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Catholics have had a longstanding argument about which kinds of technological help are warranted within a respect for God's creation and I must say I find their conclusions very reasonable.
The line between health and degeneracy is repair. It's fine to do anything to repair broken humans and allow them to do what they would be able to do if not for some disease or mutilation holding them back.
It becomes immoral when you start trying to augment humans beyond their natural existence and try to turn them into something else. Humans are not immortal, they don't reproduce asexually, they don't have 10 arm, etc.
Of course the debate at the margins can be fierce, especially since industry has changed a lot about the human condition and arguably too much already so that we suffer ills of our own making, but I think it's a generally sound principle.
Aging is merely the ability of the body to repair itself breaking down. Who says we mustn't repair that one, too? (Rhetorical question, Christians!)
I don't think Catholics would have a problem with anti-aging technology. They don't have a problem with binoculars, even if they give people the ability to see further than normal healthy human eyes could. Rather it's more tied to the concept of human flourishing, things that provide a force multiplier to human nature are fine. See The Metaphysics of Bionic Implants.
Catholics reject surrogacy because they reject IVF and the commodification of human life. They see the relationship between a mother and a child as the clearest indicator that humans cannot be reduced to individuals forming contracts, but rather we are social creatures who work towards common goods. Making a child outside of an act of love between two married people is a farce and a sin against the child - but at least usually it's a sin of passion. Surrogacy is a dispassionate sin where the maternal relationship is broken with a contract - a dramatic inversion of the family being the last bulwark against a pure Lockean society.
Doesn't the whole "Heaven" thing require that you die, as opposed to sticking around and possibly, God forbid, start getting ideas of building your own heaven on earth?
Answering as a Catholic: I assure you, this world will pass away eventually. Anti-Aging wouldn't stop the second coming of Christ, it won't even stop the heat death of the universe.
I strongly doubt our ability to build a just society on Earth on our own power, but if it happens that would be great - it's one of the things we were made to do.
In that case I don't see why not stick around until whichever comes earlier.
I don't disagree, assuming we can solve the problems of overpopulation and acedia without creating a worse mess.
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Death is a necessary and natural part of life. You don't repair what's not broken.
You are a traitor to humanity, aider and abetter of the Great Enemy. I genuinely can't believe so many people hold this view.
Seems that describes you better since you don't even want to be part of humanity.
Humans die. People that don't are something else.
As I’ve said elsewhere I’ll die, I just hope it’s billions of years away instead of 50 years away. What’s the difference?
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Right back at you, neighbor.
You posted somewhere else in the thread that the obvious core drive of a human is to escape death. I assure you, I find that statement as repugnant as you appear to find its opposite. I see it as a repudiation of everything I recognize as noble within humanity, of the true core function to choose well from limited, fraught options. Obviously, I can't force you to adopt my view, and neither can you force me to adopt mine. All that can be done is to point out that the chasm between values, even for baseline, unmodified humans, yawns wide indeed.
Then you die and let me do as I will.
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You're Christian, yes?
I find the Christian objection to transhumanist anti-death pushes fascinating, because "death" means such different things to Christians and atheists. To a Christian, there is no need to escape death on Earth, because Christ already overcame the bonds of death for us with the Resurrection, and we too will be resurrected and raised to a state of perfection if we hold firm. To seek to overcome death on Earth looks like pursuing a shallow, partial, impossible form of what is already granted free of cost to all of us. Christians have fulfilled this drive already in their minds. The rest of us, lacking such a perceptual safety net, do what we must.
This fundamental disconnect over what death is makes it complex to have a meaningful conversation about the nobility of pursuit of immortality between Christians and non-Christians, as the rest of us seek to build what you believe you already have.
I am Christian, but I've been an atheist too. Even from an Atheist perspective, I think people are better off making their peace with death than fighting to the bitter end. One of the things that makes life good is people being willing to eat the badness set before them, rather than desperately attempt to avoid it or pass it off to others. Even on the assumption that death is the absolute end, how one reacts to that end is the product of immediate and indirect choices. Abject terror is largely, I think, a choice, and not a very good one given that it seems pretty unlikely to me that such death is going to be avoided for most of the current population. Where such fears grow especially pernicious is when the threat of death might appear to be forestalled by exploiting or victimizing others. In that case, the opportunity for evil is nearly boundless, and the attitude that takes death to be the worst possible thing just weakens one's resolve.
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the resurrected person would be a copy of that person who long ago died and was buried in a grave, I think its arguable to say that its the same thing as extending your life without death.
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I’m glad we have so much diversity of values!
I was a bit hyperbolic there I admit - I apologize. What do you find noble in humanity?
The ability to choose what is Good, even when the choice is hard. Death and pain are among the things that make it hard, but it seems to me that one of the choices we have to make is between accepting them, and acquiescing to them. Avoiding death is of great value, but it is not a terminal value. Treating it as a terminal value often allows one to be "forced" into choosing evil, in an attempt to avoid the ultimately unavoidable. Evil is the Great Enemy. Death is just an unfortunate fact. One might as reasonably declare that the speed of light is the Great Enemy, and all that matters is breaking physics by achieving FTL. Any passive feature of reality can be transformed into the ultimate villian, if one is willing to torture perspective sufficiently.
I don't feel like I'm afraid of death per se, certainly not like Yud's Voldemort or even like Yud's "DAE what can be worse than death???" Harry. But it would certainly be blasted inconvenient, and I'm particularly incensed that some people turn to worshipping some funny spiral chemical's lack of interest in letting us live longer above our own interests.
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Revolution against people who insist that their way is "natural" "necessary" and "god ordered" even when it leads to endless death and suffering is necessary and natural part of history.
What if I do repair what is "not broken" to avoid dying?
What will you do to stop me? What will you threaten me with that is worse than death?
Is it? Can you point to some examples where such revolution actually succeeded according to its own priors? Are we about to get another of those cartoonish, unsourced anecdotes about how everyone prior to the Enlightenment thought medicine was witchcraft and burned doctors at the stake?
Why even attempt to form a correct view understanding of reality, when re-writing the past is so much easier?
Shouldn't death be sufficient, since that's exactly what hypothetical-you is desperately trying to avoid?
"What is the consequence of defying the luddite?"
"Death. "
"Then what is the consequence of submitting to the luddite?"
"Death."
"How shall we proceed, General?"
Conflict is eternal; if you can't deter people from instantiating horrors by threatening death, there's nothing left but to follow through and fight it out.
Transhumanist valhalla with everyone fighting at all times seems slightly superior to the wirehead utopia.
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Hey! I just wanted a Space Ark to GTFO of here.
No, I mean stepping away from pursuing transhumanism means death, even if you don't personally execute us.
Well, but if you build me a Space Ark, and I GTFO, you can do whatever you want.
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It certainly is. And those revolutions always fail. Because if something is truly natural, necessary and ordained by God, you never really escape the consequences.
Of course if it isn't, then they don't. But I don't see any reasonable argument that death isn't a natural part of the universe.
Violence ultimately, but I don't hold that cruelty has ever been an effective deterrent so I don't feel the need to invent worse punishments than death.
Hmm, certainly seems like us transgressors of God are doing quite well for ourselves as a matter of fact.
I'm not arguing this. Everything dies eventually. I'm arguing that dying in 100 years isn't any less natural than dying after 100,000 years. Do you see a difference yourself?
I'll refer to the first part of this reply. We've got you beat on the violence as well buddy.
I don't really care to go into the large argument about how miserable industrial society has made everyone, go read Ted if you want to see those arguments, but on the face of it I do want to address the most painfully ridiculous elephant in the room, which Nietzsche famously predicted as a direct consequence of this transgression:
How many people died in the XXth century?
This doesn't alter the moral calculus a iota for me. But I also don't believe you. Otherwise you'd be holding Afghanistan right about now.
How many did not? For most of recorded history, one third of all born children died in infancy, quite often taking their mother with them; of course these billions died quietly, often unnamed and unrecorded, and a death tax of a child every three in nearly every household is not so notable and exciting as a holocaust killing a hundredth of that number all in one event. The survivors didn't even find it all that noteworthy; after all it was all natural, and probably the will of God. Now the death tax is gone from most of the world, and on its way to be gone from the rest of it.
Granted, Mao is still to blame for the worst famine in history. But famines with a death tolls in the millions were quite common before the 20th century; before mechanized agriculture and the Green Revolution, it did not take a mad ideologue to starve millions in India or China; it happened quite naturally whenever the weather was too dry or too wet or too warm or too cold for a few years in a row.
Smallpox killed half a billion people just in its last century of existence (its thirtieth, give or take). It killed a significant fraction of all humans who ever lived, and left most of the survivors crippled, blinded, or disfigured. Now it's gone; and nazism and communism and religious fundamentalism and all other deranged ideologies ever dreamed up have a long, long way to go before they even get close to the death toll of one of these perfectly natural facets of the human condition.
"Accept nature", if taken as seriously as those other slogans, could be stained with quite a lot more blood than "proletarians of the world, unite" or "work will set you free".
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https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths Proportionally less than in any previous century from violence. Or in early childhood, thanks to modern medicine. Or from starvation, thanks to industrial fertilizers. As for happiness, Ted might have had a better point if he went for the invention of agriculture. But pre-industrial agricultural society meant that the vast majority of humanity were subsistence farmers subject to frequent violence.
My impression is that, while Ted Kaczynski has interesting points about runaway tendencies in technocracy and the potential for social control and all that, any of his arguments about human misery have to be taken in the context of him being abused in what was probably a literal psy-op. Ted may say it didn't permanently affect him, but I dunno...
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If my way is not ordained by God, then let Him strike me down. If yours is, why are you worried that He will allow my way to destroy yours?
We are all instruments, and my worry is part of it. I'm tempted to quote that parable about the man who refused help many times on account of his faith, not realizing it was God sending all those people to help him.
We can't expect God to do all the work.
not realizing that because God never gave him a clue for it? God knowing that he would not realize it and yet not doing the necessary correction. So God in this scenario is as effectively impotent as always.
God is a descriptive term for the nature of the universe, not a will in the proper sense. I am an atheist.
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That's what people usually say when asked to demonstrate whether their claims of God-ordainment are falsifiable or not, yes.
Well yeah, it's just the coherent outcome of this position. What of it?
We're not having a disagreement that can be settled through reason.
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Death is a necessary part of one particular configuration of an ecosystem, and appealing to nature is pointless. Everything is natural.
edit: not even that. Like darkness is an absence of life, death is an absence of longevity. It is not "a part" of life, it is that longevity is not a (necessary) part of life based on sexual reproduction. "You have outlived your usefulness", says the gene once it is duplicated and recombinated into a fresh host. I'm sorry, but who asked?
I could start to argue metaphysics, because I definitely think your view is incoherent, but that's boring and not very convincing.
Let us instead drop merrily into the realms of practicality: immortality is heavily and obviously dysgenic. Stagnant organisms lose the possibility to change, and therefore to adapt. And no cultural process can replicate one's just anihilation once they have indeed, outlived their usefulness.
Well your children presumably. I certainly think the boomers are robbing a few generations of their due by sticking around and holding onto all ressources for too long. Which is not fair, because they were themselves handed society in trust.
Immortality is just the extreme extension of this problem.
why does it matter what is improved in the future if you wont be alive to witness it?
Because society was not given to you, it was loaned. You have a duty to the future much like the past had a duty to you.
If you break that, things stop existing.
And who started this duty in the first place?
How is it in your self-interest to restrict other people from making themselves immortal?
Your ancestors, and ultimately abiogenesis.
This is a much larger question and one that is dependent on large amounts of context. I personally favor the Hoppean solution to this problem, which is that you are absolutely allowed to have values that are sorely incompatible with mine so long as you do it away from me and my kin and don't try to interfere in our affairs.
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I for one would be ecstatic to have my parents around for longer, along with the rest of their generation, even if it robs my generation of its due.
I agree that greatly extending the human lifespan would cause massive societal problems. I am willing to struggle with those massive societal problems for as many centuries as it takes.
I think it's pointed out elsewhere in this thread, but this is where the bright line between immortality and anti-aging is fuzzy. Had we robust ways of dealing with those societal problems one might be able to consider integrating that technology.
But to remove death in the absolute is clearly over the line for me. I won't go into the minute details of why given there's seemingly endless art that explores the topic.
I don't think the ways to deal with those societal problems have to be particularly robust, at least not at first. If you eliminated aging today, the short-term (next 10 years) problems would look pretty similar to the problems we face today. On a fairly immediate timescale we'd need to deal with social security, as that would suddenly have a very different financial outlook. Over the time scale of decades or centuries, we would face new and interesting problems, but I don't think "we would have moderate political difficulties immediately, and we'd need to tweak some laws in 50-100 years" is a good reason to block anti-aging tech.
To remove the ability to die would also be clearly over the line to me. But to remove the bit where the bits of my mind that make me me slip away one by one, and then the body that used to contain the person who was me stops breathing? And to do that for everyone who wants it? I think that would be massively good on the balance.
You say this, and yet my country is right now enthralled in chaos all because our ponzi scheme of a pension system couldn't even handle a fluctuation in demography that is so extremely mild compared to the change you're advocating for.
I don't think you've even begun to think through the changes to just the financial system that something like this would cause. Not to mention second or third order effects.
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Again, an ability that they only don't have as long as the evolutionary process didn't deem it necessary for them to propagate. Or as long as they don't research neuroplasticity restoration and body modification.
I'm sure I'll reckon with my children amicably, somehow. Another incentive for us all to go to space. We could also explore all those proposals about social systems that discourage concentrating wealth in a few people's hands...
"It's not like you can take it to the grave" would certainly age like milk.
All I'm hearing is a communist assuring me that once computers get good enough, they'll solve the economic calculation problem and we'll have FALGSC.
I hold this to be wish fulfillment untethered to reality, like a lot of futurism.
I don't think you will. Chronos didn't really get along very well with Zeus.
Fair enough, but I hold no objection to that. Exploration is, in fact, quite natural for humans.
All I'm hearing are appeals to "it's always been that way therefore it can only be that way" and stridently ignoring all the cases where that principle didn't work, so I suppose we're even. Besides, I wasn't talking about computers or magically inventing FALGSC out of thin air. Medical advancement isn't that fantastical. Certainly not too fantastical to refute conjecture of the "immortality is stagnancy" rate.
I hold this to be paint-the-bullseye justification of the current state of reality, like a lot of ancestral wisdom.
What can I say except that I disagree with your evaluation of what is and isn't fantastical?
And I hold this to be immortal wisdom about the nature of reality endlessly rediscovered by all human civilizations. Potato, potahto.
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Yes! I feel a bit insecure recommending Catholic teachings, because it's been a while since I heard / read them, but there are some half-remembered arguments that are bouncing around my head, that I'm recently finding myself sympathetic towards. So that would also be my official response @Gillitrut.
That's fair enough, but to that I always say the lines are drawn, and all that is left for us is to do battle.
Or let's divide the territory at least. Since you're the transhumanist, can't you go live on Mars, or something? It would be a lot easier for you than for me.
CC @IGI-111
I guess being neither Catholic nor religious I don't find arguments about humans being a certain way relative to God's intention to be very convincing.
I don't see any reason why peaceful coexistence isn't possible.
I'm not Catholic either, but I am a perennialist which is really all that's required to hold such a view: to recognize that there is an immutable (or at the very least very very slowly mutable) human nature.
I'm also of the opinion that part of this nature makes humans unwise, and certainly unwise enough that them being in charge of their own condition is the harbinger of catastrophe. We suck at planning, everything we do has unforeseen consequences and the Enlightenment, which is most essentially the project to organize the world using reason, is a massive failure.
Like I'm fond of saying around these parts, the Jovians are the good guys in Eclipse Phase.
Because I don't think you would leave us (and by us I mean humans) alone. Hence why the strict minimum of North Korea strong borders and armed neutrality is required.
This is simply drawn from the experience of history. Progressives can't help themselves from being universalists and try to insert their agenda in literally any traditional project. Ask any country colonized by Europe. Or more recently, Afghanistan.
I am unclear on what this human nature is. Humans seem very different to me all over the world such that it would be difficult to ascribe some specific nature to all of them.
Can you quantify the "humans" that are unwise enough such that being charge of our own condition is catastrophe? With an existential quantifier it seems trivial (surely some humans are so unwise it is catastrophic for them to manage their own condition) and with a universal quantifier it seems clearly false (no human is wise enough to manage their own condition). Indeed, unless you're an anarchist it seems like you believe some humans are wise enough to manage the condition of others, let alone their own condition.
What do you mean by "leave [humans] alone?" Like, we're not permitted to interact at all? To evangelize alternative ways of being? Are humans permitted to do the opposite? To decry why us not-humans are inferior and no one should be like us?
That's funny because Humans seem very similar to me all over the world. They all have the attributes Aristostle and Confuscius independently identified them as having.
That's easy, the number is zero. No man is wise enough for such a task. The wish to be as gods is always and forever delusional hubris.
First, the human condition and society are different things. Humans have to manage society as a pragmatic necessity, and yet it's established that you can't just hand this out to a single person's whims without ending up with what we call tyranny. All successful societies pretty much have complex methods to eliminate these problems, and none of them have ultimately succeeded in avoiding catastrophic failure. Which is why societies, like humans, are always dying.
But the part we're talking about isn't the cultural aspect we've already fucked up pretty bad. It's biology, and the consequences of fucking with that are much more definitive and far reaching, not to mention our wishes around it extremely influenced by irrational pulsions.
Policy is of course contingent on practicality, but it would indeed be up and including that. Subversion is an existential risk that must be prevented regardless of it being done through hard or soft power. I reserve the right to suffer not the xeno, the mutant, the heretic if necessary.
That's not for us to decide.
Such as?
For the rest of this comment I feel like I need some clarification on "the human condition", biology, and the relation between them. It seems to me humans already manage our biology in ways great and small with mostly positive results. The person with cataracts who gets surgery, the deaf person who gets a cochlear implant, the diabetic who takes insulin, the person with a lethal allergy, are all managing their biology. Sometimes with life or death implications!
So what parts of our biology does "the human condition" consist of such that we are incompetent to manage these parts?
The exact list is the object of philosophical debate of course, but generally it includes the ability to use reason and language, pair-bonding and the building of couples and households, the practice of politics and the development of societies, and the ability to practice mimesis and create art through imagination. ALl with the underlying issues that come with them, of course.
Of these both Chinese and Greeks independently derived similar forms of morality based on natural law, but I'm here drawing more from the underlying reality than these extrapolations.
All of them.
None of the examples you give, which are of course good restorative practices that can heal the sick, are equivalent to their natural counterparts and it is not even totally clear that their existence is a good thing in the absolute. I personally do not see our increasing reliance on industrial technology to survive as a good thing.
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Funnily enough, I'm not Catholic either. I've been an atheist for more than 20 years, I just can't help but find their moral framework compelling, regardless of whether or not god exists. I guess, as the joke goes, I'm a Catholic atheist.
I'd like some degree of isolation, if it's all the same to you. Otherwise it's like trying to raise your children in modesty while neighboring a strip club.
I guess I don't understand what the source of the standard that it is appropriate to return humans to is in a more atheistic framework. I understand the logic of restoring people to Be the way God intended. What is the substitute for God in terms of determining what state it is appropriate to return humans to?
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I resent being asked to move for your sake, but I could personally be convinced.
Hypothetically, let's assume that 10 billion humans are assigned equal chunks of the lightcone, including Earth. Since I'm not particularly attached to the latter, but most are, prompting very high demand, I would trade my share of Earth for any of- several thousand square kilometers of Mars/ a Jovian moon/ an exoplanet nearby/ a distant star system/ a very distant galaxy at the end of the lightcone. You're welcome to buy it off me if you care so much.
It can't be worth much to you can it? 99.9999% of the volume of the universe is unsuitable for baseline humans, and with your disdain for enhancement, you wouldn't survive the journey to the nearest star system in the first place. If all you luddites want to pool together and buy Earth to keep in stasis till the Sun engulfs it, that's entirely your right, as long as you suitably compensate the more sensible.
Just out of curiosity: what are you going to do on Mars, or in the patch of empty space in the distant star system you own, or whatever? What sort of plans do you have, outside of just owning more and more space?
Me personally? I'll become a mind upload if technologically feasible, and I see little reason it won't in the long term.
Such an entity has far lower resource footprints compared to an equivalent human in space, considering life support. All you need is a steady supply of spare parts for the computers and energy, which is available in copious amounts via fusion or solar.
So I would end up owning a large patch of land to store my compute, and any robotic industrial equipment I need for self sufficiency or simply for trade with neighbors. That's more doable when you live close to others in tightly packed neighborhoods, which is why I value a large chunk of Mars as much as an entire exoplanet. It'll be livelier if nothing else.
So once I have my share, I'll be living mostly inside simulations, running autonomously on the outside, and doing my own thing till Heat Death. I'd likely end up in a community of like minded people, or just forks of my own consciousness or children.
TLDR: I largely care about the resources and opportunity cost of a plot of land/space. Since it takes an enormous amount of time and energy in a dying universe to travel, I value a smaller sum nearby, in company, over a larger one further away or less populated and convenient.
So you wouldn't value physical exploration/discovery at all? I'd like to spend at least a few centuries venturing out. Sitting in the same server on Mars for my immortal life sounds dull, although I agree that valuing community over novelty is a good long term plan.
Keep in mind that as a mind upload, I can trivially fork and modify my consciousness, so sending a copy of myself out to explore the universe is no issue.
I can't say that would likely be a major priority for me, given the sheer travel time, and the fact that I can experience most of it in VR, but it's always an option.
Have you read Greg Egan's Diaspora? It explores this in depth.
Also, I feel like I would at least once want to be the actual consciousness exploring. Then again it would be horrifically risky compared to my cushy life on Mars I suppose. It's nice to dream.
No, that's not one of Egan's works that I've read!
Frankly speaking, I feel the sheer hassle of space exploration unless you're colonizing makes it not worth it. It would take decades to explore nearby stars, burn an enormous amount of resources, and for an experience I don't personally value that highly. Maybe send a copy on an already outbound flight, but that's about it as far as I'm really concerned. My curiosity about things is very much real, but I don't need to see it all in person!
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The same plans people had on the frontier, but with a higher range of activities and environments available?
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Why the resentment? I can be the one to move if it bothers you so much! Use your superhuman capabilities to build us a Space Ark, and launch us to Proxima Centauri, and I'll be the first to buy the tickets!
What? Not stabbing you in your sleep before you turn yourself into a cyborg is not enough?
I reject your gift of charity as much as I reject the mugger offering me an otherwise stunning deal of 60 years of my life for the low, low price of the contents of my wallet.
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How about I receive "not getting stabbed in my sleep for daring to do something to my own body", and you receive "not getting herded into a luddite concentration camp before you lot start stabbing people"?
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