Thankfully death comes along and sorts through the wants from the willing. It has a nice way of making space for a newer generation of thinkers. Old prejudices die, new thinkers arrive.
There's nothing wrong with your thinking. In my humble opinion it shows your personal desires without much concern for everyone else. I guess this is the rub I get from most people that extol the Silicon Valley dream of extending the lives*
*of those that will inevitably be able to pay for it.
>There's nothing wrong with your thinking. In my humble opinion it shows your personal desires without much concern for everyone else.
Oh shush. You know, I've got a 93-year-old grandmother with a damned sharp wit who should not fucking need assisted living and should be able to remember what we were talking about five minutes ago. I've also got a 68-or-so uncle who came down with Parkinson's Disease almost instantly upon his retirement from a lifetime of practicing medicine.
That's not to mention the in-laws with fibromyalgia and the step-father with several "bad lifestyle" diseases.
If your argument in favor of aging and death is, "Indiscriminately inflicting extreme suffering to randomly-selected people for every moment of their lives really helps to freshen up the world", you should reconsider. The problems I mentioned are not unique and special things that happened like a car accident happens. They're just what happens to everyone from living long enough. The bit at the end where you go to sleep and never wake up is nothing; the problem is the decades of suffering followed by that.
People like to assume the natural course its somehow the best course, but its far from the true, the fact its that from a biological perspective its much easier to start from scratch than to remain alive for too long; and that's how evolution works, evolution does not care much about what happens after your reproductive years have gone by (so to speak), maybe only enough so you can take care of your offspring while is needed, but thats about it.
Dragon Flys only live for 4 weeks, but its enough time to reproduce and that's all "mother nature" cares about, and hardly anyone would suggest that living 4 weeks is long enough; so we need to understand our lifespans are just as arbitrary.
The tools that made us successful as a species capped our lifespans. Technology may have changed that equation such that it makes more sense to live longer (or forever), but if immortality had made evolutionary sense up to this point we'd see a few immortals walking around.
For whatever reason, hardcoded death was the more successful route for a species to take. (with some notable exceptions. I believe there are species of lobsters that won't die if you put them in the right environment, I believe a species of jellyfish as well, and then some microorganisms as well)
Mother nature could never have awareness for the contexts in which we live now.
Purely biological success knows nothing of the societies we have built and the knowledge, ability to experience, and the complex contexts within which we all live our lives. Death really doesn't make sense for an individual, and no one is really itching for Humans V1.1 so the idea of letting evolution continue doesn't make much sense either.
If I could stop aging right now, I would be content with what I am capable of. Even if I die in 30 years from bus to head syndrome, I will have been fit and active for those years and that is a much better situation than slowly deteriorating to death.
That is the reality medicine has given us already, and anti-aging is only the focusing of a subset of general health issues that tend to cause problems as we age. It isn't the search for the imoral and exclusive elixr of life as some people seem to claim it is.
Then why are we spending so much energy trying to augment ourselves? Better exercise, better diets, better schools, less disease, etc.
I would say that almost everyone can name something about themselves that they wish evolution had optimized more. (And if not evolution, then direct intervention).
I guess that was my point, no one is expecting to enjoy the benefits of evolution (because of course they will be dead). So the argument of halting evolution or that it goes against the so far proven way to become a better species makes no sense. Better that we focus on working with what we have.
Perhaps the version was number a bad way to express that though!
Basically you are saying that it's better we die so that a new generation can come and then die for others come around just to die to make way for others.
Whats the purpose of that for the individual? Why is that by any metrics desirable for humans to die for other humans to come along to just die for yet others?
Well, I can understand how from your perspective it makes sense for you to want to live forever, but from an evolutionary perspective your species is more successful if you die after a while.
If if immortality didn't have negative consequences as severe as stunting an entire species, we'd probably see more species that were capable of immortal individuals. Such species do exist, but not in the Mammal kingdom as far as I'm aware.
But I also think it sets a good guideline. Death improves a species, because it leaves room for more children + more generations (for a given set of resources), which means more opportunity for improvements to evolutionary fitness.
edit: another commenter pointed out something I think is fairly profound. When a group of cells in your body decides to pursue immortality, it's usually cancer. And if you don't address it, it kills you, and them too. Science theoretically has a way to grant our individual cells immortality without causing cancer, but it'd have to be orchestrated carefully.
You are missing the point. Op claimed that the continuation of adding new life and letting other life die out was important. I am questioning that argument not evolution. Why should i care about the continuation of life for anyone but me.
Those were lives well lived and a lot of the meaning and wisdom now derived from their lives is because they are gone. Same can not be said for the multitude that just wants more time.
All of the meaning and wisdom derived from their lives was because they were alive. Now they aren't, and we don't get any more of their particular genius, and that is a damned shame.
It's also a damned shame that my grandfather, who is precisely nobody on the world stage, but still somebody, and currently in the hospital and I might get a text any minute saying he's dead, is on the brink of exiting the world, joining the hundred billion or so other humans who've ceased to exist for no good reason other than that the blind god Nature doesn't care about anything we care about. What Nature has ordained, she has ordained without reference to meaning or wisdom or the interests of those who live and die within her system, and we will be doing right when we remake her.
Reflection requires pause. It would not be the same if all those people were contemporaries of current modern scientists. In fact I have no clue how much value current scientists are adding or not adding or whether Feynman and friends would still be contributing in any way as you are assuming. The geniuses will appear after some reflection in a hundred years or so. Long after they're all gone.
I'm sorry for your eventual loss but immortality does not appeal to me the way I guess it appeals to others. Cycles in nature don't seem like a disease to me that need curing. Alleviating the pain and suffering of aging is fine and that's what these guys seem to be doing.
Perhaps. There might be a lot more cynicism and conservatism. Our legislators might not have adjusted to the implications of telephone and tv, let alone apps and online privacy.
Oh, I see. You mean we should be able to run on to 200 don't you? ;)
This is probably the best pro-death argument -- the social consequences. The rest can be solved.
But in two to seven decades, when they have this problem, I doubt they will see it as a moral choice to kill (/refuse to save) people because a lot of them will be conservative.
There's nothing wrong with your thinking. In my humble opinion it shows your personal desires without much concern for everyone else. I guess this is the rub I get from most people that extol the Silicon Valley dream of extending the lives*
*of those that will inevitably be able to pay for it.