I plan to live forever or die trying.
I’ve been saying that for years, and most people get the joke. We human beings aren’t immortal. Like all other life on this planet, sooner or later our physical being gives out.
I will confess that I would like to live a really long time mostly because the story of the world will still be going on after I die and I hate stopping in the middle of a good story (or, for that matter, a scary story). But I don’t want to outlive my mind and I know bodies can’t last forever.
I have often thought that it would be good if humans had a longer life span than we currently experience on the off chance that more of us would develop some wisdom while we were still capable of doing something with it. These days things that happened forty or fifty years ago are treated like ancient history and yet those very things have a profound effect on what’s going on today. Unfortunately, too many people making decisions right now don’t understand what happened fifty years ago, much less a hundred and fifty years ago.
When I think of extending human life, I’m looking at our increased understanding of human health and ability to deal with diseases. Some of that comes from major advances in biology and medicine, but some of it is much more simple and basic than things like CRISPR or even open heart surgery.
Cleaning up the air – indoors as well as outdoors – can have a large effect on our health, just to throw out one example. And that’s not to mention changing work situations so that people don’t literally work themselves to death.
But even with some real progress, even if more people continue to thrive into their 100s, we’re still not going to become immortal. We’re animals and animals don’t live forever.
Unless, of course, you believe in the singularity and transhumanism and think we’re all going to be uploaded into some kind of digital selves.
I use the word “believe” because that’s the way one approaches religion. And despite the fact that the broligarchs and others who are convinced that we will reach a point where we can just upload our brains into the cloud (or some such) will claim to be materialists, there is no more evidence for such beliefs than there is for gods.
It’s a new religion, not science.
Adam Becker in his wonderful new book More Everything Forever demolishes their efforts to prove it. The idea is based on misreading a lot of “Golden Age” science fiction and making illogical jumps.
Some people still believe, though. You hear of some men getting blood transfusions from their children because there are some theories about blood. And many of the others take all kinds of supplements and try every health fad they can lay their hands on.
They want to believe.
Me, I eat a healthy diet and get a lot of exercise, though I don’t go to extremes. I want to be healthy enough to enjoy life as long as possible, but I’m not trying to stay alive until we reach the point where I can upload my brain.
I don’t want to upload my brain. I just want to live in my body as long as I reasonably can.
Anyway, nobody’s going to have their brain uploaded anytime soon.
As anyone who has read anything by modern neuroscientists can tell you, our brains are not like computers. Further, our minds are much more than what’s in our brain. The components that make it possible for us to think and be conscious run throughout our bodies.
And nobody understands consciousness yet.
Nobody even understands brains yet, much less all the other complicated things that we humans do.
Uploading something we don’t full understand into some kind of digital storage is about as far from reality as deciding we should go live on Mars instead of dealing with climate change.
Which is another thing some of these broligarchs want to do.
Of course, most of them just want to live in their fancy bunkers and have a bunch of servants – human or artificial, doesn’t matter, as long as they’re appropriately servile – and let the rest of the place rot. Though I suspect some of them do think they’re going to figure out some way to cheat death.
I used to want to put my saying on a t-shirt, but these days I’m afraid someone will misinterpret it.
I mean, some people apparently do think they’re going to live forever.
As someone with mild claustrophobia, the idea of being uploaded has always rather squicked me out. I love my brain; I love thinking and reading and turning ideas over in my head, and interacting with people doing the same thing. But the idea of being, for want of a better word, trapped in an uplink makes me shudder. I’m not the most physical being, but… no cuddles? No enjoyment of the animal pleasure of my muscles working as they ought? It just sounds like being stuck in a box to me. Ugh.
There are other problems with living forever–or just living a long time. I wrote a story years ago called “Mules,” about the emotional consequences of life extension. I don’t know if you can avoid the flattening of experience, the lost of emotional connection. I fear the loss of what I can only think of as emotional muscle mass. Even now, I know that there were things I felt more profoundly when I was 25; I trade that for a certain amount of knowledge and experience. But if I lived to be 300 what tradeoffs would I have to make? Would I even know about them?
I intend to live as long as I can, healthily. But forever? No thanks.
I recently saw a suggestion that what you loved to do as a kid was a good indication of what you should do with your life. And what I loved to do as a kid was read. I am an intellectual by nature, but I have figured out, over the years, that my brain works a lot better if I move regularly. Also, I found myself learning things and getting new ideas by training in Aikido and related arts, which makes all that kind of movement important to me. I mean, it all feeds my mind.
Your point about emotional muscle mass is intriguing. I hadn’t thought about it like that. It occurs to me that my idea of life extension is a gradual one once you hit adulthood — more years with the energy and capacity and recovery ability of someone in their twenties, more years as a middle-aged person, more healthy years as an old one. Not the rejeuvenation (no idea how to spell that) drugs of so many SF stories, but more just disease prevention and understanding of our bodies that just keep us in a good state for longer. I don’t know what that would do the emotional flatness you speak of.
Come to think of it, an anthology of stories about extending life span could provide some juicy material for thinking and consideration. Hmmm.