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Two points I guess.
First, can I get some theory or principle for when people are obliged to accept the limits of their biology and when they aren't? I'm assuming your ok with humans ignoring the limits of their biology when it means not going blind, or letting deaf people hear, or crippled people walk. If I'm correct about the above why are LGBT people obliged to respect the "limits of [their] biology" with respect to having children but the others aren't for their conditions?
Second, why care specifically about being "human"? Whatever that means to you. I see downthread you complain about playing the definition game so I'll sidestep that and say that if becoming a "cross-over between Umgah Blobbies and the Borg" leads people to live longer, happier lives of the kind they want to have I think that's good, whether or not you (or anyone) would call the resulting entities "human."
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!)
Death is a necessary and natural part of life. You don't repair what's not broken.
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.
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.
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