[QUOTE=Bokito;29660704]Maybe matter in itself is, but a lifeform like an animal, or something like a planet won't exist forever in that form. There are no [b]immortal animals[/b] (that I know of), unless we'd do something like stated here.[/QUOTE]
[i]Turritopsis nutricula[/i] scoffs at your ridiculous assumptions.
[b]ALL HAIL THE GREAT IMMORTAL ONE![/b]
[img]http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/5746/ew090130glarge.jpg[/img]
[editline]6th May 2011[/editline]
Dammit Scorpio you ruined it.
[QUOTE=OvB;29660987][i]Turritopsis nutricula[/i] scoffs at your ridiculous assumptions.
[b]ALL HAIL THE GREAT IMMORTAL ONE![/b]
[img_thumb]http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/5746/ew090130glarge.jpg[/img_thumb]
[editline]6th May 2011[/editline]
Dammit Scorpio you ruined it.[/QUOTE]
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QEsjd1WZuY[/media]
[QUOTE=Mr. Scorpio;29660913]There is a species of jellyfish that continually reverts back to "childhood" and is essentially immortal[/QUOTE]
Because it obviously needs that function to survive. We don't :v:
Infact! We need it less!
[QUOTE=Swilly;29661083]Because it obviously needs that function to survive. We don't :v:
Infact! We need it less![/QUOTE]
uh nope
most jellyfish dont do that
it is not necessary by any definition of the word
Main problem with this is that people will become unconditioned to death (although that does happen a lot nowadays what with the mollycoddling children tend to undergo, in developed countries especially). If people become naturally immortal, there's a chance that they will become so unused to death the shock of it happening will be enormous.
Also, there's the complication of getting people to try it. Most likely they'll probably start rationalizing - either "god doesn't want it this way" or, more commonly, "this isn't right". Both are silly when you think about it, since last time I checked, there wasn't a book written on what science could or couldn't do (unless you consider the bible that book).
[QUOTE=VistaPOWA;29659861]Here's a little thought experiment:
We exchange a neuron in a brain with a chip that functions the same as the neuron does, and the person remains the same after the swap. We continue to swap neurons to chips, and the person's still the same as before, and stop when we only have a single neuron left, and the person still has the same personality.
What happens if we exchange the last neuron with a chip?[/QUOTE]
Only one reply to this? seriously?
I've thought about this theory myself a bit before, and Im really intrigued but I do have some things that might be problematic, only in my head because I haven't gotten that far in my education.
Do neurons hold a charge? or is it a constant moving array? also, because neurons signal to others via chemical synapses, theres a problem of resistance within the brain, and where to begin powering it.
would each chip have to have its own power connection so that it can power synapses to communicate with other "neuron" chips? Because I cant think of a way to redesign it without stopping activity completely.
[QUOTE=Matix;29655701]And we aren't talking about immortality. You can still die just as easily. Your body just won't really deteriorate the way it does now.[/QUOTE]
Immortality =/= Invincibility
Two different ideas. Immortality is pretty much not aging and not dieing off naturally
Invincibility would be impossible to kill with unnatural means.
Frankly, I wouldn't mind eventual death. As long as I manage to do everything I hope to do it would be a good end to a good life. People becoming biologically immortal is their own business, though it would be cool to see what immortal scientist will produce.
Many aspects of society would change. For example, dictators around the world will be needed to be killed since that's the only way of death, instead of hoping a new leader would come for change when the old one dies. Basically more killing.
Immortality has been sought after for countless aeons, based around the instinctive fear of death that drives mortal men to seek out survival. But whilst we seek to extend life, what we should be seeking is to extend existence in general.
Flesh is a unique cosmic blessing, a complex blend of chemicals ordered to recreate itself from base materials, and also in a constant state of change. With such change within the flesh, it is no wonder it eventually burns out and dies, as there's so much chaos inside. Flesh can last for long periods of our time, but is very short-lived in terms of geological time alone. Life and flesh are short-term, and last only as long as it is possible to maintain them, and like all complex machines, maintenance is time-consuming and expensive.
In my eyes, we should focus not on survival of the flesh, but survival of the mind, a way to sustain individual consciousness beyond the final breakdown of the flesh. To the best of our current knowledge, the mind dies with the death of the flesh, a dissolution of consciousness that casts us into the abstract unimaginable horrors of oblivion, something that no sane mind should ever be comfortable with. The prospect of not existing might seem like eternal sleep to some, but it is not sleep, there is no nodding-off or awakening. To the tortured and tormented, it may seem like release, but it is not release, there is no respite or sensation. There is only nothing.
If someone put death in your mailbox, nothing would come out. Nothing after nothing would pour from the slot. At no time in life should a sane being not fear the prospect of losing absolutely everything and not being able to start over. Never should they be content with nothing. Nothing is the true hell, the one true horror that screams in the unspeakable colourlessness of the void, consuming the fire of the mind with it's cruel moist extinguishing embrace, devoid of heat or chill.
A sane man would do what they could to avoid squaring with nothing. This is why we should do all we can to preserve our minds, but at this primitive stage of history, we are unable to guard our minds from the inevitable rot of our pathetic flesh. Though it is a miracle of chemistry, it is unacceptable for the long-term sustenance of the mind. If we are to fend off nothingness, and banish it from our midst, we must work towards technologies that permit our minds to exist in a far more durable vessel, one that can last for far longer periods of time without required maintenance, and that can be maintained with the barest expenditures of time and physical resources.
But with this frontier of consciousness survival, we must also guard against two other horrors that walk hand in hand with oblivion; loss of personal identity and loss of individuality. It is all too easy to slip and fall into the gaping slimy maws of these beasts, especially in the pursuit of immortality.
Losing one's personal identity is affaliated with dilemmas of teleportation and pouring oneself into a computer. For example, a teleporter supposedly breaks down matter and transports it to a receiver, rebuilding it at the target location. This is essentially death to your old body and mind, creating a copy of you at the other end, ignorant of the fact that it is not the original. Copying one's mind and converting it into computer data does nothing to ensure YOUR immortality, but instead simply stores a copy of your aspects and characteristics, which is virtually identical to your own mind, but is still not your consciousness. Retain your uniqueness, and never allow your mind to be copied, for when there are multiple versions of you, you're just another brick in a wall of copies, and no-one can tell if you're the progenitor or a clone, as you are virtually indistinguishable, with the other copies being ignorantly confident that they are the real Slim Shady.
As well as identity loss, there is also the risk of losing your individuality, the parts of you that make you you. "What sets this apart from identity?", you ask? Well, imagine a large bowl and multiple glasses of water. Each glass of water has it's own water in it, and each glass of water represents an individual mind, each with it's own perks, quirks, tropes and idioms. Now, watch as each glass of water is poured into the bowl. At first there's just one glass worth of water in there, and that mind is still individual. However, empty another glass into the bowl, and the second mind mixes with the first mind, forming a sort of "amalgam", a cocktail of memories, emotions, personalities, all those things the mind is made of. Unlike a hive mind, which is a connected collection of individual consciousnesses sharing everything between one another, the amalgam of minds essentially merges the different consciousnesses into a single individual consciousness, eradicating the individuals and creating a single individual in it's place, which has most if not all the attributes of the previous individuals, but is not any of the individuals, as they don't exist any more. Assimilated minds can't be pulled out of such a convergence, as they are already dissolved and mixed up with all the others, and even if you could extract a certain set of characteristics from the mixture, you'd simply end up with a copy, and not the original.
To bring this all back to immortality, it has many important lessons to teach; do not copy yourself, do not teleport, and DO NOT join with a hive mind, but if you absolutely wish to join such an intelligence, join one that only COMMUNICATES, and doesn't ASSIMILATE, since whilst identity loss is a bad thing, it pales in comparison to the loss of one's individuality and consciousness.
Stepping back further to the subject of sustaining your mind, one of the easiest apparent solutions would be the Mi-go brain-in-a-jar technique, sustaining a living brain with advanced life-support. However, whilst you have less flesh to maintain, the flesh of your brain is still vulnerable, and expensive to maintain and repair. Accidents can happen, and the soft grey matter isn't exactly durable. To this end, I would advise the slow-and-steady tactic of replacing the fabric of your brain with some sort of artificial grey matter designed to be far more durable and requiring far less maintenance, very gradually replacing each neuron and synapse so that the process goes as smoothly and gently as possible, as opposed to a cruder technique of replacing larger chunks of a brain, which would make the process more jarring, unsettling you with major jumps of rough transition, and increasing the chances of losing identity, individuality, and consciousness.
In short, preserving the mind is more important than preserving the body, and in order to stay yourself for as much of eternity as you possibly can, avoid copying, teleportation and hive minds like the plague, instead opting for upgrading your brain, neuron by neuron, into something more durable and easier to sustain & maintain.
But this is probably decades, perhaps even centuries too early to discuss, as we have yet to develop such hgih technology. Still, all this would be more or less material and of little worth if there were such a thing as a soul, a construct of some otherplanar materia that carried the consciousness of a material mind after the end of the flesh for a timespan way longer than that of squishy flesh. But we're drifting into pseudoscience here, so i'll end it here.
Also, concerning what I said about the whole preservation of the mind-self, certain fictional pieces that deal with this kind of dilemma include the novel Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke), the animated movie The End of Evangelion (was the conclusion of the original Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise), and to an extent Eleanor Lamb from BioShock 2 (she was to be a vessel for masses of genetic memory stored in the ADAM of Rapture's residents as part of her mother's efforts to "end The Self").
ironman17, have you ever seen "Ghost in the Shell?" It deals with a lot with what your talking about like transferring your mind into a computer and if you actually sustain your personality and such.
Pretty depressing that my generation will probably [i]just[/i] miss out on cool shit like this.
[QUOTE=Rammaster;29663533]ironman17, have you ever seen "Ghost in the Shell?" It deals with a lot with what your talking about like transferring your mind into a computer and if you actually sustain your personality and such.[/QUOTE]
I've heard of it, but I don't really watch anime that much, if at all. Personally, mind-computer transfer is essentially just copypasting program files from one machine to another. I'd much rather be a brain-in-a-jar, or if there were real souls, fuse my soul to a robot shell. Kind of like Ghost in the Shell, except without any "ghost-dubbing" involved, as I want to keep my conscious intellectual property (my individuality, identity, overall consciousness, basically my "spirit/soul") as my own, unique and uncopied, one of a kind and untainted by loss or thievery, with my own spark of conscious holding onto it, and nothing/no-one else. It's one of the few things I hold sacred in this universe, if sacred is the right word for something I revere and hold on to with unyielding will.
[QUOTE=ironman17;29663434]
Losing one's personal identity is affaliated with dilemmas of teleportation and pouring oneself into a computer. For example, a teleporter supposedly breaks down matter and transports it to a receiver, rebuilding it at the target location. This is essentially death to your old body and mind, creating a copy of you at the other end, ignorant of the fact that it is not the original. Copying one's mind and converting it into computer data does nothing to ensure YOUR immortality, but instead simply stores a copy of your aspects and characteristics, which is virtually identical to your own mind, but is still not your consciousness. Retain your uniqueness, and never allow your mind to be copied, for when there are multiple versions of you, you're just another brick in a wall of copies, and no-one can tell if you're the progenitor or a clone, as you are virtually indistinguishable, with the other copies being ignorantly confident that they are the real Slim Shady.
As well as identity loss, there is also the risk of losing your individuality, the parts of you that make you you. "What sets this apart from identity?", you ask? Well, imagine a large bowl and multiple glasses of water. Each glass of water has it's own water in it, and each glass of water represents an individual mind, each with it's own perks, quirks, tropes and idioms. Now, watch as each glass of water is poured into the bowl. At first there's just one glass worth of water in there, and that mind is still individual. However, empty another glass into the bowl, and the second mind mixes with the first mind, forming a sort of "amalgam", a cocktail of memories, emotions, personalities, all those things the mind is made of. Unlike a hive mind, which is a connected collection of individual consciousnesses sharing everything between one another, the amalgam of minds essentially merges the different consciousnesses into a single individual consciousness, eradicating the individuals and creating a single individual in it's place, which has most if not all the attributes of the previous individuals, but is not any of the individuals, as they don't exist any more. Assimilated minds can't be pulled out of such a convergence, as they are already dissolved and mixed up with all the others, and even if you could extract a certain set of characteristics from the mixture, you'd simply end up with a copy, and not the original.
.[/QUOTE]
For one thing, a single computer would be able to hold many different, completely unrelated conscious minds. I mean why not? As long as all the registers are properly separated, there's no 'hive mind' going on. Hive minds would be voluntary.
Teleporting, mind uploading: This is the Ship of Theseus, that is, 'Is an object the original after all its compounding parts have been replaced?', but this always seemed rather fixed: Every year most of your cells have undergone reproduction and death several times. You glia have weakened, certain pathways in the brain have been prioritized, others relegated, others discarded entirely, not to mention the errors that accumulate in the human genome due to telomerase loss and such plain old entropy. On average, every 20 years, all the [I]atoms[/I] (To go further with the example) on your body have been entirely and completely replaced thanks to the body's repair machinery.
So you are the constant, ever-active emergent properties in your body. Why draw the line at the body? Why even at the brain? Consider software. It's not physical, it's an emergent property (Okay, a programmed function) of electrons in silicon oxides. The program is still the same whether it's running on a silicon microchip or in Babbage's Difference Engine or in a computer the size of a world. A string of bits and bytes will be the same regardless of the medium, the backbone, that is used to represent it. Means of abstraction exist, and they can be implemented on many platforms. The mind is an abstraction implemented in the brain, so it can be implemented in a computer, given good enough hardware and proper software and knowledge of the brain, either through direction simulation or by abstracting consciousness.
The point here is that the mind is an ever-evolving, ever-changing thing. The desire to keep it 'stable' is just going against the same entropy that guarantees evolution -- And also brings about the mind's destruction. The current instance of your mind is just a copy of the old one, with minor modifications. A mind on a computer would be the same.
Consider virtual machines: They can run software, interact with the Internet and with peripherial hardware. And they are "merely" the abstraction of a processor's behaviour and some virtual input/output hacked together. Is a virtual machine any less real than an actual machine? They are both programmed functions, the difference is that one is implemented in the other, and this latter one is implemented in physical reality.
EDIT: ADDENDUM
This is a quote from Afterlife by Simon Funk, one of my favourites:
[QUOTE]"My mind is a process, information with intent, like a
computer program..."
"At the moment, literally," I interjected.
She raised a brow at me, said, "Let's come back to that,"
and then went on, "but even within the mind, where do 'I'
begin?"
"Ah," I understood her question. It was a hard one to
answer. Not because I didn't know the answer, but because
the question itself presumed so many things.
"By the way, who are you?" she asked. "I gather you area
not a gment of my imagination, which is more than I can
say for anything else here."
The grass now made a thick, soft bed around me. We
were still
oating in space, but it was no longer black with
stars, rather a glowing deep red beneath us fading to a pow-
der blue above. The big, white moon remained.
I raised a brow at her and said, "Let's come back to that,"
and then went on, "as to where do 'you' begin.... Think of
the brain as a computer, the mind as a program, and the
'self', 'you'|your identity as you introspectively experience
it|as something implemented by that program."
"Clarify that last step," she said.
"Imagine a program that animates a ball bouncing around
inside a box," I started. A glass box appeared
oating be-
tween us, spinning slowly upon a corner. Inside, a small ball
was bouncing about. "I meant that rhetorically."
"Oh, sorry." The box shrunk into nothingness and was
gone.
"The ball and the program are two di erent things. The
ball has its own identity, it has a position, a velocity, a color,
a shape. It obeys certain laws, moving through time, bounc-
ing o the walls. And yet, under the hood it's really just a
bunch of bits stored in a computer, being manipulated by
a program which is also just a bunch of bits stored in the
computer. The identity of the ball, its behavior, the laws
it obeys, these are all de ned by the program, implemented
by the program, and yet the ball is the ball, it is not the
program."
"Is the ball here my conscious self, subconscious self, or
both?"
"We can t the analogy in more than one way, but let's
call it your conscious self. It is the part that you can directly
observe."
"By observe here you mean introspection?"
"Right. And then there is all the stu behind the scenes
that you can't see, the intermediate variables used in the
calculation of the ball's trajectory, the comparisons at every
step that check whether the ball had hit a 'wall', and so on.
You need to bring up a debugger to see that stu |it's not
normally visible. That's analogous to the subconscious self."
Her eyes lit up upon hearing this, and she asked excitedly,
"Can I bring up a debugger to see my subconscious self?"
"Uh, well, yes, technically we can..." I was surprised
at the ease with which she embraced these ideas|ideas that
sent most people into a tizzy of denial out of some misguided
need to believe themselves free spirits beyond the grasp of
simple mechanics.
"That would be, like, meta-introspection. What about
changing things? Can I change things?"
"Uh, well, yes, technically you could."
"Wow, that gets confusing, doesn't it? I mean, if the
subconscious self implements the will|that is, when I, the
conscious introspective I, want something, or choose to do
something, or even choose to think something, that's because
the process, or program, that is my subconscious has made
some calculations and the equations resulted in that choice,
want, thought, action, or whatever..."
"Yes, essentially."[/QUOTE]
The way I see it, engineered biological immortality is a total detriment to human evolution. Death clears out dysfunctional, malfunctioning genetic models, making way for a better iteration of the human form. While yes, you can still have children, they would still be descended from an earlier, dysfunctional iteration. Taking into account that everyone would have sex over the centuries, millennia that they are alive, they'll be still spreading poor genetic material, compared to the projected genetic arrangement that should be at that time. Yeah, we'll all be immortal, be we will be condemning ourselves to evolutionary hell. We will be still stuck in our horrid, imperfect forms, with no way to evolve. Yeah, we could possibly force genetic evolution in living humans, but that change will be brought by other, imperfect humans, whose vision of a perfect human, is brought about by the imperfect brains. Ergo, all iterations brought about by anthropogenic evolution will never reach evolutionary perfection. Natural death is the doorway to ensured perfection of the human species.
[QUOTE=ExplodingGuy;29664037]The way I see it, engineered biological immortality is a total detriment to human evolution. Death clears out dysfunctional, malfunctioning genetic models, making way for a better iteration of the human form. While yes, you can still have children, they would still be descended from an earlier, dysfunctional iteration. Taking into account that everyone would have sex over the centuries, millennia that they are alive, they'll be still spreading poor genetic material, compared to the projected genetic arrangement that should be at that time. Yeah, we'll all be immortal, be we will be condemning ourselves to evolutionary hell. We will be still stuck in our horrid, imperfect forms, with no way to evolve. Yeah, we could possibly force genetic evolution in living humans, but that change will be brought by other, imperfect humans, whose vision of a perfect human, is brought about by the imperfect brains. Ergo, all iterations brought about by anthropogenic evolution will never reach evolutionary perfection. Natural death is the doorway to ensured perfection of the human species.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]with no way to evolve[/QUOTE]
[IMG]http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/5008/1274384583298.jpg[/IMG]
u called?
[QUOTE=Eudoxia;29664066][img_thumb]http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/5008/1274384583298.jpg[/img_thumb]
u called?[/QUOTE]
:colbert:
[QUOTE=ExplodingGuy;29664172]:colbert:[/QUOTE]
No but seriously taking over our own evolution sounds both fucking awesome and a good plot for a horror movie.
[QUOTE=Eudoxia;29664215]No but seriously taking over our own evolution sounds both fucking awesome and a good plot for a horror movie.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but looking at history, it probably will turn out bad.
But if it somehow everything turns out better than expected, holy shit, that will be the most amazing thing since bread.
[QUOTE=ExplodingGuy;29664251]Yeah, but looking at history, it probably will turn out bad.
But if it somehow everything turns out better than expected, holy shit, that will be the most amazing thing since bread.[/QUOTE]
Yes, I'm aware. It's all probably going to end like a bad horror film until we can measure and quantify and predict all the synergies of the human body. Meaning that I'd rather not have much gene therapy. At least not for a good time.
Then when it's good enough to be marketable it will be used to give people triple furry dicks on the pretension that the key to immortality is behind multiple furry dicks.
Immortality, this is why I took a course in Pharmaceutical Science,
Having more telomerase isn't enough. Haven't too much often results in cancer. A huge problem is the amount of mutations that occur within the DNA when a cell replicates. There aren't many mutations and the body has mechanisms to fix what is wrong most of the time but those changes to DNA adds up. If we want to live for much longer we need to make the whole process many magnitudes more accurate.
will u live forever if you have everything cancer
I believe you humans are already ruining the planet with your high population so I would say losing a few thousand humans a day is not a bad punishment.
[QUOTE=Rammaster;29663533]ironman17, have you ever seen "Ghost in the Shell?" It deals with a lot with what your talking about like transferring your mind into a computer and if you actually sustain your personality and such.[/QUOTE]
Agreed, the entire plot between the first season is based around one's personality and getting sucked into the collective whole while the second season actually features a revolutionary trying to do just that.
I would, I could play on Steam [b][H2]FOREVER.[/b][/H2]
As I see it, no one is forcing you to force your own evolution, however don't hold back those who do want to just because you don't like the idea.
Why do you all try to think up problems about something that doesn't even exist, then argue about the problems that don't even exist because the original point doesn't exist?
"Green eggs could be possible in the future!"
"Green eggs could be dangerous to our health..."
"Yeah like, bio chemicals etc I read about them!"
"No............ we can just reverse that!"
That's what I got out of this thread.
Don't tortoises have Biological Immortality? I read somewhere that if you placed a Tortoise in a completly disease and danger free enviroment with a source of food and water that they would live forever.
Only a few would be allowed to become immortal, otherwise we get absurd overpopulation which, at the moment, we can not deal with. Another reason to try and become rich, if immortality is "invented", you can bet your ass it will cost [B]a lot[/B].
I sure hope that immortality is invented and we will all live to see how the never ending population increase sucks all resources from earth and making it inhabitable.
Edit: Also holy shit, that "only the rich will be immortal" statement horrifies me as a proletariat sympathiser.
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