The fragility of the individual, although it results in the death of each and every one of us, is not a weakness however, because this is the means by which life tests all the different boundaries of the the environment which it inhabits, thereby producing all the diverse individuals which provide its overall strength. We ought not seek to limit diversity, because that would be a self-imposed weakness, making the vulnerability of the individual, universal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, but "life", by which you presumably mean the process of evolution, is dumb. It needs diversity to survive because it cannot and does not predict the future. We're not so limited and it does us no good to mystify evolution.

Besides our culture has already sidelined evolution, regardless of there still being genetic recombination.

Antibiotics & public health infrastructures since the late 1800s, for instance, have been doing the job (e.g. average life expentancy has at least doubled, IIRC, in less than a century). Sterilized obstetrics, family planning, eugenics, cryogenics, early cancer detection, etc since the middle of last century. The only "problem" is humanity's impatience with how gradual developments are and so far the lack of "radical breakthroughs" for solving "the death problem" once and for all. — 180 Proof

Out of psychological curiosity, do you think this is an unconscious process in the field of medicine, that people want to live longer, yet docilly accept death as an eventuality? I mean, I know that the great transformation of the industrial era resulted in this doubling of lifespan; but, what's inherently driving it forward?

However, the connection between transhumanism and natalism isn't quite as straightforward as one might think. Immortality is quite obviously going to lead to a huge space/resource crunch - how many people can the earth sustain (carrying capacity of a habitat). Both antintalists and transhumanists may want to stop procreation but obviously for entirely different reasons. - for one, it's too painful, for the other it's overcrowding. — TheMadFool

I'm not too sure if the Malthusian explosion is really a phenomenon that humanity would experience if overcrowding occurs, whatever that means.

I’m personally hesitant to be an early adopter of any new technology, and especially hesitant about invasive medical interventions, but if the time comes that it’s either risk a new technology or die, life is worth the risk. I just hope I live long enough to get to make that choice. — Pfhorrest

This sounds very much like a sentimental assertion, or a coin flipping problem. Isn't the issue then to enhance life rather than obey norms about how it happens or proceeds?

Is the human ego so intent on continuing indefinitely? — Jack Cummins

That's an interesting question. Is meaning important to continue living a wholesome life, I think, yes.

I think the issue is perplex. In some manner antinatalism doesn't need convincing, as much as living longer also doesn't need convincing, and yet as you say the natalists inherent the Earth.

What do you think about the relationship about evaluating life itself for the antainatalist and transhumanist?

I'm not too sure if the Malthusian explosion is really a phenomenon that humanity would experience if overcrowding occurs, whatever that means. — Shawn

Whaddaya mean? The Malthusian Trap

Whaddaya mean? The Malthusian Trap — TheMadFool

Sorry, I just don't believe in the Malthusian Trap.

I think that I really know some people who wish to live forever. I believe that people have varying degrees of ego strength. Some barely have enough to carry on at all, because they have been broken by harsh experiences. With the people who really seem to wish to live forever,I do wonder how this would change in the face of adversity. Regarding the transhumanists, I can't believe that the truly extended life is not going to come without a few nasty side-effects.

Why do you assume (medical progress) is "inherently driven"?

As for people per se, we don't want to die – no living thing "wants" to cease living – and we mostly live in denial of our own personal death even as we're constantly reminded of it by others dropping dead all around us daily. Mortal means awareness that you can die at any moment and will die eventually. Thus, religiosity and spirituality, magic and mysticism, arts and myth (E. Becker).

"The future is uncertain but the end is always near."

Even an "immortal" is mortal as well as finite and uncertain: death, or worse, by misadventure is an ever-present prospect (re: biological immortality), decisions always exclude other choices/options and, not only are there always known unknowns, the future is necessarily constituted by unknown unknowns. People reflexively don't want to die – however, we should be careful what we wish for – yet there are worse things than ceasing to be, no doubt, such as desperation to quit life (for whatever reason/s) but we cannot because we're immortal. If and when "immortality" is technologically achieved, let's hope it comes with an easy-to-flip, easy-to-reach (though secret, or subjective / interior) off-switch.

:up:

Do you think there's a duty to reduce deaths in the world due to aging or does this entirely rest with the individual?

No. It's a worthwhile aspiration though, perhaps even an eventual by-product of further improving clinical interventions and medical technologies. I think, however, deep space travel (& colonization) will require 'mind uploaded(?) human crews' in order to be feasible and so nonbiological "solutions" might develope lifespans far in excess of the limits of biological longevity-extension.

With the people who really seem to wish to live forever,I do wonder how this would change in the face of adversity. Regarding the transhumanists, I can't believe that the truly extended life is not going to come with a few nasty side-effects. — Jack Cummins

Yup. Personally, I never understood the quest for immortality.

Suppose transhumanism is obtained by a group who eventually become the only living group of individuals. This group thereby perfects the ideal of self-preservation at the individual level, such that there is no destruction, decay, or ill that can naturally occur for any individual within this group. How would this resolve the problem of interpersonal conflict, including activities such as sabotage, betrayal, manipulation, enslavement, rape, theft, and so forth, to not mention the yet viable possibility of murder - even if it only occurs through the extermination of a program that was once an uploaded consciousness? To unendingly live with the possibility of such activities, if not their actuality, doesn’t seem to me to resolve anything.

The notion of salvation via immortality of the self - even if the goal were to not be illusory, this as transhumanists claim - doesn’t seem to remedy the issue of undue suffering. I’m reminded of Sartre’s “No Exit” here. (For the record, I’ve never been able to buy into the notion of heaven as a place devoid of suffering for similar reasons. Nor am I an anti-natalist.)

Even an "immortal" is mortal as well as finite and uncertain — 180 Proof

:100:

Personally, I never understood the quest for immortality. — javra

From Gilgamesh to "The Tower of Babel", "El Dorado" to Frankenstein, "Muad'Dib" to "Lestat" ... what greater quest could there be? Transhumanism is just the latest "Tree of Knowledge" ideology for undertaking anew that species quest for (or back to?) the "Tree of Life". Of all the windmills on our horizons, none seem to loom larger than 'my death' to go tilting at ...

(I'm planning on some sort of chemical brain preservation process rather than tissue-cellular destroying "cryonics" to hopefully keep my brain 'viable' after I die until the technology is (if it's ever) ready for prime time.) — 180 Proof

I don't want to live forever, just don't want to die before physical laws, so to speak, pull the plug.

:death: :flower:

... what greater quest could there be? — 180 Proof

For the physicalist, I don’t know. Although I could envision a quest for global harmony a la good old fashioned humanism, one that is accordant to nature as-is.

For the non-physicalist, such as for them Buddhists that maintain self to be a metaphysical (rather than physical) illusion, the experience of a self can be conceived of as that what brings about - hence in some sense causes - samsara, the latter in part being unending vacillations of pleasure and pain that equate to dissatisfaction. Here, the ultimate quest can be the liberation from this unending dissatisfaction via, for lack of better words, some means of transcendence, whereby the experience of a self ceases - this while not leading to oblivion. Yea, I know, not to be taken seriously by physicalists (although physicalists can also maintain the self to be an illusion). And this is just one person’s interpretation of Buddhist aspirations. Nevertheless, here the ultimate quest precludes the notion of a perfected preservation of the *self* and, hence, immortality of the self. Arguably leading to more selfless behaviors while in no way being nihilistic.

The issue is sustaining being grateful for a very, very long time. I'd think we'd need a different type of brain to be able to do that. — Manuel

I'm not convinced that that's true, but if it is: okay, let's make ourselves a different type of brain, and in the mean time survive long enough to do so.

In contrast to Darwinian life, transhuman life will seem self-evidently wonderful by its very nature. — David Pearce

:up: :100:

And some of us, myself included, have been fortunate enough to experience glimpses of what that "self-evidently wonderful by its very nature" view of life is like. They're called various things like "peak experiences", "mystical experiences", or "religious experiences". I've had them here and there over the course of my entire life, but it wasn't until 2019 that I experienced a prolonged period of the opposite kind of thing -- an unprovoked nearly year-long period of abject existential dread -- that I realized the significance of them.

That there's something entirely interior to the mind, regardless of actual circumstances in the world around oneself (though it can also react to them, of course), that's something like a... I think of it visually as a water pipe connected to a basin, where the basin is sort of one's emotional being and the water is wellness.

And the pipe can either drain water out so that no matter how much emotional wellness gets poured in from the outside it's never enough and one feels helplessly emotionally empty and like nothing could ever possibly make life worth living no matter how good things might be outside in the actual world, like just living at all is inherently awful and nobody should ever be subjected to it.

Or, the pipe can pump water in instead, to fill up the basin to overflowing, so that no matter how much of an emotional drain things outside are, one is still always filled up with emotional wellness, so just being alive at all feels worthwhile, and whatever problems there might be outside, one feels happy to go out and fix them, to take that overflowing well of wellbeing and pour it out onto the rest of the world until everything outside is as good as one feels inside.

I take it that part of the transhumanist vision is to enable everybody to feel the latter way all the time, and make it so that nobody ever has to feel the former way.

This sounds very much like a sentimental assertion, or a coin flipping problem. Isn't the issue then to enhance life rather than obey norms about how it happens or proceeds? — Shawn

I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but the point is very much to enhance life, yes. To make life feel worth living, and to enable people to continue living it.

https://www.alcor.org/

I'm not sure I understand you correctly, but the point is very much to enhance life, yes. To make life feel worth living, and to enable people to continue living it. — Pfhorrest

I'm hesitant to say that living longer isn't going to automatically make you feel happy; but, rather that long term plans of living that do not incur death are going to be hard to determine whether one wants to pursue new things.

Death anxiety is quite a strong motivator, but, once you eliminate it, what do you think would be the new prevailing motivator to pursue in life?

I'm hesitant to say that living longer isn't going to automatically make you feel happy; but, rather that long term plans of living that do not incur death are going to be hard to determine whether one wants to pursue new things. — Shawn

I'm unsure if I understand you again, but I didn't mean to suggest that living longer will automatically make anyone happier (though relieving death anxiety is something that could make people suffering from it happier). Making people happy just to be alive is a separate thing from enabling them to continue to be alive.

Death anxiety is quite a strong motivator, but, once you eliminate it, what do you think would be the new prevailing motivator to pursue in life? — Shawn

I think most people are already motivated by things other than avoiding death. Having a persistent fixation on death is psychologically abnormal and unhealthy; a normal healthy mind finds a variety of things interesting and meaningful and pursues them for their own sake, not just because they will be instrumentally useful in avoiding eventual death.

Also, supposing that one needs a specific motivation is kind of putting the cart before the horse, and indicates a mentality where, in that metaphor I used in my last post, the pipe drains rather than fills, so you need to find something to keep filling yourself up with. If we can instead let everyone have a pipe that fills them to overflowing, it's not a question of needing something to motivate you, because your motivation comes from inside: it's just a question of where you're going to pour your overflowing positivity, and anything at hand will do.

Learn things just for the sake of learning them. Accomplish things just for the sake of accomplishing them. Teach others for the sake of teaching, and help them accomplish their goals too, just for the sake of helping. Reach out to harness all the resources and information of the universe, and then spread them far and wide to everyone else too. That project is probably infinite, but even if it's not, then you can just rest contented at having finally "won at the universe", and look back happily on all that you've learned and achieved, contented forever after.

No.

Why not?

If so, that is another problem to be fixed. We’re talking about transforming the whole human experience for the better, not just prolonging it as it already is.

Fixed. How?

If so, that’s a good thing. Labor is undervalued right now..

Sure. How would that change with several billion immortals? - actually, if estimates are correct, about 11.2 billion at peak:

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth

Not assuming one, but aiming for one. “Utopia” shouldn’t be a dirty word

Fair. So, what does this realistically achievable and sustainable technological utopia actually look like? How are the very real problems I've described (and others), going to be solved?

Personally, I find it difficult to see transhumanism being more than just a positivist, simplistic, model-driven, conceptual / analytic perspective on reality. Sure, models are great, but they lack a holistic, and therefore realistic, grasp of the complexity of our actual reality. Models after all, are full of assumptions.

Does the threat of, and inevitability of death make the act of living life more beautiful / meaningful? — CountVictorClimacusIII

No. — Pfhorrest

Why not? — CountVictorClimacusIII

Why would it? What is meaningfulness or beauty, and why would the inevitability of death add that to life?

Fixed. How? — CountVictorClimacusIII

Of course I don't know all of the details of exactly how to fix everything, or I would be out there fixing it myself. We don't even know the details of how to go about living forever yet. But the topic is whether it's worth trying to live forever, and if the reason not to try is that there could be problems as a consequence of succeeding, the possibility of overcoming those problems is the natural counterargument. We're talking about what to aim for, not the specifics of how to get there.

Sure. How would that change with several billion immortals? - actually, if estimates are correct, about 11.2 billion at peak:

Source: https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth — CountVictorClimacusIII

Interesting! In the same post you're responding too I made a back-of-my-ass calculation on what world population would stabilize at if right now a cure for mortality was found and also from now on everybody had exactly one child, and I estimated about 12 billion. Pleasing that an actual data-driven estimate is so close, too.

okay, let's make ourselves a different type of brain, and in the mean time survive long enough to do so. — Pfhorrest

I was struck by this and related comments in your posts.

What, if anything, then makes lobotomizing oneself bad, granted that it will lead to greater degrees of unperturbable happiness for the remainder of one’s days? Assume that the lobotomized individual will be well taken care of and will live a longer than average life. Else, that they will immortally live as such.

Simply being happy to me seems to be an insufficient goal. As another type of example, mass murders who've committed and continue to commit "perfect crimes" can also be said to live happy lives, and if they obtain immortality while so doing they'd be so much the happier. Should we then change our brains into such mindsets?

I'm unsure if I understand you again, but I didn't mean to suggest that living longer will automatically make anyone happier (though relieving death anxiety is something that could make people suffering from it happier). Making people happy just to be alive is a separate thing from enabling them to continue to be alive. — Pfhorrest

I'm not sure. I think I'm brining into focus the issue of knowledge of living longer, going to college at 40 or resuming a job at 60... These are the unknowns I'm trying to grapple with in regards to how life would look like for some person with a 200 year life-span...

Also, supposing that one needs a specific motivation is kind of putting the cart before the horse, and indicates a mentality where, in that metaphor I used in my last post, the pipe drains rather than fills, so you need to find something to keep filling yourself up with. If we can instead let everyone have a pipe that fills them to overflowing, it's not a question of needing something to motivate you, because your motivation comes from inside: it's just a question of where you're going to pour your overflowing positivity, and anything at hand will do.

Learn things just for the sake of learning them. Accomplish things just for the sake of accomplishing them. Teach others for the sake of teaching, and help them accomplish their goals too, just for the sake of helping. Reach out to harness all the resources and information of the universe, and then spread them far and wide to everyone else too. That project is probably infinite, but even if it's not, then you can just rest contented at having finally "won at the universe", and look back happily on all that you've learned and achieved, contented forever after. — Pfhorrest

All true, but that's just hard to find an occupation that would be inherently rewarding, apart from perhaps book reading, education, and work, which are paramount to life, no?

You must have missed in the post you replied to where I explicitly dismiss cryogenics.

You must have missed in the post you replied to where I explicitly dismiss cryogenics. — 180 Proof

Yes, well that's the best I found on the internet. It is mostly according to their statement "vitrification".

What, if anything, then makes lobotomizing oneself bad, granted that it will lead to greater degrees of unperturbable happiness for the remainder of one’s days? — javra

I don't think that that can be granted. The peak experiences I have had, which are what I imagine is more in the ballpark of the aim of transhumanist mind-alteration, feel the opposite of what I imagine a lobotomy would feel like, assuming a lobotomy would feel something like drunkenness or sedation. During a peak experience I not only feel more calm and happy and tranquil and accepting but I also feel smarter and more aware of both myself and the world around me, I take passionate interest in everything and find it all wondrous and fascinating, and I want to learn and to create, to find and build connections between everything. It's both peace and joy. Just being numbed into emotional painlessness, if that's what a lobotomy would even do, sounds like a much less desirable state of mind than that; even setting aside the dis-utility of being unable to take care of oneself, as in your scenario.

As another type of example, mass murders who've committed and continue to commit "perfect crimes" can also be said to live happy lives, and if they obtain immortality while so doing they'd be so much the happier. Should we then change our brains into such mindsets? — javra

Murderers are making other people unhappy (the people who get murdered, and anyone who might miss them), even if they never have to answer for their crimes. It's therefore better that they not murder, and so better that they not want to murder, and it would be worse if our brains were made such that we wanted to murder too. Given that someone already is a murderer, though, it's not somehow an improvement of the situation if he's a really unhappy murderer rather than a cheerful murderer.

The peak experiences I have had, which are what I imagine is more in the ballpark of the aim of transhumanist mind-alteration, feel the opposite of what I imagine a lobotomy would feel like, assuming a lobotomy would feel something like drunkenness or sedation. During a peak experience I not only feel more calm and happy and tranquil and accepting but I also feel smarter and more aware of both myself and the world around me, I take passionate interest in everything and find it all wondrous and fascinating, and I want to learn and to create, to find and build connections between everything. It's both peace and joy. — Pfhorrest

I grant what you're saying. What I was alluding to, through both examples, is that what you are grateful for experiencing and seem intent to further experience is what a layperson might term a heightened, or raised, consciousness. Which encompasses far more than mere happiness and longevity of lifespan. And without which happiness and longevity, I'll argue, lose their value.

The ideal of manipulating brains so as to invoke heightened consciousness, however, presupposes that one already knows a) what the zenith of this heightened consciousness (if there is one) consists of and b) how to biologically alter brains to produce it; rather than, say, producing something akin to drug-induced altered states that deviate from such heightened consciousness. So, were one to have one's brain preserved in some manner after death and then restructured at some future point in time when such understanding might be obtained, the transhumanist brain-alteration that would occur would render the person to not be the you which you are now. Like altering the brain of a particular frog (for lack of a better example) so that it obtains the awareness of the average human, the being in question that would emerge from the operation would not be the initial being that craves immortality as the self it knows itself to be.

Maybe more succinctly, immortality of self requires a stagnation of selfhood; whereas, I'm thinking, mortality of self is required for the evolution of selfhood in general. Here, one grants other selves their moment in the sun just as past selves have granted you this opportunity. With each generation learning from the last.

Murderers are making other people unhappy (the people who get murdered, and anyone who might miss them), even if their crimes are never discovered. It's therefore better that they not murder [...] — Pfhorrest

I of course agree with this. But if an individual's happiness alone is the goal, on what grounds would it be better for the happy murderer - who obviously harms others - to not murder?

I'll again aim at raised consciousness being a good that excels the goodness of individual happiness. Nebulous as this notion of raised consciousness likely is, I'll nevertheless argue that it in part is where one finds portions of oneself in others and treats these others as extended aspects of one's intrinsic self. This raised consciousness thereby leads to empathy. But empathy can lead to one's suffering when others suffer. The greater one's general empathy, the greater the number of people whose suffering will impact one. So again, a mere individualistic happiness doesn't seem to suffice as an objective, for the happy murderer is far more happy than the person who holds empathy for not only people on the other side of the world (like children in Yemen) but for future generations yet to come (think global warming as an example).

I'd like to say briefly, that the recent economic situation of the world has been about economizing happiness to a great extent.

With that in mind, there's a nuance to note about who benefits from this situation the most, meaning the rich and powerful. It seems to me that money can indeed provide for happiness if not realize it in the extension of one's life-span.

May I ask for your opinion, @David Pearce?

Also, supposing that one needs a specific motivation is kind of putting the cart before the horse, and indicates a mentality where, in that metaphor I used in my last post, the pipe drains rather than fills, so you need to find something to keep filling yourself up with. If we can instead let everyone have a pipe that fills them to overflowing, it's not a question of needing something to motivate you, because your motivation comes from inside: it's just a question of where you're going to pour your overflowing positivity, and anything at hand will do. — Pfhorrest

I was pondering over this and found a very apt description for what you describe on Wikipedia called the Hedonic Treadmill.

It seems to me that for the majority of people experience a deficit in happiness in that it cannot be granted easily or without any issues with regards to economics. Yet, it's my personal belief that throughout time, economics is finding a way to make happiness less scarce at affordable levels.

What do you think about the Hedonic treadmill?

Why would it? What is meaningfulness or beauty, and why would the inevitability of death add that to life?

It's a matter of perspective. We view these concepts in a subjective way, depending on a multitude of factors, for example, our unique historical, social and cultural contexts. So, how can a transhumanist approach then reliably take an objective stance on any of these concepts to then say, "ok, we can provide gradations of "bliss" in any number of ways "en masse" so nobody suffers, and we can all experience equal amounts of joy etc."

The way you view and experience joy or suffering, could be far different to how I view and experience joy or suffering. The human experience is uniquely individual in may ways. I don't see how transhumanism takes that into consideration.

We're talking about what to aim for, not the specifics of how to get there.

That's the problem, and what I alluded to in the final paragraph of my last point. It's idealistic to the point of being pure fantasy. Without tangible specifics on the how of doing things it's not realistically applicable. Let alone sustainable. It's basically just saying, hey don't worry about it mate, technology will sort everything out in the end for everybody. Don't worry about the nitty gritty, it's not important.

...I estimated about 12 billion. Pleasing that an actual data-driven estimate is so close, too.

The data driven estimate I provided arrives a state of unsustainability with out planet's natural resources. Some research suggests the Earth could only sustainably support roughly 2 to 3 billion people.

https://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/3_times_sustainable

https://worldpopulationhistory.org/carrying-capacity/

However, this number is contested. The article below suggests that the majority of studies settle around less than 8 billion (still well below the 12 billion suggestion).

https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/how-many-people-can-earth-actually-support

So what do we do with all these extra people? Especially if they're immortal.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for the evolution and progression of humanity as a species. To be all we can be. I just question schools of thought that don't provide specifics, and settle on blanket statements with questionable evidence to back up their claims.