Hi Owen! The advantages and limitations of immortality needs more thought as our society is starting to more seriously invest in anti-aging.
One of my challenges with this post is that it claims to provide an “anti-immortality case,” but then proceeds to simply list some problems that might arise if people were immortal.
To make an anti-X case, you need to do more than list some problems with X. You need to make a case that the problems are insurmountably bad or risky, even after a consideration of possible solutions. Alternatively, you can make a case that the downsides inevitably outweigh the benefits, despite a presumption that people will work hard to mitigate those downsides and maximize the benefits.
Your article is specifically about immortality, or at least adding perhaps 10,000 years to average human life expectancy. That’s a different topic from more realistic incremental anti-aging efforts. But that also gets into a Sorites paradox, so it seems worth bringing up incremental efforts as well.
Note: what follows isn’t an attempt to bombard you with Gish-gallop-style questions. It’s just food for thought.
If I could push a button to increase lifespans 100x or 10,000x I would be much more hesitant.
If you could push a button to give everybody one extra year of youthful life, how many times would you press it?
What if you had the option of pushing that button, or not pushing it, every year?
What if the world’s life sciences and engineering community was paid to push that button every year? Would we be glad that they had such a button to push?
What if the world’s governments were in charge of deciding whether or not to push the button? Would we like them to have control over the button?
Now consider the same questions, but for a button that removes one year of old age from everybody’s lifespans. Would you be happy that the relevant people had access to such a button? How many times should it be pressed?
Finally, imagine everybody had a button they could individually press in order to extend their youthful life by one year. They can press their buttons once a year. You have a button that reduces the effectiveness of their buttons by half, or that disables their buttons entirely. Would you press your button-disabling button?
If you don’t think anybody should press the life extension button, but you also don’t think that anybody should press the life-shortening button, then we need an explanation for why you believe people are living the perfect amount of time for overall human wellbeing.
I think that anti-aging research is most likely to produce “one year of life extension” buttons, every now and then. Every time such a button is pressed, society will have a chance to observe the effects and adjust in advance of the next button press. This specific anti-aging scenario is the one that I think merits the most focused attention.
Good questions! I could give answers but my error bars on what’s good are enormous.
(I do think my post is mostly not responding to whether longevity research is good, but to what the appropriate attitudes/rhetoric towards death/immortality are.)
Hi Owen! The advantages and limitations of immortality needs more thought as our society is starting to more seriously invest in anti-aging.
One of my challenges with this post is that it claims to provide an “anti-immortality case,” but then proceeds to simply list some problems that might arise if people were immortal.
To make an anti-X case, you need to do more than list some problems with X. You need to make a case that the problems are insurmountably bad or risky, even after a consideration of possible solutions. Alternatively, you can make a case that the downsides inevitably outweigh the benefits, despite a presumption that people will work hard to mitigate those downsides and maximize the benefits.
Your article is specifically about immortality, or at least adding perhaps 10,000 years to average human life expectancy. That’s a different topic from more realistic incremental anti-aging efforts. But that also gets into a Sorites paradox, so it seems worth bringing up incremental efforts as well.
Note: what follows isn’t an attempt to bombard you with Gish-gallop-style questions. It’s just food for thought.
If you could push a button to give everybody one extra year of youthful life, how many times would you press it?
What if you had the option of pushing that button, or not pushing it, every year?
What if the world’s life sciences and engineering community was paid to push that button every year? Would we be glad that they had such a button to push?
What if the world’s governments were in charge of deciding whether or not to push the button? Would we like them to have control over the button?
Now consider the same questions, but for a button that removes one year of old age from everybody’s lifespans. Would you be happy that the relevant people had access to such a button? How many times should it be pressed?
Finally, imagine everybody had a button they could individually press in order to extend their youthful life by one year. They can press their buttons once a year. You have a button that reduces the effectiveness of their buttons by half, or that disables their buttons entirely. Would you press your button-disabling button?
If you don’t think anybody should press the life extension button, but you also don’t think that anybody should press the life-shortening button, then we need an explanation for why you believe people are living the perfect amount of time for overall human wellbeing.
I think that anti-aging research is most likely to produce “one year of life extension” buttons, every now and then. Every time such a button is pressed, society will have a chance to observe the effects and adjust in advance of the next button press. This specific anti-aging scenario is the one that I think merits the most focused attention.
Good questions! I could give answers but my error bars on what’s good are enormous.
(I do think my post is mostly not responding to whether longevity research is good, but to what the appropriate attitudes/rhetoric towards death/immortality are.)