases precisely an incentive to do all these things. But that doesn't diminish its merit, on the contrary.

Death makes any meaningful* life gloriously tragic. Not only because all these admirable things done are pointless to avert this fate, but also because it interrupts the creative process. Think about all the things that Da Vinci, Mozart or Einstein could have done more.

Don't think for a second that this text has any depressive objective or expresses any negative perspective on life. What makes the human condition tragic is precisely the wonderful nature of life, despite death.

Rather this text is praise to all the atheists that face their destiny openly, keep doing meaningful things and dare to be happy.

Don't criticize life, because the problem isn't life, but death. Being our life a wonderful "miracle", because of its improbability (a part of us had literally the run of his life to live, the spermatozoid, and won over millions of his brothers), not enjoying it is much more absurd than our destiny it self.

Yes, time flues unrelentingly fast. And, yes, we have a short life. But it isn't that short on comparative life terms. Even if you, fellow reader, are still a teen, think about your first memories: probably, it looks like if it was another life, because of how long ago it seems.

* In the sense of a life with positive consequences to others: see the OP.

[EUROPEANTURK]

Warning: this text might depress you. Read at your own risk.


Traditionally, a philosophical or religious question, the issue of meaning is starting to be the subject of scientific studies.

Meaning is important because we are self-aware and we are conscious of the certainty of our death. Meaning is one of the ideas that help us dealing with death. Is part of our "terror from death management" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory). It helps us dealing with the fact that we live in a death row (for a crime we didn't commit), trying to entertain our selves while we wait for our turn (A. Camus). Or, to use more crude words, said clearly to shock the reader, that we "are corporeal creatures—breathing pieces of defecating meat no more significant or enduring than porcupines or peaches." (Solomon: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fear-death-and-politics/).

Interesting post. It's a very pessimistic way of viewing life. I'm very critical about the view of 'entertain our selves while we wait for our turn', as we age the quality of life worsens. I think at some point some of us can no longer entertain ourselves. In some lives there is no space for entertainment at all.

Hal Finney is cryonically frozen. Perhaps death is not the final destination.  

you are completely right .. this post is very interesting but there is no need to be so pessimistic about future at all.. maybe,  science can find solution today's biggest problems in the future .. who knows ?

[Trading]

I wonder if saying we will all have to die, soon or later (including after using all the means science is expected to give us to postpone it) is being pessimistic...