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In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the virtuous pagans - whose ranks include figures such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil - are confined to the first circle of Hell:
Those who inhabit this circle of the Inferno committed no extraordinary sins, over and above the sins that are committed in the course of any human life, that would merit damnation. Many of them were quite exemplary in their conduct and in their virtue. Few men in the middle ages commanded as much respect as Aristotle, whose influence on the development of scholastic philosophy was unrivaled. But they nevertheless had the misfortune of being born before Christ. They were deprived of the one and only way to the Father; thus they cannot be saved. There can be no exceptions. An obligation unfulfilled through no fault of one's own, an obligation that was in fact impossible to fulfill, remains an obligation unfulfilled.
This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms. He was not wracked with inner anxiety, asking himself whether he had the "right" to think such thoughts, as he drew up his precise and detailed classification of all the damned; nor did he live in a culture of religious pluralism that needed to be placated with niceties and assurances. Dante simply knew. This fundamental conviction in what must be, the will to adhere to a vision, to one singular vision, is something that is now quite foreign to us; indeed it is something that is now viewed as rude and suspicious.
This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational. But all genuine responsibility is psychotic; that is the wager you accept when you choose to be a human instead of a mere appendage of the earth. Kant was well aware of this. Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life. The moment you decide to perform or abandon your duty based on a consideration of the consequences is the moment at which it is no longer a duty for you; the logic of utilitarian calculation has become dominant, rather than the logic of obligation.
I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children. The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution. Despite some assurances that we have entered a post-postmodern era of revitalized sincerity, the idea of being committed to any cause that is not directly related to one's own immediate material benefit remains passé and incomprehensible. The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.
Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us? Is there any way that this idea, or even any remnant of it, can again become a living idea, can find root in this foreign soil? Perhaps not necessarily its Christian content, but the form of it, at any rate: the form of a responsibility that is not directed at any of the old and traditional obligations, but may indeed be directed at new and strange things that we can as of yet scarcely imagine.
Plainly we are beyond the domain of "rational" argumentation, or at least any such argumentation that would be accepted in the prevailing Enlightenment-scientific framework. We live in the age of the orthogonality thesis, of the incommensurability of values. In an important sense though we should remember that we are not entirely unique in this condition; the groundlessness of all values is not solely due to the fact that God has fled. There would have been an important open question here for the medieval Christians as well. Such questions date back as far as Plato's Euthyphro: are things Good because they are loved by the gods, or do the gods love Good things because they are Good? Are we truly responsible, in an ontological sense, for following Christ and abstaining from sin, or are we only contingently compelled to do so because of the cosmic gun that God is holding up against all of our heads? It has always been possible to ask this question in any age.
At certain times, the production of new values is a task that has been assigned to artists. Perhaps a poet, if he sings pleasingly enough, could attune people to a new way of feeling and perceiving. But it has never been at all clear to me whether art was really capable of affecting this sort of change or not. I view it as an open question whether any "work" itself (in this I include not only art, but also all the products of philosophical reflection) has ever or could ever affect change at a societal level, or whether all such works are really just the epiphenomena of deeper forces. There is a great deal of research to be done in this area.
There is a certain ontological fracture at the heart of the cultural situation today, a certain paradoxical two-sidedness: from one perspective, centers of power are more emboldened than ever before, able to transmit edicts and commands to millions of people simultaneously and compel their assent; we saw this with Covid. From another perspective, social reality has never been more fragmented, with all traditional centers of social organization (churches, obviously, but also the nightly news, Hollywood, universities) disintegrating in the face of the universal solvent that is the internet, leading to an endless proliferation of individual voices and sub-subcultures. In either case, it is hard to find an opening for authentic change. It is impossible to imagine Luther nailing his theses to the door today, or Lenin storming the Winter Palace. This type of radical fragmentation, when the narrative of no-narrative asserts itself so strongly as the dominant narrative that no escape seems possible, is what Derrida celebrated in Of Grammatology as "the death of the Book, and the beginning of writing" - writing here being the infinite profusion of signs, the infinite freeplay of identities, infinite exchange and infinite velocity, and, in my view - even though Derrida would refuse to characterize it in these terms - infinite stasis.
It's fascinating that Derrida had the foresight in the 1960s, when computing was in its infancy and the internet and LLMs were undreamed of, to say the following about "cybernetics":
(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post. @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details. Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)
It's hard to be very optimistic. The best I can offer in the way of advice is to look for small seeds of something good, and cultivate them wherever you find them:
The first circle of Hell is Limbo, and it is a place "of perfect natural felicity". That is, it is our world when all the bad things are solved - war, sickness, poverty, greed and so on. But it is without hope. It is deprived of the supernatural, of the vision of God which is what the enjoyment of the saved and blessed consists of.
It is true that the Church has softened on Limbo and really you never hear of it anymore today. But it was never formally a doctrine (something that has to be believed); rather, it was grappling with the problems of justice and mercy; if infants die before they can be baptised, how can they be condemned to Hell? What about the virtuous pagans and those who never got the chance to hear of God?
On the other hand, if you can be saved just by living a good life, then there was no need for the Incarnation and, crucially, the Crucifixion. If you can be saved without believing in Christ, without ever hearing of Him, then what does that mean for the Great Commission?
So Limbo was a technical solution: a human paradise (for the righteous but unsaved) without the supernatural.
Which is why Limbo, in the Divine Comedy, is on the outskirts of Hell and is a place of sadness, even though there is no pain or sickness or the rest of our earthly woes there. They can never enjoy the bliss of the Divine Vision. And why Purgatory, even though the souls there (by one reading) suffer pains as grievous as the damned in Hell, is a place of hope - because it is where the saved work off the earthly penalties for sin, before they go to Heaven (and it's not a matter of "second chance" or 'earning a place in Heaven' - the souls in Purgatory are already saved).
C.S. Lewis had a somewhat different take on it in his The Pilgrim's Regress, but he too took the view: a place not of suffering, except the suffering of being without hope.
I've often thought about the contrast here - we on earth want an earthly paradise, no more tears or grief or loss, Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. And the Church says "yes, you can have that - but it's in the map of Hell, not of Heaven. You can have the secular ideal, but never the supernatural one."
And some people probably would be very happy with that bargain. I never watched The Good Place, but a while back there it was all over social media. And my understanding - SPOILERS - is that in the end, after uncounted millennia of perfect happiness, the characters finally choose non-existence because they've had it all. The writers seem to have presented that as the most desirable end, and not true eternity. But I think it's interesting that even there, the same message is in the water: without the supernatural, purely natural felicity will eventually pall and satiate.
I read an excellent review dissecting the rather bankrupt worldview underpinning The Good Place somewhere, but can't really recall where that was. It might even have been the Motte.
It absolutely makes me seethe when I imagine people being given the gift of immortality (or merely a very long and indefinite lifespan, like we're talking astronomical figures here) be such utter nonces about it, and succumb so quickly to boredom and ennui.
A modern human living say, 80 years or so is nowhere near done trawling the vast expanse of interesting environments, ideas, people or concepts that even our limited baseline human minds can experience. The reason most people today might possibly lose the will to live is their bodies failing them, such that they can't actually get out there and do more of it without it being infeasibly difficult or painful.
I fully support the right of any sane sapient entity to self-terminate for any reason it chooses (without classifying the desire for suicide as insanity itself), but even then I can only groan at the sheer lack of vision or imagination that involves.
Mere millennia are grossly insufficient to do or feel all the things worth sticking around for, and humans consistently expand that space faster than we can consume it already. As evidence, go find the last person who read every book worth reading, it's certainly centuries ago, and maybe half a millennia.
To them I say:
How dare you get bored when you have everything you need, when billions of your ancestors fought hard against the cold to bring Utopia to you? You ungrateful fucks, if you haven't outlived a few stars, what makes you so old and world-weary that you'd rather end it all?
And even if you have, and after about 20 billion years your brain has cycled through every possible interesting thought and emotion available to grey matter (or a simulation of it) constrained to 20 watts and the volume of a cranium, have you even considered expanding your horizons and augmenting your consciousness so you can find new and amazing exercises to do?
A human being has exponentially more pleasant (or at least interesting) experiences and thoughts at their disposal compared to a chimp, and the larger your brain equivalent, the faster the combinatorial equations explode.
Try upping a couple hundred IQ points or petaflops of computational power and then try again you weakling.
Fine, your computational substrate has exceeded the size and mass limits that make it inevitably collapse into a blackhole? And your cumulative lifespan needs to be expressed in Knut Arrow notation? You get a hall pass to off yourself knowing you've known everything to know and seen it all. Don't talk to me till you're there, because I'd kill to be.
Even the latter belongs to the unlikely scenario where humanity solves everything, including infinite energy and resources. You're not going to get there in practice with merely all the matter and energy in the observable universe.
And mere boredom has technological solutions, I'd happily undergo a procedure that could erase it if I was convinced that it was outright counterproductive. Or I'd erase my memories and start again, anything but consigning to oblivion this infinitely lucky instance of sapience that was fished out from the endless ocean of All Possible Minds to enjoy its day in the sun.
The writers of The Good Place are small minded scum crying sour grapes at a prospect they'd be far too lucky to actually experience. I'd even deny it to them on principal if I was feeling mean.
Quite right. How can all these authors diss immortality? They've never even tried it! Nobody's tried it.
Our revealed preference is to spend enormous amounts of time and effort extending our lifespans in the health sector, despite rapidly diminishing returns in quality of life. Our revealed preference (or at least the revealed preference of governments and thought leaders) was to make considerable sacrifices during COVID lest a few years be shaved off the lifespans of geriatrics and the obese.
It's hypocritical to be so contemptuous of immortality when we go to such huge effort for far lesser fruits.
Likewise, it would be great if we could 100x or 1000x the population. More people means more and better artistic output. I know I'm preaching to the choir with you but there's a fairly large cult of 'growth must slow' when it's the opposite that we need. There's a great deal of unused real estate on Earth - tundra, deep ocean, desert, ice and massively more in the rest of the Solar System.
It's the ultimate sour grapes. We can never have it, so we must convince ourselves that we don't really want it. I do believe sour grapes is a perfectly rational and healthy response to impossible desires, however.
The crux is that there's no reason to assume that immortality (in the sense that you don't die except for external accidents or violence) isn't clearly plausible. At least it is to me based off what I know about biology, assuming only modest advances in biotech. At the very least, aging is almost certainly a curable disease!
When you get into the realm of mind uploads, you can trivially guarantee a form of you making it to Heat Death if you regularly fork and hide copies of yourself all throughout the universe where nobody can get to them.
I wouldn't say that going sour grapes is a good response either, when you can simply say that "yeah, that would be nice but it's not happening so no need to dwell on it".
I acknowledge that it is theoretically possible, but it's also been "30 years away" for much longer than that. I don't think anyone on this forum will be living past 2150. And yes, being able to accept the truth with equanimity would be better than self-delusion, but our powers of self-delusion are very strong, so we may as well get some use out of them.
I mean, I evidently disagree! From my understanding of biology (which ought to be better than average, or I've wasted 7 years of my life), aging doesn't seem fundamentally intractable at all. I'd be hard pressed to think of anyone other than the other doctor here, and perhaps @ChristPrattAlphaRaptor who might know more, though I don't know if gerontology and SENS is anything he's interested in.
If I had to put semi-serious numbers on it, I'd say that most people under 30 have a 70-80% chance of reaching longevity escape velocity (when your life expectancy grows faster than you age), in the counterfactual world where AGI doesn't become a reality.
Now, I sincerely expect AGI to become a thing more likely than not, and within a decade at most, at which point it's a tossup as to whether it gives us immortality and catgirl blowjobs, or kills us all.
At any rate, I have no qualms about claiming that a superhuman AGI should trivially be able to solve the problem, not that I really want to take that risk until I'm already old and doddering haha
I can't see it. Increases in average lifespan haven't translated into increases in maximum lifespan (Aeschylus lived to 92 in ~400 B.C., that's still longer than most American men today). It seems to be no low hanging fruit. Diseases that were easily treatable are becoming more and more resistant to antibiotics, and development of new ones has slowed down. Maybe that will pick up again, maybe it won't. More than immortality, dying of a hyper-MRSA infection after a difficult surgery in late middle age seems a likely outcome to me. Of course, I'm not a doctor or a biologist.
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